Date: Sat, 26 Jul 1997 11:14:12 -0500 From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood-AT-panix.com> Subject: Re: M-I: Re: M-FEM: Ludic Feminism and Red Feminism I have little to add to Yoshie's fine posting, but I'd like to take off a bit from this: >For instance, on pp. 797-8, Ebert writes: "In class societies economic >resources are not distributed equally (to each according to her or his >needs), thus there are unfulfilled needs and these produce desire." This >appears to me to be a simplistic account of desire as well as needs. Would >desire disappear as soon as all our needs are fulfilled? Are the idea and >reality of desire as anti-revolutionary as she makes them out to be? Isn't >it rather the case that socialist revolution is (or ought to become) an >object of desire as well as needs? Ebert's descriptions and explanations of >desire most of the time begin and end in her reactions against and simple >negations of postmodern accounts of desire, and she fails to present and >elaborate her own Marxist account of desire, love, and sexuality. Though >Ebert seems to regard dwelling on such matters as a sign of "middle-class >(or bourgeois) privilege," but I would instead say that the second nature >abhors vacuum, and if there is no compelling Marxist account of desire, >non- or anti-Marxists' will fill it. I happened to pick up Ludic Feminism yesterday trying to track down a quote, which was my first exposure to it since the influx of the Wild Buffaloes. Sadly, I could hear their deadly cadences in her prose. As much as I liked the book when I read it, her comrades have highlighted its deficiencies: a grim one-dimensional "materialism" and, as Yoshie argued, an inflation of the importance of postmodernism. But while inflating pomo's importance, they don't really take it seriously enough either. That is, they exhibit a very undialectical attitude of condemnation even as they uncritically reproduce its style. As silly as it often is, pomo "problematization" of universals, subjecthood, and materiality is something to be taken seriously, not denounced as bourgeois self-indulgence. What might new universals look like? What would a (post-postmodern) Marxian analysis of discourse look like? Ebert cites Voloshinov's saying that systems of signification are an arena of class struggle, which is an appealing point, but it would be nice to see it developed further. Our idea of the material is constructed through discourse (and this shouldn't be a shock to Marxists of the non-vulgar sort) - but what are the social and material constraints on those constructions? And why is desire such an object of suspicion? Can you have a revolutionary politics without a desire for utopia, and wouldn't a utopia be a place of (noncommodified) desire? Though Ebert is far smarter than the rest of the gang that's showed up here, I don't see a real engagement with these issues, but mainly assertions of how they're wrong. Doug
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