7/30/2019 Deconstruction, Marxisim

1/2

On DeconstructionSocial democracy believes in working on the "inside" of the capitalist system: persuaded of its omnipotent, all-pervasive, as it were "metaphysical presence, itseeks nonetheless in humble fashion to locate and prize open those symptomatic points of "hesitancy," negativity, and incompletion within the system into whichthe thin end of a slim-looking reformist wedge may be insertedDeconstructionDeconstruction is in one sense an ideology of left-reformism: it re-produces, atthe elaborate level of textual "theory," the material conditions in which Western hegemony has managed partially to in-corporate its antagonists-in which, at the level of empirical "consciousness," collusion and subversion are so tightly imbricated that all talk of "contradictions" falls spontaneously into the metaphysical slot. Because it can only imagine contradiction as the external warring oftwo monistic essences, it fails to comprehend class dialectics and turns instead to difference, that familiar ideological motif of the petty bourgeoisie. Deconstruction is in one sense an extraordinarily modest proposal: a sort of patient,probing reformism of the textOn Deconstruction[O]ther face of deconstruction is its hair-raising radicalism the nerve and daring with which it knocks the stuffing out of every smug concept and leaves the well-kempt text shamefully disheveled. It ignores, in short, the madness and violence of deconstruction, its scandalous urge to think the unthinkable, the flamboyance with which it poses itself on the very brink of meaning and dances there, crumbling away the cliff-edge beneath its feet and prepared to fall with it into

the sea of unlimited semiosis or schizophrenia .Marxism/DeconstructionWhat deconstructs the "inside/outside" antithesis for Marxism is not the Parisian left-intelligentsia but the revolutionary working class. The working class isthe agent of historical revolution not because of its potential "consciousness"(Lukacs), but because of that location within the capitalist mode of productionironically assigned to it by capitalism itself. [] Capitalism gives birth to itsown gravedigger, nurturing the acolyte who will one day stab the high priest inthe back. It is capitalism, not Marxism, which has decreed that the prime agentof its own transformation will be, not peasants, guerillas, blacks, women, or intellectuals, but the industrial proletariatOn the Production of Human SubjectAmong the various modes of production in any society, one of the most central is

the mode of production of human subjects. Like any other mode of production, this one comes equipped with its particular practices, techniques, and institutions: the family, sexuality, the church, the media, and of course the school. Different human societies will of course require greatly different forms of subjectivity to fulfill their ends, and in this sense the production of subjects/subjectivities is just as historically relative and changing as the production of economic goods.[S]ubjectivity is always to the advantage of the ruling order.On LiteratureA moral technology consists of a particular set of techniques and practices forthe instilling of specific kinds of value, discipline, behaviour, and response in human subjects: and one rather important type of moral technology in our own day goes under the name of Literature. It is imperative that the modern nation-s

tate has detailed knowledge of its subjects, for such knowledge is vital to theends of social order.

On Moral TechnologyMoral technologies, religious, educational, literary and so on. What these techniques at once map and produce, for the ends of social knowledge and order, are certain forms of value and response. With a certificate to provide an individualin English Literature - to give him or her, let us say, a university degree - isto certify - to put on state record - that he or she has been judged proficientin certain historically specific techniques of sensibility. This certificate is

7/30/2019 Deconstruction, Marxisim

2/2

added to the state's store of recorded knowledge, so that it is able to categorize, capacitate, or incapacitate that individual in what are judged to be appropriate ways.

Revolutionary Function of LiteratureThe construction of the modern notion of the aesthetic artefact is thus inseparable from the construction of the dominant ideological forms of modern class-society, and indeed from a whole new form of human subjectivity appropriate to thatsocial order. .... But my argument is also that the aesthetic, understood in a certain sense, provides an unusually powerful challenge and alternative to thesedominant ideological forms, and is in this sense an eminently contradictory phenomenon( 3).