[PEN-L:2150] Re: Re: Re: Re: was 'discourse' now identity politics

[Dennis R Redmond <dredmond@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 13 Jan 1999, Louis Proyect wrote:

> I don't mean that she is for "identity". All I am saying is that she is an
> academic theorist who makes her living participating in sterile debates
> around such questions. I think you are misunderstanding the entire context
> of the term "self-determination". The question of "self" occupies a very
> small place in Marxist politics, which is my speciality. It is of major
> concern to bourgeois ideologists, who inherit this from Enlightenment
> philosophy.

But Lou, academia nowadays is just another extension of the factory
system, and the whole question of the self and subjectivity is the
*essence* of Marxism. Identity, as Adorno said, is the ur-form of
ideology; it's the raw material which gets processed into culture,
art, politics, consciousness, and all that other good stuff. Radicals who
can't talk about subjectivity are like economists who can't talk about the
concept of capital, or culture theorists who don't want to acknowledge
the contemporary culture industry. Butler at least raises some thorny,
vexing, complicated issues involving culture and identity, which any
progressive movement worth its salt has to think through and
critique. There'd be no Marx without Hegel, right?

-- Dennis