Are we postmodern? On capitalism, fluidity, and parataxis

Cultural Studies, 1987

2012

I. The relationship to the social world is not the mechanical causality between a "milieu" and a consciousness, but rather a sort of ontological complicity. When the same history inhabits both habitus and habitat, both dispositions and position, the king and his court, the employer and his firm, the bishop and his see, history in a sense communicates with itself, is reflected in its image. (Bourdieu 1981. 306) This essay deals with consteHations of relationships that have largely been overlooked during the process of feminism's arduous trek into the university. In what follows, I trace a set of homologies that exist among and between postmodernism, feminism, and the larger political context to illustrate what Bourdieu describes as "ontological com plicity" (but what might also be defined as "ideology" in Marx's sense of a distortion of real contradictions). The main tendency I will discuss is a correspondence among post modernist social theory, the postmodernist turn in feminism, and the wider sphere of political debate. Because the terms I use in this argument have been unnecessarily complicated and mystified, I want to briefly define the following at the outset: socialism, historical materi alism, and postmodernist social theory. In the first, socialism describes an organized Soc. i_':r1rl political movement at the center of which is the concept that the relations of production structure social life, that the exploitative character of capitalism is the root of social and political oppression. and that the proletariat will serve as the agent of revolutionary social change. In terms of class. under capitalism, society is divided antagonistically into a rul ing class, which owns the means of production, and a working class, those who must sell their labor power in order to survive. The middle class in the U.S. are those workers who do not own the means of production. but for whom certain advantages (i.e., economic, institutional, cultural) do exist. Gramsci's theory of hegemony-primarily concerned the construction of nodal points which partially fix meaning ... the partial character of this fixation proceeds from the openness of the social, a result, in its turn, of the constant overflowing of every discourse by the infinitude of the field of discursivity. (1985,113) Articulatory practices. which "take place not only witllin given social and political spaces, but between them" (140), thus replace alliances previously forged with subordi nated classes and through political struggle.

lyotardproject.org

2003

If there is one thing that is clear in feminist postmodernism as the new millenniu m begins, it is that bodies are texts. And textual as they are, they are no longer the flesh and bloo d sites of oppression and liberation feminists theorized thirty years ago. They are sites of play, sites of performance, sites of chatechresis. I am interested in a new radical feminist account tha t both draws from the theoretical developments that turned the body into a text, and returns the body to its flesh and blood. This effort will take us into one of the central insights of feminis t postmodernism's 2 account of agency, and subject this account to a Marxian turn on its head, in order to bring the body out of its textual playground and back to earth. "Back to earth" is meant literally here, as the earth itself in the "naive" extra-textual sense, is both what brings us back and what we come back to. This project is motivated by a certain dismay at the distance between feminist "hig h theory" in the U.S. and the most pressing political and social issues of our times. Particularly, in the face of unprecedented levels of global environmental destruction, we seem to be unable to articulate our relationship to the planet we inhabit in a politically meaningful way. The textual body, or in some accounts the virtual body, seems to have little relation to the body of the Earth, seems in fact to be the realization of that quintessential Euro-masculine fantasy of emancipation from necessity, where "necessity" serves as a negative marker for the relationship of dependence between humans and our environments, between persons and places .

New Political Science, 1998

The postmodern turn which has so marked social and cultural theory also involves conflicts between modern and postmodern politics. In this study, we articulate the differences between modern and postmodern politics and argue against one-sided positions which dogmatically reject one tradition or the other in favor of partisanship for either the modern or the postmodern. Arguing for a politics of alliance and solidarity, we claim that this project is best served by drawing on the most progressive elements of both the modern and postmodern traditions. Developing a new politics involves overcoming the limitations of certain versions of modern politics and postmodern identity politics in order to develop a politics of alliance and solidarity equal to the challenges of the coming millennium. ******* In the past two decades, the foundational claims of modern politics have been challenged by postmodern perspectives. The grand visions of emancipation in liberalism, Marxism, and other political perspectives of the modern era have been deemed excessively totalizing and grandiose, occluding differences and neglecting more specific oppressions of individuals and disparate groups. The liberal project of providing universal rights and freedoms for all has been challenged by specific groups struggling for their own rights, advancing their own specific interests, and championing the construction of their own cultures and identities. The Marxian project of revolution, worldwide and global in scope, has been replaced in some quarters by more localized struggles and more modest and reformist goals. The result is a variety of new forms of postmodern politics whose discourses, practices, and effects we shall interrogate in this study. In our view, the contemporary world is undergoing major transformations and the discourse of the postmodern serves to call attention to the changes and novelties of the present moment. In this context, the postmodern turn in politics describes the new forms of political conflict and struggle. The present conjuncture is highly ambiguous, positioning those in the overdeveloped Western and Northern areas between the era of modernity and a new epoch for which the term postmodernity has been coined, while people in other parts of the world are still living in premodern social and cultural forms, and on the whole the developing world exists in a contradictory matrix of premodern, modern, and postmodern forms. The rapid transformation of the world and development of novel cultural forms generates new dangers, such as the potential loss of the modern traditions of humanism, the Enlightenment, and radical social traditions, as well as innovative possibilities, such as emerge from new technologies, new identities, and new political struggles. The old theories, concepts, modes of thought and analysis, will only go so far in theorizing, analyzing, and mapping the emerging constellations, thus requiring novel modes of thought, strategies, discourses, and practices. Accordingly, in addition to the transformations in

The Social Ontology of Capitalism, 2016

This chapter locates the body in a critical social ontology operative on the triple planes sociopsyche-soma. While critical social theory powerfully negates symbolic structures of political economy (and imaginary projections of ideological culture, it never quite knows what to do with corporeal bodies. We begin with Marx's account of the body ontology of capitalism in his post-1859 writings (especially Capital, Vol. 1), in which value (on the ontic plane of abstract labor) is extracted from the concrete bodies of laborers caught in capital's grasp. Psychoanalytic social theory takes up the body where Marx left off, and we analyze the congruent body ontologies of Marx and Jacques Lacan. Lacanian social theory analyzes imaginary (sublime) ideologies as ontically-shifted projections of structurally-wounded bodies (Zizek 1989; Zizek 1992). For Zizek, sublime ideological objects complete and unify reality for subjects whose wounded bodies are violently installed within capital's symbolic order (Zizek, 1999). The prevalence of wounded body-fantasies in the cultural productions of late capitalism, including those that feature reanimated corpses (undead) and incorporation of the body into technological structures (cyborgs). These fantasy projections sustain the subjectivity of workers whose bodies are installed within the structural-symbolic order of capitalism, generate fantasies of wounding, energy-streaming and perforation of bodily boundaries. We conclude, like Marx, that body ontology is necessary to comprehend and critique capital in its symbolic and imaginary forms.

La science politique comme bien des disciplines des sciences sociales a subi l’effet d’un abandon progressif des macrothéories du social. À la fragmentation en sous-champs disciplinaires s’est ajoutée une atomisation des paradigmes. Avec l’obsolescence des grandes théories compréhensives (marxisme, systémisme, béhaviorisme, etc.), les sciences sociales, et singulièrement les sciences du politique, se sont recroquevillées sur des modèles à portée limitée, la différenciation et la spécialisation croissante des champs conduisant logiquement à ce que leur émergence se produise au sein de communautés épistémiques de plus en plus restreintes. Au nom de l’efficacité épistémologique, le débat théorique a changé de niveau. Dans le champ de l’analyse des politiques publiques, les modèles théoriques idéaux seraient des boîtes à outils où les concepts, affûtés au tour, seraient très pertinents au regard des réalités singulières pour lesquelles ils ont été construits. Cette métaphore de la boîte...

Democracy & Nature, 2001

The postmodern turn which has so marked social and cultural theory also involves conflicts between modern and postmodern politics. In this essay, we articulate the differences between modern and postmodern politics and argue against one-sided positions which dogmatically reject one tradition or the other in favor of partisanship for either the modern or the postmodern. Arguing for a politics of alliance and solidarity, we claim that this project is best served by drawing on the most progressive elements of both the modern and postmodern traditions. Developing a new politics involves overcoming the limitations of certain versions of modern politics and postmodern identity politics in order to develop a politics of alliance and solidarity equal to the challenges of the coming millennium. "What's going on just now? What's happening to us? What is this world, this period, this precise moment in which we are living?" Michel Foucault In the past two decades, the foundational claims of modern politics have been challenged by postmodern perspectives. The grand visions of emancipation in liberalism, Marxism, and other political perspectives of the modern era have been deemed excessively grandiose and totalizing, occluding differences and neglecting more specific oppressions of individuals and disparate groups. The liberal project of providing universal rights and freedoms for all has been challenged by specific groups struggling for their own rights, advancing their own specific interests, and championing the construction of their unique cultures and identities. The Marxian project of revolution, worldwide and global in scope, has been replaced in some quarters by more localized struggles and more modest and reformist goals. The result is a variety of new forms of postmodern politics whose discourses, practices, and effects are beginning to register and come under critical scrutiny. The contemporary world is undergoing major transformations in science, technology, economics, culture, and everyday life. This "great transformation" (Polyani), comparable in scope to the changes produced by the industrial revolution, is moving toward a postindustrial, infotainment, and biotech mode of global capitalism, organized around new information, computer, communications, and genetic technologies. Scientific and technological revolution are key elements of the global restructuring of capitalism, which includes the growth of far-reaching transnational corporations; intensified competition on a planetary scale; moving industry and manufacturing to the developing world, while investment flows into the overdeveloped world; heightened exploitation; corporate downsizing; and greater levels of unemployment, inequality, and insecurity. Yet the scientific-technological-economic revolutions of our time also involve the advent of novel forms of labor, politics, culture, and everyday life which contain new economic opportunities, openings for political transformation, and a wealth of innovative products and technologies which might improve the human condition.

Updating the Deconstruction of Postmodernism: On the Spirit of "Post-bourgeois" Capitalism, 2021

If there still is a hegemony of postmodernism in today's leftist academia, and if it can be analysed as the spirit of contemporary capitalism, then this poses a problem for nowadays' leftist academia itself. I start with the premise that the just mentioned hegemony exists, and present its analysis in neo-Marxist fashion.