Dialectical itineraries

History and Theory

Volumn 38, Issue 2, 1999, Pages 169-197

  Fracchia, Joseph ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF OREGON   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0038075009     PISSN: 00182656     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/0018-2656.00085     Document Type: Review

References (51)

1. History and Theory 30 (1991), 153-179
2. All Whitman citations from The Portable Walt Whitman (New York, 1969)
3. Marx-Engels Werke, vol. 3 (Berlin, 1973). All citations of Marx are my translations from his writings that are, with one exception, collected in Marx-Engels Werke. The exception is citation from the Grundrisse published by the Europäische Verlagsanstalt (Frankfurt, n.d.). I shall cite the Marx-Engels Werke as MEW plus volume number plus page number; the second page number is the English translation found, unless otherwise noted, in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert Tucker, cited as MER (New York, 1978)
4. Richard Lewontin, "The Organism as Subject and Object of Evolution," in The Dialectical Biologist (Cambridge, Mass. , 1985), 85-106
5. On these wrong reasons, see notes 11, 14, 18
6. This is Terry Eagleton's characterization of postmodernist treatments of dialectics. See Eagleton, "Where Do Postmodernists Come From?," Monthly Review 47 (July/August, 1995), 69
7. Gunnar Broberg, "Homo sapiens, Linnaeus' Classification of Man," in Linnaeus, the Man and his Work (Berkeley, 1983), 175-176.
8. Hegel, Logik, Werke V, 70-71
9. Here Hegel echoes in sentiment at least the injunction that his poetic counterpart Goethe issued through Faust: "What you have inherited from your fathers, appropriate it in order to possess it. " See Goethe, Faust, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York, 1963), 115
10. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (New York, 1959), 101-102. Lévi-Strauss. citing Roman Jakobson's work, reiterates the notion that "the opposition between synchronic and diachronic is to a large extent illusory," and he adds that it is "useful only in the preliminary stages of research" (Structural Anthropology [New York, 1963], 89)
11. On the synchronic state of language as a "methodological fiction," see Jonathan Culler, Ferdinand de Saussure (New York, 1976), 32
12. Culler, Ferdinand de Saussure, 92.
13. See Richard Rorty, The Linguistic Turn [1967] (Chicago, 1992)
14. John Toews, "Intellectual History after the Linguistic Turn," American Historical Review 92 (October, 1987), 879-907
15. Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny (Cambridge, Mass. , 1977), 289
16. Plato, Symposium, in Collected Dialogues (New York, 1961), 554.
17. Jean Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production (St. Louis, 1975) and For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (St. Louis, 1981)
18. Marshall Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago, 1976).
19. See Sahlins, Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities: Structure in the Early History of the Sandwich Islands Kingdom (Ann Arbor, 1981)
20. Islands of History (Chicago, 1985)
21. Anahulu: The Anthropology of History in the Kingdom of Hawaii, with Patrick Kirch (Chicago, 1992)
22. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca, N.Y., 1981), 45
23. Antonio Gramsci, "The Formation of Intellectuals," in The Prison Notebooks, ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York, 1971), 9
24. See Norma Alarcon's concluding reminder about intellectual privilege regardless of race or gender in "The Theoretical Subject(s) of 'This Bridge Called My Back' and Anglo-American Feminism," in The Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory, ed. Linda Nicholson (London, 1997), 297
25. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" [New York, 1993], 5
26. see Donna J. Haraway, "Situated Knowledges," in Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York, 1991), 197-198
27. Hegel's retort to his postmodern and poststructuralist critics might easily have been: "At those who look at the world semiotically, the world looks semiotically back, and appears as made up essentially of signs" (see note 11 above). He could have immediately pointed out to his postmodern critics, as Sebastiano Timpanaro did about them, that they were all kindred spirits in their insistence on the signifying capacities of the mind as the exclusively human and on "mentifacts" as the exclusive content of culture. Where Hegel sees human history in the history of philosophy, postmodernists see it as the history of semiotic systems. Hegel, of course, would have had as little patience with poststructuralist relativism as poststructuralists have with his universalism. See Sebastiano Timpanaro, "Structuralism and its Successors," in On Materialism (London, 1980), chapter 4, 135-219
28. Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 3.
29. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon in MEW VIII, 111; MER, 595. See also a similar passage in the German Ideology, MEW III, 20; MER, 149
30. I have addressed this issue in greater detail in "Marx's Aufhehung of Philosophy."
31. Norman Geras, Marx and Human Nature: Refutation of a Legend (London, 1983), 109.
32. Antonio Gramsci, Letters from Prison, ed. Lynne Lawner (New York, 1973), 271
33. As Terry Eagleton notes, Marx generally used the individualistic production of artists and artisans' production as his model of material production or objectification (Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, [ Oxford, 1990 ], 204). This, combined with Marx's tendency to use the category to depict material production, is no doubt one of the reasons that prompted Agnes Heller to posit the category of "objectivation" to describe the more collective production of semiotic (linguistic and symbolic) artifacts (Heller, "Paradigm of Production: Paradigm of Work," Dialectical Anthropology 6 [1981], 71-79)
34. The use of the plural "histories" is quite consciously intended to indicate the anti-teleological character of Marx's own writings and of a historical-materialist Wissenschaft. If there was a degree of ambivalence regarding the question of teleology in the German Ideology, by the chapter in the Grundrisse on "Economic Forms which Precede Capitalism," Marx rejected a teleological and therewith, too, a unitary view of human history, the result of which is that a historical-materialist Wissenschaft must focus on the different histories or discrete sociocultural forms. On the question of teleology in Marx, see Fracchia, "Marx's Aufhebung of Philosophy," 166-169
35. As Engels intimated and Gayle Rubin elaborated, those antagonistic relations can also be based in what Rubin called a sex-gender system. See Gayle Rubin, "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex," in The Second Wave, ed. Nicholson 27-62, esp. 31-34, for her sympathetic discussion and critical expansion of the insights Engels made in his 1884 essay "The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State" (MEW XXI, 25-173; abridged English version in MER, 734-759)
36. Engels, letter to Joseph Bloch, 21 September 1890, in MEW XXXVII, 462; MER, 760
37. See Althusser, Reading Capital, 184, 186-187. Reacting against attempts to define the "last instance" in proximate temporal terms, Althusser rejected the idea that the bell would ever toll on the "lonely hour of the 'last instance'" (For Marx, 113). He insisted, instead, that the economic last instance is an always already given structure whose form is determined by the means of production and whose content is "the co-presence of all its elements and their relations of domination and subordination" (Ben Brewster's Althusserian glossary in For Marx, 225). Althusser's redfinition of the last instance as a structural rather than a temporal category points out the generally overlooked, but crucial structural meaning of the term. There is a problem, however, that results from his elimination of the temporal or diachronic dimension and that is evident in his notion that the economic last instance is an always already given structure. The exclusively synchronic approach to structures results in a static kind of analysis that pulls Althusser back into the kind of Hegelian totality and expressive causality that he wanted to avoid. As will be argued below, this is precisely the point where the understanding of theory as a collection of abstract leitmotifs which demand further analysis is crucial to avoid falling into the trap of the logocentric subject
38. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford, 1977), 85.
39. See Heidi Hartmann, "The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism," in The Second Wave, ed. Nicholson, 97-122
40. See also Rubin, The Traffic in Women in the same volume, 27-62.
41. Convinced that Marx was indeed caught in the twin traps of the centered subject and essen-tialism, the two editors of Postmodern Materialism and the Future of Marxist Theory: Essays in the Althusserian Tradition (Middletown, Conn., 1996), Antonio Callari (also the panelist mentioned in the text) and David Ruccio advocate a "postmodern materialism" that, "by virtue of its association with a concept of postmodernism, would present itself as radically new - and different in structure, analytics, and imagery from what has come to be known as classical Marxism" (4). Their critique of "classical Marxism" as centered and essentialist is certainly accurate
42. But as Moishe Postone has brilliantly argued, Marx's own theory has little in common with classical or, in Postone's terms, "traditional" Marxism (Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination [Cambridge, Eng., 1993], Part I, 3-120). And once one rejects the identification of Marx with classical Marxism, one might begin to look carefully at the logic and methodology of Marx's own texts and realize that the roots of what Callari and Ruccio claim is radically new can, as Foucault noted years ago (see note 54), be traced to Marx himself
43. See Foucault's 1964 essay "Nietzsche, Freud, Marx," in Transforming the Hermeneutic Context, ed. Gayle L. Ormiston and Alan D. Schrift (Albany, 1990), 61, 63
44. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York, 1972), 12-13
45. Foucault expressed his perplexity over postmodernism in an interview with Gerard Raulet in spring, 1983, reprinted in Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York and London, 1988), 33
46. This includes the determination of the position, limits, and possibilities of "dissynchronous" pockets within the social whole. For example: the persistence of pockets of individual artisan-like production within industrial capitalist society (the situation of the Mittelstand in Weimar Germany's industrial capitalist economy); or the persistence of churches in an overwhelmingly secular and "rationalized" society. On the unwieldy category of the "dissynchronous," see Ernst Bloch's use of Ungleichzeitigkeiten in Erbschaft dieser Zeit (Frankfurt, 1973), 104-126. For Althusser's version of the term, his insistence that each social sphere (such as economics, politics, aesthetics, philosophy, science) has its "peculiar time and history," see Reading Capital, chapter 4, esp. 98-100
47. This is, of course, crucial to determining strategies of local politics and explains Marx's insistence in the statutes of the First International that each national section had to develop its own historically specific row to hoe. See Karl Marx, Die Gruendung der I. Internationale (Berlin, 1964), 57
48. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and the Unmaking of the World (New York, 1985), 179, 181ff.
49. See note 40 above. Crucial to the expansion of the concept of "objectification" in this way are the insights of Agnes Heller in "Paradigm of Work: Paradigm of Production"; Gyorgy Markus in "Die Welt menschlicher Objekte," in Arbeit, Handlung, Normitivitaet, ed. Axel Honneth and Urs Jaeggi (Frankfurt, 1980); and Ferruccio Rossi-Landi in Language as Work and Trade. Heller and Markus insist that Marx's concept of objectification refers only to the production of material artifacts and cannot encompass the production of semiotic artifacts. They prefer instead what they see as the more encompassing category of "objectivation" - a very Schopenhauerian term (See Arthur Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, in Arthur Schopenhauer: Ausgewählte Schriften [Sigbert Mohn Verlag, n.d.], 233-275). I see no reason why Marx's "objectification" should not be applied to the production of semiotic artifacts, especially considering the current (and correct) insistence on the materiality of semiotic artifacts
50. See George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago, 1980)
51. and Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (Chicago, 1987).