From: LKED54B-AT-prodigy.com ( DEB   KELSH)
Date: Thu, 26 Jun 1997 23:28:04, -0500
Subject: M-I: Response to R. Pearson




Russell Pearson:

As perhaps my comments to Karl may have suggested to you,
without knowing why you regard Ebert's book to be a "tome," I
can neither explicate what may not be clear to you (for whatever
reason) nor articulate any specific critique of hers to issues you 
take
to be critical.

(Is it "tome-ish" because long?  It is 308 pages, compared to
*Capital* vol. 1, the edition of which I have measures in at 848
pages.  Or is it "tome-ish" because it works to repudiate the
dominance of the local narrative and reclaim for transformative
(large scale) politics the necessity of international praxis, which
pushes the reader to struggle with some of the most current and
serious challenges to and appropriations of emergent socialist
consciousness?)

Moreover, as I'm sure you're aware, anyone who attempts to give
a "thumbnail sketch" of a conceptually dense and complex
theoretical work, which draws on a long line of similar works, runs
the risk of treating that work reductively.  Nevertheless, I'll take
the opportunity your request presents briefly to historicize her 
work
and then copy out a few paragraphs in which she historicizes her
project.

All of Ebert's work struggles to bring labor back into materialism
which, in the postmodern moment and in the wake of
poststructuralism, has been severed from "the praxis of labor
through which humans act  upon external nature' and change it, and
in this way simultaneously changes themselves (Marx, *Capital*
284)" (Ebert 34).

In *S/Z* Roland Barthes, a semiologist who stands on the cusp of
structuralism and poststructuralism, theorizes reading as a ludic
process: ". . .it would be wrong to say that if we undertake to
reread the text we do so for some intellectual advantage (to
understand better, to analyze on good grounds): it is actually and
invariably for a ludic advantage: to multiply the signifiers, not to
reach some ultimate signified" (165).  Here Barthes--as did others,
including Derrida, Barth, Borges, Nabokov. . .--theorizes all
signifiers as referential only to one another, that is, "there is no
longer any  representation'" (Barthes 164).  In this move, any text
is about itself and other texts only; text is cut off, in short, 
from
social struggle.  Such a move works to erase from one's
understanding of language, text, argument. . .the traces of the 
labor
struggles in which any use of language or production of text and
argument occurs.  As Charles Russell explains, "Instead of
presuming and attempting to speak about or illustrate the
phenomenal world, the artwork regards itself as the primary reality"
(("The Context of the Concept" in Natoli and Hutcheon, *A
Postmodern Reader* p. 289; reprinted from *Bucknell Review's
Romanticism, Modernism, Postmodernism* ed. Harry R. Garvin). 
Materiality in this view--which Ebert refers to as matterist--
consists
of people acting on language in order to effect change in the world
and consequently themselves.  

Private property is no longer that which promulgates inequity,
rather linguistic propriety produces equity.  (Doug, this is 
pertinent
to the issue you indicated you'd like to take up.)

It is against this grain that Ebert struggles.  Here's the core of 
her
argument:

     "The political and epistemological crisis that materialism has
produced in ludic feminism has to do with its class politics.  Ludic
feminism becomes--in its ~effects~, if not in its intentions--a 
theory
inscribes the class interests of what bourgeois sociology calls the
upper middle class.  Ludic feminism does not acknowledge the
materiality of the regime of wage labor and capital.  It does not
acknowledge the existence of a historical series independent from
the consciousness of the subject and autonomous from textuality. 
Such a recognition would lead to the further acknowledgment of
the materiality of the social contradictions brought about the 
social
relations of production founded upon the priority of private
property.  Ludic feminism cannot accept a social theory that finds
private property--the congealed surplus labor of others--to be the
cause of social inequalities that can be remedied only through
revolution. Ludic feminism is, in ~effect~, a theory for property
holders.  Nor can ludic feminism simply revert to an essentialist
position and posit the consciousness of the subject as the source of
social reality.  Such a move would go against the general
poststructuralist constructivism and consequently would lead to,
among other thins, a reinscription of logocentrism and the
phallocentrism that underlies it.  Ludic feminism therefore needs to
invent a form of materialism that gestures to a world not directly
present to the consciousness of the subject (as class
poststructuralism has done), but not entirely constructed in the
medium of knowing (language) either.  It has simply become
 unethical' to think of such social oppressions as sexism, racism,
and homophobia as purely matters of language and discourse. 
Ludic feminism, in other words, is beginning to learn the lesson of
Engels's *Anti-Duhring*: the fact that we understand reality
through language does not mean that reality is made by language.
     "The dilemma of ludic feminism in theorizing materialism is
a familiar one. . .  Although posed as an epistemological question,
the dilemma is finally a class question: how not to deny the world
outside the consciousness of the subject but not to make the world
the material cause of social practices either. . . . This then is 
the
dilemma of ludic feminism: the denial of materialism leads ludic
feminism to a form of idealism that discredits any claims it might
have to the struggle for social change; accepting materialism, on 
the
other hand, implicates its own ludic practices in the practices of
patriarchal capitalism--the practices that have produced gender
inequalities as differences that can be deployed to increase the 
rate
of profit.  This dilemma has lead feminism to an intolerable 
political
crisis: a crisis that is, in fact, so acute it has raised questions 
about
the viability of feminism as a theory and practice itself" (26-7).

Ebert's book works to put pressure on this crisis through sustained
critique of the dominant strands of feminist theory.  Through such
critique, she works to go beyond ludic feminism to a red feminism
which struggles in solidarity with all women around the globe to
transform the class relations that produce inequity from difference.

Deb Kelsh
Red Theory Collective
The University at Albany, NY

l  




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