AUT: Re: the masses (Poulantzas), was antiwar movement

["David McInerney" <borderlands@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Angela

A quick response to yours on my post

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From: ".: s0metim3s :." <s0metim3s@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <aut-op-sy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Sunday, March 28, 2004 3:33 PM
Subject: AUT: the masses (Poulantzas), was antiwar movement


> DM:
>
> : then how will they ever relate to
> : the masses?
>
> Why are 'the masses' always 'other people'?

This is a good question.  What I meant was not that we might not be from the
masses, but rather how do we relate to those who remain within the
mainstream (subjected/dominated) mass culture?  It seems that we must work
within and upon mass culture in ways that do not assume a condescending
attitude towards it.  Assuming a position of infallability - which is bound
not only to fail in the eyes of others, but also eventually to ourselves
(hence the shift from position to position, sometimes in the direction of
increasingly conservative, in others to increasingly doctrinaire and
sectarian leftism) - would seem the attitude most likely to fail.  A monkish
attitude only produces an order of monks, not a revolution.  I was recently
berated by a former student of mine - who has joined a buddhist order - for
being overly concerned with the material world, not only for an interest in
the sensual/physical (sex, movies, food, even physical disciplines such as
weight-training and martial arts) but also for my Marxism, which he sees as
overly concerned with the physical and mundane.  He didn't seem to be too
impressed with my Spinozist response of rejecting the mind/body dualism and
asserting that discourse and ideas are entirely material in existence!

> Btw, I like Balibar quite a bit, especially
> _Masses, Classes, Ideas_ (I'm not sure if this is
> how it was published elsewhere).  Balibar was
> always a more careful reader of Spinoza than Negri
> I think; and both of them owe something of a debt
> to Althusser for their attention to Spinoza.

If you like _Masses, Classes, Ideas_ I would recommend _Politics and the
Other Scene_ (2002) which contains the essays that were published with the
french expanded edition of the former (entitled _La crainte des masses_ -
'the fear of the masses') and his contribution (on Rousseau's and Kant's
ideas on 'the people') in Mike Hill and Warren Montag (eds), _Masses,
Classes and the Public Sphere_ (2000), which are all cognate papers to Parts
I & III of _Masses, Classes, Ideas_, as is the book _Spinoza and Politics_;
also, if you liked Part II of that book (the part on ideology and Marx)
Balibar's _The Philosophy of Marx_ develops that work on Marx's concepts of
ideology and fetishism.

Jason Read is working on a review article on Balibar's recent work for
_borderlands_ e-journal and we hope to publish that either in the next issue
or the one following.  We have a paper by Jason on Deleuze and Guattari's
reading of Marx in _Anti-Oedipus_ in our latest issue.

> And PS.  I'm interested in anyone who's got some
> info on Poulantzas, specifically the circumstances
> of his death.  Ok, morbid, but there's a point to
> this given Balibar's arguments with the CP over
> migration around the same time.
>
> Angela

On Poulantzas there was a rather good book written on him by Bob Jessop.
Not sure that I agree with all of it, but it's very well-informed.  I'm not
sure that it says anything about his death.  There were a number of suicides
on the Left in France around that time, together with Althusser's breakdown
and killing of his wife Helene.  These do not seem to be unrelated to
political events, especially elections, but perhaps the relations between
elections and suicides is symptomatic of a general lack of optimism with
respect to revolutionary politics that was pervasive after 1976.  On the
details of how Poulantzas killed himself, if that's all you want, he threw
himself from a balcony in much the same manner as Deleuze did more recently.
Another prominent Marxist theorist, Michel Pecheux, apparently threw himself
into the river weighted down with stones in 1983.  I guess either of these
is preferable to becoming a conservative!

DM

Dr. David McInerney
Borderlands e-journal
www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au




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