Marxism in the Poststructuralist Moment: Some Notes on the Problem of Revising Marx

Abstract

T o be a Marxist in a humanities department at an American university these days is an anomalous situation. On the one hand, the climate is in some ways more favorable to radical forms of cultural analysis than has been the case at any other time since the 1930s. The terms politics and ideology appear almost routinely in the titles of books, articles, and academic panels that discuss literary and cultural matters. Professors calling themselves Marxists are cropping up in many humanities departments, and the cash bar sponsored by the Marxist Literary Group has been for several years now one of the largest and loudest events at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association. An emerging generation of canon-busting scholars is exploring culture as a field defined largely by intersecting discourses of race, gender, and class; indeed, the 1988 convention of the American Studies Association devoted its entire program to these issues. Even the threat posed by William Bennett, Allan Bloom, and the recently formed conservative consortium calling itself the National Association of Scholars-while potentially destructive of the as-