Date: Tue, 3 May 1994 18:54:59 -0700 Sender: pen-l@ecst.csuchico.edu From: James Lawler Subject: Re: Derrida In the description for my graduate course on Marx for next semester, I somewhat opportunistically cited Derrida from his new book, though my only acquaintance so far is in review. This was to attract the postmodernist students in English and Comparative Literature, and to let them know that their concerns will be welcome in the class. (Philosophy, where I teach, is a bastian of anti-postmodernism, based on analytic philosophy.) I agree that Marx was in some sense a deconstructionist -- this is the negative side of Marx's critique of capitalism and ideology. But in an epistemological context, I would disagree in equating "modern" and "bourgeois" and so describe Marx as a "postmodernist". As I understand it postmodernism means a radical criticism of "enlightenment rationalism". But Marx maintained the essence of an "enlightenment" approach (see Chris Pines' recent book with SUNY Press on Marx' theory of ideology) believing that it is possible to reveal the reality beneath the ideological "false consciousness". This rationalism is highly critical and self-conscious, but also involves a definite, if very flexible dialectical methodology. The reality that is uncovered is not only the bourgeois world that should be physically deconstructed, but the new realities and forces that are emerging within that world and that provide the basis for a better one. It is the to-be-deconstructed bourgeois world itself that is responsible for bringing these new possibilities into existence. Moreover, the new post- capitalist world will still require important aspects of the old world (the state, money, markets) for some significant period of time. At the recent Socialist Scholars Conference in which I debated with Bertell Ollman on whether Marx was a market socialist, Ollman, who argued that Marx was *not* a market socialist, nevertheless said, based on Marx's texts, that a market society would continue to exist for 30 to 50 years after the communist revolution -- though this, he said, would not yet be socialist -- to say nothing of communist. So the "dialectical socialism" of Marx is different from what I call the "nihilistic socialism" of some other socialists. Bakunin, for example, said that he didn't see anything in the contemporary world worth "building on". The main job of critics, he thought, was to destroy. Ultra-radical criticisms of capitalism of the nihilistic sort may be harmful to the general socialist project. The language of the Communist Manifesto may have been heavily influenced by an attempt to sound as negative about capitalism as the nihilists, while trying to say something quite different. As a result social- ist misreadings of Marx in the future, emphasizing this negativity, could appeal to the Manifesto. So there are, as Derrida apparently says, historically situated communisms, including Marx's, and not some rigid idea that stands outside of history. But this fact is not so overwhelming that we can't extract some general truths. Jim Devine notes the "intellectual nihilism" of "some" postmodernists. But then he sees in the citations from Derrida a different variety. Perhaps Derrida is not an intellectual nihilist, but this, I think, cannot be determined from the citations about hunger that were cited earlier. It is one thing to be an intellectual nihilist, and it is another to be politically active. Intellectual nihilism can be taken in a politically radical, left direction, but it remains quite different from Marxist dialectical socialism which discerns the baby through the bathwater. So the fact that postmodernists become politically involved and join in the struggle with other socialists does not mean that they have adopted some kind of "methodological realism". I admit that the Derrida citations about hunger do suggest this, but then I read that Derrida turns toward the implications of the fact that "Marx" is a proper noun and I feel discouraged. And I suspect that the idea of a multiplicity of contextual communisms gets us into labyrinths, rather than helps us get clarity about what is essential and what is for us inessential in Marx's text. It is important to be positive as well as negative. Peter Bratsis' criticism that deconstructionism "refuses to reconstruct some catagories qua objects of analysis that are usefull to the understanding of contemporary society and political practice; the State, class etc." acknowledges this intellectual nihilism. But there is perhaps something basic to this intellectual current that goes against the grain in "reconstructing" categories, if there is nothing but a "decentered social whole". Without "totalizing discourses", aren't we left with a choice between the "piecemeal reformism" that Karl Popper advocated, directing his fire also against the "totalitarian" thinking of Hegel and Marx -- this line is taken up by some postmodernists who see "capitalism" as already some fundamentally new and undefinable society -- and some kind of nihilistic socialism that cannot find anything positive in the existing world that is positively worth developing? (The "great refusal" of Marcuse.) So I find myself sympathetic to Habermas' general project of defending "modernism" and rationality -- which is polemically directed against postmodernism (beginning with Nietzsche). On the other hand, I think that Marx was a postmodernist in the sociological, if not in the epistemological sense, in that he understood that a radically new kind of society is coming into existence, one that will eliminate the hierarchical forms of division of labor characteristic of capitalist production. The development of advanced scientific technology is undermining the rationale for capitalist ownership, even as capitalists try to adapt to the requirements of postmodern "flexible production". The new forms of production relations imply another kind of practical rationality than the hierarchical rationality of capitalist control and the instrumental rationality of capitalist profit. Epistemologically, postmodernism generally *identifies* rationality with that hierarchical and instrumental form. Hence, there is the emphasis on particularity, circularity, against linear universality, as though these are the only choices. I go back to Hegel on this, where he argues that the critique "abstract understanding" with its "either/or" logic leads to some kind of irrationalist intuitionism or mysticism, unless a dialectical rationality can replace it. All this said, I very much welcome Derrida's contribution to giving legitimacy to very fundamental ideas of Marxism -- i.e. that capitalism has not brought us the end of history. Perhaps Derrida would agree with all the above fairly prosaic ideas, and has gone significantly beyond them. At a recent conference I attended, there was a heated argument between a postmodernist who was sympathetic to Marxism but impatient with what he regarded as the simple- minded epistemology of Marxists who like to talk about "bosses", and some Marxists who had no patience with people who could not see that Marx had explained everything about ideology in a few pages in the German Ideology. My interjection was to point out that to say "boss" these days in the academy can be a highly sophisticated intellectual endeavor, witness the fact that Derrida, that paragon of intellectual sophistication, has mentioned such elementary realities as hunger and drawn the connections between this fact and capitalism, something that until now would have been regarded as very out of date, especially by a Marxist. In certain circumstances, it takes enormous powers of deconstructionist talent to say such things. --Jim Lawler phijiml@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu phijiml@ubvms.bitnet