I propose that this term be permanently retired. It is more obfuscatory than clarificatory. It muddies the waters more than it points to any meaningful tendency or political trajectory. Let's leave this one in the dustbin of history.
For those who aren't familiar with the notion of "humanist Marxism" (or Marxist-humanism or whatever), here's a bit of background. The term is often associated with those who allegedly emphasize the "early Marx" (e.g. the 1844 Manuscripts, On the Jewish Question, The Critique of Hegel's Doctrine of the State, etc.) at the expense of the "later Marx" of Capital. For some, the mere invocation of concepts from Marx's earlier writings, e.g. alienation or the quasi-Aristotelian idea of a "species being", is enough to mark one out as a "humanist". On the other hand, sometimes "humanist" Marxists are associated with an interpretation of Marx according to which Engels is a distorting influence to be cast out of the genuine Marxist tradition. Still further, there is a Polish Marxist movement that called itself "humanist" for slightly different reasons. Then there's a small sect of Marxists in the US who tack closely to the writings of Raya Dunayevskaya who call themselves "Marxist-Humanists". The imprecision with which the label is thrown around is reason enough to reject it.
The origins of the so-called "humanist" controversy really go back to the 1930s when many of Marx's early works (especially the 1844 Manuscripts) were discovered and published for the first time. Since these texts were quite obviously at odds with Stalinist orthodoxy, they were, from the very beginning, dismissed and criticized by Stalinist ideologues. As Lucio Colletti puts it in his excellent introduction to the penguin edition of the Early Writings, "the sheer rigidity of official doctrine, the rigor mortis which already gripped Marxism under Stalin, contributed in no small way to the cool reception with which the writings met with when they appeared, to the manner in which they were immediately classified and pigeon-holed."
In the 1960s and 1970s, French Marxist (and member of the Stalinist PCF) Louis Althusser ignited further controversy by penning a series of attacks on this so-called "humanism". Althusser himself defended a strange reinterpretation of Marxism grounded more in structuralist anthropology than the left-Hegelian of German philosophy. He therefore set himself against the tradition, captured and coined as such by Perry Anderson in the 1970s, of "Western Marxism" including such innovative Marxist thinkers as Gramsci, Lukacs and Korsch. One of Althusser's most contentious arguments against "humanists" involved an interpretive claim about the so-called "early" and "late" Marx. According to Althusser, there was a sharp "epistemological break" between the "early" and "late" Marx. Crudely put, the "early" Marx was still mired in the "humanist" muck of Hegelian thought, whereas the "later" Marx broke free by rejecting this "lingering bourgeois hangover" once and for all.
The meat of Althusser's argument was the following. In social theory and historiography, there is a tension between structural explanations and agential explanations. That is, it is often acknolwedged that there is a disanalogy between analyses that focus on system-level structural processes on the one hand, and, on the other, analyses that focus on the perspective of the participant in social practices, i.e. what it's like to be an agent from the inside. (In American sociology, the distinction is typically described as one between structure and agency. In the German tradition this is described in terms of the subject/object distinction, or, if you like, the distinction between the lifeworld and system). This distinction is one which Marxism (just like any other social theory) must navigate. Althusser's reductionist solution was to eliminate agency entirely. For Althusser, the "early" Marx made the mistake of leaving room for the perspective of the agent (i.e. the "subject" in Althusser's language) in his social theory. For Althusser, the perspective of social science is purely third-personal: the agent, as such, is produced by system-level processes that cannot be grasped from within the participant perspective. Thus, the innovation of the "late" Marx, according to Althusser, was that he completely rejected first-personal perspective of the participant in favor of an entirely impersonal (and, for the first time, genuinely scientific) structural perspective. Thus began the "humanist" controversy: Althusser and his followers declared themselves "anti-humanists" and railed against the "humanists" for talking seriously about actions, agency, and so forth, whereas the "humanists" criticized Althusserians for having an implausible social theory that left no space for genuine human agency whatsoever. That, in rough sketch, is the so-called humanist vs. anti-humanist distinction in the Marxist tradition.
As I said above, I think the whole distinction needs to go. It doesn't pick out anything meaningful- it only tracks a series of stipulative moves made by Althusser (and other Stalinists) in the 1960s. But Althusser's project was idiosyncratic and (in many respects) very un-Marxist, so I don't think it really makes sense to continue to use the term at all. What follows are three arguments in defense of this claim.
First, the idea of a "humanist" Marxism rests on a faulty binary between the "early" and "late" (i.e. the "immature" and "mature") Marx. I think this is basically a distinction that rests on a non-existent difference. The notion of an "epistemological break" in Marx's writings fits neatly with Althusser's overall project (as it does with the need to legitimate the mechanical, rigid Stalinist "version" of Marxism), but it has little grounding in Marx's writings. It is more a super-imposed import than a real feature of Marx's corpus. It's also worth noting that the two interpreters of Marx most influenced by this distinction (i.e. Althusser and G.A. Cohen) are famous for defending the most mechanistic versions of Marxism. (G.A. Cohen's Marxism, which places primacy on the forces of production as the source historical change, is rightly impugned as little more than "technological determinism").
Furthermore, Marx's "later" writings, just as much as his earlier works, draw heavily on Hegel. To say that Marx suddenly abandoned his Hegelian roots is preposterous. Lenin's claim that Hegel's Logic is necessary pre-reading for Capital is a bit of an exaggeration, but the basic idea is right: Marx must be read as a determinate negation of Hegel's thought. Moreover, the shifts in emphasis in Marx's writings (from more philosophical works, to historical analyses, to more political economy, etc.) track not sharp political turns in his work, but shifts in subject matter. You can't cover it all, all the time. It doesn't follow, for instance, from the fact that Marx never wrote a sustained theoretical treatise on, say, epistemology that it is irrelevant to Marxism. (The same is true of ethics and moral philosophy). The "early" vs. "late" distinction derives from the need to shield a mechanical distortion of Marxism (particularly Stalinism) from critique. The sooner it is abandoned the better.
Second, the idea of a "humanist" Marxism only makes sense on the assumption that there is a contrary, "anti-humanist" Marxism. But who is it that goes around calling themselves "anti-humanist" these days? Althusserians are (thankfully) an endangered species. To be sure, there are plenty of folks influenced by post-structuralism in the academy that would gladly claim the "anti-humanist" mantle for themselves, but they are beyond the pale of Marxism. So, if the contrary of "humanist" Marxism is so patently absurd (and irrelevant), what is the term picking out that is of use to contemporary Marxists? It seems to me that the genuine Marxist tradition has always set itself against the mechanical, deterministic distortions of Stalinism and aspects of the Althusserian project. So why not just speak of Marxism tout court, and reject the "humanist" modifier as a relic?
Third, and finally, it seems to me that the "humanist" label carries too much unnecessary baggage. It would be better to have particular views about the Marx/Engels relationship than to simply affix the label "humanist" to those who regard Engels as an ossifier rather than an innovator. It's also worth saying that simply rejecting the complete identification of Engels and Marx's thought doesn't commit one to the view that they should be completely disentangled. The debates are the complex relationship between Marx and Engels are important, and they aren't helped along by throwing around the "humanist" label. Moreover, the complex Hegel/Marx relationship is similarly maligned by the term. It can't turn out that anyone who talks about alienation, species functioning, dialectics, and so forth is therefore a "humanist". The structure/agency (or, if you like, the spontaneity/organization, or objective/subjective) problem in Marxism is a difficult one that requires a careful, dialectical treatment that does not admit of facile reductive moves. In my view, "humanism" is nothing more than a bogey put forward by those (e.g. Althusserians) who wish to reduce Marxism to an undialectical, purely third-personal functionalist theory in which human agency does not figure into the model. Let's abandon the term and get on to what matters.
Further reading: I highly recommend Alasdair MacIntyre's essay "Notes from the Moral Wilderness" on this topic. Read it here. Also, Perry Anderson's book In the Tracks of Historical Materialism does an excellent job of tracing how the "permanent oscillation" between structure and agency worked itself out in 20th Century Marxism. His view is that the lack of Marxist response to Althusser within the Francophone world primed the pumps for the rise of post-structuralism (which, like Althusser, tended to reject the notion of agency as such as a mere epiphenomenon).
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
On "Humanist" Marxism
Friday, November 26, 2010
It's the system, stupid
Dominant ideologies teach us that "personal responsibility" and individual efforts are all that shape our social and political world. All Great things, we're taught, were forged out of nothingness by Great individuals (who, it turns out, are almost always men). Accordingly, we learn American History as though it were, in the first instance, the outcome of the actions of individual Presidents. We're encouraged to admire fabulously wealthy "self-made men" at the same time that we're taught to blame only ourselves for all our hardships. These ideologies, Fredric Jameson points out, "all find their functional utility in the repression of the social and historical, and in the perpetuation of some timeless and ahistorical view of human life and social relations".
This ludicrous view is even given a "scientific" veneer in the fantasy world constructed by neoclassical economics, where we are told that the money individuals receive in market societies attaches to nothing but their marginal productive contributions. These ideas are part of the conceptual legitimation of the society we live in, and, thus, it is unsurprising that they should be ubiquitous and "obvious" to many.
Accordingly, when radicals, and Marxists in particular, criticize the capitalist class it is often assumed that the criticism is merely a moralistic condemnation of individual capitalists. For example, when those on the Left criticize, say, the dominance of multinational corporations, this criticism is often heard as an attack on "evil corporate leaders". But the Marxist complaint has never been that the individual capitalists are evil or merely in need of moral scrutiny.
The Marxist complaint isn't that the ruling class is evil. In the first instance, of course, the Marxist complaint against the ruling class consists in hostility to the fact that they are a ruling class. The Marxist complaint, therefore, is not concerned to moralistically attacking capitalists as "bad persons", it is a complaint that targets certain unequal social relations. And what grounds and structures social relations, of course, is not for any individual to decide willy nilly: human beings "make their own history, but not in conditions of their own choosing", that is, "in the social production of their life, men [sic] enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of the development of their material productive forces" (see the Eighteenth Brumaire and the 1859 Preface respectively).
Thus, the complaint isn't that we have a ruling class that is too greedy, too mean to their workers, too insensitive to human need. The complaint is that we have a ruling class at all.
But we can sharpen this further still. When Marx criticizes the actions of the ruling class, it isn't because he thinks they made incompetent or insufficiently moral decisions. It's because he thinks that the basic structure of capitalism makes it rational for those in certain institutional roles, such as the role (class) of capitalist owner, to tend to act in certain ways. Hence, in order to be a capitalist at all, given the way that economic structure of capitalist societies is set up, you have to be able to compete against other capitalists, reinvest profits in further growth, etc. In order to be a capitalist, you have to do certain things whether you like it or not, given the pressures of market competition and the way that investment is structured. To be sure, as an individual you are free to diverge from the structural pressures of the system, but only so much. The reactionary slogan that "you can't buck the market" has a slice of truth to it (the reactionary part of it being that it suggests that we can't get rid of the market itself). An excessively "friendly" capitalist might easily be pushed out of business by more ruthless and exploitative competitors.
As political theorist Alan Ryan describes it:"Marx supposes that under capitalism, there are two sorts of oppression at work, rather than one. Capitalists oppress workers, driving them as hard as they can to extract maximum surplus value from them. But this is not because capitalists are individually brutal; they themselves are driven by their capital. The irrationality of a capitalist economy in which production is dictated by the accidents of market interaction is read by Marx as the blind tyranny of capital over its human subjects. The fact that capital is in any case only dead labor leads Marx to tremendous rhetorical flights in which he describes capital as a vampire, renewing its life-in-death by sucking the blood of living laborers...what humanity has done is create Frankenstein's monster; so far from the world submitting to human control, it has been set in motion as a blind force tyrannizing over all of us... Capital dominates all of us and turns all of us into its purposes."
Or, as I described in a recent post on alienation:Think of the terms in which the present financial crisis is described. People in the media talk about the economy as though it were a natural disaster, completely beyond our control, laying waste to human lives in its wake. But the market is no force of nature; it is something that human beings constructed. And what we've built up, we can tear down. "The market is like a monster we have accidentally created, but which now comes to rule our lives". Capitalism, in Marx's words, is "the complete domination of dead matter over men".
Capitalism is, thus, like a car that humanity built, which we continue to fill with fuel but which we have no capacity to control or steer. Adding the threat of global warming to this metaphor would be to say that our out-of-control vehicle is steadily heading towards a steep cliff.
I should add one more thing to stave off a misunderstanding. It's not that I think that individual members of the ruling class should be exempt from moral critique qua persons. On the contrary, I think many of them are reprehensible in many respects. But we shouldn't confuse such moral criticism from the political critique we need in order to properly place their behavior in its institutional context. Suppose some individual capitalist was won over by such moralizing critique and then sold off their productive assets to become a revolutionary. This is all well and good, but the way the system is set up it is certain that someone else will fill this person's "empty seat" at the ruling class table in no time. The Marxist argument is that we need to get rid of these seats and this table itself, not just the particular individuals who happen to sit there at any one time.
I also hardly mean to suggest that because we're all dominated by capital, we're all somehow in the same predicament. We're not; capitalism is a class society and the ruling class dominates and exploits the majority of us for their benefit. But we won't get very far if we think that capitalism is a highly coordinated, planned system that is ruled by a small, highly organized and conscious class whose intentional actions shape the system all the way down. This is not a left-wing critique, but a conspiracy theory that draws on the individualist ideology I impugned above. This kind of line suggests that the ruling class deliberately drove the world economy into the dumps, since whatever happens would have to be intended by the all-powerful rulers.
But this isn't Marxist in the least; the most interesting part of the Marxist critique of capitalism is that we get a dialectical interpretation of the relationship between structure and agency, between system and individual, such that neither is wholly reducible to the other. The actions of the ruling class do matter and need to be critiqued, but always in the context of the pressures of capitalist system which shape and structure their motivations and actions. In the case of the recent economic meltdown, for example, this analysis allows us to see how capitalism makes certain actions appear locally rational for individual capitalists, but collectively irrational even for the entire capitalist class writ large! It is an chaotic system that structurally requires myopic individual (or firm-level) profit accumulation.
Marx says on many occasions things to the effect that "human beings make their own history, but...". As Alasdair MacIntyre puts it, the goal of socialists is to remove that "but...".
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Peter Dews quote.
"For while there has often been a de facto alliance between the intellectual Left (in the US) and recent French theory, with post-structuralism providing tools of analysis which have been widely applied, there has sometimes been little attempt to think through the ultimate compatibility of progressive political commitments with either the dissolution of the subject, or a totalizing suspicion of the concept of truth." - Peter Dews, from Logics of Disentegration , Verso (1987)
Monday, February 9, 2009
Badiou on Althusser: "Subjectivity without a Subject"
To complicate matters more, here is another critical account of Althusser's Marxism and the role of 'the Subject' within it. I will forgo any introduction of Alain Badiou, first of all because I feel totally unqualified to do so (I know nothing of his 'philosophy' proper, only of his concretely 'political' writings (on Sarkozy, for example) and his radical/activist personal history and his involvement with Maoist organizations). This critique of Althusser appears in Metapolitics (2006) put out in English by Verso. Don't ask me what the title of the chapter "subjectivity without a subject" is supposed to mean.
On Badiou's account, in Althusser no theory of the subject is possible, nor could there ever be one. He summarizes the point:
"For Althusser, all theory proceeds by way of concepts. But 'subject' is not a concept. This theme is developed with utmost clarity in his work. For example: the concept 'process' is scientific, the concept 'subject' is ideological. 'Subject' is not the name of a concept, but that of a notion, that is, the mark of an inexistence. There is no subject since there are only processes."For Badiou, the question we should ask of Althusser is: What does eliminating the subject from theory mean for politics?
The danger is that politics collapses into ideology, because in Althusser there is always a hard and fast distinction between science and ideology. For Althusser, (social) science is the project of parsing out ideology from objective features of political, social and economic processes. Yet this conception of science, as Badiou emphasizes, is only about 'processes', not 'subjects'. But if we're only left with analysis of the 'processes' by which economic/political structures overdetermine the social field, where does this leave the possibility of purposive political action?
Now Althusser is a self-proclaimed Marxist, that is, a radical committed to changing the world, not merely interpreting it. But what room is there for political action in the anti-humanist Althusserian framework?
Of course, Althusser doesn't want to commit himself to leaving no room for political action. He, after all, conceives of philosophy itself as only properly undertaken as part of the 'class struggle in theory'. But I'm not interested in merely what he said or in what conclusions he deigned to avoid: I'm interested here in how his theory actually functions with respect to politics.
Althusser says on many occasions that politics is neither science nor ideology. As Badiou charts it: "In 1965 Althusser distinguished political practice from scientific and ideological practice. In 1968, he explained that every process is 'in relations'... Finally Althusser posits that only the 'militants of the revolutionary class struggle' really grasp the thought of 'the process'... that is, only those engaged in political practice genuinely understand the 'processes' by which the social/political field operates."
But who are these militants? I'm not sure I understand.
For Althusser, Bourgeois ideology is characterized by "the notion of the subject whose matrix is legal and which subjects the individual to the ideological State apparatuses: this is the theme of subjective interpellation." Thus, Badiou concludes, in Althusser's sense the subject is a function of the State (where 'State' is construed broadly to include 'Ideological State Apparatuses' (e.g. Churches, Schools, media institutions, etc.) that extend beyond of the coercive State proper).
But if subjectivity is itself a function of the state, there cannot be a political subject for Althusser, because any properly revolutionary politics ipso facto cannot be a function of the state since it consists of a commitment to the overthrowing of the State altogether.
But if there aren't any political subjects (since 'subjects' are ideological), then where does this leave politics in relation to the science/ideology distinction? Science, as we've seen, consists entirely in uncovering what is objective (the concrete functioning of ISAs, the processes by which ideology clouds the reality of the economic/social field). But politics, Althusser says, is not about objectivity; which is to say, politics is not a science. Where then, in the Althusserian universe, is politics?
Althusser uses terms like 'partisanship', 'choice', 'decision', 'revolutionary militant', etc. which all lead in the direction of subjectivity. They all presuppose or indicate that there is someone for whom 'partisanship' and 'militancy' inhere as predicates or actions. Badiou asks here, somewhat enigmatically, whether we should attempt to read Althusser as trying to 'think subjectivity without a subject'. I'm not sure I understand what that means.
Badiou ends the chapter abruptly by making some remarks indicating some of Althusser's worthwhile contributions to radical political theory while trying to salvage some of his insights. For example, Badiou argues that we read "overdetermination" in Althusser as a limitation on the politically possible. But possible for whom? I'm again unsure what to make of any of Althusser's insights at all unless we risk reinstating some conception of the subject. After all, who is it that authors texts that are purportedly scientific, that aim to show the functioning of ideology? I don't want to say that either subjects are located within ideological structures or they are completely outside them. Nonetheless, we must be careful not to close off the possibility within our theorization of ideology of explaining how it is that we, as subjects, came to theorize about it in the first place.
It seems to me to be a serious problem that Althusser's project cannot account for its own conditions of possibility. Moreover it seems obvious that the choice between homo-economicus and the ultra-functionalism of Althusser's approach are not exhaustive possibilities. Yet since Claude Lévi-Strauss and subsequent 'structuralists' in social science introduced the idea of the subject, as such, as a product of determinate social processes, this problem has persisted in French thought. My limited engagement with some recent French theory suggests to me that the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction, such that vague invocations of 'subjectivity' or 'singularity' are taken to be obviously good.
Butler, Structure and Subject
Since I'm reading Gender Trouble right now (for the first time) and recent posts have been focusing on the interepellation of subjects and feminism, it seems timely to relay some recent insights I've gleamed from Butler on this topic.
Butler's project takes its point of departure from politics: the aim of the book is, at least in one concerted sense (i.e. this isn't an exhaustive aim), to critically evaluate the assumption among some feminists that a unified conception of 'woman' is a necessary condition of political action for feminists. The point of doing this, for Butler, is to locate ways in which the feminist project is in some ways complicit with oppression, thus enabling her to gesture at ways we might more effectively (and fully) resist or subvert the oppressive regime of sex/gender.
The opening sentence of the book is as follows:
"For the most part, feminist theory has assumed that there is some existing identity, understood through the category of women, who not only initiates feminist interests and goals within discourse, but constitutes the subject for whom political representation is pursued."Instead, Butler wants to complicate and criticize the idea that representation (which requires an antecedent conception of 'woman') should be the goal of feminist politics. Part of her reason for pursuing this goal is that she sees subjects as produced, as interpellated by oppressive structures. Her point of departure owes much to Foucault, who held that "juridical systems of power produce the very subjects they subsequently come to represent." Of course, Foucault was a student of Althusser's who is very much a part of the tradition of 20th century French philosophy which emerged from 'structuralism' and held 'anti-humanist' views about subjectivity.
She continues:
"The question of 'the subject' is crucial for politics, and for feminist politics in particular, because juridical subjects are invariably produced through certain exclusionary practices that do not 'show' once the juridical structure of politics has been established. In other words, the political construction of the subject proceeds with certain legitimating and exclusionary aims, and these political operations are effectively concealed and naturalized by a political analysis that takes juridical structures as their foundation."This seems to jibe with a point Arvilla made in the previous post. The idea that representation of 'women' (uncritically accepted as an unproblematic category, unmarked by power) is all that is necessary to facilitate emancipation, overlooks the structures (legal, educational, cultural, economic, etc.) which actually produce the subjects in question. In other words, merely quibbling over the Senate's gender makeup is not going to cut it. Butler acknowledges, though, that such concerns are hardly reactionary, indeed by and large we inhabit a world where the pervasive social/cultural condition is such that women's lives are "misrepresented or not represented at all". Nonetheless, 'representation' must not go uncriticized as the goal of feminist politics. For Butler, feminist political practice requires a "radical rethinking of the ontological constructions of identity appears to be necessary in order to formulate a representational politics that might revive feminism on other grounds." What this means more specifically, is that "the identity of the feminist subject ought not to be the foundation of feminist politics, if the formation of the subject takes place within a field of power regularly buried through the assertion of that foundation."
'Identity' is also regularly invoked as a concern within feminist politics. But for Butler, to return to this theme about the social/discursive-constitution of subjects, we must ask "to what extent do regulatory practices of gender formation and division constitute identity, the internal coherence of the subject, indeed, the self-identical status of the person?" She answers: the "coherence and continuity of 'the person' are not logical or analytic features of personhood, but rather, socially instituted and maintained norms of intelligibility." Thus, she continues: "Intelligible genders are those which in some sense institute and maintain relations of coherence and continuity among sex, gender, sexual practice, and desire." Accordingly, "the very notion of 'the person' is called into question by the cultural emergence of those 'incoherent' or 'discontinuous' gendered beings who appear to be persons but fail to conform to the gendered norms of cultural intelligibility by which persons are defined."
For Bulter,
"The cultural matrix through which gender identity has become intelligible requires that certain kinds of 'identities' cannot 'exist' -that is, those in which gender does not follow from sex and those in which the practices of desire do not 'follow' from either sex or gender. 'Follow' in this context is a political relation of entailment instituted by the cultural laws that establish and regulate the shape and meaning of sexuality."Later in the book, Butler undertakes an immanent critique of Monique Wittig's revolutionary 'lesbian materialism' (see Wittig's marvelous short book of essays titled The Straight Mind). Butler's main bone of contention with Wittig is the alleged humanism underlying her theoretical writings. Butler accuses Wittig of putting the project of feminist politics in the following way: either you accept the prescribed normative regime of heterosexuality (and by this she means the traditional marriage of 'man' and 'woman' with all of its patriarchal, violent and oppressive qualities) and you are complicit, or you radically reject this regime and refuse it. To refuse it means, concretely, to destabilize the regime of heterosexism and lesbianism seem to be, for Wittig, the only serious means of resistance. Because according to Butler's reading of Wittig, the goal of the latter's politics is to explode from within and eliminate the compulsory norms of heterosexuality and to thus recover some prior-existing "I" which had been oppressed and weighed down by dense layers of ideology (sexual dimorphism.) Unsurprisingly, Butler takes aim at this supposedly pre-discursive "I" which must be recovered and freed within Wittig's emancipatory project.
But I'm unsure of what to make of Butler's critique. I suppose this unsureness really speaks to my uneasiness with the whole 'anti-humanism' of the tradition of French thought from which Gender Trouble in some sense emerges. Are we really stuck choosing between the "humanism" of classical liberalism (the pre-social, unencumbered, 'homo-economicus' rational chooser) or the "anti-humanism" of post-Althusserian French philosophy in which there simply are no 'subjects' at all, where the notion of 'the subject' is always already an ideological category? My sense is no. But don't ask me for a third alternative yet. I dont think one necessarily has to have that figured out in order to find problems with the structuralist/poststructuralist animosity toward 'the subject' as such. Their critique of the bourgeois conception of agency is well taken, as is Butler's elaborate and very compelling deconstructurion of gender/sex. But are we really left with no subjects at all?
Here I'm tempted to think here of Adorno (paraphrased here by Gillian Rose) who held that "any theory which sought completely to deny the illusory power of the subject would tend to reinstate that illusion even more than one which overestimated the power of the subject".
I must also admit that my acquaintance with French theory (particularly Structuralism and Poststructuralism) is highly influenced by Perry Anderson's account in his short book (itself based on a series of lectures) called In the Tracks of Historical Materialism. (Incidentally, his other short book Considerations on Western Marxism is probably the best summary of 20th century Marxist theory there is). The chapter on "Structure and Subject" is particularly relevant to this discussion. There, Anderson situates French structuralism/poststructuralism historically and politically as a mode of engaging the 'structure versus subject' problematic, in other words, the "nature of the relationships between structure and subject in human history and society."
This has always been an insoluble problem within the Marxist tradition. As Anderson points out (and as I alluded to in my post on Althusser, when describing the controversies over the precise nature of the 'economic base' in the theory of ideology), "there is a permanent oscillation in Marx's own writings between his ascription of the primary motor of historical change to the contradiction between the forces of production and the relations of production, on the one hand (think Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy)... and to the class struggle (think of the Communist Manifesto) on the other."
So, for Anderson, Marxism (in France, at least) was challenged on its own turf by structuralism/poststructuralism (that is, the turf of structure vs. subject) and the latter has obviously supplanted the former as the dominant intellectual force in France today. But what is to be said of the anti-humanist 'solution' to the structure/subject problematic offered by structuralism/postructuralism? Anderson identifies a few key aspects of the way it has been fleshed out among theorists associated within this intellectual milieu (e.g. Foucault, Lacan, Derrida, Deleuze, Kristeva, etc.). First, there is the 'exorbitation of language'. In poststructuralism, there is a huge emphasis on language, on the linguistic, on 'discursive practices', on the symbolic and the circulation of signifiers. Put succinctly, there is a "fundamental expansion in the jurisdiction of the linguistic" in structuralism, a "speculative aggrandizement of language". The result, for Anderson, is the "gradual megalomania of the signifier" in which we are left with "a system of floating signifiers pure and simple, with no determinable relation to any extra-linguistic referents at all".
As Anderson points out:
"High structuralism was never more strident than in its annunciation of the end of man. Foucault struck the characteristically prophetic note when he declared in 1966 that 'Man is the process of perishing as the being of language continues to shine ever more brightly upon our horizon.' But who is the 'we' to perceive or possess such a horizon? In the hollow of the pronoun lies the aporia of the program."I am tempted to agree with Anderson who concludes that structure and subject are 'interdependent categories', that must be understood with a 'dialectical respect for their interdependence.' But where does this leave us? This post has meandered on long enough, from Butler's denunciation of 'identity politics' to her rejection of 'the Subject' and the alleged underlying humanism in Wittig, through Althusser and structuralism/poststructuralism and eventually to a sort of dialectical proposal to engage the subject/structure problematic.
I've spent a lot of time sorting through theory here, but what I'm really interested in is what it means for political practice. Perhaps a proper appraisment of this aspect of the above theoretical musings will have to wait for a later post. What I'm really interested in is what the tension between Butler/Wittig means for feminist political practice. More on this to come.
