Date: Fri, 18 Apr 1997 14:23:21 -0500
From: Yoshie Furuhashi <Furuhashi.1-AT-osu.edu>
Subject: Re: M-I: RED-NET: TEXT ONE


Doug wrote:
>Really? Given the influence of Nietzsche on a lot of postmoderns, I'd think
>that most of them would recoil at the soc dem label. SDs like big
>institutions, like governments and unions and quangos, and they tend to be
>squeamish about power - which would disqualify them from at least the
>Foucauldian branch of postmodernism. According to James Miller, a name not
>popular on this list I know, Foucault even had a late-life flirtation with
>Austrian economics, finding some antistatist appeal in classical liberalism.

Yes, they would "recoil at the soc dem label," and that's why we should
(repeatedly) say that's what they are until the label sticks! They would
hate to see their rhetorical radicalism deflated! Th SD label most
obviously applies to folks like Laclau & Mouffe, as Terry Eagleton has said.

What about the rest of them whose politics is less clearly articulated in
their theory? Let's take Slavoj Zizek. His theory mixes Marx (without a
revolutionary project), Freud, Lacan, and Hegel (minus teleology), to
produce a sort of apologia for "permanent revolution" of capital as well as
formal democracy. (Maybe Trotskyists like Hugh and Malecki should read the
guy to reclaim the concept!) Let me quote the most explicit passage from
Zizek's _The Sublime Object of Ideology_:

"The Lacanian definition of democracy would then be: a sociopolitical order
in whch the People do not exist--do not exist as a unity, embodied in their
unique representative. That is why the basic feature of the democratic
order is that the place of Power is, by the neccesity of its structure, an
empty place (Lefort 1981). In a democratic order, sovereignty lies in the
People--but what is the People if not, precisely, the collection of the
*subjects* of power?...Because the People cannot immediately govern
themselves, the place of Power must always remain an empty place: any
person occupying it can do so only temporarily, as a kind of surrogate, a
substitute for the real-impossible soverign--'nobody can rule innocently,'
as Saint-Just puts it. And in totalitarianism, the Party becomes again the
very subject who, being the immediate embodiment of the People, *can* rule
innocently. It is not by accident that the real-socialist countries call
themselves 'people's democracy'--here, finally, 'the People' exist again.
	It is against the background of this emptying of the place of
Power, that we can measure the break introduced by the 'democratic
invention' (Lefort) in the history of institutions: 'democratic society'
could be determined as a society whose institutional structure includes, as
a part of its 'normal,' 'regular' reproduction, the moment of dissolution
of the socio-symbolic bond, the moment of irruption of the Real: elections.
Lefort interprets elections (those of 'formal,' 'bourgeois' democracy) as
an act of symbolic dissolution of social edifice: their crucial feature is
the one that is usually made the target for Marxist criticism of 'formal
democracy'--the fact that we take part as abstract citizens, atomized
individuals, reduced to pure Ones without further qualifications." (147-148)

Postmodernists do not necessarily reject institutions. In fact, their
theory can be read as analysis interminable of why institutions produce
their discontents, why everybody is neurotic (when not psychotic), why we
can't or shouldn't get rid of institutions nevertheless. (So they slide
into the apologia for the status quo.)

The reason why they are part of social democracy instead of (renovated)
classical liberalism is that they do not have the guts to bring their
theory to its logical conclusion. They are squeamish, as you said. They
want to think of themselves as radicals on the left side. They want to
rebel in the margins and *talk* about postmodernism instead of *performing*
postmodernism as Thatcher and Reagan did--*true* masters of
"destabilization," "subversion" of meanings. (Who is a "Freedom fighter"?)
This highly entertaining combination of rhetorical radicalism influenced by
Nietzsche with social democracy has its antecedent in George Bernard Shaw.
(By saying this, perhaps I do injustice to Shaw.)

Besides that, I think it is important to examine their rhetorical
procedures, that is, forms that their theory assumes. For instance,
"neither A nor B" is one of their favorite modes of writing, which points
to their desire to overcome dualism theoretically--an index of their search
for the Third Way between capital and labor, capitalism and socialism.
(Let's turn the table and do a "symptomatic" reading on them!) Just in case
people don't get the point, they reinforce their style crudely at the level
of content--between Fascism and "Stalinism." In their minds, "Stalinism"
covers a wide spectrum--perhaps everybody on this list (as well as those on
the LeninList). As if all the living marxists must personally atone for the
Original Sin (which also retroactively punishes those who came before
Stalin). They seem to like Marx and Walter Benjamin, though, and parts of
Gramsci and Althusser. What they like about Marx, above all, is a style of
his theory, and the best of postmodernists (like Zizek) can occasionally
imitate it very well while strenuously excluding anything remotely
approaching Marx's politics. (Read his essay "How Did Marx Invent the
Symptom?" in _The Sublime..._ to see how Zizek tries to steal Marx's
style.) This, I believe, is another thing we should reclaim from
postmodernism. We need to remember _how_ Marx wrote as well as what he
wrote; Marx's style of writing was not incidental to his theoretical
content.

The case of Foucault is interesting. In fact, I have a lot of respect for
him. His _History of Sexuality_ helped me think about the meaning of eating
(dis)order as (in part) the revolt of the body against the discipline of
discourse. I believe it is possible to integrate that sort of insight into
marxism. Moreover, if James Miller is right, Foucault got the ability to
recognize the kinship between Austrian economics and political implications
of his theory (not every postmodernist possesses such self-awareness). But
his kind of anarchism or libertarianism requires as its base the kind of
material comforts that only social democracy in the first world can provide
through institutions such as higher education. No share of surplus value
for unproductive cultural workers provided through public institutions, no
private theatre (such as S&M or Foucauldian theory) where pleasure can be
had through the phantasmatic enactment and dissolution of power and
institutions (such as "individuality" in bourgeois humanism).

Yoshie






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