marx after derrida || marxism, structuralism, and post-structuralism

Marxism, Structuralism, and Post-StructuralismIn the Tracks of Historical Materialism by Perry AndersonReview by: Terry EagletonDiacritics, Vol. 15, No. 4, Marx after Derrida (Winter, 1985), pp. 2-12Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/464931 .

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MARXISM, STRUCTURALISM, AND

POST-STRUCTURALISM *

TERRY EAGLETON

Perry Anderson. IN THE TRACKS OF HISTORICAL MATERIALISM. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1984.

In Considerations on Western Marxism (1976), Perry Anderson proposed a number of theses which have since passed into the general wisdom of the Marx- ist left. Western Marxism, he argued, sprang essentially from proletarian defeat in the post-Bolshevik era; the predominantly aesthetic and philosophical biases of its thought, in marked contrast to the political and economic preoccupations of classical Marxist theory, reflected a damaging dislocation of historical materialism from a blocked and thwarted working-class movement. For all its undoubted theoretical fertility, Western Marxism remained a largely academic phenomenon, drawing deeply upon idealist philosophical sources and marked by a most untraditional pessimism and melancholia. At the turn of the 1970s, Anderson claimed, this ambivalently creative and crippled heritage was on the wane, as renewed socialist militancy in the advanced capitalist societies appeared to herald the possibility of a Marxism less aloof from political practice.

That, in effect, was the situation when Anderson wrote his book; and this latest essay begins by assessing in hindsight the accuracy of the predictions which Considerations advanced. Two of these predictions- that Western Marx- ism itself would generate no more substantial work, and that there would be a return to the crucial political and economic issues which it had suppressed - Anderson believes to have been justified by the past decade. Since 1974, some decisive, even pioneering bodies of work (by Mandel, Braverman, Aglietta, Poulantzas, Miliband, Therborn, Olin Wright, Bahro, Cohen and others) have signalled a reversion to the classical problems of historical materialism in a range of theoretical areas. At the same time such work has represented an in- triguing geographical shift, away from the heartlands of Western Marxism (France, Germany, Italy) towards the Anglophone world. The rise of a powerful Marxist historiography in that region, since the appearance of Considerations, is one major sign of this geographical displacement. The traditional relation between British and Continental Marxism, then, seems for the moment to have been effectively reversed.

Another of his predictions Anderson acknowledges to have been strikingly unvalidated: this resurgence of traditional Marxist topoi in the realm of theory did not lead to a reunification of theory and popular practice in a mass revolutionary movement. Strategic thinking remained immune from the 1970s' theoretical renaissance; contemporary Marxism continues to share a "poverty of strategy" with its Western Marxist precursors. Moreover, the shift in Marxist theory to the English-speaking world was coupled with a grave crisis of Marxism

* A portion of this essay appeared in Economy and Society 13:1.

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in the Latin societies, tantamount often enough to an abrupt renunciation of historical materialism as a whole. The apostasy of Lucio Colletti in Italy, and the squalid degeneration of the erstwhile Maoist Tel Quel group in France into strident anti-Sovietism and portentous mysticism, are signal instances. The paradox, then, is plain: "At the very time when Marxism as a critical theory has been in unprecedented ascent in the English-speaking world, it has undergone a precipitous decline in the Latin societies where it was most powerful and productive in the post-war period" [30]. "Paris today," Anderson claims, "is the capital of Euro- pean intellectual reaction"; and it is to an exploration of this phenomenon that his first chapter is devoted.

The hypothesis which Anderson entertains here, to account for the French Marxist decline, is a striking and simple one: French Marxism is in crisis because it has been routed by structuralism. Shorn of an adequate theory of the subject, Althusserianism was unable to offer any coherent response to the mass insurgency of 1968; the consequence was a pro- gressive effacement and dissolution of this current by the mid-1970s. Structuralism in general, however, passed through the ordeal of 1968 and out the other side, though in significantly transmogrified form. The post-structuralism of Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze and others outstripped Marxist thought, and can be characterized, so Anderson argues, by three major intellectual themes: the exorbitation of language, the attenuation of truth and the randomization of history. Linguistics rashly extended its jurisdiction to im- perialize all major structures of society, culminating in Derrida's flamboyant claim that "there is nothing outside of the text." Parallel with this inflation of the signifier went an attenuation of its referent, breeding the various neo-Nietzschean skepticisms about the very possibility of determinable truth, and the consequent elimination of the very grounds of rational knowledge. History was accordingly scattered into a purely aleatory phenomenon, in which adjacency eclipsed sequentiality. An implacable structural determinism gave birth, ironi- cally, to a sheer contingency of historical change, which is no more than the chance out- come of a synchronic combinatory. Such a paradox is inscribed in the dualistic model of structuralism's founding father Saussure, for whom the language system as a whole is struc- turally predetermined and individual speech random and contingent; but it also mapped itself chronologically in the transition from the "ascetic objectivism" of "high" structuralism to the "saturnalian subjectivism," the "subjectivism without a subject," of the mid-1970s. Post- structuralism, Anderson writes in an agreeable rhetorical flourish, "strafed meaning, over-ran truth, outflanked ethics and politics, and wiped out history." Its themes can be found echoed in the work of Jorgen Habermas, whose initial insistence on the centrality of symbolic communication slides into an assertion of its primacy over production. Discourse, once more, is steadily inflated over all other social structures, although with Habermas in "angelic" rather than "diabolic" form: language assures the foundations of society and political consensus, restores order to history, and is somehow naturally wedded to truth.

At this stage in the book, the reader is firmly convinced that the editor of New Left Review has undergone an inexplicable degeneration into idealism. Was Latin Marxism really rolled back and routed by the Saussurean sign? The answer, of course, is that it was not; in a carpet-pulling compositional device, Anderson explores this hypothesis only to reject it. Led gullibly up the garden path for an entire chapter, the reader is now decisively returned to the firm terrain of historical materialism. The explanation for the crisis in Latin Marxism lies in its "external" rather than "internal" history: if Marxist political disarray was particularly evident in the Latin societies, it was because they more than others endured the disillusionments of what appeared at the time to be two viable alternatives to Stalinism, namely Maoism and Eurocommunism. It was precisely in these societies, with their mass communist parties, that the chances of Eurocommunism seemed most favorable, and the bitter deflation of those chances thus most disorienting. In the Anglophone societies, by contrast, as well as in Scan- dinavia and West Germany, such hopes and projections had never been so vigorously generated, and the prospects of a reformist administration of capitalism held few novelties. In these nations, "a steadier and more tough-minded historical materialism proved generally capable of withstanding political isolation or adversity, and of generating increasingly solid and mature work in and through them." The culprit for the Marxist crisis is not, after all, the vagaries of the signifier but the vicissitudes of Eurocommunism.

One of the major virtues of Considerations was its deft articulation of the theoretical and

diacritics / winter 1985 3



political histories of Western Marxism. At every point, the limitations and lacunae of the theoretical work itself were grasped in relation to the historical situations of Western Marxist intellectuals. In this study, by contrast, any such significant articulation is effectively denied. The story of structuralism and its progeny, and the narrative of recent European political history, are both delivered with the intellectual acuity, bold synoptic sweep and formidable erudition which we have come to associate with Perry Anderson's work; but they are in no sense to be linked. In a kind of trompe d'oeil or conjuror's flourish, structuralism is waved alluringly before the reader only to disappear again, dismissed as an insignificant element of the Marxist crisis. It never, in brief, presented Marxism with any real challenge. This is a

highly implausible claim, and in its way an idealist one. Structuralism, according to Ander- son, was never significantly imbricated with the material political history he identifies as the true cause of Latin Marxism's dilemmas. Was it, then, merely a set of fashionable ideas con-

ducting its own intellectual life in stately isolation from that historical context? Where did it come from, and what secured its intellectual tenacity and durability? Does Anderson not risk the very aleatory model of history he rightly denounces in Parisian post-structuralism? And if his study rightly rejects one kind of idealism -the fantasy that structuralism in itself could have defeated the Latin socialist movements-does it not run the risk of keeling over into another, sealing the complex historical phenomenon of structuralism into its own hermetic space, in a gesture curiously reminiscent of its own intellectual habits?

The fundamental reason why Anderson is unable to relate structuralism at all significantly to the historical context he analyzes is because his view of it is unremittingly negative. In one sense, to be sure, one might argue that no critique of certain features of post- structuralism in particular could be negative enough. Its grosser political and philosophical absurdities, which have managed to turn the heads of a whole younger generation of potentially valuable militants now arrogantly confident that they have deconstructed a Marxism

many of them have not even encountered, merit the most implacable opposition. From one viewpoint, post-structuralism certainly emerges from a political history: in some of its aspects it articulates a massive, pervasive failure of political nerve consequent upon the disillusionments of post-1968. Its profound pessimism (power is ubiquitous, the Law inescapable, the ego impotent and derisory, truth and communication inconceivable, general theories of

society terroristic, only marginal political activity feasible) is surely to be tracked to that source, as a later, more theatrical version of Western Marxist melancholia. Similarly, the

euphoria of post-structuralism-its paradoxical other face-is at once displacement and recreation of the revolutionary moment: the orgasmic crisis of jouissance, the thrills and spills of the skidding signifier, the kclat of ecriture, Lyotard's aging-hippie points of libidinal inten-

sity. It is not that Anderson's book is not aware of post-structuralism as in these aspects a

political retreat. But the connections are not made in detail, for structuralism is wheeled on stage only to be rolled instantly back into the wings. One could imagine, indeed, a parody of this book which began by gravely entertaining the notion that Zen Buddhism was responsi- ble for Thatcher's re-election, proceeded to deliver a proper materialist denunciation of Zen Buddhism, and then concluded that it had in fact been of nugatory significance for the event in question. The theoretical and compositional question which the book thus raises is simply: why discuss structuralism at all? Just because it happens to be there? The unqualifiedly negative treatment of the topic is curious for a writer like Anderson, than whom (after a little youthful intemperateness common to us all) there is no more generous-minded, intellectu- ally charitable, impeccably judicious British Marxist. Anderson's work is distinguished not only by its theoretical brilliance but by its moral conscientiousness- its readiness to concede what it can to an opponent's case, its swiftness to engage in self-criticism, its striking intellectual humility and fair-dealing. His treatment of structuralism, by contrast, is notably undialectical, failing as it does to attribute the least grain of intellectual worth to its tenets, and failing in consequence to grasp its essentially contradictory nature. A properly dialectical assess- ment has yet to be made of how the "high" or classical structuralism of the 1960s was at once, in its scientism, idealism, compulsive holism, elimination of subjectivity, reification of social process and synchronic arresting of history, an ideology eminently suitable to late capitalist society, and also, in its extreme philosophical conventionalism, its disdain for triumphalistic historicisms and the pieties of bourgeois-humanist subjectivity, its ruthlessly

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"de-naturalizing" impulse and exposure of truth as production, its resistance to the bourgeois divisions of academic labor, a limited subversive strategy.

The same contradictory character can be found in the bodies of writing which flowed from this "classical" period. The denunciation of all global theorizing as epistemologically in- defensible metadiscourse is certainly an assault on Marxism; but it was also a potentially valuable deconstruction of certain "overtotalizing" theories (not least certain versions of Marxism) which did indeed ride roughshod over difference, conflict, and specificity. The "saturnalian subjectivism" Anderson scorns is indeed often enough a politically despairing hedonism, but it has also engaged (in the work of Julia Kristeva, for example) more authen- tically Bakhtinian themes of the carnival of the oppressed. Foucauldian "micropolitics" represent at once a politically disastrous dispersal of traditional Marxist forms of political organiza- tion, and a recovery of vital, twilight regions of political work which traditional Marxism has often brutally suppressed. The "attenuation of truth" is certainly one of the more irresponsi- ble features of post-structuralism; but Anderson writes as though the correspondence theory is quite unproblematic and in good working order, despite the grievous difficulties with which it is beset.

Anderson's summary treatment of Jacques Derrida exemplifies, his seriously one-sided approach to his topic. Language, as Anderson interprets Derrida's view of it, is "a system of floating signifiers pure and simple, with no determinable relation to any extra-linguistic referents at all" [46]. This is indeed the ridiculous case touted by many of Derrida's less canny acolytes on both sides of the Atlantic, but Derrida himself has specifically defended the place of authorial intentionality in discourse, acknowledged the determinate forces of productive matrix and historical conditions in the construction of meaning, and firmly denied that he is a pluralist [Interview with Derrida, The Literary Review 14]. The statement that "there is nothing outside of the text" is not to be taken, absurdly, to suggest that, for example, Jacques Derrida does not exist, but to deconstruct empiricist or metaphysical oppositions between discourse and some "brute" reality beyond it. Derrida has insisted in recent years that deconstruction is a political rather than textual operation - that "it is by touching solid structures, 'material' institutions, and not merely discourses or significant representations, that deconstruction distinguishes itself from analysis or 'criticism'" ["Le parergon," La verite en peinture 23-24]. He has refused to ally himself unequivocally (so far at least) with post- Marxism, criticized the American appropriation of his work as confirming dominant political and economic interests, and denounced the attack on the teaching of philosophy in French schools as an assault on Marxism.' Anderson's polemic quite fails to distinguish between "left" and "right" deconstruction - between those for whom the theory merely offers an op- portunity for hermetic textualism and self-indulgent word-play, and those who have dis- cerned in it (not least within the women's movement) political possibilities. Nor can the work of Michel Foucault be as airily and abrasively dismissed as Anderson would appear to wish. For if anyone has presented traditional Marxism with a powerful challenge, one with immense influence upon a whole younger generation of radicals from Sydney to San Diego, it is precisely Foucault. It is not that the challenge is always by any means a productive one; the work of Foucault well deserves many of Anderson's scornful strictures. But it can by no means be evaded or ignored; and the tone of this book invites us, in effect, to do precisely that. The blank puzzlement evinced by Etienne Balibar and Pierre Macherey at how exactly to respond to Foucault's work is one index of the fact that (post) structuralism, pace Ander- son, has indeed played its subordinate part in the crisis of French Marxism.2

It is symptomatic of Anderson's too sweeping excoriation of structuralism that while many of his points are superbly just and effectively unanswerable, others are off the mark. He chides Lacan's famous formula that "the unconscious is structured like a language" on the Freudian grounds that the unconscious "is a stranger to all syntax"; but while this is true, Lacan is referring here specifically to the mechanisms of (metaphorical) substitution and (metonymic) displacement, which are not dependent upon a well-ordered grammar. He makes a casual, scathing reference (a familiar bugbear, this) to Lacan's "ten minute" psychoanalytic sessions; in fact, these are sessions in which the analyst, having failed to

'See Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and lean-Luc Nancy, eds., Les fins de l'homme (Paris, 1987), 526-29. 2See Etienne Balibar and Pierre Macherey: Interview, Diacritics 12:7, 57.




establish himself as "Other" to an analysand who insists on seeing him in the "imaginary," prematurely forecloses the dialogue on that account. Anderson rightly upbraids linguistic or discursive imperialism, but he is himself too uncritical of Saussure, appearing to endorse his view of parole as some form of free individual contingency. On the contrary, discourse theory (and not least that of Voloshinov, in his Marxism and the Philosophy of Language) has revealed the rigorously constrained social determinations of all speech, the subject of which is never, as Anderson asserts, "axiomatically individual" but always, as Bakhtin has shown, a dialogic subject.

Several of these points are minor in themselves; but they betray a certain unfocusedness of analysis, and accumulate to a point where Anderson's language grows exorbitant and its truth-value attenuated. The book's refusal to allow structuralism any significant role in the crisis of Marxism, and its unmodifiedly inimical treatment of the topic, are significantly related. For if Anderson had more judiciously assessed the positive aspects of structuralism, he would have been more sensitive to their appeal to the Left; he would have thus been less inclined to intimate a purely negative relation between structuralism and political society, in which the two are either bluntly disconnected or the former is viewed simply as a flight from the realities of the latter.

Anderson's failure to take the full positive measure of these intellectual developments reproduces itself, in the book's Postscript, in a seriously flawed account of feminism. He rightly emphasizes the greater historical and social weight of sexual as against class oppression, and while insisting that only the forces of organized labor can finally produce the social transformations which might bring patriarchy down, in no way denies the autonomy of feminist political practice. But his estimation of the potential power of the women's movement is curiously defective. He is unwarrantably skeptical about the possibilities of collective resistance among women, stressing what he sees as the typically "individual" character of women's rebellion. Having made this point, he seems to remember the power and solidarity of the women's movement, and hastily qualifies himself: "None of this means, of course, that joint action by women for their liberation is impossible" [92]. It would indeed demand the most full-blooded post-structuralist skeptic to survey the historical record and deny that! Having inserted this saving clause, Anderson then reassumes a critical position; but now his argument has subtly shifted to an essentially different one concerning the ultimate (socialist) forces of emancipation. He regards the biologically-based interdependence of the sexes as a serious stumbling bloc in the movement to women's liberation, generating as it does ties of "sentiment and support;" yet there is no reason in principle why the functions of biological reproduction could not be fulfilled without such ties, in a world where men and women had severed all emotional relationship with each other. These emotional gratifications, so Ander- son argues, provide women with (politically counterproductive) "compensations" within the structures of sexist oppression, which he claims have no strict equivalent in the economic relationships between workers and capitalists. No strict equivalent, perhaps; but the process of hegemony is among other things the generating of gratifications and compensations in the labor process too, and there is no reason to believe that these are necessarily less tenaciously rooted than the fulfillments derived from sexual relationship. Women, Anderson argues, tend to concentrate their rebellion on a "particular partner" rather than a whole gender-a speciously universalizing claim which (even were it true) merely effaces the whole hard- bought experience of consciousness-raising and collective political activity within the women's movement. Women "do not possess either the same positional unity or totalized adversary" as the working class; yet they do indeed of course possess a "totalized adversary" -men!- and the capitalist class is quite as physically dispersed as the male sex. It is true that women do not share the same positional unity as the proletariat, but neither, for example, does the peasantry, which has nonetheless manifested itself as a socially transform- ative force from time to time. The "peculiarity" of women's condition, Anderson argues, is the absence of any specialized agencies for their regulation and repression; but this is not in fact a feature peculiar to women, as the case of homosexuals and ethnic groups well enough reveals. If there is "never any overall centralization of the structures of women's oppression," this is quite as true of certain structures of racist oppression; yet powerfully collective movements have shaken such structures in their time.

The lapses in Anderson's account of the women's movement are at once serious

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enough in themselves, and significantly related to the one-sidedness of his critique of structuralism. For there has been, of course, a certain historic alliance between feminism and post-structuralism, as radical, oppositional movements gravely skeptical of certain central features of classical Marxist politics. Anderson rightly stresses the need for a socialist movement "various and plural in composition," within which feminists will "muster under their own banners"; and it would therefore be quite mistaken to view his account of feminism as a politically appropriating one. It is rather a politically belittling one: by no means in its en- tirety, but in its curious insensitivity to the historical realities and future potential of collective feminist action. The analyses of structuralism are, as I have argued, similarly insensitive to its more constructive and subversive aspects. I am afraid that it is already possible to foresee the feminist and post-structuralist reviews of this book which read it as a mere re-statement of a

classical Marxist position which, they feel, has nothing in it for them. Its most damaging effect would be to confirm the sometimes warrantable, sometimes complacent, assumption that Marxism has remained merely unscathed by feminist and post-structuralist developments. Anderson is certainly a "traditional" Marxist, but he is by no means an uncritical one; the final pages of this book are devoted to a brilliant expos6 of some of the in- tractable problems of socialist construction which, as Anderson recognizes, much Marxist thought has left studiously vague. The account of feminism, while flawed in the ways I have suggested, also contains some powerfully positive, politically suggestive elements; the account of structuralism, while brilliantly accomplished, is much more seriously belittling. Jacques Derrida once wrote that as far as he was concerned, the encounter with Marxism was "still to come." I am afraid that, after this book, the same must be said by Marxism about post-structuralism.

Anderson's book, then, represents in a certain sense an evasion of the theoretical challenge of post-structuralism, and of the political challenge of feminism. What it cannot be




said to represent is an evasion of the political challenge of post-structuralism. For what, exactly, is that? Where is this buoyant trend which has an unreconstructed Marxism on the hip, returning answers to the great global problems which beset us more cogent and contemporary than this discredited brand of nineteenth-century rationality? Perhaps it lies with the work of Jean Baudrillard, who now discerns in the mesmerized media consumer a subversive, Schopenhauerian abandonment of political will, desire and knowledge [see "The Im- plosion of the Social in the Media," NLH]. From Lenin to the late show, so to speak; soap opera addiction as a sagacious, strategic strike against Washington. If one is not persuaded by this particular academicist fantasy, then one can always turn to the writing of Michel Foucault, who ended his days discussing the defense of the Free World, and advocated resistance to power while deftly eradicating anything which might do the resisting. Charles Taylor has written with engaging casualness that "Foucault's analyses are terribly one-sided," ["Foucault on Freedom and Truth," Philosophy and the Human Sciences 164], a statement which might well qualify as the understatement of the decade. Nobody has demonstrated more profoundly and relentlessly than Foucault how subjectivity is subjugation and in- carceration; and nobody has more violently suppressed the paradoxical companion truth, that if emancipation is not from, through, and by human subjects, then it is nothing. If we are still a little dissatisfied, then we might always turn relievedly to the current writings of Jean-

Fran:ois Lyotard, who has found his latest secret weapon in the ruptures, instabilities, and micro-catastrophic discontinuities of "paralogical" science [The Postmodern Condition, parts 13 and 14]. It is to this, rather than to the clapped-out narratives of classical emancipation, which we are advised to have recourse-a statement which was published in Britain just as the miners' trade union, led by revolutionary socialists, was hell-bent on bringing down Mrs. Thatcher and replacing her with a workers' government.

Anderson is perfectly right to characterize Paris as the capital of intellectual reaction. For the steady movement away from Marxism there, though the trajectory has been different with individual intellectuals, has been a record of the most discreditable political bankruptcy and renegacy, as one grotesque and desperate "solution"- the so-called oriental arts of love, mysticism, catastrophism, the death drive, the wholesale liquidation of meaning-has tumbled recklessly on the heels of another. Is Marxism really being summoned to defend itself against all that ? "All that," of course, being for the most part "post" nothing whatsoever, but a tired rehearsal of some of the most familiar themes of nineteenth-century liber- tarianism. Jacques Derrida is now speaking, perhaps a little late in the day, of nuclear

weapons. Such talk would be a good deal more impressive if Derrida, who after all has a

degree of influence in Europe and the USA, had publicly denounced the disgraceful nuclear

policy of his government, as some of the Marxist intellectuals in Britain have done in the case of theirs. To speak of "Marxism after post-structuralism," from this viewpoint at least, is rather like talking of Eisenstein after Disney.

If dialogue between Marxism and post-structuralism is difficult, then it is in part because of a difference in historical time-scale- because they do not quite inhabit the same epochal dimension. Perhaps one can best formulate this by suggesting that it is not so much that Marxism cannot accept much of what post-structuralism has to tell it, but that it cannot ac-

cept it yet. Truth, science, reason, an adequate approximation to the real are not, indeed not, the telos of human practice and discourse; Richard Rorty and others offend no tenet of Marxism in rejecting the need to "justify" the conversation which is history, to ground it

securely in something beyond itself. If we are asked why we bother to speak to somebody, then we can usually adduce some reasons; if we are asked why anybody bothers to speak to anybody at all, then we are quite properly at a loss for an answer. Of course the play of the signifier is its own end, and there is nothing outside the text; Marxism has no quarrel with these admirable notions. It is simply that, tedious old spoilsport that it is, it has happened to notice that there isn't quite enough text to go round, that the play of the signifier is hardly as free as one would wish, that discourse jams and falters, that the conversation is ridden with conflict and cross-purposes and that not everybody seems to be getting in on the dialogue. In such a situation, somebody has to shoulder the thankless task of truth, science, the real, and all the rest, inquiring into why all this should be so, examining falling rates of profit and the structures of Stuart absolutism. Rorty's cultivated conversationalists sound a little too club- bable and laid-back to be bothered with this bleak stuff, blithely concerned as they are with

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keeping the ball in the air. If the signifier is really to be floated in all directions, if discourse is to pullulate and explode, then some luckless lackey is stuck for the moment with the science/knowledge/truth/reality bit of the language game, unable quite as yet to pitch into the general euphoria. But of course we hope to be able to join you later, as Marx was impa- tient to finish with all the "economic crap" of Capital and get down to his big book on literature. The Eighteenth Brumaire looks forward with exhilaration to a time when the signifier will be ceaselessly subverted, the "content go beyond [the form]," as Marx puts it [vol. 11 106]; it is just that it is shrewd enough to recognize that any society which claimed to have achieved this happy condition and, for example, retained commodity production and parliamentary representation, would be self-deluded.

Something rather similar can be said of the idea of history, that nightmare from which post-structuralism is trying to awaken. Marxism, with its view that history is mostly bunk, is quite at one with this attractive goal, as the opening paragraphs of the Brumaire again attest. "Pre-history" is Marx's dismissive label for everything that has happened so far. But if we are to ensure that, a la Last Judgment, we all wake up together, then something a little more is needed than the odd paralogical somersault into the Now by the odd virtuoso. If history is the obstacle to our freedom then it is also, as Walter Benjamin knew, the only means to it; only by a revolutionary nostalgia for enslaved ancestors will there be liberated grand- children. In its haste to deconstruct the grand narratives of Enlightenment progress, post- Marxism has ended up undoing Benjamin's traditions of the oppressed along with them; in re-enacting Nietzsche's euphoric amnesia, it ineluctably repeats that erasure of the history of human suffering for which every ruling class is notorious. "History does not exist," we are in- formed by Britain's most reckless pedlars of post-Marxism, Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst [Pre- Capitalist Modes of Production 309-13]; to which the only answer is that it all depends on where you happen to be standing at the time.

In the dialogue or confrontation between Marxism and post-Marxism, each partner must surely be conscious of an aporia or undecidability in its attitude to the other. Marxism, loyal child of Enlightenment that it is, has always maintained an implacable hostility to irra- tionalism; but it is never very easy to decide whether, in seeking to block the path to another Auschwitz, you are simultaneously cold-shouldering the very dangerous styles of thought that might somehow lead you out of that entire epoch and episteme. There are times, in short, when the question of what counts as a productive or regressive break with Enlighten- ment rationality in any particular historical conjuncture will be simply undecidable, as we have not yet seen enough to be sure. In such moments, some will be honorably persuaded to stay where they are, unsatisfying though they see that to be, because the possible conse- quences are too dreadful to contemplate. Bolder spirits will chance their arm, but- this is all one would ask of them - must do so in fear and trembling. Both of these troubled positions are able to share a mutual exasperation with those who do not even recognize a dilemma here: those who, gullibly confident that they have put all the old claptrap about Reason and History behind them, advance with insouciance down paths whose termini are by definition obscure and unknowable. One would respect Benjamin's work a good deal less if one could not see just how aware he was of what comfort his "modernist" or "deconstructive" form of materialism could give to the fascists - of the embarrassing affinities between his own eman- cipatory "liquidation" of history and their own rather more brutal and practical pursuit of such goals. Perhaps it did not come as a surprise to Erwin Piscator that Goebbels offered him a job; if you deconstruct, suspend, dismantle, dismember, then you must always be pre- pared for the political enemy to come along and do something startling with the pieces. "Something always escapes-but it has to pay a heavy price," Jacques Derrida once re- marked in a seminar. It is those post-Marxists who do not seem to have paid their dues who tend to make Marxists uneasy.

This brings us to the aporia on the post-Marxist side. There are situations in which it is probably not possible, for feminist and post-structuralist critics of Marxism, to distinguish adequately between that in their critique which is urgently, illuminatingly hostile to Marx- ism, and the criticisms which any bourgeois(e) can comfortably make. Radical critics of Marxism, not least in these days when radicals of any sort are hardly very thick on the ground, have a political duty to discriminate their upbraidings of historical materialism, however sharp and searching, from the ignorant banalities mouthed in the country clubs. It




has to be said that this duty has not always been very conscientiously observed. Post- Marxism, one assumes, describes the thought of those who, having worked their way through Marxism, have now emerged somewhere on the other side. It does not describe the position of those middle-class liberals who, having in many respects stayed exactly where they were, now discover aspects of that case to be theoretically fashionable. Such "post- Marxists" are "posterior" in the sense that Bertrand Russell was to Hegel, not in the sense that Nietzsche was. The appeal of post-Marxism in the largest capitalist society in the world cannot, of course, be wholly ascribed to these facts; but it cannot be wholly dissociated from them either. The aporia, in any case, remains: post-Marxism cannot help giving comfort to the political Father in assailing its older sibling. One asks only that this damage be reckoned in as prudently and calculatively as is possible.

When it comes to the revolutionary potential of post-structuralism, then much must evidently hinge on the question of the subversion of the bourgeois-humanist subject. It is hard not to feel, however, that late capitalism has in some ways performed this task much more efficiently than any group of avant gardistes in Paris or New Haven. Is the post- structuralist critique of the subject inimical to late capitalism or collusive with it? The forms of post-structuralism which assume the ideological hegemony of the coherent humanist subject in late bourgeois society gain for themselves a certain radical political relevance only at the cost of overlooking certain "postmodern" political realities; the kinds of post-structuralism which acknowledge those realities tend to sacrifice radical political impetus by celebrating them. Post-Marxism, in other words, would seem to be caught in something of a cleft stick between realism and revolution. There are types of anti-bourgeois feminism, for example, which concentrate their fire on the monadic patriarchal subject but appear unaware of how crippled a critique this is of, say, the consuming subject of late capitalism; and there are others (notably, Lyotard and Kristeva) who are increasingly able to identify in the dispersed, decentered libidinal circuits of consumerist capitalism an approximate figure of the very post-humanist subject they desire.

As far as Marxism is concerned, both positions are drastically undialectical. Each sup- presses one pole of the contradictory character of the late bourgeois subject, which can be roughly summarized by stating that in our kind of societies what it is to be, say, a parent is not easily reconcilable with what it is to be, say, a consumer. As postmodernist culture at- tests, the contemporary subject may be less the strenuous monadic agent of an earlier phase of capitalist ideology than a disarticulated network of libidinal attachments, emptied of ethical substance and psychical interiority, the ephemeral function of this or that act of con- sumption, media experience, technological practice, sexual encounter or trend of fashion. The "unified subject" looms up in this light as more and more of a straw target, a hangover from an older liberal epoch of capitalist production, before technology and consumerism scattered our bodies to the winds as so many bits and pieces of reified technique, passing ap- petite, mechanical operation or reflex of desire. But this is by no means the whole story. For at other vital levels of the modern bourgeois social formation, in the schoolroom and the voting booth, the courthouse and confessional, in certain ethical, political, and juridical areas incongruously discontinuous with Las Vegas and the late show, the ideology of the humanist subject indeed continues to exert its implacable force. Any theory incapable of en- compassing these dialectical contradictions-contradictions rooted for Marxism in the ideological impasse between two definitive phases of capitalist production - is in dire danger of either tilting at windmills or, like Baudrillard, brutally affirming the most painful spiritual depletion as the highest form of political authenticity.

if the subject has been one focus of debate between Marxism and post-Marxism, the related concept of totality has been another. Here, once more, a number of straw targets have been cheerfully on offer, about which it is perhaps enough to say in passing that if one rarely comes across anybody who holds that nothing relates to anything else, one is equally hard put to it to flush out the benighted totalitarians who are supposed to believe that everything is just one thing in disguise. It is sometimes felt that Marxism is a form of totalizing essentialism because, among other errors, it holds that all forms of human practice can be explained in the last instance by reference back to an economic "base." This is in fact to misunderstand the meaning of the Marxist term "superstructural." "Superstructural" is, so to speak, a "focusing" term: its task is to pick out those elements of human practice, those parts

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of discourses and institutions, which at any given historical moment are acting as supports of certain dominant relations of social oppression. It does not designate an ontological "realm," a fixed, determinate, and unequivocal set of functions or structures; it invites us instead to contextualize a certain piece of practice or discourse in a particular way, without the

slightest guarantee that this is always and everywhere the most appropriate context for it. There are situations in which to say "What a fine dress you're wearing!" is "superstructural," and there are other situations where it is not. Not even the political state (let alone television stations, schools, and law courts) is superstructural tout court, though a Marxist would want to add that it is most of the time.

If Marxism is not quite as totalizing as some have thought, anti-totality thinking is not quite as detotalizing as some have suspected. It is surely obvious, for example, that the work of Michel Foucault remains captive to a rigidly totalizing impulse, nervous of dispersion and plurality. Foucault would seem to believe that there exist total systems known as "prisons," as though some unitary entity corresponded to the appellation "Alcatraz." But what is Alcatraz other than an decentered assemblage of this or that cell, warder, disciplinary technique, hypodermic syringe? Why this remorseless urge to homogenize these diffuse realities in a singular concept? The effort to elude any such totalizing metaphysics of the "prison" carries, of course, distinct political implications. There could, for example, be no orienting oneself tactically to the "total institution": no debating with the Governor about the "prison regime," no contrasting of one "prison" with another, no permissible statement which designated the prisoners as a collective body. Such totalizing would be no more than an inverted reflection of the relentless homogenizings of the ruling order, if it were admissible to speak of a "ruling order," which it is not. A genuine micropolitics of the prison would be in every sense cellular.

It is always possible, in other words, to stumble across a more fervent nominalist than oneself. For all those who feel that the human body is no more than a disarticulated ensem- ble of this or that organ, there is always someone else who feels just the same way about the concept of organ. It is as though almost any thought can be made to appear an illicit homogenization from the standpoint of some other, and so on in a potentially infinite regress. Whatever the argument over "totality" is about, it surely cannot be about this. There are, in fact, two distinct aspects to the concept, which are sometimes overhastily conflated. "Totality" may be a way of describing the structure of given social order, grounding it in a central principle; or it may be a way of describing the configuration of forces opposed to that order, which are equally seen as anchored in a determining instance (in classical Marxism, the proletariat). That these two aspects of the concept do not necessarily go hand in hand can be demonstrated by the fact that there are Marxian thinkers like Raymond Williams who would seem to hold to a concept of totality in the latter but not the former sense, and there are Marxists like Fredric Jameson who appear to subscribe to the notion of totality in the former but not in the latter sense. You can, in other words, be pluralistic about the structure of the given order but not about its antagonist, or vice versa; pluralistic about both, or about neither. It is not self-contradictory to claim that though there is indeed one ultimately deter- minant power holding the social formation together, it can be ousted only by a multiplicity of countervailing forces; or, conversely, that though there is in fact no such single given deter- minant, only the hegemony of a particular antagonist can transform the situation as it is.

What happened in fact, during the 1970s, was that both concepts of totality failed together. But this was not because left-inclined intellectuals suddenly lost faith in the sup- position that there was something called a "total system," as one might imagine occurring in a relatively unrepressive, welfarist, ideologically low-profiled era of capitalism. Far from it: the 1970s were certainly not that, and the inexorably constrictive effects of a "total system," "centered," "grounded" or not, were there for anyone to behold. What had seemed to fail most decisively and definitively was the alternative concept of totality: the classical Marxist doctrine of a primary, founding negation of the dominant order. The reasons for this were dual: the emergence of oppositional forces unanticipated by the classical concept, and the failure of the proletariat to respond adequately to the political crisis of 1968. This was not a failure which any Marxist familiar with the steady history of betrayals, misleadings, and counterrevolutionary tactics characteristic of the Communist Parties greeted with the slightest touch of astonishment; but to those less skeptical Communist fellow travelers, the




moment was likely to figure as a decisive break, or as the culmination of an increasing disillu- sionment.

To lose faith in "totality" in this (oppositional) sense, and yet to retain the concept of totality in the other sense-a theory of the social formation as centrally directed by certain exploitative class-relations- is, naturally, a desperately uncomfortable situation to be in. For in classical Marxism, there is of course an internal bond between the two concepts: it is just because Marxism is a theory which attends centrally to the exploitative class-relations of society that it ascribes revolutionary primacy to the only social force so generated, organized, equipped, and crucially located by those class-relations as to have the material capac- ity to transform them. To lose faith in that social force was thus to leave oneself with a question without an answer - unless one changed the question. Changing the theoretical question in response to a political disillusion is what is known as post-Marxism. It is as though, having lost the breadknife, one declares the loaf to be already sliced. Post-Marxism is not a response to a system which has changed its spots, become less "total," eased up, disarticulated, pluralized itself, but to precisely the opposite: to one which, gripped by a crisis of global pro- portions, is more "total" than ever, is thus temporarily stronger than its chief antagonist, and so is temporarily capable of discrediting it. It is because it is business as usual, only more so, that some fall prey to the illusion that the business in hand has changed.

Hence, arising out of this historical situation, some of the celebrated slippages and self- contradictions of post-Marxism, which could be tracked across almost every paragraph of Michel Foucault's dialogue "Revolutionary Action: 'Until Now"' [Language, Counter- Memory, Practice]. There is a system, but it is hopeless to confront it directly. There is a system, and also a concept of "total system," but if only we were to give the slip to the latter we could more effectively combat the former. There is no "total system": this is just an illusion of Western metaphysical thought. Something is oppressing us, but it cannot be called a system, even though it is everywhere. The fact that it is everywhere and nowhere, and so not systemically formalizable, is exactly what makes it so oppressive. This is part of a general theory of power, but general theories are obstructive and oppressive. There cannot be a total system, because to know it would require a general concept, and we know on other grounds that general concepts are tyrannical. We revolutionaries must be pluralists because that is the way the system is. We must be pluralists because that is exactly what the system is not. What we know about how the system is, or is not, does not require the aid of a general concept ....

- "Then," said Cranly, "do you not intend to become a protestant?" - "I said that I had lost the faith," Stephen answered, "but not that I had lost self-

respect. What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?" [James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 243-44]

WORKS CITED Baudrillard, Jean. "The Implosion of the Social in the Media," New Literary History 16 (Spring

1985), 577-89. Foucault, Michel. "Action: 'Until Now."' Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Ithaca:

Cornell University Press, 1977. Hindess, Barry, and Paul Hirst. Pre-capitalist Modes of Production. London: Routledge and

Kegan Paul, 1975. Lyotard, Jean-Francois.

The Post-Modern Condition. St. Paul: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. New York: Viking, 1962. Marx, Karl. The Eighteenth Brumaire, vol. 11, Marx/Engels Collected Works. Moscow:

Progress Publishers, 1975. New York: International Publishers, 1978. Taylor, Charles. "Foucault on Freedom and Truth," Philosophy and the Human Sciences:

Philosophical Papers 2. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

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marx after derrida || marxism, structuralism, and post-structuralism

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