Date: Mon, 2 Jun 1997 12:16:23 -0500
From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood-AT-panix.com>
Subject: M-I: Butler on Marxists


I've just gotten a copy of "Merely Cultural," the paper that Judith Butler
delivered to the Rethinking Marxism conference at UMass-Amherst last
December (which will be published in a forthcoming issue of Social Text).
Here's the opening:

"I propose to consider two different kinds of claims that have circulated
recently, representing a culmination of sentiment that has been building
for some time. One has to do with an explicitly Marxist objection to the
reduction of Marxist scholarship and activism to the study of culture,
sometimes understood as the reduction of Marxism to cultural studies. The
second has to do with the tendency to relegate new social movements to the
sphere of the cultural. Indeed to dismiss them as being preoccupied with
what is called the 'merely' cultural, and then to construe this cultural
politics as factionalizing, identarian, and particularistic. If I fail to
give the names of those I take to hold these views, I hope that I will be
forgiven. The active cultural presumption of this essay is that we utter
and hear such views, that they form some part of the debates that populate
the intellecdtual landscape within progresive intellectual circles. I
presume as well that to link individuals to such views runs the risk of
deflecting attention from the meaning and effect of such views to the
pettier politics of who said what, and who said what back - a form of
cultural politics that, for the moment, I want to resist.
   These are some of the forms that this kind of argument has taken in the
last year [i.e., since the Sokal affair, one of the names she refuses to
mention]: that the cultural focus of Left politics has abandoned the
materialist project of Marxism, that it fails to address questions of
economic equity and redistribution, that it fails as well to situate
culture in terms of a *systematic* understanding of social and economic
modes of production; that the cultural focus of Left politics has
splintered the Left into identiarian sects, that we have lost a set of
common ideals and goals, a sense of common history, a common set of values,
a common language and even an objective and universal mode of rationality;
that the cultural focus of Left politics subsitutes a self-centered and
trivial form of politics that focuses on transient events, practices, and
objects rather than offering a more robust, serious, and comprehensive
vision of the systematic interrelatedness of social and economic
conditions."

A little later:

"The charge that the new social movements are 'merely cultural,' that a
unified and progressive Marxism must return to a materialism based in an
objective analysis of class, itself presumes that the distinction between
material and cultural life is a stable one. And this recourse to an
apparently stable distinction between material and cultural life is clearly
the resurgence of a theoretical anachronism, one that discounts the
contributions to Marxist theory since Althusser's displacement of the
base-superstructure model as well as various forms of cultural materialism
(Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak). Indeed the
untimely resurgence of that distinction is in the service of a tactic which
seeks to identify new social movements with the merely cultural, and the
cultural with the derivative and secondary, thus embracing an anachronistic
materialism as the banner for a new orthodoxy.
   This resurgence of Left orthodoxy calls for a 'unity' that would,
paradoxically, redivide the Left in precisely the way that orthodoxy
purports to lament. Indeed, one way of producing this division becomes
clear when we ask, which movements, and for what reasons, get relegated to
the sphere of the merely cultural, and how that very division between the
material and the cultural becomes tactically invoked for the purposes of
marginalizing certain forms of political activism? And how does the new
orthodxy on the Left work in tandem with a social and sexual conservatism
that seeks to make questions of race and sexuality secondary to the 'real'
business of politics, producing a new and eery [sic] political formation of
neo-conservative Marxisms."


Are there any Marxists today who take the view of culture that Butler
ascribes to classical/orthodox/neoconservative Marxism? Are there many
Marxists, aside from the comical Rolf Martens, who would dismiss
gay/lesbian liberation as somehow secondary, trivial, "merely cultural"?

It seems to me that in their (justified) rejection of crudely deterministic
base-superstructure models, Butler & her poststructuralist comrades have
embraced a purely discursive model, which seems not terribly interested in
any notion of discourse being shaped by social forces.

Any comments?

Doug

--

Doug Henwood
Left Business Observer
250 W 85 St
New York NY 10024-3217 USA
+1-212-874-4020 voice  +1-212-874-3137 fax
email: <mailto:dhenwood-AT-panix.com>
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