[lbo-talk] Heartfield on Derrida

Alan Rudy alan.rudy at gmail.com
Fri Apr 10 11:52:58 PDT 2009


On Fri, Apr 10, 2009 at 12:48 PM, James Heartfield < Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:


> Doug asks
> "By the way, James, there are a lot of traditional leftists who hate
> Derrida for promoting self-doubt among intellectuals. You rightly point to
> the decline of the radical labor movement as key to the crisis of Marxism,
> but do you think the intellectuals were/are wrong to become so
> self-questioning, and skeptical of, yadda yadda, master narratives?"
>
> Heartfield responds


> (Indeed, to paraphrase Alasdair MacIntyre, deconstruction of master
> narratives is itself a master narrative.) What deconstruction offered to
> students was a cheap erudition that allowed them to dismiss schools of
> thought without ever really bothering to master them.
> The attraction for me of Marxism (and Hegelianism) is that it develops
> thought through criticism. But deconstruction only deconstructs. As Francis
> Bacon says somewhere the difference between me and the sceptics is that I
> doubt everything at the first setting out, as a way towards greater
> knowledge, but they see doubt as the goal (paraphrase from memory).
>

You know, in many ways this exchange points to the same issues "c b" (quotes for clarity not scariness) and I are exploring. There are, of course, many reasons for the decline of the radical labor movement... and one of them is that many folks were insufficiently socially self-reflexive and advanced a simplistic and inflexible (an often cheaply erudite) master narrative of exploitation in production and class (over every other kind of) identity, analysis or struggle. Furthermore, and again I am fully aware of all the other reasons - from the Pinkertons to the FBI to liberal collaboration to fear and loathing between craft and industrial unions to the oppressive insanity of Stalinism and beyond - this attachment to the simplistic and inflexible master narrative was maintained in the face of the increasing complexity and uneven development of the national divisions and the international division of labor.

One night, after a good bit of beer and some nice whiskey, after I'd finished my Masters on Bookchin and was working on my comps, I noted to Jim O'Connor how absolutely insane Bookchin had driven me as I worked through his stuff and how this continued even after I'd gotten over the insecurity of knowing he was wrong but not knowing what my, better (if not correct to the point of absolute certainty) stance was... but that, after figuring out my position, I'd gradually come to see how much I'd learned from Murray's work and how much it had contributed to my final, better, synthetic-rather-than-oppositional approach. Jim tossed off this one liner thats stuck with me ever since: "If your first reaction's not an over-reaction its likely not genuine or very deep."

Going to grad school in Santa Cruz - one of the three of four main hotbeds of post-modern deconstruction in the US during the 80s and early 90s - I despised post-modernism and deconstruction (but loved a good materialist and historical ideology critique). Over time, though, as grad students in the History of Consciousness Department moved away from deconstructive texts about texts about texts (however much "text" referred to lived material semiotic practice) and "back" towards relational epistemologies - often tied to feminist or critical racist interactionism/pragmatism - I decided it might just be that under Harvey's condition of post-modernity and the oppressive and reductionist character of both the left and rights high modern/Cold War politics, maybe deconstruction was a geniune, and sometimes fairly deep, over-reaction that - ironically, without enough complexity or playfulness - could teach us quite a bit about our past, as well as what not to do in the future.

Did this post lose its thread? I'm not sure at the moment - discombobulated by the fact that both boys are actually napping... and THIS is how I spend that glorious quiet time, what has become of me...



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