The Rhetoric of Post-Marxism: Discourse and Institutionality in Laclau and Mouffe, Resnick
and Wolff
Author(s): Robert Miklitsch
Source: Social Text, No. 45, (Winter, 1995), pp. 167-196
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/466680
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The Rhetoric of Post-Marxism
DISCOURSE
AND
INSTITUTIONALITY
MOUFFE,
IN LACLAU AND
RESNICK AND
Like the map of Africa before the great explorations, [the theory of the
superstructure] remains a realm sketched in outline, with its great mountain
chains and rivers, but often unknown in detail beyond a few well-known
regions. Who has really attempted to follow up the explorations of Marx
and Engels? I can only think of Gramsci.
-Louis Althusser, "Contradiction and Overdetermination"
[If] error is serious in historiography, it becomes still more serious in the art
of politics, when it is not reconstruction of past history but construction of
present and future history which is at stake. In this case . . . the snake bites
the snake-charmer ...
-Antonio Gramsci, The Modern Prince
Preamble: Marxism in the New World Order
What can the above locution mean but, to invoke the apocalyptic Krokers,
Marxism "in the age of Lenin in ruins,"' which is to say Marxism after the
fall of communism, a brave new world where the mot d'ordreis capital.
The May 1991 cover title of The Economist is appropriately economic:
"From Marx to the Market."2A rich legend.
Not from central planning or command economy to the market. Nor
from Marx to Smith (Adam Smith, that is). But from Marx to the market,
where the market is not only the last word in a long war of words, but a
concept-the market-that is the absolute Other of Marx the man and
myth, everything Marx the proper name signifies (that is, Marxism,
socialism, communism).3 In fact, the concept of the market insinuates a
neonarrative that abolishes, in a word, the master narrative of Marxism.
The big story, then, is not from capitalism to socialism and beyond, but
from socialism to capitalism, where capitalism, not communism, is the
omega of history. In sum, the banner "From Marx to the market" invites
a double reading, at once rhetorical and historical.
In some sense, of course, all of this is very old news indeed. Both capitalism and socialism have been pronounced DOA more times than one
cares to remember. ("Active forgetting," as Nietzsche knew so well, is the
Social Text45, Vol. 14, No. 4, Winter 1995. Copyright ? 1995 by Duke University Press.
Robert
WOLFF
Miklitsch
sine qua non of that abuse-intensive discipline which goes by the name of
"history.") Still, to give the champions of capitalism their due, there does
appear to be something world-historical, something climacteric, some
would even say grave, about this most recent of crises for socialism.
It is writ large in, among other things, the suddenly not-so-liberal
elite print media. Though John Kenneth Galbraith is characteristically
circumspect in his account for the New YorkReview of Books, even he
begins with the "common sense" sense of things: "In the common reference communism having failed, capitalism is triumphant."4In the Times
Literary Supplement, David Selbourne enlists the grand disenchanting
rhetoric of The Tempest:"profound changes in intellectual perspective are
under way on the Left; but few, if any, will own up to them. These Prosperos of ours have abjured their rough Marxist magic and buried their
staffs in earth, but you would not know it."5
It is only a small step from the Selbourne-which would make a late
capitalist of Caliban-to Morton Kondracke's indictment in the New York
Times:"Now that communism is in disgrace and its systematic devastation
of people, the environment and simple truth is being made plain, there
ought to be a political reckoning in the West. No one should be lined up
against the wall, but. ..."6 The bad Orwell impersonation aside ("The
simple truth being made plain"), Kondracke appears to have forgotten
about the custom of civil rights in the West, though he eventually comes to
his senses, reflexively affirming the First Amendment: "The First Amendment protects the right to rant" (his own included, of course).7 Yet not
unlike that hackneyed moment which from time immemorial has been
indispensable to Hollywood courtroom dramaturgy,the damage has been
done; the McCarthyist note has been struck and, presumably, the above
insinuation has been registered by the reader, that jury of the last instance:
the American demos.
So goes the case against Marxism, a trial straight out of Kafka. Which
brings me to the issue at hand: the relationship between the "political"
post-Marxism of Laclau and Mouffe (hereafter abbreviated as L&M) and
the "economic" Marxianism of Resnick and Wolff (hereafter abbreviated
as R&W).
Laclau and Mouffe: Hegemony,
Political Theory, and Radical Democracy
In "The Crisis of Marxism," Edward and Ronald Chilcote enumerate
four "theoretical thrusts" (their words) that distinguish the "alternative
Marxisms" emanating from the work of Marx and Engels: structuralism,
analytical Marxism, critical philosophism, and materialistcollectivism.8 As
Robert Miklitsch
both analytical Marxism and materialist collectivism are outside the scope
of this paper, I want to focus here on the remaining two strains of Marxism: critical philosophism, which derives, according to the Chilcotes, from
the early Marx and includes the Frankfurt School and, more recently,
Habermas, Bowles and Gintis, and L&M; and Marxist structuralism,
which might be called the "school of Althusser" and which comprises the
work of Poulantzas and R&W. My working hypothesis is that the similarities between critical philosophism and structuralism-between, that is to
say, L&M and R&W-are at least as great as their differences. In order to
determine the very real differences between L&M and R&W, though, it is
first necessary to figure their relationship to political economy.
The opening sentence of Hegemonyand Socialist Strategy,which recollects the Jena Hegel as well as the early Marx (especially if one registers
Habermas's recollection of this trope in the Philosophical Discourse of
Modernity9), asserts the critical character of L&M's intervention: "Leftwing thought today stands at a crossroads."10This crisis or conjuncture
is, for L&M, a function of two "events" that have challenged the "'evident truths' of the past" (HSS, 1). The first event is on the order of a
negative and corresponds to those "failures and disappointments" with
which the Marxist Left is only too familiar. Indeed, this particular series
of events constitutes that narrative of negativity for which the proper
name "Marx" is the metaphor in the locution with which I began this
essay: "From Marx to the market." Hence L&M's via negativa: "from
Budapest to Prague and the Polish coup d'etat, from Kabul to the sequels
of Communist victory in Vietnam and Cambodia" (HSS, 1). The second
"event" that has necessitated a rethinking of Marxism and its "classical
forms of analysis and calculation" (HSS, 1) is that "whole series of positive new phenomena" which, for the sake of convenience, I will refer to as
the "new social movements" (though the latter term is even more heterogeneous, as L&M recognize, than its ostensible conceptual double,
class).
The slow, very public, and very painful death of Marxism-Leninism
and the sudden birth of the "new social movements" constitutes, then, the
terrain of post-Marxism. Behind us is the dismal landscape of revolution,
its "Jacobin Imaginary" scattered about the ruins like so many bloody
body parts. Ahead is the future which, for all its enlightened post-Enlightenment promise, nonetheless remains something of a "dark wood."
L&M's figure of choice is not, however, Dante but Descartes.
"[W]hen one enters new territory," Descartes observes, one must follow
the example of
travellerswho, findingthemselveslost in a forest, know that they ought not
to wanderfirstto one side and then to the other,nor, stillless, to stop in one
The Rhetoric of Post-Marxism
169
place, but understandthat they should continueto walk as straightas they
can in one direction,not divergingfor any slightreason,even thoughit was
possibly chance alone that first determinedthem in their choice. By this
means if they do not go exactly where they wish, they will at least arrive
somewhereat the end, where probablythey will be better off than in the
middleof a forest. (HSS, 2)
At once classical and philosophical, this trope is meant to illustrateL&M's
contention that in their "discourse on method," Hegemonyand Socialist
Strategy, "[a]ll discursive eclecticism or wavering [has been] excluded
from the very start" (HSS, 2).
Now, L&M's insistence in the preface that they have methodically
eschewed "wavering" may come as news to those Marxists who maintain
that their discursive-theoretical appropriation of deconstruction is a classic instance of eclecticism. But what, exactly, is this "straight"course that
Hegemony and Socialist Strategy putatively accomplishes? What sort of
"place" do L&M "arrive" at in the "end," and is "somewhere" in fact a
"better" position to be in than the "middle of a forest"?
In addition to the above peripatetic trope, L&M announce that their
discourse is situated at the "middle point" between a "two-way movement": the theoretical and the political (HSS, 2). Yet given this self-determination, it is perhaps more accurate to say that the discursive method of
Hegemonyand Socialist Strategy is not critical philosophism but political
theory. Indeed, this political-theoretical project derives, if only by way of
inversion, from its discursive-methodological Other: political economy.
With respect to the latter, L&M suggest as much in "Hegemony: The
Difficult Emergence of a New Political Logic," where they differentiate
between two narratives of the Soviet revolutionary moment. In the "first
narrative" (which corresponds to the classical-Marxist or, more precisely,
Second International reading of Russian social democracy12),the "laws of
capitalist development are the plot, while the characters, with perfectly
assigned roles, are the proletarian and capitalist classes" (HSS, 50). The
"second narrative" (which can be metonymically represented by the
"Parvus-Trotsky thesis" of "permanent revolution"13) assumes-at least
from the perspective of the first, dominant-evolutionist narrative-the
character of an anomaly: "the bourgeois class cannot fulfill its role, and
this has to be taken over by the other character" (HSS, 50). Question:
what class will adopt that role which-at least according to the plot of
Capital-the nonexistent Russian bourgeoisie were supposed to play?
Answer: the proletariat.14
According to L&M, the "structural" relationship between these two
narratives is distinctly asymmetrical: while those "class relations" associated with the first, programmatic narrative are, in Saussure's terms, "facts
Robert Miklitsch
of langue," the "hegemonic relations" associated with the second, anomalous narrative are "facts of parole" (HSS, 51). One might well want to
problematize L&M's recourse to Saussure here (where the political is
effortlessly translated into the linguistic), but according to Hegemonyand
Socialist Strategy, even Trotsky's storied reading of the Russian socialdemocratic problematic was ultimately dictated, like Lenin's (not to mention Pokrovsky's), by the synchronic master narrative of Capital:
There is no specificity,eitherfor Trotskyor for Lenin, which can assurethe
survivalof a Soviet state unless a socialistrevolutionbreaksout in Europe,
unless the victoriousworkingclasses of the advancedindustrialcountries
come to the assistanceof the Russianrevolutionaries.Here the "abnormality" of the dislocationof the stages in Russia links up with the "normal"
developmentof the West:what we have called a "secondnarrative"is reintegrated into the "first narrative":"hegemony"rapidly finds its limits.
(HSS, 54)
Though there are important political and theoretical differences between
the Soviet instance and various Western European exceptions to the
orthodox, "stagist paradigm" (for example, the Austrian Social Democratic Party [SPO]), I want to submit that L&M's rereading here of Russian social democracy-a reading that owes not a little to "theoreticians of
the Comintern" such as Plekhanov and Axelrod as well as later, more
original critics like Gramsci-can itself be read, en abime, as the "meta-"
or master-narrative of Hegemonyand Socialist Strategy.15
The real story of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy is not the first,
economistic grand recit of Capital (exemplified by the minimal hegemonic
discourse of Plekhanov) nor the second, social-democratic petit recitassociated for L&M with Trotsky's discourse (where the hegemonic dimensions of indeterminacy are given maximum play), but that moment of the
Soviet revolution in all its supplemental "specificity" which escapes these
two narratives. In the interests of economy, so to speak, the "metanarrative" of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy can therefore be synopsized as
follows: in lieu of political economism, which in the last instance assumes
the primary role in that "saga" of hegemony (mis-)narrated by Lenin
and Trotsky, Pokrovsky and Plekhanov, L&M substitute political theory.
How one reads this "role substitution"-of hegemony for economy
and social or, more properly, radical democracy for the politics of the
proletariat-depends, of course, on one's perspective. Thus, one doesn't
have to be an orthodox Marxist to argue that at the "end" of Hegemony
and Socialist Strategy (that is, "Hegemony and Radical Democracy"),
L&M may have gotten where they wanted to go but that they are nonetheless still "lost in a forest" (HSS, 2), that this strategic "end" is a dead end,
nowhere rather than "somewhere" (and, for that matter, not even the
The Rhetoric of Post-Marxism
171
"nowhere" of the utopian). In a phrase: they cannot see the forest for the
trees.
But, however one reads Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, it is beginning
to look, at least in retrospect, like the "inaugural manifesto" of the postclassical period of Marxism. Hence L&M's methodological double reaccentuation: post-Marxism(with the stress at once on the prefix "post-" and
the substantive "Marxism" [HSS, 4]).
R&W: Class, Overdetermination,
and the
Epistemology of Neo-Economics
In the postscript to the second chapter of Knowledgeand Class (1987)which, like Economics: Marxian versus Neo-Classical, appeared two years
after Hegemony and Socialist Strategy-R&W offer a parable about Hin-
dess and Hirst (hereafter H&H)16 that remembers neither Dante nor
Descartes but Homer. I mention this not simply because R&W's odyssey
trope corresponds to L&M's "Cartesian" one17 but because their folksy
story points up the common terrain of their respective projects: the discourseof poststructuralism.
The parable, not unlike L&M's master-narrative, has two parts. Part
one: though H&H start out as vigorous critics of empiricism, with the
"changed political and theoretical conditions" of the 1960s, they begin to
doubt the relevance of the "existing theoretical approaches," including
their own reactive rationalism (KC, 107). As a result of this "politically
healthy" skepticism, H&H embark in Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production on
a quest to find a theory that will be "relevant to current struggles," the socalled current situation, which theoretical embarkation ends the first part
of the odyssey (KC, 107).
Part two: if, despite its criticality, Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production
does not effect a genuine break with Althusser-and H&H's initial rationalism therefore remains intact (since the above work's "empirical testing of
alternate frameworks"constitutes a sort of theoretical reaction-formation),
their second book, the post-Althusserian Mode of Production and Social
Formation: An Autocritique of Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production, repre-
sents a definite turning point in the quest. The problem is neither rationalism nor empiricism but the "swinging back and forth" between the two
positions without, alas, ever being "able to escape the inevitable dogmatism of the swing" (KC, 107). For H&H (at least according to R&W), the
answer is obvious: the "only way to 'socialism"' is to take the "true high
road," to integrate, that is, "those economic and political and cultural
struggles that characterize social life" (KC, 108).
172
Robert Miklitsch
However, if this last position is H&H's "affirmative answer" to that
question which is the "rapidly changing world" of the late 1960s and
early 1970s (which, in turn, constitutes the historical conditions of possibility for the New Left), this position is itself predicated on a dogmatic
rejection of epistemology as such (KC, 108). This refusal, according to
Gregory Elliott, "is the 'anti-epistemological break' between the young
rationalist-scientific Hirst and Hindess and their mature ideological-discursive selves."18Hence, despite the fact that H&H have thought "long
and hard, and more often than not rather brilliantly, about epistemology
and its consequences" (to return to R&W's parable), they are ultimately
unable to comprehend the truth and consequences of their post-epistemological odyssey. The moral of R&W's story about H&H is not so much
Homeric as gnomic: "To seek the Truth is to find it; but beware of the
company for they are you" (KC, 108).
What are "we" to make of this caveat: "beware of the company for
they are you"? Who is this "you"? Me? H&H? L&M? You?If the "lesson"
of the H&H parable is, as R&W say, a "final" one, who in the end has the
truth here?
In "Marxian Epistemology," the second chapter of Knowledge and
Class, R&W take up the question of Russian social democracy in order to
make a larger, more general point about political economy. Russian social
democracy is not only one "index" of the "unresolved status" of the
debate over economism in classical Marxism (a position to which L&W
would, I think, assent), but an instance par excellence of the epistemologically defeatist habit in that tradition of historically linking specific economic debates to their "political contexts." The issue for R&W, though, is
not so much what Lenin identified as the "errors and failures" of Russian
social democracy-its theoretical tendency towards economism, or even
the alleged link between its politics and economics-but the "common
epistemological terrain" that subtends these various positions and practices. In other words, the problem with political economy for R&W is
neither the economy nor the polity, but epistemology.
Accordingly, in a quasi-confessional moment that is as unexpected as
it is revelatory, R&W observe in passing that the impasse of political economy-or, more to the point, its ruinous ruling epistemologies, the Scylla
of rationalism and the Charybdis of empiricism-is in fact what provoked
them into the "oppositional act" of writing "Marxian Epistemology" (KC,
46). Hence R&W's definitive methodological move: if both empiricism
and rationalism are forms of essentialism (where the essence of the Real is
"experience" and "reason" respectively), Marxian theory can, and must,
be distinguished from other, non-Marxian theories such as rationalism
and empiricism as well as from rationalist-empiricist strains within Marx-
The Rhetoric of Post-Marxism
t73
ism itself by its "distinct epistemological standpoint": antiessentialism.
Furthermore, since rationalism and empiricism open the door, unwittingly or not, to non-Marxian concepts such as "sex, class, [and] race"
(KC, 47), R&W's aim is to "eject" both empiricism and rationalism by
"closing the door through which they arrived" (KC, 48).
So much, one might say, for L&M, the New Left, and the "new social
movements." Still, R&W's project as it is developed in Knowledge and
Class is not simply a negative, destructive one. If they close various, nonMarxian doors, they simultaneously open another, more properly Marxian one. Via an emphatically overdeterminist displacement (which can be
said to constitute the affirmative moment of this particular deconstruction), the latter door opens, in turn, "onto a different terrain."Admittedly,
this terrain is rather like that forest in which L&M found themselves at the
beginning of Hegemonyand Socialist Strategy,which is to say a terraincognita (since the signs that once showed the way have been swept away like
so many hallucinatory landmarks). However, unlike the post-Marxist
landscape of L&M's discourse (which has a certain aseptic "air," like
Mars), the "twin subsets" of R&W's theory of Marxianism, epistemology
and social theory, retain an extremely classical aura or, to invoke one of
their own words, "aroma" (KC, 49).
The twist, of course, is that neither dialecticalmaterialism(whose critical concept is overdetermination) nor historical materialism(whose critical concept is class) is, for R&W, the "essence, cause, or final determinant
of the other" (KC, 29). Given this diversion of, inter alia, the base-superstructure problem, it is clear (at least to R&W) that if the economic does
not drive the political, the political does not drive the economic. All of
which is to say that even as R&W's project in Knowledgeand Class is a
species of economic theory, it is also, like L&M's political philosophy, a
nonclassifiable or "abnormal" species (that is, neo-economics). For both
L&M and R&W, then, there is no genus "Marxism," there are only
species, "dialectical" and "historical" materialisms. Or post-Marxism and
Marxianism, respectively.
And yet, if L&M's political and R&W's economic discourses share a
common epistemological terrain (poststructuralism or, if you prefer, "discourse theory"), what is the difference between R&W and L&M? Are
these yoked letters slightly different figures for the same poststructuralist
project, or is the difference literal, that is to say, constitutive? More specifically, if the key figure for R&W is Althusser, and for L&M Gramsci,
what door, if any, does this key open?
174
Robert Miklitsch
De-Tour: Gramsci/Althusser, or Gramsci
after Althusser and Lacan
In Knowledgeand Class, R&W articulate Gramsci/Althusser a number of
times. For instance, in the subsection on "Althusser," R&W observe a la
Gramsci and Althusser that Marxianism's recognition of a plurality of
theories under construction is a "necessary precondition for effective criticism," that is to say, for the "achievement of theoretical hegemony" over
the various truths under construction at any given moment (KC, 90). At
the same time, R&W contend that Althusser, like Gramsci, was hesitant to
break fully and finally "from the religious prehistory of epistemological
guarantees of truth" (KC, 95), a radical epistemological step or conclusion that R&W are more than willing to take:
[T]his hesitancyleft Althusseropen to the chargeof remainingan essentialist in epistemology,specificallya rationalist.Similarly,[Althusser's]hesitancy on last instancedeterminismleft him open to the chargeof being an
essentialistin socialtheory,specificallya sophisticatedeconomicdeterminist.
Thus Althusser'shesitancyto take the next step and break unequivocally
from essentialismof theory (rationalism)and essentialismin theory (economic determinism).(KC, 95)
Precisely because Gramsci, like Althusser, was unwilling to take the next
step-to make, that is, an absolute break with philosophies of essentialism
(say, "absolute historicism")-his own "work was largely negative," aiming as it did to "distance" Marxism from its assimilation to bourgeois
theory (KC, 78).
Though this critique of Gramsci/Althusser is, to say the least, moot
(see, inter alia, Althusser's critique of Gramsci in Reading Capital19),
R&W's reading of Gramsci is especially contrary, it seems to me, since
that work was anything but "negative," whether this negativity is understood as a form of critical destruction or deconstruction. In fact, one
"affirmative" direction of Gramsci's work devolves from his constructive
engagement with the material institutions of civil society.20
Unfortunately, the concept of civil society was worse than beside the
point for Althusser. The following passage from Reading Capital ("The
Object of Political Economy") is symptomatic in the strict sense of the
term:
The concept of "civilsociety,"as found in Marx'smaturewritingsand constantlyrepeatedby Gramscito designatethe sphereof economicexistence,is
ambiguousand shouldbe struckfromMarxisttheoreticalvocabulary.21
The Rhetoric of Post-Marxism
175
R&W'salmost
complete
reduction of the
political-economic
(hegemony) to
the theoretical
(epistemology)
suggests to me
that their
"negative"
reading of
Gramsci needs to
be stood on
its feet.
176
The extremity of the rhetoric here, which has unfortunate, if unintentional
effects (I am thinking of Stalinist "historiography"), displays not only the
dogmatism of Althusser's notion of "epistemological break" (that is, the
"bourgeois" aspects of the "mature" Marx must be purged) but the
exegetical limits of the Althusserian text as well. Thus, with respect to the
last point, readers of the Prison Notebookswill recall that Gramsci's triadic
understanding of civil society differs in many crucial aspects from Marx's
dichotomous one. Where Marx in the preface to the Critique of Political
Economyreduces civil society to political economy, Gramsci distinguishes
"civil society" from both the economy and "political society."
One can nevertheless appreciate the perversity of R&W's reading of
Gramsci by situating it within the meta-epistemological narrative that
fuels the first part of Knowledge and Class, a narrative that is itself
inscribed within a certain post-Althusserian orbit. To tactically reduce
and rewrite R&W: "Gramsci's particular theoretical development of
[hegemony] constitutes [merely] another step toward the formulation of
the concept of overdetermination" (KC, 301 n. 123). When it comes to
epistemological matters, overdetermination is all.
R&W's almost complete reduction of the political-economic (hegemony) to the theoretical (epistemology) suggests to me that their "negative" reading of Gramsci needs to be stood on its feet,22 so much so that
one can speak of a Gramsci after Althusser or, more elaborately, after
Althusser and Lacan. Which is to say, a Gramsci after R&W and L&M.
But first, L&M on Gramsci/Althusser. In Hegemony and Socialist
Strategy, L&M contend that the "most profound potential meaning of
Althusser's statement that everything existing in the social is overdetermined, is the assertion that the social constitutes itself as a symbolic
order" (HSS, 98). R&W would, I think, consent to this Lacanian-inflected
gloss of the meaning of overdetermination since L&M's rendition stresses
its radically antiessentialist impulse: "Society and social agents lack any
essence, and their regularities merely consist of the relative and precarious
forms of fixation which accompany the establishment of a certain order"
(HSS, 98). In addition, L&M assert a la R&W that the concept of overdetermination was "unable to produce the totality of its deconstructive
effects" within Marxism because of Althusser's economism (that is, determination in the last instance) and, equally importantly, because of his
residual rationalism (HSS, 98).
As for the "school of Althusser" (that is, H&H), L&M's critique
mirrors R&W's: in order to avoid analytically regressing back to the
"rationalism or empiricism" debate which H&H desperately, albeit
unsuccessfully, sought to resolve, "it is necessary to move to a different
terrain" (HSS, 103). However, the concept that will simultaneously
effect this displacement and mine the radicality of the "original
Robert Miklitsch
Althusserian formulation," according to L&M, is not overdetermination
but articulation (where articulation is the precondition of that "structured totality" which is discourse as such [HSS, 105]). The "specific
logic" of articulation reveals, in turn, not only a certain consonance
between Gramsci/Althusser-"the
progressive affirmation . . . of the
material character of ideologies" (HSS, 109)-but the hegemonic limits of
their projects as well. That is, once the essentialist assumption of an a
it be the "unifying role of a class" (as in Gramsci)
priori unity-whether
or the "functional requirements of the logic of reproduction" (as in
abandoned, "the category of articulation acquires a difAlthusser)-is
ferent theoretical status" (HSS, 109). This status is, strictly speaking, the
hegemonic one.
Now, I invoke L&M's critique of Gramsci/Althusser here in order,
first, to avoid a precipitate valorization of Gramsci over Althusser and,
second, in order to perform a tactical displacement (via "Lacan"23) of
both a certain neo-Gramscianism and post-Althusserianism.24 But before
I turn to the latter "proper name" (that is, Lacan), let me recapitulate
those propositions with which I closed the second part of this chapter: if
L&M's project can be characterized as political theory where the critical
concepts are hegemony and radical democracy, R&W's project can be characterized as an economic theory where the privileged "entry points" for
their epistemology and social theory are overdetermination and class
respectively.
To turn, or return, to Lacan: in "Freud and Lacan," Althusser asserts
that without doubt the "most original aspect of Lacan's work, his discovery," was his insistence on the Symbolic or what Althusser calls the "Law
of Culture."25 Paradoxically enough, what escapes both L&M and R&W's
discursive theories is the concept and practice of culture.
Though there are very few discussions, let alone illustrations, of culture per se in Knowledge and Class, the following passage is representative:
We may . . . extend Marx's theorization of what we term subsumed classes to
encompass social processes providing ideological or, more broadly, cultural
conditions of existence for the capitalist fundamental class process. The subsumed class of directors of the state apparatus often provides, for example,
for free public education and free public cultural programs. This involves
the design and dissemination of concepts of justice, society, work, individuality, and so forth. These concepts function in people's minds as means to
construct and construe their life experiences. Belief in and thinking by
means of specific conceptual frameworks are cultural conditions of existence
of the capitalist fundamental class process. (KC, 130)
This description of the so-called cultural process not only draws laboriously on Althusser's statist conception of ideology (that is, "ideological
The Rhetoric of Post-Marxism
177
state apparatus"),26but it is even less nuanced, which is to say more functionalist, than the latter. It therefore invites, in the absence of other, counterfactual textual evidence,27 the sort of "dominant ideology thesis" critique advanced by Abercrombie, Hill, and Turner.28
If R&W's understanding of culture in Knowledgeand Class is, at best,
perfunctory and, at worst, instrumental, L&M's understanding of culture
in Hegemonyand Socialist Strategyisn't appreciably more complex, despite
Gramsci's obvious influence.29 In fact, L&M's only real discussion of the
cultural sphere occurs in the last chapter of Hegemonyand Socialist Strategy, where they draw on French regulation theory (in particular, the work
of Michel Aglietta) to argue that the "intensive" regime of capital associated with the postwar period, so-called post-Fordism, resulted in a "commodification" of the socius, a process that "destroyed previous social relations" and replaced them with "commodity relations through which the
logic of capitalist accumulation penetrated into increasingly numerous
spheres" (HSS, 161). In addition to the bureaucratization of social life
and the "reformulation" of liberal-democratic ideology, the hegemonic
formation of post-Fordism also produced distinctly cultural effects: "the
new cultural forms linked to the expansion of the means of communication" (HSS, 163).30
L&M, then, unlike R&W, do account, if only in passing, for the profound impact the sphere of culture has had on social life since the Second
World War, particularly in the United States. Indeed, L&M's articulation
of what I will call the "culture of capitalism" with political economy or,
more properly, social and economic regulation is quite close to the concerns of this essay. This said, the problem with L&M's analysis of the cultural is that it all too typically remains at an Olympian level of generality.
For if in our media-based culture new cultural forms such as video are in
fact related to the expansion of the means of communication, it is imperative, it seems to me, to understand the specificity and materiality of this
cultural-communicative relation, a relation that raises a number of critical
questions. What, exactly, are the "new cultural forms"? Equally importantly, what are their industrial-institutional or, more precisely yet, productive and distributive conditions of existence?
In sum, if in R&W culture is subtly reduced to either the class process
or the "state apparatus," in L&M it is reduced-like almost everything
else-to political theory, as if Habermas were the paradigm of "high culture."31Recollecting Gramsci, I want to propose that the Law of Culture-which, as we have seen, derives from Althusser by way of Lacanonly takes on its true value when and if it is reinscribed as the sphere or
space of civil society. Though the concept of civil society has, it is true, an
ambiguous status in Gramsci's work,32I understand it here as that domain
of social hegemony which mediates between the economy and political
Robert Miklitsch
society. (Hence the accent in Gramsci on the institutions of civil society as
"culturalintermediations."33)As Gramsci puts it: "Between the economic
structure and the State with its legislation and its coercion stands civil
society" (SPN, 208). In other words, while a determinate dialectical relation obtains among these various spheres or structures, civil society
retains, true to Gramsci's double "declaration of independence," a semiautonomy from both the economy and political society.
With respect to the former (the economic), Gramsci states that civil
society is "resistant to the catastrophic 'incursions' of the immediateeconomic element (crises, depressions, etc.)" (SPN, 235; italics mine). More
importantly, this civil-social resistance to the economic34 intimates that a
hegemonic revolution or "war of position" must be distinguished from
that "immediate," "catastrophic" transformation of the economy associated in classical Marxism with the concept of Revolution or, for Gramsci,
"war of manoeuvre."35 Again, though there is a perhaps irreconcilable
ambiguity in Gramsci between "war of position and "war of manoeuvre"
(for example, not only the genetic, "tactical" question of which moment
comes first, but the larger, "strategic" question of whether both moments
are necessary),36 I want to insist here on the historical specificity and singularity of the "war of position" which, for Gramsci, assumes its significance only after the "events of 1917" (SPN, 235).
As for political society, Gramsci's formula-"State = political society
+ civil society" (that is, "hegemony protected by the armour of coercion"
[SPN, 263])-reflects his position that, "in concrete reality, civil society
and State are one and the same" (SPN, 208),37 a "general," "integral"
position that is reflected in Althusser's distinction between the Repressive
and Ideological State apparatuses (the ISAs and RSA respectively [LP,
141-48]). Against the latter, statist conflation of civil and political society,
though, I want to argue that civil society is not only distinct from the
economy and political society but refers,explicitly, to the "'private' apparatus of 'hegemony"' (SPN, 261),38 which "private apparatus" refers in
turn to the "ensemble of organisms" or, for Althusser, "body of institutions" ("religious apparatus," "educational apparatus," "communications
apparatus," et cetera. [LP, 150]).
Yet if Althusser is clearly concerned to elaborate the material character of ideologies ("Thesis II: Ideology has a material existence" [LP,
165]), the point is to attend not so much to ideology as to the body or
materiality of the above civil-social institutions, as Althusser himself does
in the following passage from "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses": "ideology always exists in an apparatus, and its practice, or practices. This existence is material" (LP, 166). As my recourse to the concept
of the Law of Culture is intended to suggest, I also want to emphasizeagainst both L&M and R&W-the cultural as opposed to economic or
The Rhetoric of Post-Marxism
179
political character of these civil-social intitutions, an emphasis that is not
inconsistent with a certain Marxism, since according to Gramsci, the
"philosophy of praxis" consists precisely "in the 'exploitation' of the cultural factor, of cultural activity, of a cultural front which is as necessary as
the merely economic and the merely political one."39
In fact, with respect to the question of culture, the celebrated passage
from the conclusion to Gramsci's "State and Civil Society"-"The crisis
consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be
born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear"
(SPN, 276)-this "pessimistic" passage must itself be read within the
dialectical context of the final, affirmative sentence of the essay: the
"reduction to economics and to politics means precisely a reduction of the
highest superstructures to the level of those which adhere more closely to
the structure itself-in other words, the possibility and necessity of creating a new culture" (SPN, 276).
About this Law of Culture (which is also, as Levi-Strauss reminds us,
the domain or terrain of language, and is not therefore antagonistic to a
delimited, realist-strategic notion of discourse40), I want to say five things.
One: Marxianism afterMarx. The Law of Culture is not synonymous
with the "name of the father" (here Marx), however understood.41
From this post-Marxistperspective, R&W's Marxianism remains thoroughly ensnared in an Imaginary relation with Marx, or at least a certain
reading for which Marx himself constitutes the last, theoretical instance.
R&W's misreading of the following, critical passage from the Grundrisse
illustrates just how far they are willing to go to save Marx for Marxianism.
First the Marx, then the R&W:
The conclusionwe reachis not that production,distribution,exchangeand
consumptionare identical,but they all form membersof a totality,distinctions within a totality. Productionpredominatesnot only over itself, in the antithetical definition of production, but over the other momentsas well. (KC, 61;
italicsmine)
[T]he first sentence indicates Marx's concept of the concrete-realas the
totality of mutually overdeterminingand overdetermined"members"or
sites. The second sentence indicates which concepts Marx defines and
deploysdistinctivelywithinhis science-which conceptspredominatein the
specific sense of serving as the entry point . . . and the goal point of his
strictlynonessentialisttheoreticalprocess. (KC, 61)
While it is certainly possible to enlist the above, rich passage from the
Grundrisse,as I have elsewhere, as an instance of Marx at his most complex (for example, consumption is not simply determined by production),42 I am unwilling as a reader to grant that Marx's formulation here
RobertMiklitsch
ultimately breaks, as R&W claim it does, from a productivist problematic
(this last in the strict, Althusserian sense of the term).43Marx may, despite
his own famous disclaimer, have been a Marxist, but whatever he was, he
was no Marxian.
Unlike R&W's post-Althusserian or, more precisely, post-HindessHirstian take on classical Marxism, L&M's post-Marxism problematizes
the above patronymic lure as well as those quasi essentialisms, such as the
category of class, which continue to haunt R&W's discourse. That is,
L&M's post-Marxism is not a "new interpretation of what Marx 'really
wanted to say"' (NR, 203), which is not to say that post-Marxism is an
"ex-Marxism."44In fact, the political and intellectual tradition of Marxism
is anything but irrelevant to Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, as Laclau
notes in "Theory, Democracy, and Socialism":
the ambiguityof Marxism-which runs throughits whole history-is not a
deviationfrom an untaintedsource, but dominatesthe entireworkof Marx
himself.... It is becauseMarxismhas been nothingbut the historicallocus
of this ambivalence,because its history has largely been an attempt to
resolvethat ambivalenceby a movementawayfrom its essentialfeatures-a
process that our book describesin detail-that a final settlementof scores
with that essentialismmust be termedpost-Marxism,not simplyMarxism.
(NR, 236)
In this passage, the difference between L&M and R&W asserts itself
since, despite a certain procedural sameness, L&M insist not so much on
the antiessentialism of Marxianism (as in R&W) as on the history and
ambiguity, the ambivalent historicity, of the discourseof Marxism. Still, the
insistence in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy on discourse rather than,
say, the institutional is by no means unproblematic, which brings me to
the second point.
Two: The point of le point de capiton. The impossibility of what L&M
call an "ultimate fixity of meaning" presupposes the existence of partial
fixations, since as L&M themselves observe, even in order "to differ, to
subvert meaning, there has to be meaning" (HSS, 112). Unlike Deleuze
and Guattari, then, L&M recognize the necessity of signification: "a discourse incapable of generating any fixity of meaning is the discourse of
the psychotic" (HSS, 112). Hence the indispensability, for L&M, of
Lacan's notion of the points de capiton,45which constitute the "privileged
discursive points" of the "partial fixations." But what is the status of these
"nodal points" in L&M's discourse?
In Hegemonyand Socialist Strategy at least, the emphasis is firmly on
the fictional and differential "nature" of these "partial fixations." For
instance: if the "practiceof articulation . . . consists in the constructionof
nodal points whichpartially fix meaning,"the "partial characterof thisfixaThe Rhetoric of Post-Marxism
181
tion proceedsfrom the opennessof the social, a result,in its turn, of the constant
overflowingof every discourseby the infinitude of the field of discursivity"
(HSS, 113). The stress here, it is clear, is less on the structural, materialinstitutional limits of "dislocation" or dissemination as on the infinite
force of this "spillage."46
As for the ontological status of the nodal points, L&M are equally
emphatic: "All discourse of fixation becomes metaphorical: literality is, in
actual fact, the first of metaphors" (HSS, 111; italics mine). Not unlike
Derrida, L&M are fixated, as it were, on the concept of fixation, as if literality were somehow always already protofascist.47 The problem with
this "fear" of fixation is that it not only "betrays an anarchistic suspicion
of institutionality as such," ignoring, in Terry Eagleton's words, the
"extent to which a certain provisional stability is essential ... for revolutionary politics" (IA, 198), it also seems to forget-and rather willfully at
that-the degree to which post-Fordism and the electronic mass media in
particular are predicated on the infinite glissementof the signifier.
Three: The discourse of institutionality. If, as L&M say, "the social
does not exist," the social nonetheless assumes certain institutional if not
rational forms, of which "the market" is one, super-institutional instance.
Here Gramsci meets Althusser on a path that neither L&M nor R&W
really pursues. In "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," though,
Althusser marks the following debt: "Gramsci is the only one who went
any distance on the road I am taking. He had the 'remarkable' idea that
the State could not be reduced to the (Repressive) State Apparatus, but
included, as he put it, a certain number of institutions from 'civil society"'
(LP, 142).
With this important, albeit statist, passage from Althusser in mind (as
well as L&M's appropriation of Lacan's notion of the points de capiton), I
want to propose that the material-discursiveinstitutions of civil society are
the "nodal points" of the Law of Culture. More to the point, I want to
propose that this Law or Symbolic Order is not simply the "absolute precondition of any discourse" (as in Lacan as read by Althusser [LP, 212])
but the "cultureof capitalism" or, more specifically yet, the capital-intensive colonization of the "private" sphere.48
Yet if this cultural-economic aspect of capitalism is arguably an
implicit part of L&M's radical-democratic project, the material specificity
of institutionality remains as underdeveloped in Hegemony and Socialist
Strategy as the question of culture. Despite or perhaps because of L&M's
reliance on Foucault,49the problem of institutionality is merely one "element" among many in L&M's analysis of the discursive/non-discursive
distinction: "if the so-called non-discursive complexes-institutions, technologies, productive organizations, and so on-are analyzed, we will only
182
Robert Miklitsch
find more or less complex forms of differential positions among objects"
(HSS, 107). Here, even as the specificity of institutions is erased via an
indiscriminate seriality (not unlike R&W's mechanical invocation of culture in Knowledgeand Class), the materiality of the institutional is reduced
to the "complex" differentiality of the discursive.
Laclau's response in New Reflectionson the Revolutionof Our Time to
Nicos Mouzelis's critique of his and Mouffe's work does, it is true, provide a more considered account of the problem of institutionality.50Following in the footsteps of Foucault and Derrida, Laclau usefully observes
that "social agents are partially internal to the institutions, thus forcing
both the notion of 'agency' and 'institution' to be deconstructed" (NR,
223). However, Laclau's defensive reiteration of his and Mouffe's position
on institutionality in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy in the very same
response speaks volumes:
It is completelyuntruethatwe haveeverstatedthat socialpracticesoccur in
an institutional vacuum. Indeed, institutions are fully present in our
(NR, 223)
approach:they are whatwe have calledsystemsof differences.
Here, one might say, is the crux of the problem with respect to both
the question of institutionality and L&M's project in general. While on
one hand it may be productive to focus on the differential structure of
institutions, one really has to wonder about the theoretical, not to mention
political, use-value of describing institutions such as the market or transnational corporations as "systems of differences."51Such a hyperdiscursive description of institutionality evacuates, it seems to me, any and every
"trace" of that materiality which distinguishes mass-media institutions
(say, Time Warner) from this or that art-commodity (say, a Madonna
video), since the latter text is also arguably a system of differences.52
Though the class-based analysis of "enterprise" in Knowledge and
Class is problematic on a number of accounts-the analysis of advertising
as a cultural process leans, for instance, on a simple notion of ideology as
rationalization (KC, 169)53-R&W, unlike L&M, do produce a sustained
and relatively integrated examination of the "fundamental" institution of
capitalism. In fact, R&W's critical disaggregation of the notion of profits
from the problem of exploitation as such54should be required reading for
those Marxists who believe that there is a necessary rather than sufficient
relation between capitalism and commodification. This last point-translated into the adjacent domains of media and cultural studies-could well
have a salutary effect on the study of the complex relations between cultural and commodity production as well as the more general, and generally neglected, issue of institution vis-a-vis ideology critique.
The Rhetoric of Post-Marxism
183
In Hegemonyand Socialist
Four: Thefundamentalityof neo-economics.55
Strategy,the lack of attention to culture and institutionality produces what
Eagleton calls an "overpoliticization" (IA, 213) that, paradoxically
enough, undermines whatever strategic value L&M's radical democratic
project might have. Similarly, in Knowledge and Class a certain fundamental understanding of class and the state blocks any real engagement
with the "cultureof capitalism." Like Althusser who brackets the "repressive" function of the Ideological State Apparatuses even as the state
remains the "precondition for any distinction between public and private" (LP, 144), R&W advance an equally qualified reading of the state in
"Class Analysis: A Marxian Theory of the State" (the "state as the social
site where certain conditions of existence of the capitalist fundamental
class process are produced need not always be the site where they are
produced" [KC, 273]) only to smuggle a certain statism in through the
back door. Indeed, for R&W, a certain neostatism seems to be inextricable
from a certain neoclassism. I say "neo" because although R&W note the
"relativeposition of the state in capitalist society" (KC, 273) as well as the
various "processes" that comprise any particular social formation ("natural, economic, political, and cultural" [KC, 19]), the emphasis in Knowledge and Class is distinctly on the state (as opposed to, say, civil society)
and class (as opposed to, say, race).
Thus, though R&W's discussion of class in "A Marxian Theory of
Classes" (especially their distinction between "fundamental" and "subsumed" class positions/processes56) represents a genuine contribution to
the topic, this innovation appears to come at the direct expense of any
comparable discussion of race and sex-gender. In fact, R&W always only
invoke the general category of "non-class" processes rather than any specific process such as "sexual oppression" (KC, 279), as if the latter category might unduly burden the streamlined epistemological model that
graces Knowledgeand Class. The following passage is indicative: "the conditions of existence of the class process are all the non-class processes in
the social totality without whose particular characteristics and interactions the class process could and would not exist" (KC, 116).
Moreover, on those rare occasions when R&W do engage an extra"economic" practice such as culture, their discussion tends to concentrate
exclusively on its class character: "the set of processes defining the relationship called working includes cultural processes involving, say, the
manner in which the workers conceptualize the social significance of their
work" (KC, 20; italics mine). If this reading of labor is legitimate within
its own quite specific context, it is also hard to imagine a more restricted
illustration of the process of culture, working-class or otherwise. In fact,
the above passage, classist as it is, makes the most proletarian literature
appear positively expansive by comparison.
Robert Miklitsch
To be fair, in "This Book's Political Position," the final part of Knowledgeand Class, R&W bravely endeavor to respond to the question that lies
like a fault beneath the prosaic, superexpository surface of their text:
"Why choose class as an entry point rather than racial or sexual oppression?" (KC, 279). The short answer to this question is, as I have suggested, Marx(ianism): "What Marx sought and we continue to seek to
contribute to struggles for social change are not only our practical energies but also certain distinctive theoretical insights. The most important of
these for us concerns class" (KC, 279). The longer and more persuasive
answer to this question is that the concept of class was a "'repressed' element in the consciousness of [Marx's] time" and, as such, represented a
"critical lapse in the knowledge of society" (KC, 279).
Now, inasmuch as class arguably remains the unconscious of American society, one would think that R&W's valorization of class in Knowledgeand Class would have a certain theoretical, not to mention polemical,
force. The irony, though, is that R&W's deployment of poststructuralist
discourse in Knowledgeand Class effectively re-represses or re-domesticates
the issue of class by attempting to square it with Marxist discourse at its
most classical and by failing to articulate it with those other discourses
and practices which, however "minor," tend to dominate the national
consciousness: race (the L.A. riots), sex-gender (the Clarence Thomas
hearings), et cetera.
For all its surrealist epistemological allure, then, R&W's marriage of
Marxian economics and poststructuralist discourse theory-a conjunction which sometimes seems like the critical equivalent of an "umbrella
and sewing machine on a dissecting table"-looks, in the end, all too
familiar. At the end of the odyssey that is Knowledgeand Class, we are, like
Odysseus himself, back home (oikos), back at the beginning.
Five: The embarrassmentof "enriched"Gramscianism.57If all roads for
R&W lead back, despite the postmodern twists and turns, to Marx,
L&M's Cartesian peregrination comes to something of the same dead
end.
The irony of Hegemonyand Socialist Strategy is that at the end, the
"only path" left open to L&M is the one that they have been traveling all
along (and, not so incidentally, which they reproach H&H for having
pursued): "a logical pulverization of the social, coupled with a theoretically agnostic descriptivism of the 'concrete situations"' (HSS, 104). In
this passage, L&M subject themselves to an implicit, and devastating,
self-critique. For what else is L&M's deconstruction or, more precisely,
destruction58of the socius-embodied in the concept of "post-society"(NR,
193)-than a "logical" and, ultimately, super-rationalist "pulverization of
the social"? Furthermore, L&M's epistemology, sophisticated as it is, is
ultimately as vulnerable to the charge of "cognitive agnosticism" as H&H
or R&W's,59since in Hegemonyand Socialist Strategy, the "concrete situaThe Rhetoric of Post-Marxism
185
tion" is subjected to a relentless discursive processingthat de-situates even
as it describes the "concrete real." The result (in a nutshell) is an order of
discourse that appears to be able to generate endless descriptions of the
"social" order yet cannot explain how, or why, any one description might
be more preferable than another.
Again, this dematerializationof the Real (in the Jamesonian sense60) is
clearest in L&M's understanding of institutionality, as in the following
post-Kantian passage:
To showthe originalsense of something... is to questionits obviousness,to
refer it back to the absolute act of institution.And that act is absolutely
institutionalif the possibilitiesof otheracts existed,if the institutionaldecision was ultimatelyarbitraryand contingent.... [T]he groundon whichthis
absoluteact of institutiontakesplace is whatwe call politics,and the desedimentationof the social consistsof revealingits politicalessence. (NR, 213)
Desedimentation or, to revert to another vocabulary, demystification is, it
is clear, a necessary moment of any project that calls itself critical. However, desedimentation rapidly reaches its practical-political limits, its purchase as a "socialist strategy," when it comes up against actually existing
institutions, whose sedimentation is surprisingly resistant to the sort of
radicalized notion of Husserlian "reactivation"that, for L&M, is the positive moment of desedimentation.61In the final analysis, L&M's critique of
the social in general and institutions in particular leaves things just as
they are-which is to say, untouched.
Here, one might say, the ghost of Gramsci returns with something of
the force of the repressed. Or the snake bites the snake charmers. While
the "radical historicity" of social relations-the fact that "there is no institutional structure which is not ultimately vulnerable"(NR, 224)-is, for
Laclau, cause for "radical optimism," such intellectual optimism, tonic as
it admittedly is on the Left today, is only viable if one has the necessary
"will" to transform the actually existing, civil-social institutions of capitalism.
Such, at least, was Gramsci's lesson.
Postscript: Gramsci after Hegel/Lacan/Althusser,
or Gramsci after Zizek
Unlike both L&M and R&W, Slavoj Zizek effects an explicit return to
Hegel by way of Lacan: "the only way to 'save Hegel' is through Lacan."62
Indeed, in The Sublime Objectof Ideology,Zizek maintains that the Habermas-Foucault debate masks another, more originary couple: Lacan/
Robert Miklitsch
Althusser.63 Accordingly, elaborating on the Lacanian-Althusserian axis in
the introduction to They Know Not What They Do, he defines the "three
centres of gravity" of his work as "Hegelian dialectics, Lacan's psychoanalytic theory, and contemporary criticism of ideology."64 Hence the relevance, for me, of the following formula or reformulation: Gramsci after
Hegel/Lacan/Althusser. Or: Gramsci after Ziek.
I rehearse this mini-genealogy of Zizek's work because in his critique
of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, "Beyond Discourse Analysis" (which
is appended to Laclau's New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time), he
radically misreads the real lack at the heart of L&M's project and thereby
threatens to deepen the already by no means negligible problems that
attend their project. Bluntly, the "beyond" of "discourse analysis" has
less to do, pace Zizek, with the "subject as an empty place correlative to
[social] antagonism" or with "social fantasy as the elementary ideological
mode to mask the antagonism" (NR, 259) than with the "culture of capitalism," which Law of Culture, as I have argued above, refers to those
civil-social institutions that have always already sutured the capitalist
Imaginary.
In other words, it is time to return to the referent (where the institutional constitutes one, critical referent for that metadiscourse which is
Marxism).65
Along just these lines, Eagleton argues in "Discourse and Ideology"
that the "semiotic model" that governs H&H's practice and, a fortiori,
L&M's is the structural-linguistic one between signifier and signified (read
metadiscourse) rather than the one between sign and referent (read material discourse). The result is that two very different meanings of discourse
are conflated in L&M's metadiscursive model:
those which are said to constitute our practices [material discourse] and
those in which we talk about them [metadiscourse]. Ideology, in short, goes
to work on the "real" situation in transformative ways .... [F]or if our discourses are constitutive of our practices, then there would seem to be no
enabling distance between the two in which this transformative labour could
occur. And to speak of a transformative labour here implies that something
pre-exists this process, some referent, something worked upon, which cannot be the case if the signifier simply conjures the "real" situation into being.
(IA, 209)
Precisely because it allows one to distinguish analytically between material discourses such as institutions and metadiscourses like L&M and
R&W's, whether political-theoretical or economic-epistemological,
Eagleton's distinction here between meta- and material discourse is, it seems to
me, indispensable for a post-Marxism that desires to refuse, both consistently and conscientiously, the lure of discursivism.
The Rhetoric of Post-Marxism
187
The binary
of reform and
revolutionor, as I have
strategically
reinscribed
it here,
"war of position"
versus "war of
movement"ultimately proves
counterproductive
as the antinomy
between
centralization
and marketization.
188
Not insignificantly, a working distinction between meta- and material
discourse not only recognizes the discursive "nature" of institutions (a
position that is not, needless to say, alien to Gramsci66)but preserves the
ontological distinction between the order of things and the order of discourseas well. The latter differentia,which neither R&W nor L&M appears
willing to entertain,67is in turn predicated on what Roy Bhaskar calls the
"intransitive."68With this in mind, one might say that to fall prey to the
"epistemic fallacy" (roughly, the reduction of things to discourse) is to
surrender to the "politics" of discourse theory. And whether it is the
"political voluntarism" of H&H69or the more moderate, "modified" critical Hindess-Hirstianism of R&W and L&M, the politics of the signifier
will not, in the final analysis, do.
Though the rhetoric of post-Marx(ian)ism in L&M and R&W sometimes seems like a form of rhetorical Marxism, it is also important to
remember that what Eagleton laments as the "long march from Saussure
to social democracy" (IA, 213)-the fall, that is, from "revolutionism to
reformism"-cannot simply be attributed to discourse theory. Indeed,
such a sweeping gesture threatens to collapse into just the sort of caricature that Eagleton himself critiques. For if it is crucial to retain the concept of the referent in order to engage, among other things, the materiality of civil society, this does not mean, at least as I read it, a return to
revolutionism as such, whether Leninist or Gramscian. The binary of
reform and revolution70-or, as I have strategically reinscribed it here,
"war of position" versus "war of movement"-ultimately proves as counterproductive as the antinomy between centralization and marketization.
The experience of defeat under which the international Left is now laboring encourages, it is true, just such blinkered thinking, so that even to
broach the subject of the "market" in Marxist circles is to be guilty pure
and simple of reformism, while by the same logic to advocate the unadulterated good of "smashing the State" and of "planned allocation" remains
the most revolutionary, albeit reflexive, of gestures.
Is this the historical lesson of the twentieth century?
I submit that a rather different, if less radical, counterhegemonic stratis
egy called for. In order to begin to activate this strategy, however, it is
first necessary to begin entertaining some pretty unorthodox assumptions: first and foremost perhaps, the argument that reform in the strong
sense of the term71 may be on the agenda today for the Left in the
advanced capitalist countries does not represent, at least not necessarily,
some craven capitulation to the triumphalist rhetoric that has punctuated
the "debate" about "the market" versus "the plan" since the "end of
communism."72As Laclau remarks in New Reflectionson the Revolutionof
Our Time: just because the days of centralized planning are gone "does
not mean that we must give up on conscious regulation of the economic
process and trust entirely to market mechanisms" (NR, xii-xv).
Robert Miklitsch
And yet, if it is clear, as Laclau argues, that the exclusive alternativeof
"Marx or the market" must be rigorously deconstructed, this is only the
first step. If we are to avoid repeating the historical mistakes of, inter alia,
Russian and European social democracy, it is imperative not only "to go
through the fantasy" of the social, as Zizek suggests, but to traverse and
reclaim the "culture of capitalism," those all-too-real, material-discursive
institutions that constitute the heart of civil society. That the institutional
is a, perhaps even the, most laborious route toward a better, more equitable world goes without saying. Still, if it is true that we stand today at a
crossroads, the "cold war" finally behind us and some sort of "new world
order" ahead, then the future depends, it seems to me, on whether or not
we are willing to take this difficult step.
Notes
1. Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, Ideology and Power in the Age of Lenin in
Ruins (New York: St. Martin's, 1991).
2. Editorial, "From Marx to the Market," Economist, 11 May 1990, 11-12.
3. Drawing on linguistics, Fredric Jameson notes that the "word market,with
its various dialect pronunciations and its etymological origins in the Latin for
trade and merchandise, is printed as market; on the other hand, the concept, as it
has been theorized by philosophers and ideologues down through the ages, from
Aristotle to Milton Friedman, would be printed <<market>>" (See "Economics:
Postmodernism and the Market," in Postmodernism,or, The Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991], 260).
4. J. K. Galbraith, "The Rush to Capitalism," New YorkReview of Books, 25
October 1990, 51-52.
5. David Selbourne, "The Light that Failed," TimesLiterary Supplement, 10
May 1991, 7-8.
6. Morton Kondracke, "Leaning on the Left," New YorkTimesBook Review,
15 March 1992, 16.
7. Ibid., 16.
8. Edward and Ronald Chilcote, "The Crisis of Marxism: An Appraisal of
New Directions," RethinkingMarxism 5 (summer 1992): 84-106.
9. Jirgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. F G.
Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), 74.
10. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy:
Towardsa Radical DemocraticPolitics (London: Verso, 1985); hereafter cited in
the text as HSS. When discussing Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Laclau frequently speaks for his partner, Chantal Mouffe. I will adopt this convention,
however problematic, unless otherwise indicated, in which case I will speak of
Laclau in the singular.
For the Mouffe, see her "Radical Democracy: Modern or Postmodern?" in
UniversalAbandon: The Politics of Postmodernism,ed. Andrew Ross (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 31-45; and her "Democratic Politics
Today" and "Democratic Citizenship and the Political Community," in Dimensions of Radical Democracy:Pluralism, Citizenship, Community, ed. Mouffe (London: Verso, 1992), 1-14 and 225-39 respectively.
The Rhetoric of Post-Marxism
189
11. For a more detailed discussion of the "new social movements" as well as
a more "positive" evaluation of L&M's project, see Miklitsch, "News from Somewhere: Reading Raymond Williams' Readers," in Cultural Materialism, ed.
Christopher Prendergast (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).
12. The question of social democracy-both Russian and European-is of
course a subject of intense debate from Marx and Engels through Kautsky, Luxemburg, Hilferding, and beyond. It seems to me that the sorts of problems social
democracy posed both in theory and practice (reform vs. revolution, "mixed" vs.
"command economy," etc.), are back on the agenda-albeit in very changed circumstances. In 1920, Otto Bauer queried, "Bolshevism or social democracy?"
(BolschewismusoderSozial-democratie?)As I hope to make clear in the conclusion
to this essay, this particular question, like the base-superstructure model, is not
part of the answer but part of the problem.
On Austro-German as well as European social democracy both before and
after 1945, see L&M, "Crisis and Degree Zero" and "Social Democracy: From
Stagnation to 'Planism,"' in HSS, 45-54 and 70-75 respectively.
On Russian social democracy, which constitutes a locus classicus for L&M
(vide infra n. 13-14), see "Combined Development and the Logic of the Contingent" (HSS, 14-19). I might add that although L&M's critique of social democracy is indispensable, the value of social democracy is that, however reformist, it
engaged the actually existing institutional structures of the day (e.g., electoral
representation). For all its theoretical resourcefulness, L&M's project for radical
vis-a-vis social democracy remains, essentially, a theoretical program.
For an excellent historical overview of social democracy, see Adam Przeworski, "Social Democracy as a Historical Phenomenon," in Capitalism and
Social Democracy(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 7-46.
13. Alexander Klefland, under the pseudonym Parvus, composed the introduction to Trotsky's pamphlet, "Until the Ninth of January" (1905), where he
introduced the notion of "permanent revolution." For Gramsci on Parvus-Trotsky, see Prison Notebooks, vol. 1, trans. Joseph A. Buttigieg and Antonio Callari
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 441-42 n. 53.
For Laclau's take on Trotsky's position, see "Politics and the Limits of
Modernity," in UniversalAbandon? 74; and "New Reflections on the Revolution
of Our Time," in New Reflectionson the Revolution of Our Time (London: Verso,
1990), 48-49; hereafter cited in the text as NR.
14. While Parvus-Trotsky argued for the proletariat as mediated by the
Social-Democratic Party, the opposing tendency-the Bolsheviks and Bukharin
in particular-petitioned for an alliance between the peasantry and the proletariat as well as, equally importantly, the possibility of "socialism in one country."
15. For Laclau's critique of "meta-narratives," see "Politics," 63-82, esp.
63-66.
16. Hindess and Hirst (H&H) are centralfigures, like Gramsci and Althusser
(and, less directly, Lacan), for both L&M and R&W. H&H's critical texts in this
regard are Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1975) and Mode of Productionand Social Formation:An Autocritiqueof PreCapitalist Modes of Production (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977).
For L&M's critique of H&H-including Marx's "Capital" and Capitalism
Todaywith Cutler and Hussain (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977), see
Hegemonyand Socialist Strategy (100-5). For R&W's critique of H&H, see their
"Postscript: Parable of Hindess and Hirst," in Knowledgeand Class: A Marxian
Robert Miklitsch
Critique of Political Economy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); hereafter cited in the text as KC. In addition to the postscript, see also R&W's "Readings of Althusser" (KC, 99-106) as well as the critical debate conducted in the
footnotes (esp. 304-05 n. 165-172). For another take on H&H, see Terry Eagleton, "Discourse and Ideology," in Ideology: An Introduction (London: Verso,
1991), 203-18; hereafter cited in the text as IA.
17. For what I take to be the source of this trope, see Gregory Elliott, "The
Odyssey of Paul Hirst," New Left Review, no. 159 (September-October 1986):
81-105.
18. Ibid., 94.
19. Louis Althusser, "Marxism Is Not a Historicism," in Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books,
1970), 118-44, esp. 126-37.
20. See "On Education," in Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and
trans. Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International,
1971), 26-43; hereafter cited in the text as SPN. Among many possible examples, I will limit myself to what I take in the context (i.e., academic journal) to be
a particularly apposite one: Gramsci's response to the so-called Gentile Reform,
which was instituted in 1923 under the sign of the Mussolini regime.
On this topic, see also "The People, Intellectuals, and Specialized Knowledge," the postscript to Anne Showstack Sassoon's Gramsci'sPolitics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). See also n. 27 below.
21. Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital, 162.
22. Gramsci himself cites Marx's famous critical trope: "the mystification
which the dialectic suffers in Hegel's hands by no means prevents him from being
the first to present its general form of motion in a comprehensive and conscious
manner. With him it is standing on its head" (Sie steht bei ihm auf dem Kopf). For
the Marx and Gramsci, see "Marx and Hegel," SPN, 231-32 and 518-19.
23. Lacan's influence on L&M and R&W appears to be a mediated one,
especially in the latter case. For instance, L&M's invocation of the points de capiton-which they translate as "nodal points"-is a parenthetical one (HSS, 112).
On L&M's employment of the concept of "suture," which derives from JacquesAlain Miller and Stephen Heath, see the interview with Laclau, "Theory,
Democracy and Socialism" (NR, 210-11).
For good or ill, whatever influence Lacan has had on the work of R&W
appears to have been completely mediated by Althusser (see, for example, KC,
18 and 81).
24. For a trenchant critique of Gramscianism in, inter alia, British Cultural
Studies, see David Harris, From Class Struggle to the Politics of Pleasure (London:
Routledge, 1992).
25. Louis Althusser, "Freud and Lacan," in Lenin and Philosophy,trans. Ben
Brewster (New York:Monthly Review, 1971), 209; hereaftercited in the text as LP.
26. Althusser, "Ideology," 127-86. For a brief but incisive critique of
Althusser's statism that is especially relevant to the concerns of this essay (e.g.,
"civil society"), see Jean L. Cohen and Andrew Arato, "Excursus on Gramsci's
Successors: Althusser, Anderson, and Bobbio," in Civil Society and Political Society (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992).
27. On the relation between the state and public education, see "A Marxian
Theory of the State" (KC, 232, 235-236, and 254-255). For R&W's antistatist
caveat, see KC, 312 n. 58.
The Rhetoric of Post-Marxism
191
28. Nicholas Abercrombie, Stephen Hill, and Bryan Turner, The Dominant
Ideology Thesis (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1980).
29. The opening passage of "Politics and the Limits of Modernity" is typical: "The theme of postmodernity, which first appeared in aesthetics, has been
displaced to ever wider areas until it has become the new horizon of our cultural,
philosophical, and political experience. In the latter realm, to which I shall here
limit my analysis ...." (Universal Abandon? 63; italics mine).
30. For a critique of the rhetoric of post-Fordism, see, however, Michael
Ruskin, "The Politics of Post-Fordism: or, the Trouble with 'New Times,"' New
Left Review, no. 175 (May-June 1989): 54-77. See also Harris, "Post-Fordism:
the Gramscianism of Postmodernism," in Class Struggle, 44-46.
31. In "Building a New Left" (1988), an interview conducted after the
appearance of Hegemonyand Socialist Strategy,Laclau has noted that with respect
to contemporary culture, the only theme "relevant" to his and Mouffe's politicaltheoretical project is the "critique of the fundamentalism of the emancipatory
projects of modernity" (NR, 188), or philosophical postmodernism. However,
responding to the pointed observation that the "examples of democratic struggle"
in Hegemonyand Socialist Strategy tend to be "explicitly 'political,"' Laclau concedes that the "field of cultural struggles has a fundamental role in the construction of political identities" (NR, 189). Accordingly, hegemony for Laclau entails
not only the "construction of a new culture" (as in Gramsci) but, more specifically, the construction of viable strategies for the mass media, which "play a capital role in the shaping of cultural identities" (NR, 190).
32. For the best, and most recent, discussion of the concept of "civil society"
in Gramsci, see Cohen and Arato, "Gramsci and the Idea of Socialist Civil Society," in Civil Society, 142-59.
33. Cohen and Arato, "Theoretical Developments in the Twentieth Century," Civil Society, 117. I should note that the stress in this essay on the mediative nature of the concept of civil society in Gramsci by no means implies a
"harmonious" relation between the three spheres; instead, I subscribe, as in
Cohen and Arato, to a "conflict-theoretical" sense of hegemony, which implies in
turn a "positivenormativeattitudeto the existing version of civil society or, rather,
to some of its institutional dimensions" (Civil Society, 150; latter italics mine).
34. It is imperative to remember that Gramsci's noneconomistic conception
of civil society was nonetheless developed within a determinate class context (i.e.,
"proletarianrevolution"): "[Gramsci's entire analysis is framed within the general
paradigm of the Marxian class theory and geared to the strategic questions flowing from the revolutionary project, namely, how to develop working-class consciousness, a socialist counterhegemony and, ultimately, working-class power"
(Civil Society, 641 n. 82).
35. For this distinction in Gramsci-a crucial and contested one-see, for
instance, his "Political Struggle and Military War," SPN, 229-39. For L&M's
discussion of Gramsci's martial tropes and their effects (e.g., "demilitarization of
war"), see HSS, 69-70.
36. Gramsci himself writes of Trotsky's report to the Fourth World Congress
of the Comintern, at which he was present: "The question . . . was whether civil
society resists before or after the attempt to seize power" (SPN, 236). Moreover,
as Sassoon observes, the "metaphor which Gramsci employs of hegemony as a
system of fortifications" is presented both as a "system of trenches in front of the
fortress of the state . . . and at times as the trenches behindit" (Gramsci'sPolitics,
Robert Miklitsch
233 n. 14). The crucial passages in the Selected Prison Notebooks are, respectively, 193 and 204.
37. The question of the State vis-a-vis civil society in Gramsci is a particularly vexed one. The standard discussion in English is Perry Anderson, "Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci," in New Left Review, no. 100 (November-January
1976-1977): 5-78. See, however, Cohen and Arato, who argue that despite
Gramsci's critique of "statolatry," his "progressive version of statism" (where
civil society absorbs the state, and not vice versa, as in fascism or Jacobinism)
betrays a certain "left totalitarianism" (Civil Society, 154). That the last is not
inconsistent with Leninism-or at least a certain reading of Lenin-is, I believe,
very much to the point.
38. As Charles Taylor notes, civil society-as in Hegel (Sittlichkeit)-is not
identical with the "private sphere" in general or the family in particular. This is a
crucial reminder as it opens up the whole question of the relation between civil
society and the "public sphere." See Taylor, "Modes of Civil Society," Public
Culture 3 (fall 1990): 110-111.
39. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere (Turin: Einaudi, 1975), 1124. Cited in
Sassoon, Gramsci'sPolitics, 111.
40. For my understanding of realism as a philosophical strategy as well as for
an important critique of Althusser, see Ted Benton, "A Defence of Epistemology," in The Rise and Fall of Structural Marxism (New York: St. Martin's, 1984).
41. The question of the "name of the father" (nom-du-pere) in Lacan is a
complicated one, though I think it is fair to say that the symbolic "father" I am
invoking here (Marx) is, true to Lacan, mort-which does not of course imply a
diminution of the former's discursive power (quite the opposite, in fact).
42. See Miklitsch, From Hegel to Madonna: Towardsa General Economy of
"CommodityFetishism" (Albany: State University of New York Press, forthcoming [1996]).
43. In "Marxian Epistemology," R&W ask that the "reader consider the
plausibility of [their] reading and reflect with [them] upon its implications in permitting an original resolution to the economic determinist debate within the
Marxian theoretical tradition" (KC, 62). Though I believe critiquesof Marx can
help us resolve the above problem, I must insist here on the implausibility of
R&W's reading of Marx, an insistence that is consonant with my argument in this
essay for a post-poststructuralist epistemology and the sorts of truth/false claims
and determinate reading protocols associated with the latter, critical-strategic
realism.
44. Laclau, "Politics," 77. For a critique of Hegemonyand Socialist Strategy,
see Norman Geras, "Post-Marxism without Apologies," New Left Review, no.
163 (May-June 1987): 40-82; see also L&M's response to this critique in "History of Marxism," New Left Review, no. 166 (November-December 1987):
79-106, esp. 97-99. For by no means the last word in this debate, see Geras,
"Ex-Marxism without Substance," New Left Review, no. 169 (May-June 1988):
40-82. For a reading of this "interchange" and, in particular, its rhetoric, see
Harris, "Post-Marxism," Class Struggle, 32-36.
45. For a sense of this concept in Lacan, see his "The Agency of the Letter
in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud," in Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan
Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 154.
Though the concept of le point de capiton is only alluded to in Hegemonyand
Socialist Strategy, it is crucial to any understanding of "suture," as the work of
The Rhetoric of Post-Marxism
193
Slavoj Ziiek makes clear. On suture, see Zizek, "The 'Quilting Point,"' in For
They Know Not What They Do: Enjoymentas a Political Factor (London: Verso,
1991) and, in particular, his "pointed" reading of L&M's "democratic invention"
(276 n. 52). See also The Sublime Objectof Ideology,where Zizek illustrates the
point de capiton in terms of, among other things, the "classic" Marlboro advertisement, Coca-Cola, and the "Jew" ([London: Verso, 1989], 96, 99, and 101-2
respectively).
46. On "dislocation," see "Dislocation and Antagonism" and "Dislocation
and Capitalism," in NR, 5-41 and 41-59. For the term spillage as well as, more
generally, a critique of poststructuralism, see Richard Harland, "Derrida and
Language as Writing," in Superstructuralism (New York: Routledge, 1991
[1987]), 140.
47. For L&M's "privileging of the moment of negativity" in Hegemonyand
Socialist Strategy in addition to a critique, en passant, of Adorno and the Frankfurt School in general, see "New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time," 17
and 51-53.
48. My use of the term cultureof capitalism-which deliberately takes the risk
of culturalism-is not only meant to understand capitalism as at once "cultural"
and "economic" but to mark the increasing culturalization of the "life-world." It
is also meant, as my allusion to Levi-Strauss suggests, to understand the culturaleconomic together with the concept and practice of discourse. This last articulation is not, however, the conventional poststructuralist one, where the accent is
"unequivocally" on the signifier. For a rather different sense of this notion, see
Alan Macfarlane, The Cultureof Capitalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1989).
I would only add that the early Gramsci's sense of revolutionary praxis as, in
part, an "intense critical effort of cultural penetration" can, and should, be read
as an anticapitalist counterhegemony. See "Socialism and Culture" (1916), in
Selectionsfrom Political Writings, 1910-1920, ed. Quintin Hoare and trans. John
Matthews (New York: International, 1977), 10-13.
49. Not surprisingly, the Foucault invoked in Hegemonyand Socialist Strategy
is the discursive-epistemic Foucault of the Order of Things (1966) and The
Archaeologyof Knowledge (1969) rather than the "critical-institutional" Foucault
of, say, Discipline and Punish (1975).
50. Nicos Mouzelis, "Marxism or Post-Marxism," New Left Review, no. 167
(January-February 1988): 107-123.
51. See, for example, Gramsci,Historical Materialism and InternationalRelations, ed. Stephen Gill (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
52. See my "Corpus Delicti: The Star Commodity-Body-Sign in Madonna
Studies," in From Hegel to Madonna.
53. See Eagleton, Ideology, 51-54.
54. See, for example, "A Marxian Theory of the Enterprise": "What is
unique to capitalism is clearly not capital and profits, but rather the productive
forces of capital, the capitalist form of the fundamental class process and its
quantitative measure, the value profit rate" (KC, 229).
55. I employ the pleonasm neo here because R&W explicitly refuse in
advance any reading of their work that claims that Knowledgeand Class privileges
any one "condition of existence" (e.g., class) over another: "Any assertion claiming to rank the relative importance of the book's determinants (i.e., its various
conditions of existence) would violate the logic (overdetermination) of the Marxian theory that the book constructs" (KC, 276). My recourse to the formulation
"neo-economics" is therefore intended as an ironic reinscription of the above
Robert Miklitsch
relativist-epistemological stance. For R&W's position on this last, see "Everythingism, or Better Still, Overdetermination," New Left Review, no. 195 (September-October 1992): 124-26.
56. The "fundamental" class process refers, as in the Marx of the Grundrisse, to the historical forms in which surplus value is performedand extracted
(i.e., slave, feudal, ancient, capitalist, etc.). Unlike these fundamental processes,
"the subsumed class process refers to the distribution of already appropriated
labor or its products" (KC, 118). R&W also distinguish between class positions/processes (hence the virgule). For these distinctions, see "Classes: Fundamental and Subsumed" (KC, 117-24).
57. For the term enriched Gramscianism,see David Forgacs, "Gramsci and
Marxism in Britain," New Left Review, no. 176 (July-August 1989): 86.
58. I use the Heideggerian word destructionin the strict sense: "This new
field is one which may be characterized as 'post-Marxist' and is the result of a
multitude of theoretico-political interventions whose cumulative effect in relation
to the categories of classical Marxism is similar to what Heidegger called a
'destruction of the history of ontology"' (Laclau, "Psychoanalysis and Marxism"
[NR, 93]).
59. For my sense of "cognitive agnosticism," see Benton, "Epistemology
and Relativism," in Rise and Fall, 180.
60. See Jameson, "Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan," in The Ideologiesof
Theory:Essays 1971-1986 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988),
1:75-115.
61. For Laclau's inflected sense of these Husserlian terms (i.e., "sedimentation" and "reactivation"), see "New Reflections," 33-36.
62. Ziiek, Sublime Object,7.
63. Ibid., 1.
64. Zizek, For They Know Not What They Do, 2.
65. One might call this-pace Lacan, Althusser, and Zizek-a return not to
Freud, Marx, or Hegel, but to the "referent" (in quotations). Need I add that to
invoke the referent is not to repeat some prediscursive, phenomenological gesture? As Jameson puts it in his reading of Lacan: "The study of the referent... is
the study, not of the meaning of the text, but of the limits of its meanings and of
their historical preconditions, and of what is and must remain incommensurable
with individual expression" ("Imaginary and Symbolic," 108).
66. On a positive appraisal of the relation between Gramsci and discourse
theory, see Sue Golding, "The Continuing Search," in Gramsci'sDemocraticTheory: Contributions to a Post-Liberal Democracy (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1992), 132-4 and 186 n. 3.
67. For L&M and R&W on the issue of the referent, I would only cite,
respectively, the following representative passages: "The structure of any decision
has a discursiveoutside as its intrinsic point of reference" (NR, 244; initial italics
mine); "We are not bothered by the nature of [the] infinite regress of meaningproduction, by this complete rejection of a reference that is independepent of
these 'interdependent terms' [Saussure] and that may serve as an ultimate ground
of truth for these meanings" (KC, 28).
68. For my sense of realism, critical realism, and the notion of the "intransitive" in particular, see Roy Bhaskar's restatement of his position-developed in,
most recently, Realism and Human Emancipation (1986) and Reclaiming Reality
(1989)-in "For Critical Realism," in Philosophyand the Idea of Freedom(Oxford:
Blackwell, 1991), 137-85. On Gramsci's epistemology, about which Bhaskar is
The Rhetoric of Post-Marxism
195
decidedly critical, see "Marxist Philosophy from Marx to Althusser," 162-85,
esp. 170-75.
I might add that while R&W reject realism outright ("Marxian theory
refuses to entertain the illusion that the 'realism' of one or another theory . . .
determines its truth also for other theories-in that sense of absolute truth" [KC,
59; cf. also 88-89 n. 46]), L&M-whose epistemology is rather more sophisticated than R&W's-concede: "Hegel's idealism, far from being a denial of external reality, is the strongest affirmation of it; it not only exists but necessarily
exists. If this is the question at issue our position is, therefore, unequivocally
realist, but this has little to do with the question of materialism" ("Post-Marxism
without Apologies," 87). If the passage from Knowledge and Class courts the
charge of philosophical banality, as if all theories of realism determine the truth
as absolute, the last clause of the L&M is, needless to say, symptomatic inasmuch
as only an extremely restricted understanding of materialism (such as L&M's)
would distinguish absolutely between the question of materialism and realism.
69. See Robert Resch, "Hindess and Hirst and the 'Post-Althusserian' Negation of History," in Althusser and the Renewal of Marxist Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
70. For an incisive analysis of the difference between reform and reformism
as well as an absolutely sobering reading of both socialism and social democracy,
see the postscript to Przeworksi's Capitalism and Social Democracy,239-48.
71. For some sense of the complexity of this issue, see the ongoing debate
conducted in the pages of New Left Review in the late 1980s between Alec Nove
and Ernest Mandel: Nove, "Markets and Socialism," New Left Review, no. 161
(January-February 1987): 98-104; Mandel, "In Defense of Socialist Planning,"
New Left Review, no. 159 (September-October 1986): 5-38; and Mandel, "The
Myth of Market Socialism," New Left Review, no. 169 (May-June 1988): 108-21.
For a critique of both Nove and Mandel, see Diane Elson, "Market Socialism or
Socialization of the Market?" New Left Review, no. 172 (November-December
1988): 3-44.
72. Noberto Bobbio writes: "it is ... necessary to recognize that by 'cultural
leadership' Gramsci means the introduction of a 'reform' in the strong meaning
which this term has when it refers to a transformation of customs and culture."
See "Gramsci and the Conception of Civil Society," in Gramsciand Marxist Theory, ed. Chantal Mouffe (London: Routledge, 1979), 39.
Robert Miklitsch