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In this issue, our first offering is Cindy Patton’s article on the curious similarity of the logics of social space that are currently enunciated and acted out by a growing radical right and by queer activists. In Patton’s mapping of the changing geopolitical landscape, both the New Right and queers have succeeded to a degree in materializing social space through a politics of presence that threatens the dominant but disintegrating liberal pluralism. It is liberal pluralism, says Patton, that ostensibly dematerialized social space by constituting and transforming the "essential" differences (of lifestyle and memory) of "minority" groups into claims of civil rights within a pluralized, hence "neutral" public. In Patton’s view, the New Right cleverly seized upon liberal pluralism’s notion of public space as an articulation of citizenship in terms of separate but formally equal identities, and presented its demands as a beleaguered minority of whites and other "true Americans" who also had been victims of discrimination. Yet, as she shows, the New Right has gone beyond liberal pluralism, which was fracturing as a result of the proliferation of minority claims and new identities, and instead has moved to a new logic of space, one that regards social space as "nonpartitionable" and essentially God’s own. In this space, the New Right legitimizes its violent apocalyptic attempts (epitomized by the killing of abortion-clinic doctors) to clear God’s space of evildoers, all those dissident bodies that comprise the minoritarian public of liberal pluralism. Further, Patton regards the emergence of queer politics and activism as having actualized a similar fracturing of the liberal, pluralist spatial logic as queers, too, insist on their prior, central, and material (omni)presence and thereby a notion of monospatiality. Of course, Patton considers the important differences in the spatial logics enacted by the New Right and queer activism, reflecting on the fact that while queers are more interested in "transmogrifying" all bodies by queering them, "through the concept of evil, [the New Right] has tried to connect some bodies with a force that threatens the project of monospatial production." Thus, while queers seek to infiltrate and create public space in a queer image, New Rightists are intent on " reclaiming" holy space, in effect ratifying a genocide against unholy bodies. Patton ends by considering the differences between queers and lesbian and gay rights activists, noting that the latter are more wedded to the civil rights discourse of liberal pluralism and are therefore less likely to "queer" state-sanctioned rights, institutions, and practices, like marriage. While the political differences within the New Right are not over spatial logic (the Christian right regards all space as holy land), the differences between queers and lesbian and gay rights activists, Patton avers, are politically difficult to traverse. Yet, rejecting the diagnosis of a schism, Patton hopes that alliances will occur through the new queer logic of space that does not require queer, lesbian, and gay bodies to have a "natural unity" to be represented in the public, political space created by liberal pluralism.
The idea that sex, gender, and class are neatly correlated, especially in the household, is a hallmark of radical feminist conceptions of a "patriarchal mode of production" and of the oppressiveness of female domestic labor. The one-to-one correspondence construed in this literature has been criticized on diverse grounds, including arguments that there is no preexisting, transcultural unification of sexual and gender identity and that the division of labor in households is extremely complex and can be understood in terms of a variety of possible class processes and subjective class positions. Jenny Cameron seeks to "trouble" both radical feminist notions of domestic labor as the universal and originary site of women’s economic and gender oppression and the poststructuralist and overdeterminist Marxist criticisms of these notions. She cites the work of Harriet Fraad, Stephen Resnick, and Richard Wolff (see RM, Winter 1989) as a good starting point to break the necessary link that previous feminists had drawn between female domestic labor and the class position of women inside and outside households. It shows that inside contemporary households, women can find themselves in any number of class positions, from providers of feudal surplus labor for their male "lords" to a member of a family "commune." However, Cameron also argues that in Fraad, Resnick, and Wolff’s work there is a tendency to treat gender differences as preexisting and in need of transcendence through the equalization of gendered power relations within a transition to communist households. Cameron’s critique invokes both a poststructuralist notion of gender as "performative" and an argument that the very act of participating in class processes allows subjects to "become" gendered. She presents these arguments by discussing the domestic arrangements of one "Pam," an Australian civil servant who, in Cameron’s view, "self-appropriates" the fruits of surplus labor (washing clothes, making dinner, etc.) she produces and then distributes to her male partner. Cameron well understands that Pam can be seen as an exploited feudal serf and that her performance of the traditional responsibilities of women in households bespeaks her prior gender constitution in a familiar heterosexual context. Yet, she employs Pam’s own narrative as a means of making problematic the idea that her surplus labor is simply expropriated rather than independently appropriated and freely given, and that the gendered division of labor within which she performs is imposed rather than chosen as her way to achieve mostly heteronormative experiences of sexual pleasure and gender differentiation. Cameron concludes by showing that Pam’s "gendered becomings" through her participation in domestic labor and the heterosexual matrix are, themselves, "open to disruption and destabilization." And this, Cameron tells us, suggests a new class and gender politics in which all gendered becomings and class processes are ripe for "troubling," not as a "linear movement from a backward and regressive class process or gendered becoming to a more progressive form, but a fragmentary and uneven opening up of differences."
Noel Castree considers the "impasse" created within contemporary Marxism as a result of the polarization of modern and postmodern readings of Marx. The either/or posturing that marks these current disputes is, to his mind, unproductive and insensitive to the "productive conjunction" that modern and postmodern approaches can bring to elucidating the unifying power and the irreducible ambivalences of the Marxian project. Castree thus appreciates "modernist" attempts, like that of Murray Smith in his recent book Invisible Leviathan, to make "visible" the underlying relations of value and capital that presently structure the global economy. He finds much of great importance in Smith’s text, most notably the presentation of the complex problem in Marx of value as a "real" dissimulation of the social relations of production which it (mis)represents. For Smith, this problem is not simply theoretical but is experienced as a reality for the world’s working class, as market exchange and the movements of capital hide of necessity their exploitative and competitive character through the value form of an "equal exchange" of supposedly disembodied, free-floating commodities. Castree approves of Smith’s bringing to light the "invisible Leviathan" of global capitalism as a counterpoint to the "invisible hand" of the market, "whose beneficence is so vaunted by the forces of the Right." But while he esteems highly Smith’s work of making legible the value ontology of living capitalism, he also finds Smith taking up a resolutely (and largely one-sided) modernist position on these value relations. In Castree’s view, Smith reserves for himself the role of an Archimedean observer of a capitalist economy, with all the privileges of clear, unified, and "better" sight this reservation entails. Likewise, Castree sees in Smith aspects common to much modernist Marxism for which a capitalist economy is a "pure," autonomous, and ubiquitous entity capable of existing "in-itself" and for which an undifferentiated subject of history (the working class or humanity) is this economy’s "real" product and ultimate opponent. From his critique of Smith’s modernist aporias, Castree turns to an appreciation of Gayatri Spivak’s more textually centered speculations on value and economic relations. In Spivak, Castree sees some of the necessary remedies to Smith’s modernist renderings of value, while still keeping the focus on the powerful vision that a Marxian value discourse implies for laying bare the structures of exploitation and inequality in world economic affairs. In Castree’s view, the innovation in Spivak’s meditations is her opening up of Marx’s concept of value to its own textual deconstructions and discontinuities, which consequently sheds light on the heterogeneity and diversity that are named by such critical social concepts as "use-value" and "class." Finally, Castree takes from Spivak’s discussions of the subaltern a reminder that while the task of making visible capitalist value relations is indispensable, the modernist fallacy of speaking from everywhere (and thus nowhere) must be jettisoned in preference to stressing "the active role of the investigator in making things seen," a view perhaps that can be contributed by postmodern readings of Marx.
Quoting from George Steiner’s review of Louis Althusser’s "autobiography," Philip Goldstein tells us that the sharp decline in interest in Althusser’s work is largely attributable to the terrible murder of his wife and his equally troubled, though perhaps pitiable, recurring bouts with depression until his death. This summing up of Althusser’s "irrationality" is, of course, then carried over into his theoretical work in defense of the scientificity of Marxism and his commitment to postmodern modes of theorizing. Or, as Goldstein suggests, Althusser’s life’s work is reduced to the symbol of his violent insanity since the irrationality this signifies comports well with the violence, horror, and abuse that, supposedly, are unleashed with the application of scientific Marxism to the construction of real communism and with the relativist nihilism of postmodern theory. Goldstein proceeds to explain the ways in which Althusser’s defense of Marxism’s scientific status was thoroughly opposed to the forms of Hegelian and Stalinist humanism and to rationalist notions of the unity of theory and practice that Althusser believed to be among the primary faults of orthodox Marxism and Soviet communism and that, only partly, led to the latter’s degeneration into a totalitarian nightmare. Goldstein argues that traditional (anti-Soviet) Marxists and critical theorists are joined, ironically, with conservative historians of the Soviet Union in believing that it was largely the misapplication of scientific practice and the betrayal of reason that led to this nightmare, not the uneven development of socioeconomic and ideological formations to which "postmodern" thinkers such as Althusser constantly called attention. Thus, Althusser’s accounts of communism are best suited, in Goldstein’s view, to combating the conservative totalitarian theories (and those of their "humanist" leftist compatriots) that remain the constituent elements of dominant approaches to the history of communism. From start to finish, Goldstein presents Althusser as a unique figure in contemporary Marxism, negotiating the difficult terrain of science and postmodernism, standing nearly alone in articulating a theory that "preserves the theoretical integrity of scientific Marxism but rejects any ‘foundational’ or humanist guarantees of truth."
This issue’s Remarx section begins with Peter d’Errico’s brief historical deconstruction of the doctrine of "corporate personality." D’Errico provides a synoptic overview of the last 150 years of legal decisions in which corporations enter into the law as personified entities with all the "rights" and "freedoms" of "natural persons." He traces two strands of legal thinking–one Germanic, the other Roman– in which corporate bodies are thought to be organic associations of "real" persons whose sovereignty is independent from the state (Germanic) or "fictional" persons whose legal status is owed to the state’s authority to create this artifice (Roman). In the United States, d’Errico argues, the fictional legal personhood of corporations became predominant over the course of the past century. This historical development has meant that rather than conforming to some notion of "real" or "natural persons," the identity of corporations as persons has become more abstract and defined by their economic activities within a capitalist market economy. Not only have corporations, then, been legitimized in abstract, political-economic terms, but the idea of "real" persons as entering into the law as "natural" has been subverted by the application of the same legal abstractions; as d’Errico puts it, natural persons and forms of human community have been subsumed to the fiction of the legal personality. D’Errico gives several examples of the law’s superimposition of abstract, market-based "legal personality on the existential reality of human beings." Using a civil rights case from the 1960s as a prime example, he shows that in the recent past the move to define legal personhood abstractly has both reflected and been determinative of market economic relations, as even the refusal to blacks of "equal access to public establishments" was corrected by the courts on the basis of their legally sanctioned status as consumers in a market economy, not their status as " real" humans with corresponding rights. In d’Errico’s view, the U. S. legal system is built on "personal property and formal equality of all ‘persons,"’ which has resulted in the ascendance of a corporate managerial class with sufficient power to "consume the earth in a mad war for global domination." His hope is that by challenging the doctrines of corporate personality, a renewal of discourse about freedom, equality, and alternative types of human organization will ensue.
The discursive turn that is closely associated with the advent of postmodernism has made it possible to treat categories that were thought to be fixed once and for all in the realm of the "real" as the sites of contradictions and a multiplicity of meanings. Anjan Chakrabarti and Ajit Chaudhury investigate two such cases in which previously anchored "ontological" social categories–the "working class" and the "subaltern"–have been reconceived according to postmodern logics of difference and discursivity. Chakrabarti and Chaudhury are particularly interested in how the category of the subaltern, which was developed extensively by the subaltern studies movement initiated by Ranajit Guha, has been rethought by Gayatri Spivak as a richly differentiated discursive space in a move to free it of its original essentialist connotations. Yet, as Chakrabarti and Chaudhury worry, Spivak’s rescue of the subaltern from its inscription within an essentialist power discourse and her recuperation of the concept as a "blank space within elitist (Western) texts" renders the subaltern as a category of "quiet other" that cannot speak for itself. Chakrabarti and Chaudhury compare this change of terrain from ontology to discourse with another: Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff’s rendition of class not as a "noun," but as a name for a kind of process and as an adjective that describes a multiplicity of positions that any agent can occupy within the field of surplus production, appropriation, and distribution. Chakrabarti and Chaudhury see strong similarities between Spivak’s move to treat the subaltern as a discursive fiction, not as a "thing," and Resnick and Wolff’s rejection of the ontological fixity of the concept of "working class." They state as their own goal carving out a space for Marxian categories of class within the broader postmodern space of the subaltern. Their concern is that Spivak’s notion of the subaltern does not so much make space for contextual concepts such as Resnick and Wolff’s "working class" as it omits or possibly even prevents their emergence since, unlike the general category of the subaltern, the "working class" concept of Resnick and Wolff can "speak" as part of the "inner voice of the West." Chakrabarti and Chaudhury also detect in Spivak’s work and in that of many other theorists of subalternity the view that Third World intellectuals and their "enlightened" comrades in the West are complicit in the continued subordination of the non-West. Chakrabarti and Chaudhury regard the reintroduction of such morally loaded and essentialist distinctions as a negation of an overdetermined logic in which the Third World is always already the West and vice versa. The consequence of this reintroduction, they conclude, is to "stifle a political strategy that seeks realignment of people on a global scale" and therefore to prevent the awakening of a new internationalism in opposition to global capitalism.
In our Review section, Loren Kruger furnishes an account of several recent art exhibitions scattered across postapartheid South Africa. Kruger sees these exhibits as embedded within a continuing struggle to bring art and history into productive dialogue even while visions of the new are in the process of formation. The historical residue of apartheid and the related complicity of foreign and domestic capital are, of course, the subject of some of what she sees. After all, as she points out, it is not just self-indulgence that makes official exhibitions and festivals the sites of familiar narratives of sacrifice, terror, and liberation. Rather, in an active process of creating a historical memory and taking stock of the numerous (and often less-known) personal, local, and domestic effects of the struggle, artists in South Africa investigate the past to produce an archive "which contains a multitude of histories rather than a single official history." In Cape Town she visits the Fault Lines project, designed to "cast a critical as well as affirmative eye on the processes of history, memory, and commemoration" on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the Soweto Uprising of 1976. She finds entries that unwittingly continue the process of historical forgetting as well as ones that are able to present the past as "texture," something that remains yet reconfigures the terrible moments of the mass movement meeting police brutality. Passing on to Grahamstown, she selects for review exhibitions, forming the National Arts Festival, that range from those that register and acquiesce in the commodification of history and those whose elements (photographs of "New Africans" taken between 1890 and 1950, for instance) demonstrate that the historical desires of South African blacks to become citizens and partake of the fruits of commodity society were capable of both documentation and abandonment. Kruger is partial to the work of Trevor Makhoba, a young artist whose paintings move through history revealing hidden secrets, shame, and desire within social dramas. Several of the prints accompanying her review are Makhoba’s work, and they are both disturbing and amusing for mixing "sex and power in explosive proportions" while also including "critical reminders of the social and economic factors affecting women’s and men’s freedom of movement" in South Africa. She ends by reflecting on a video that does not tarry in the past as a means to disguise the ills of the present, as its animated subject–History of the Main Complaint–suggests that the historical relationship of apartheid and capitalism cannot be set aside with the demise of the former. Commenting on what she calls the ANC’s "recent neoliberal turn," Kruger sees this animated work of historical allegory as art bearing witness that "the end of apartheid does not yet mean freedom for all."
The Editors