Date: Fri, 3 Mar 1995 10:51:07 -0500 (EST)
From: Louis N Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: Postmodernism revisited


Louis Proyect:
I'm taking a seminar with Randy Martin at the Marxist School in NYC. 
Randy teaches at Pratt and is the author of "Performance as Political 
Act" and "Socialist Ensembles: Theater and State in Nicaragua and 
Cuba". The seminar involves a re-reading of some basic works of Marx 
in the context of contemporary critiques by postmodernists, feminists 
and postcolonialists. 

I came to the seminar expecting to pick up some ammunition to use against 
all those trendy "post" thinkers, but have discovered, much to my 
initial dismay, that Randy Martin has a more nuanced view of things. Since 
I am a rather crude fellow, both personally and intellectually, this 
has required me to alter my habits of thought. But it may pay off in 
the long run--who knows. In any case, I would like to submit a statement 
by Randy on some of the basic issues being discussed in the seminar for 
your consideration. As you will see immediately, they are the same issues 
that were discussed recently in the postmodernism thread in this list.

Randy Martin:
A certain amount of mischief has been done under the sign of the 
prefix "post." It is often inserted in front of a noun not as a modifier, 
but as a total break with what it is manifestly attached to. It seems to me 
more useful to inquire into the nature of this attachment, and to repose 
the "post" as a complication within rather than complete rupture from 
the subject in question. It is within this in mind that I would like to 
examine the relation between marxism, postmodernism, feminism and 
postcolonialism.

My interest is not in subsuming the last three terms into the first, but in 
exploring their mutual articulation. It is not uncommon to construct a 
rather brittle and straw figure of marxism in order to constitute a 
critical project that can strengthen an understanding of politics that 
have typically been difficult to perceive from a marxist optic. One risk 
in this procedure, however, is to reproduce internally the very features 
one is attempting to correct through the critique of marxism. An 
example of this can be found in certain treatments of postmodern 
politics, exemplified in the radical democracy of Laclau and Mouffe. 

Their declaration of the end of master narratives has all the ring of a 
universalizing proclamation, and their newly decentered subjects may 
not be able to recognize what they share with the old ones. More 
specifically, the claim that Marx is the source of a master narrative of 
history ending with the victory of communism and the industrial 
proletariat as universal subject, rests on a reading of Marx that would 
greatly simplify any text. As noted by Foucault, Marx shares with 
Nietzsche and Freud a view of history as internally discontinuous, and 
therefore contributes to the very theory of decentering that 
contemporary theorists depend upon.

The notion that, for Marx, history can be apprehended as a narrative, 
has been greatly problematized by Althusser and others. Careful 
attention to the opening pages of the Manifesto bear out these 
assertions. There, as in the 18th Brumaire, as in Capital, Marx is 
vigilant in presenting the ambivalent and divided movement of history, 
not as an inexorable synthesis that is the same everywhere it appears, 
but as a contradictory process that destroys boundaries only to 
reconstitute new societal divisions, that depends upon a socialization of 
labor that it subsequently flees, that levels distinctions only to reinscribe 
them more extensively. This account of creative destruction is helpful in 
grasping the dynamics of the postcolonial condition.

But doing so assumes that is possible to extract what is analytic in 
Marx, rather than reading him descriptively and generalizing form a 
specific situation. To do so can only produce a eurocentric account of 
marxism. This is not to say that Marx's (or anyone else's work) could be 
transcribed in toto to account for contemporary situations of 
postcoloniality or other phenomena. The same would have to be said 
regarding the relation of marxism to feminism. Yet feminism's success 
in showing that the separation between public and private is itself a 
political construct, is not at all inconsistent with Marx's efforts to 
analyze how the disarticulation of production and reproduction (and of 
circulation) is generative of politics. Clearly this does not exhaust 
feminist analysis but makes a case for a certain supplementarity among 
critical endeavors that share a given epistemic context.


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