post-Marxist Theory Research Articles

Political Crisis: Conflict Between The Types Of Dimensions Of The Political

In recent years, political crisis has aggravated especially in postSoviet countries. One of the most important tasks in curbing this situation is by finding the appropriate tools for describing and explaining it. The main aim of this paper is to provide an approach to the political crisis in the light of the coexistence of different types of dimensions of the political. The methodological base of research in this context is the post-marxist theory of rupture (S. Zizek, A.Badiou A., J. Ahambnen), hegemony (A. Gramsci) and ahonizm (C. Mouffe), sociology of everyday life and frame analysis, discourse analysis, and the theory of linguistic determinism. In general, this analysis focuses on anthropological dimension (near the spatial and temporal). This is especially based on the the political subjectification, which forms three basic types of correlation of the political. Every type of correlation forms the symbolic and semantic field simultaneously. Thus, such an approach expands the model of interpretation of the political crisis. In addition, it also expands the political phenomenon particularly. It can be interpreted as a multivariance in the context of three types of dimensions of the political.

Metody walki semiotycznej w społeczeństwie informacyjnym

CEL/TEZA: Autor wychodzi od postmarksistowskiej tezy mówiącej, że informacja generowana przez korporacje i sprzężone z nimi media masowe pełni funkcję sterowniczą, kontrolną i opresyjną. Dowodzi jednak, że przynajmniej część jej odbiorców (konsumentów) jest zdolna do samodzielnej, krytycznej, refleksyjnej interpretacji narzuconych komunikatów. KONCEPCJA/METODY BADAŃ: Artykuł odwołuje się do postmarksistowskiej teorii komunikacji masowej i jej krytyki dokonanej przez Szkołę Birmingham oraz nurt poststrukturalistyczny. Autor ilustruje owe koncepcje przykładami zaczerpniętymi ze źródeł zastanych oraz własnych obserwacji. WYNIKI I WNIOSKI: Autor przyjmuje, że wielki biznes, w porównaniu z konsumentami, dysponuje znacznie większymi zasobami informacyjnymi i dostępem do środków ich przekazywania, kolonizując procesy komunikacji masowej. Podważona jednak zostaje teza, jakoby konsumenci byli zmanipulowani i bezbronni, biernie przyswajając komunikaty generowane przez informacyjnych hegemonów wraz z narzuconymi przez nich interpretacjami. Wyrazem aktywnej i krytycznej postawy konsumentów jest podejmowana przez nich walka semiotyczna. W artykule zaprezentowane zostały jej metody. Omówiono pojęcia subwersji i culture jam m ingu. Przedyskutowano także wpływ rozwoju technologii komunikacyjnych, zwłaszcza Internetu na komunikowanie masowe jako takie i formy semiotycznego oporu. ORYGINALNOŚĆ/WARTOŚĆ POZNAWCZA: W artykule przedstawiono nowe formy i potencjalne kierunki rozwoju semiotycznej walki w epoce Web 2.0. Wyrażono przekonanie, że działania subwersywne ulegają upowszechnieniu, a zarazem - jak ma to miejsce w przypadku memów - często nabierają bardziej rozrywkowego, niż ideologicznego charakteru.

In Search of Radical Democracy: The Ideological Character of Current Political Advocacies for Culture Change in Planning

This paper argues that current attempts to situate the crisis in planning in demoralised or old planning cultures are playing a key role in strengthening the ideological commitment of planning to an advanced liberal social order. In order to provide planners with the means to understand some of the ideological mechanisms at work in such processes, the 2007 Danish structural reform and the parallel advocacy for culture change in planning are analysed. Drawing on post-Marxist theories of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, the analysis draws attention to the need for reflection on whether the current ideological commitment of planning is that which best serves a democratic society.

The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference Roderick A.Ferguson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012.

The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference Roderick A. Ferguson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012.A central demand of the student movements in the United States throughout the 1960s and 1970s was an opening of the academy through the creation of new courses, departments and schools, increased enfranchisement through the enrollment and hiring of non-white students and faculty members, and a challenge to conventional pedagogies of minority difference. However, as this sophisticated and thoughtprovoking study illustrates, the rise of interdisciplines through new departments and fields on race, gender, sexuality and ethnicity represented not only a challenge to hegemonic depictions of minority difference by state, academy and capital but also an opportunity for minority culture and the politics of difference to be appropriated by these same networks of power.Contrary to conventional poststructuralist and postmarxist theories which have neglected these social movements and the rise of interdisciplines, Ferguson stresses the need for new theoretical perspectives which seriously consider the impact and effect of new fields such as race studies, ethnicity studies and queer studies on the academy. Building on Foucault's reading of the strategic nature of power relations {The History of Sexuality, 1990) and Stuart Hall's critique of institutionalisation (Cultural Studies and Theoretical Legacies, 1993), the author develops a rich theoretical framework centered on minority difference being identified by institutions of power as something that could be absorbed into their own aims and objectives. Ferguson highlights the inherent contradictions of the student movements in simultaneously working to innovate and add new meaning to critical discourses on minority difference whilst at the same time attempting to formalize and institutionalize this difference in a way that made it presentable within the university system.The opening chapters chart the rise of the interdisciplines and the proliferation of minority difference in the post-war period, situating these transformations within the broader context of a fragmenting national culture which had historically presented itself as homogenous and the changing role of the American academy, which became more heavily invested in difference as part of sweeping changes within the US university system. Ferguson skilfully links localised case studies of the contestation and reproduction of minority difference such as the Lumumba-Zapata movement at the University of California in the late 1960s and early 1970s to the broader co-option of revolutionary movements by imperial and constitutional projects to bolster the global US political economy. He complicates the credit attributed to black studies in leading the charge to the institutionalisation of racial studies by examining its role in helping to midwife interest in minority difference (110), although at points the attempt to map multiple discourses of minority difference within the academy and the community becomes tangled. …

Poly Economics—Capitalism, Class, and Polyamory

Academic research and popular writing on nonmonogamy and polyamory has so far paid insufficient attention to class divisions and questions of political economy. This is striking since research indicates the significance of class and race privilege within many polyamorous communities. This structure of privilege is mirrored in the exclusivist construction of these communities. The article aims to fill the gap created by the silence on class by suggesting a research agenda which is attentive to class and socioeconomic inequality. The paper addresses relevant research questions in the areas of intimacy and care, household formation, and spaces and institutions and advances an intersectional perspective which incorporates class as nondispensable core category. The author suggests that critical research in the field can stimulate critical self-reflexive practice on the level of community relations and activism. He further points to the critical relevance of Marxist and Postmarxist theories as important resources for the study of polyamory and calls for the study of the contradictions within poly culture from a materialist point of view.

INVESTING IN THE FUTURE

This essay explores not the imaginative fictions that represent or respond to the financial economy but the fictions produced by financialisation, the historical ideologies that have underwritten a newly financialised economy in the post-1973 epoch. It connects recent popular discourses about the future to transformations in the economy, arguing that the adjacent ideologies of ‘the end of history’ and ‘investment in the future’ emerge, respectively, out of the ‘new economy’ of immaterial labour and the deferred temporality of financial speculation. It further suggests that certain of these ideological fictions also haunt explicitly critical accounts of the period. The fiction of end-of-history abundance appears as a historical fact in post-marxist theories of ‘immaterial labour’, while an almost messianic account of finance capital appears in post- structuralist theories of financialisation. The ideas of history that have come to dominance since the 1980s are not only deeply rooted in the economy but have also blocked our access to actual economic history. This essay thus concludes with a reading of Marx's term ‘fictitious capital’, locating in it a reminder about the necessity of critical historical materialism, even in an age of ostensibly ‘immaterial’ value.

The Politics of Catastrophe

The catastrophe of the presidential plane crash in April 2010 was of course a far-reaching event in Polish politics, with consequences still very present. The article describes and interprets various ways of speaking about the catastrophe. I consider this rhetoric in the context of a clash of ideologies: that of modernization and of national-religious values. The conservative camp insists on inscribing the crash into Polish history and claims that it reveals a division into two Polands: one of true patriots and another of collaborators. I analyze this narrative through post-Marxist political theory, particularly Laclau and Mouffe and the concept of ideology developed by Bakhtin/Voloshinov. Ideology is understood as a complicated language phenomenon that permeates all spheres of everyday life as well as generates political programs. I then analyze the political consequences of the catastrophe through the concept of “post-postcommunism” and show how the catastrophe’s complicated symbolic representation has shaped Polish political discourse.

Fiscal impact of privatization in Uganda 1992-2007

This interdisciplinary paper investigated the impact of US capitalization policy on Africa and the postcolonial responses of Africans to these forces of internationalism by applying post-Marxist theory to a selection of social ‘writings’, creative works of art and films. It examined the post-World War II environment that necessitated the politics of capitalization by the emerging US Core and its allied powers. It analyzed the impact of capitalization on this environment and found that the policy led to new ideological clashes, widening social gaps, political and economic conditionality's, patron-client regimes, ineffective delivery systems, militarization of aid delivery and new consumerist practices. It concluded with suggestions for new strategic perspectives on how to deliver the capitalization policy in the globalizing context of Africa. It pointed out that social ‘writings’, creative works of art and films were ideally placed as qualitative sources of data for this kind of research. Key words: US capitalism, neo-imperialism, new forms of nationalist resistance in Africa, underdevelopment, post-Marxism, new development strategies, creative art, films and social writings.

US policy of capitalization and its discontents in Africa: A post-Marxist reading of postcolonial responses in art, film and social 'writings'

This interdisciplinary paper investigated the impact of US capitalization policy on Africa and the postcolonial responses of Africans to these forces of internationalism by applying post-Marxist theory to a selection of social ‘writings’, creative works of art and films. It examined the post-World War II environment that necessitated the politics of capitalization by the emerging US Core and its allied powers. It analyzed the impact of capitalization on this environment and found that the policy led to new ideological clashes, widening social gaps, political and economic conditionalities, patron-client regimes, ineffective delivery systems, militarization of aid delivery and new consumerist practices. It concluded with suggestions for new strategic perspectives on how to deliver the capitalization policy in the globalizing context of Africa. It pointed out that social‘writings’, creative works of art and films were ideally placed as qualitative sources of data for this kind of research. Key words: US capitalism, neo-imperialism, new forms of nationalist resistance in Africa, underdevelopment, post-Marxism, new development strategies, creative art, films and social writings.

‘Pulling the Monster Down’: Interview with William K. Carroll

William K. Carroll is one of Canada’s foremost sociologists. His research and teaching focus on the contemporary capitalist political economy and transformative social movements, as well as Marxist and post-Marxist theories, particularly those informed by Gramsci. His empirical work investigates central actors within the Canadian and world political economy, including social democratic governments, right wing think-tanks and the for-profit and alternative media. He is the author of more than a hundred books, articles, chapters and reports, making important contributions on many subjects, including globalization, neoliberalism and critical research methods.

Topographies of Class: Modern Architecture and Mass Society in Weimar Berlin, Sabine Hake, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008

The Weimar-Republic, and the modernist architecture and planning that was born there, is still a contested place, from whence liberals, reactionaries and Marxists can all trace their lineage. Sabine Hake’s Topographies of Class attempts to clarify this contestation, through an interdisciplinary study of the modernist geography of the interwar-capital, Berlin. The book offers many new insights into the Weimar-era city, countering a tendency on the Left to reject the twentieth-century city in favour of the romanticised ‘capitals of the nineteenth century’, with their insurgent proletariat and their lushly ornamented boulevards. Topographies of Class is a reminder that, irrespective of the era’s rejection of ornament and romanticism, it was a site of class-struggle as intense as that of the Paris of the 1870s. However, Hake’s study is dominated by a conception of class as an ‘identity’, akin to the identity-politics of race or gender, leading to an argument centred on the suppression or expression of ‘class-difference’ rather than class-struggle. In the process, her reading of the city’s modernism becomes overly one-sided, as a period of tension between labour and capital is read, under the influence of Manfredo Tafuri and Italian post-Marxist architectural theory, as being governed almost solely by the logic of Fordist capital.

What Happened in the Twentieth Century? En Route to A Critique of Extremist Reason

Peter Sloterdijk first presented the following text as his inaugural lecture for the Chaire Emmanuel Levinas, March 4, 2005 at the University of Strasbourg. To a certain extent, it bears homage to that great thinker of the complex Other. However, other than taking a political stance, Sloterdijk prefers the perspective of a curator who is concerned about conserving the past century’s critical impulse, which today’s consumerism and the collapse of Left-wing traditions tend to render ghostly. In the first two parts of his essay, Sloterdijk argues that if in contemporary diagnoses the twentieth century appears as a time of confusions, this is because it is an “Age of Extremes” (Eric Hobsbawm): an age of revolts against complexities by the critical reference of all actual or objective states of affairs to a basic cause or fundamental factor. The subject of this extremist reason is defined by its vassalage, apostolate, and mediality in relation to a commanding and disinhibiting reality. Its forerunners are champions of “good crime” such as Marquis de Sade and the young Hegelians; its exemplary twentieth-century cases are Lenin and Mao. Alain Badiou is right to note that the memory of their critical projects is rapidly giving way to the uncontested status of today’s global neoliberalist ideology. Yet, Sloterdijk argues, this is not necessarily a bad thing, not even for critical thought. In the third and fourth parts of his essay, his explicit aim is to “translate” Badiou’s thesis that the twentieth century was marked by a “passion for the real” into the context of his own project of spherology. The twentieth century consists primarily of the activation of the real in a passion for technological and economic antigravitation. The result is the slow but unavoidable emancipation of Western civilization from “the dogmatic opportunism of the real as power-of-the-base-from-below” toward “a free-moving position intermediate between the heavy and antigravitational tendencies.” Economically, the ending of scarcity (Entknappung) and, technologically, the exoneration (Entlastung) of the burdens of human life by the intrusion of new motive forces into human propulsive arrangements have led to the death throes (“Agonie”) of the belief in the base/superstructure division and the radicalism or fundamentalism derived from it. If the twentieth century can still inspire us today, this is because its reprogramming of the pitch of existence (Daseinsstimmung) paves the way for a “critique of extremist reason,” a “post-Marxist theory of enrichment,” a “new interpretation of dreams,” and a “general economy” of energy resources based on excess and dissipation.

HEIDEGGERIAN EXISTENTIALISM AND POST-MARXISM

In this article, the articulation of Heideggerian existentialism to the post-Marxist theory of politics is examined critically. With this articulation, post-Marxism aims to grant politics an ontological status by using concepts which are detached from their philosophical context. The article argues that this articulation is problematic, as the theoretical and philosophical problems generated by this incorporation remain unresolved. However, it also argues that this problematic articulation reveals the inherent theoretical limitations of post-Marxism, which are basically related to the dissolution of “the social” from the theoretical horizon of post-Marxism.

An Archaeology of Political Discourse? Evaluating Michel Foucault's Explanation and Critique of Ideology

The resurgence of interest in the concept of ideology and its empirical application neglects the important contribution of Michel Foucault. Despite Foucault's epistemological reservations about the concept of ideology, both his archaeological and genealogical writings develop original approaches to the analysis of concrete ideologies. This article evaluates Foucault's archaeological approach by applying it to the case of Black Consciousness ideology in South Africa. When translated into an appropriate form, archaeology provides a useful set of tools for the analysis of concrete ideologies. However, it should not be taken as a free-standing approach for its employment exposes important methodological and substantive difficulties. Archaeology thus needs to be supplemented by a genealogical investigation of discursive practices and by a post-Marxist theory of hegemony.

Critical theories of the state: Marxist, neo-Marxist, post-Marxist

Critical Theories of the State is a survey of radical perspectives on the modern state. By focusing on Marxist theory and its variations, particularly as applied to advanced industrial societies and contemporary welfare states, Clyde W. Barrow provides an extensive and thorough treatment of the topic. Barrow divides the methodological assumptions and key hypotheses of Marxist, neo-Marxist and post-Marxist theories into five distinct approaches: instrumentalist, structuralist, derivationist, systems-analytic and organisational realist. He categorises the many theorists discussed in the book, including such thinkers as Elmer Altvater, G. William Domhoff, Fred Block, Claus Offe and Theda Skocpol, according to their concepts of the state's relationship to capital and their methodological approach to the state. Based on this survey, Barrow elaborates a compelling typology of radical state theories that indentifies with remarkable clarity points of overlap and divergence among the various theories. Scholars conducting research within the rubric of state theory, political development, and policy history should find Critical Theories of the State a valuable review of the literature. Moreover, Barrow's work should make a useful textbook for undergraduate and graduate courses in political science and sociology, and can also be used by those teaching theory courses in international relations, history and political economy.

Before Post-Marxism: Ellen Meiksins Wood on Modern Theory and Ancient Society

Ellen Meiksins Wood is a subtle and original Marxist historian of antiquity and critic of classical ideology, coauthor, with Neal Wood (1978), of Class Ideology and Ancient Political Theory, and author of Peasant-Citizen and Slave: The Foundations of Athenian Democracy, published in 1988. She is also a prominent polemicist for Marxist theory, well known for her critiques of certain post-Marxist theories, for example, Emesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, that deny a unique role to the working class in the project of abolishing capitalism and achieving socialism. She has set forth her position most fully in The Retreatfrom Class: A New “True” Socialism, the main thesis of which is summarized in a talk delivered to the Socialist Scholars Conference in 1987 and published the same year under the title, “Why Class Struggle is Central.” In what follows, I analyze and bring into confrontation with each other Wood’s contributions in both spheres, indicating in the conclusion what I take to be a curious tension between them. This tension centers on the primacy of exploitation in the analysis of social conflict and contradictions: Wood appears to take rather a more exclusive and determinist position in the case of modem capitalism than she does with respect to the ancient city-state.

Marxism and Post-Marxism

This brief paper has three objectives. First, we want to defend the thesis that post-marxism is largely a misnomer based on a dubious reading of Marx's own work and that of the marxist tradition. Second, we want to argue for the reexamination of what is original in Marx so that we neither miss the crucial lessons he taught, nor laboriously and wastefully reinvent his wheel. Finally, we will illustrate our general argument with a brief focus on one particular line of postmarxist theory.

Theoretical Perspectives on the Arts, Sciences and Technology

What separates Leonardo from the various other contemporary art magazines (for example, Artforum, Arts, Art in America, Artnews) is less its noncommercial status than its active interest in the relation of art to science and technology. Leonardo has always maintained the belief that art and science are closely related activities. Much current art today is produced in a resolutely antiscientific mood. Nobody was astonished when a famous, important painter was recently described, in all apparent seriousness, in a gallery catalogue as an alchemist [1]. Whether critics emphasize the craft tradition on one hand, or take up esoteric postMarxist theories on the other, the practice and thought of art is effectively isolated from work in science and technology. Given this situation, what could be more welcome than an extended study of art as a science? The publication of M.J. Rosenberg's The Cybernetics of Art: Reason and the Rainbow provides a welcome opportunity to think about these issues [2]. My discussion falls into five parts. I begin by explaining why artificial intelligence (AI) [3] researchers believe that computer simulations of creative thinking are possible. Second, I consider some objections to their research, which, although not ultimately convincing, are relevant to the exploration of the links between art and science. Third, I summarize Rosenberg's approach, indicating how he adopts important ideas from the psychologist Herbert Simon. Fourth, I point to limitations in Rosenberg's theory by contrasting it with Richard Shiffs recent study of Cezanne's work. Finally, I ask what work by art historians can contribute to scientific