Date: Wed, 6 Mar 1996 08:39:40 -0500 (EST)
From: "Bryan A. Alexander" <bnalexan-AT-umich.edu>
Subject: Re: Red Feminism


First off, thanks to Carrol for initiating this thread, and starting it 
so well with this text!
	Second, a few comments:

Bryan Alexander					Department of English
email: bnalexan-AT-umich.edu			University of Michigan
phone: (313) 764-0418				Ann Arbor, MI  USA    48103
fax: (313) 763-3128				http://www.umich.edu/~bnalexan

On Sun, 3 Mar 1996, Carrol Cox wrote:

> Since this list is so overwhelmingly male, it occurred to me that one
> way to partly redress that fact is simply to quote from important
> female Marxists. The following are the final paragraphs from Teresa
> Ebert's "Critiques for a Red Feminism" From *Transformation* 1:

Thanks for going to all this typing trouble...
> ...
>   for Reductionism"). To articulate the relations connecting
>   seemingly disparate events and phenomena is in fact a necessary
>   and unavoidable part of effecting knowledge of the real.

This seems basic dialectics.  And opposed to Althusserian 
overdetermination, instead arguing for a level series of effects.
	And the term "ludic feminism" seems strange.  It sounds like it's 
coming from Bob Black and the Zerowork gang - is this totally opposed to 
what's being said here?
>...  
>     This is not to say that the conflicts over ideology, cultural
>   practices and significations are not an important part of the
>   social struggle for emancipation: the issue is how do we explain
>   the relation of the discursive to the non-discursive, the e
>   relation of cultural practices to the "real existing world"--
>   whose objectivity is the fact of the "working day"--in order
>   to transform it? Obviously this relation is a highly mediated
>   one. But for the ludic materialists the relation is so radically
>   displaced that it is entirely suppressed: mediations are taken
>   as autonomous sites of signification and consequently the actual
>   practice of ludic cultural analyhsis is confined entirely to
>   institutional and cultural points of mediation severed from the
>   economic conditions producing them. The analysis of "mediations"
>   becomes a goal in itself, and the operation of "mediations" is
>   deployed to obscure the "origin" (surplus labor) and the "end"
>   (class differences) that in fact frame the "mediations." It is
>   only in the context of historical materialism that one can point
>   up the politics of this erasure of "origin" (arche) and "end"
>   (telos) in poststructuralist theory. In ludic feminism the
>   arche and telos are erased as if they were merely metaphysical
>   concepts. My point is that the erasure of arche and telos serves
>   a more immediate and concrete purpose: it makes it impossible
>   to connect the "mediated" to other social practices; and
>   consequently the inquiry into and analysis of the "mediations,"
>   themselves, take the place of knowledge of the social totality
>   in which mediations are relays of underlying connections. For
>   historical materialist feminists, however, cultural and ideological
>   practices are not autonomous but are instead primary sites for
>   reproducing the meanings and subjectivities supporting the unequal
>   gender, sexual and race divisions of labor, and thus a main arena
>   for the struggle against economic exploitation as well as cultural
>   oppression. The untimely time of red feminism has come.

1. This argument for autonomous struggles recalls Gramsci quite strongly 
- but without the popular fron or other general organizing rhetoric.  
Carroll, does Ebert talk about this elsewhere?

2. I'd be interested to see how an Adornian reading works here.  If 
Jameson is right, Adorno theorizes the effects and logic of surplus value 
throughout his work - and especially within discussions of mediation.
	I don't just want to play off other theorists vs this text.  I'm 
interested in what capital logic become here - I get a sense of 
functions, interests, etc., but I'm not sure how exchange vs use value 
plays out here.  On the one hand is the patriarchal use of the economic 
powers of victorious exchange value to keep women in secondary places 
within a detailed, concentric schema; on 
the other, a culture crushed under and radically informed by total 
exchange value produces sites of meaning with a specific logic of 
identity, controlled signification, but not necessarily a complex hierarchy.

> >     (Teresa Ebert develops the argument of 
this essay in greater >   detail in her book *Ludic Feminism and After*)
> 
>       Carrol Cox
>       (Note: the entirety of this posting is quoted from Ebert; I
> happen to agree with much that she says, but I quote it here as hers,
> not mine.)
> 
> 
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> 


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