Marxism, Deconstruction, and Ideology: Notes toward an Articulation

Abstract

It was perhaps inevitable in the apathetic late 1970s and early 1980s that we would finally witness a series of efforts (nostalgic, allegorical rewritings?) to politicize discourses generated from the atmosphere of experimentation in the 1960s, and which produced a kind of implicit synthesis with those of Marxism. The 1960s, after all, were the times when incongruities were merged, when a plethora of new knowledges were pressed into utilitarian service by the pressures of advancing consumer society. Foucault and Derrida's interdisciplinary discourses; Lacan's intermixing of psychoanalysis and linguistics; and Althusser's articulation of Marxism with various subjective and idealist discourses: French theory's principal representatives of critical vanguardism provided a fresh impetus for the New Left to make use of non-marxist discourses to regenerate interventions into the superstructure. And a similar openness to subjective discourses was clearly evident in the theorizing of Critical Theory (always working within an interdisciplinary mode, and a major influence on the left) in the 1960s as well, most notably in Marcuse. While this 1960s synthesizing mentality, it can be argued, was a more or less inadvertent one and applicable to a wide range of practical, aesthetic strategies, the dispositions molded in the next decade or so were to reify into the narrow constraints of specialized disciplines in competition with each other. With the entrenchment of theory in the academy, the function of a metacriticism (at least partially) committed to a leftist politics of some kind has been to construct and justify this early synthesis within the inner logic of the inherited specialization. This project of articulation in the age of specialization and division has taken a variety of forms: Rosalind Coward andJohn Ellis' Language and Materialism (1979), in many ways a grand summation of the 1970s Screen and its Kristevian or Tel Quelian notion of an avantgarde, which forges together Lacan, structuralism, linguistics, and Marxism into an unwieldy, analogical apparatus which has little relevance for the forms