From Gramsci On (Althusser. Poulantzas, Laclau/Mouffe and Analytical Marxism)

[LeoCasey@xxxxxxx]

The discussions initiated by David's commentary have opened up what are, for
me, some very interesting threads. (But interesting postings are coming so
fast and furious that it is hard for those of us with full-time, non-academic
jobs and lives to keep up.) Let me take up just a few of points.

1. The significance of Althusser.
Louis asks an important question concerning the place/significance of
Althusser within Marxism. My personal take is that Althusser was the Martin
Luther of Stalinist Communism. Before Althusser, Communist militants/scholars
did not read/interpret Marxian texts on their own, but took their cues from
the official, stultifying dogmatic reading provided by the Communist papacy
residing in the Communist Rome, Moscow, transmitted through the local
episcopal sees. Althusser's "reading of Marx" opened up the space in which
the Communist militant/scholar could establish his/her own independent
relationship with the Marxian texts. Thus, despite Althusser life long fealty
to the PCF, his students were among the leaders of 1968 and of French Maoism.
Althusser's reading opened up a number of key questions in the interpretation
of the Marxian texts: (1) What is the relationship of Marxism to Hegel? (2)
What is the proper role of politics and ideology in Marxist theory? (3) What
does it mean to say that Marxism is a science? (4) What relationship does
psychoanalysis have to Marxism? While one may dispute the particular formulas
through which Althusser poses these questions (ie, the use of the concept of
epistemological break to define the Marx-Hegel relationship, or the use of
the Lacanian based notion of interpellation to define ideology), and while I
personally find few of them to still retain much merit, it would be difficult
to argue that Althusser was not addressing some pretty fundamental issues
within Marxism. IMHO, Althusser remains important not because of his
particular theoretical contributions, but because of the theoretical space he
opened up.

2. The Nation in Poulantzas' _State, Power, Socialism_
I would like to pick up a point David mentioned at the beginning of these
threads with which I have some interesting agreements and disagreements, but
which has been lost in the ensuing threads. I agree that Poulantzas' analysis
of the nation is a very crucial contribution, and that nothing I have read
before and since comes close to its insight. In brief, Poulantzas employs the
work of Foucault and the Annales school of French historiography to develop
an analysis of the nation which locates it in the underlying temporal and
spatial organization of modern social structures. Synopses of this line of
thinking are somewhat misleading: one must really read the analysis in the
original, with all of its detail, to appreciate its beauty and its
productivity. For example, I believe that it helps locate within larger
modern social dynamics, and thus make sense of, the Holocaust. What I find
problematic in Poulantzas' analysis is this location of the dynamic force of
these temporal and spatial modes of organization within Marxist conceived
modes of production; I don't see this as at all a necessary or even fruitful
theoretical construction. Thus, when David talks of these analyses as
materialist, I become suspicious that materialism is being used here as
synonymous with recuperation into familar Marxist categories. As I noted to
Rakesh on the relationship between Foucault and Marxism with respect to
Foucault's analysis of 'normalization' and the Marxist analysis of the labour
process two weeks ago, Poulantzas shows how much of Foucault's analysis can
be recovered within an open, non-dogmatic brand of Marxism. But there is also
-- and it is a much more disconcerting possibility for Marxists -- the
equally plausible option that Marx's analysis is really just a local
contribution to a much broader analysis of power in modernity.

3. Lacanian Analysis, Ideology and The Subject
Although I think that David too quickly dismisses the contributions of a
Lacanian (and, by geneology, Hegelian) analysis to the notions of
subjectivity and discourse, I am actually in agreement with him that I do not
find Zizek and Slovenian turn in Laclau's work particularly fruitful. (Note,
for an interesting contrast, that Zizek is almost entirely absent from
Mouffe's writing after _Hegemony and Socialist Strategy_; she moves into (or
better, remains on) the terrain of political theory, while Laclau seems to
have been seduced into the 'sublime' world of ideological analysis. I find
Mouffe's work on Carl Schmitt, for example, quite interesting, even where I
disagree with it.) I found this a strange but not completely implausible
trajectory for Laclau. The move can be reconciled in this way -- Laclau finds
in Zizek a general theory of ideology as that which attempts to close the
uncloseable (the social). But I would agree that where _Hegemony and
Socialist Strategy_ opened a great deal of creative theoretical space,
Zizek's Lacanian analysis of ideology has at best a very narrow and
circumscribed use. (Thus, David's use of the 'dead end' imagery.) This in
part reflects my view of it as a de-politicized theoretical turn, not unlike
Analytical/Academic Marxism. (More on this below.)

4. Discourse Analysis
It is a serious mistake to treat Zizek's Lacanian theory of ideology as
synonymous with the field of discourse analysis. Back in June and July 1995,
when I first started posting to this list, Howie Chodos and I had a long and
interesting exchange on Laclau/Mouffe, post-Marxism and discourse theory. It
can be resurrected from the archives, I am sure, if one is so inclined.
Suffice it to say here, that I believe that the notion of discourse as the
medium in which all social practice takes place to be potentially far more
theoretically productive than the classical Marxist idea of production as the
ground of all social practice. In my own work, as a high school teacher in an
inner city Brooklyn high school and as an activist and leader in the
teachers' union, I have found discourse type analysis very helpful in
thinking through the concrete political tasks and strategies before me in
ways that notions of surplus value, the labor theory of value and
distinctions between productive and unproductive labour are really useless.
The one component of classical Marxist analysis which I have found useful is
the analysis of the labour process, and it is precisely this component which
is most easily assimilable into discourse analysis. I place a high premium on
the political efficacy of theory, and this what attracted me to discouse
theory (and Gramsci...)

5. Analytical/Academic Marxism
The virtue of analytical Marxism is its insistence upon rigorous standards of
logical argumentation, something which is often seriously lacking in the
Marxism of political movements where sectarianism mindsets can lead to the
sloppiest and most superfacial modes of thinking. Insofar as Marxism was to
be taken as intellectually serious in the academy, such developments were
inevitable -- and to be welcomed. But if we look at the first in this school
of thought, Gerry Cohen's reconstruction of Marxism, it becomes clear that it
is possible to logically construct models of Marxism which would be of no
use, and could be even detrimental, to political movements... I write, of
course, of his completely economic determinist Marxism (the handmill gives
you feudalism, etc.) It thus remains very questionable, precisely because of
their distance from politics and their choice, for the most part, of
de-politicized objects of study, whether or not these AM developments will
have any appreciable impact -- positive or negative -- on social and
political movements. Parenthetically, I found interesting (as someone trained
in political theory) Justin's confession of the influence of Michigan's
(notoriously empiricist and behaviorialist) poiltical science department. It
reminds me of a talk I once heard from a young African-American woman scholar
(who had graduated from Michigan and was teaching at Yale) on the
controversies surrounding the implementation of the "Rainbow of the Children"
curriculum in the New York City public schools; this curriculum was designed
to encourage multi-culturalism, and the rather small section which taught
tolerance for lesbians and gay men ran into a firestorm of fundamentalist
protest. You can imagine how problematic the application of 'rational choice'
models to this real, live political dispute was. The scholar introduced
herself as a "recovering Michiganite."

6. The State and Civil Society
Let me finish these musing by taking up Chris B.'s inquiry concerning state
and civil society. One could easily write a Ph.D. dissertation on the
relationship between these categories of thought, for they date back to the
dawn of the modern era and the first social contract theories in political
thought. Locke and a few others (in contrast to Hobbes and Rousseau) had a
two contract theory -- first, there was a pact of civil association which
established civil society (all individuals agree to establish society) and
then, there was a padct of submission, in which civil society establishes the
state by agreeing to submit to its rule in return for a protection of life,
liberty and property. Without going into great lengths here, at issue was the
extent to which civil society (and the realm of the private, the individual)
could be established as prior to -- and thus a constraint upon -- the state
(and the realm of the public). Hegel and Marx were more in the Hobbesian and
Rousseauian tradition, in which the state was understood as necessarily an
instrument of domination -- there is one 'social contract', it is the pact of
domination. In the _Philosophy of Right_, Hegel argued that the state was the
unity and the inner truth of civil (bourgeois) society; in his early works,
Marx inverts this formula, and argues that civil (bourgeois) society is the
inner truth and unity of the state (ie, the state is a class, bourgeois
state). IMO, the analyses of Gramsci and Poulantzas takes that analyses
forward by, among other things, specifically questioning the polarity of
state and civil society. For one of the functions of the modern state is to
establish and reestablish the line of demarcation between private and public,
and thus, between civil society and the state proper. In this respect,
insofar as civil society is broadly defined, if you will, by the state, it
can be seen in certain respects as part of the state. (This thesis, however,
can lead to some seriously anti-democratic politics if handled in a crude
fashion which destroys all distinctions between state and civil society.) I
know this is a theoretically dense explanation, so maybe a practical
illustration will make it somewhat clearer. One way in which contemporary
political struggles (class struggles, if you want) are being fought out is
around the right wing project of 'privatization', of removing from the public
sphere and the responsibility of the state, social services and key
industries. Part of what is being done here is the state redefining the line
of demarcation between itself and civil society. I hope that helps a bit.



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