Date: Thu, 17 Oct 2002 10:05:36 -0500
From: Cliff Staples <Clifford_staples-AT-und.nodak.edu>
Subject: Re: AUT: Academia....



--Boundary_(ID_09RKtjR/LG81p5Fr+FID4w)

Tahir:

Thanks much for your thoughtful response to my ignorance on the matter of 
"autonomous Marxism."
And while I do not want to in any way minimize that thoughtfulness with my 
response, I must be brief as I have to get ready for class.

First off, while I did read Althusser way back when, I come to him 
primarily via Resnick and Wolf (see Knowledge and Class, in particular) 
.  From what I can tell, while they do set themselves against humanism, 
empircism, and rationalism, and so in this sense likely have an affinity 
with Althusser, their primary interest in him seems to be his concept of 
"overdeterminism," which they claim Althusser took over from Freud.  The 
concept is their alternative to any kind of sociological determinism, which 
for someone like me is a breath of fresh air, as I spent a good deal of my 
time (with misgivings) messing with Erik Wright's class categories and 
regression equations.

The 'structure-agency' debate has been going on in bourgeois sociology for 
years.  And I face it nearly every day in the classroom where my students 
are, to say the least, anti-Althusserian (not that they know it yet) in 
their obliteration of any 'structure' in favor of pedal-to-the-metal 
voluntaristic individualism.  In short, the are true believers in the 
American creed.  I spend all semester chipping away at this edifice (mostly 
to no avail).

I'm somewhat surprised to learn that Althusser went so far overboard.  He 
did read Marx, didn't he (wink, wink)?  Marx is who I offer to those few 
students who are really interested in striking a balance.  Didn't Marx say 
something to the effect that "people make their own lives, but not under 
conditions of their own choosing?"  What more need be said on the 
matter?  Obviously those "conditions" were created by earlier generations 
of people making THEIR own lives.  I suppose one could use his "ensemble of 
social relations" statement to sustain a sociological reductionism of the 
self, but the American Pragmatist G.H. Mead always prevented me from going 
that far.

In any case, in our (me and my brother) most recent empirical work (if that 
phrase still makes any sense), we tried to strike just the sort of balance 
that Marx was talking about.  How successfully is quite another 
matter.  I'd love to hear what you think about it.  See William Staples and 
Clifford Staples, Power, Profits, and Patriarchy: the Social Organization 
of Work in the British Metal-Trades, 1791-1922  (Rowman & Littlefield, 
2001).  It's a case-study of the workers and owners of the Kenrick iron 
foundry, just outside of Birmingham during a very long 19th Century.  This 
firm was also studied by the business historian R.A. Church.  The Kenrick 
workers were, at times, very autonomous!  And, in the "Strike of Girls" in 
1913,  the young women especially so.

Best,

Cliff





At 11:24 AM 10/17/02 +0200, you wrote:


> >>> Clifford_staples-AT-und.nodak.edu 10/16/02 04:24PM >>>
>I probably shouldn't say, but I have no idea what "autonomist Marxism" is, 
>though from reading the list I gather it has something to do with the work 
>of Negri, which I have not (yet) read.  On the other hand, if it means you 
>don't take orders from anyone, I'm all for it.
>
>
>Cliff, as someone who did his time in Althusserian studies, particularly 
>via the linguistic work of Althusser's student, Michel Pecheux, I can 
>probably state the point of departure of autonomism fairly crisply in 
>contrast to that. It turns on two differing notions of subject. In all 
>anti-humanist post-strucuralist approaches, and certainly in Althusser, 
>subject is defined in terms of structure rather than in terms of notions 
>such as activity, agency or will. Thus it presented a 'solution' to the 
>old subject/structure dichotomy in social science. But it did this at a 
>high price in my opinion, by subordinating the subject to the notion of 
>structure (subject is 'constituted' by structure). The autonomist 
>tradition only really began to appeal to me when I began to recognise that 
>it presented an alternative on precisely this matter. It approaches the 
>working class as subject of history, as active force shaping the class 
>struggle and forcing new developments of capital, not a class 
>'interpellated' by capital's institutions, as in Althusser. The legacy of 
>Althusser is a hugely overdeveloped vocabulary relating to structure and a 
>notion of agency that is so impoverished as to be almost unthinkable. 
>Developing a notion of subject linked to agency is my own project. I 
>define ideology, for example, as a 'mediation of the will'. I'm sure the 
>difference to the structuralist notion is obvious. Thus you will generally 
>find amongst autonomists a much greater respect for Hegel than you would 
>among the apostles of structure. My understanding of Negri, by the way, is 
>that he seems to fall somewhere in the middle. There definitely is a kind 
>of postmodernist wing of autonomism, but that is actually the side of it 
>that interests me the least. I think the best kick-off point to exploring 
>autonomism is to read Harry Cleaver's book, Reading Capital Politically.
>
>One further problem with the notion of structure that you might like to 
>comment on, is its static nature. It is now a routine gesture in cultural 
>studies, for example, to start off with 'social structure' as underlying 
>reality that is used to explain particular phenomena. So structure=the 
>unconditioned and phenomenon=the conditioned. But structures are not 
>'given', they arise in history as a result of the actions of people. Thus 
>to say that the actions of people are to be understood in terms of 
>underlying structure loses the question of how structures may be 
>understood in terms of human activity. There is a circularity here and 
>ultimately a stasis. This is very unmarxist in my view. The only 'social 
>science' Marx knew was the science of history, and that doesn't stand 
>still. It moves because people are doing things to push it along.
>Tahir

--Boundary_(ID_09RKtjR/LG81p5Fr+FID4w)

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