Editor's Introduction

Abstract:

In this issue as part of the run-up to the Rethinking Marxism 2006 conference to be held at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, we devote a special section to "Setting in Motion," the art exhibit curated by Susan Jahoda and Jesal Kapadia for RM06. The exhibit itself will set in motion a provocative variety of individual and collaborative projects from across the United States and around the world, utilizing a wide range of media - including film, animation, video, and texts. The goal, drawing on the recent work of Jacques Rancière, is not to occupy the space created by the apparent weakening of "real" politics - not to substitute art for politics - but to relocate, redefine, and reshape that space. Here, using capsule summaries and a selection of poetry, stills, and images from fourteen distinct projects, Jahoda and Kapadia undertake to represent on the printed page how the works in the exhibit enact new ways of sensing and sense-making, of combining heterogeneous elements and different politics of sensibility, of making visible what has been rendered invisible, allowing new objects and new subjects to appear, disclosing hidden possibilities - in short, how they become "critical art" by creating and sustaining scenes of conflict, collision, and dissensus.

Yahya M. Madra, in his contribution to the art/iculations series, also confronts the issues surrounding the political aesthetics of contemporary critical art. Utilizing the Marxian critique of political economy in a subtle and creative manner, Madra contextualizes and interrogates the latest in the long series of Venice Biennials (the Venice Biennial being one among a burgeoning number of art biennials worldwide). Given the current penchant for combining national exhibition halls and curated multinational exhibits, Madra locates the Venice and other such international biennials within a "transitional conjuncture" in the mode of appropriating art: from art as a "sublimated object that functions as the representative of the national identity" to a new institutional form, one that seeks to combine the contradictory tendencies of, on the one hand, radicalized and pluralized art practices and, on the other hand, transnational corporate funding. What roles do these proliferating art biennials play? In Madra's view, they impose and create transnational aesthetic standards; they have become the new art market, in which the practices of selected artists are valorized; and they are part of the "festivalization of the arts" conducted and coordinated by global-city governments, transnational corporations, and internationally renowned curators. What then of the "critical art" that is exhibited in these biennials, which seeks to resist the commodity form by offering strong political perspectives and by assuming forms (such as performances and installations) that are difficult to market? The problem is that much of the art Madra encountered in Venice was often formulaic, sterile, and "reformist" - "not only despite but because of the political nature" of the works. As he explains, the art works were reformist to the extent that they represented an acceptance of, and then an attempt to navigate within, the formal structure of the biennial. The alternative outlined by Madra is to extend the questioning of the "material and institutional conditions of the imperial/national mode of appropriation of art" (by, for example, Hans Haacke in 1993 and Daniel Knorr in 2005) to critically engage the "new transnational mode of appropriating art qua spectacle."

A. Kiarina Kordela's goal in "Capital: At Least It Kills Time" is to formulate a theory of temporality and historicity appropriate to secular capitalist modernity. She then uses this theory to enter into a critical dialogue with several thinkers whose work plays an important role in redefining contemporary Marxist thought. Kordela is concerned, in particular, with theories of capitalist stage development (as utilized, for example, by Fredric Jameson), the so-called Neo-Spinozist Left (associated, in different ways, with both Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari), and deconstruction (especially Jacques Derrida). What is at stake, for Kordela, is a conception of history as a set of "synchronic blocks," each with its own formal logic, that makes it possible to understand the formal conditions of the existing block that need to be changed and to move to a "really other historical block." The key concepts Kordela deploys come from Marx and Lacan, who in her view shared the goal of carrying out a "transcendental critique" of value (both economic and linguistic), and Spinoza, who conceptualized the transcendent as both cause and effect of the historical. The resulting "pantheism of value" is the synchronic temporality of capital, and the emergence of a different historical block - in the here and now and not in some diachronic future - depends not on objective knowledge but, in Lacanian terms, on "surplus-enjoyment." The problem with Jameson's stages theory is that it adjoins the fantasmic surplus to objective knowledge (involving either the perpetuation of capitalism or its inevitable collapse). As for the "Neo-Spinozists," they either collapse the object of desire and the time of capital or construct desire as the necessary endpoint of some diachronic trajectory. Finally, for the deconstructionist left, there is no otherness, since the future is eternally deferred. For Kordela it is important to understand that capital has already killed the linear sequence of time, and that the "so-called 'future' is another present, yet unrealized block whose structure can be articulated only through its formal difference from the given past and present blocks."

The first essay in the Remarx section also focuses on the issue of time and history - in this case, to confront the problem of white working-class conservatism in the United States - but with an approach quite different from that of Kordela. Like Kordela, Geoff Mann argues that it is important to take the "temporal orientation" of politics seriously. However, he wants to distinguish the anti-futural "interest" articulated in and by the conservative, proto-fascist politics of the Bush regime with an "interest in the future" heralded by the Left. This, by way of moving beyond the given (Weberian or other) interests often imputed to the working class, and the resulting false-consciousness analysis (of writers like Thomas Frank), in order to explain "what makes capitalism so bearable, even welcome, despite its 'unbearability'?" Mann believes it is important to recognize that interests are neither natural nor universal, not grounded in some set of underlying needs or psychic processes. His own suggestion is that interests "represent, or are a product of, a struggle-search for political subjectivity or agency" that is necessarily oriented toward the future even when it is haunted by the past. The challenge for critical intellectuals is to help radicalize this struggle-search, by acknowledging and investigating the "depth of mourning of what used to be" and discovering ways to celebrate a working-class past "without snickering."

Wolfgang Fritz Haug, in the second Remarx essay, takes issues with those "neo-Hegelian" readings of Marx according to which, after the Grundrisse, Marx attempted to popularize his theory and, as a result, moved away from the Hegelian dialectical method, thereby impoverishing his work. For Haug, in contrast, the changes Marx made - for example, in preparing the second edition of the first volume of Capital, in revising the French translation of the first volume, and composing the Marginal Notes on Wagner - attest to the fact that Marx's writings were a "work in progress." Perhaps even more important, they make the Marxian critique of political economy vital and open-ended and thus relevant to the "theoretical understanding of the emerging high-tech capitalism" of our time. Haug's careful scholarship (paying particular attention to what Marx does and less to what Marx says he does) describes the "improvements" Marx makes - in relating his concept of surplus labor to the everyday language of unpaid labor, in avoiding a relapse into speculative dialectics by referring to the determinate commodity, in explaining that his starting point was not the value-concept but the concrete commodity - as a reworking of his basic concepts "in the bright daylight of his workshop." Rather than the betrayal of a fixed method (that of Hegelian dialectics), what Haug sees in Marx's later texts is evidence of Marx's learning process: a "historical materialist rethinking of dialectics."

In the first of the three reviews that complete this issue, Chizu Sato enthusiastically endorses Suzanne Bergeron's critique of the key role a naturalized "national economy" has played in discussions of economic development, the state, and women in the post-World War II period. Sato focuses particular attention on three aspects of Bergeron's analysis: her challenging of the tendency of experts (from both mainstream and radical strands of development economics) to blame others for not knowing how to manage national economies instead of seeing their own unwillingness to relinquish the status of detached, rational observers ; her ability to see the "contradictory and heterogeneous processes" that make it difficult to conceive of the nation as a monolithic economic entity; and her intervention into feminist debates on globalization that continue to presume that capitalism is monolithic and singularly powerful. Sato concludes her review by suggesting that Bergeron's powerful critique would be complemented and extended by considering such issues as the diversity of class processes, the role governmentality plays for women in the global South, and how the rethinking of expertise might lead to the emergence of new, collaborative relationships with the very subjects of development.

Richard Wolff, for his part, expresses an appreciation for Stanley's Aronowitz's latest book not only because it is "smoothly written and readily accessible" but also because it achieves "an important current political intervention." Wolff credits Aronowitz with exposing how, within U.S. capitalism from the "Reagan Revolution" on, higher profits have come at the expense of fewer and worse jobs and that the deteriorating employment situation is neither a sign of efficiency nor a temporary aberration. In other words, Aronowitz successfully documents the "sustained assault on the U.S. working class" over the course of the last thirty years. Still, Wolff believes that two other issues deserve additional attention: the fact that real wages have suffered a sustained decline for the first time since the beginning of the nineteenth century, with deleterious effects on the working class and U.S. society as a whole; and the idea that neoliberalism is merely one form of capitalism (as against, for example, more state-led forms of capitalist development), thus challenging the Left to direct its opposition to capitalism across all its phases.

In the third and final review, of Peter Hitchcock's Imaginary States, Maria Markantonatou notes that Hitchcock uses the tools of cultural studies, sociology, and literary criticism, and takes up a wide range of both theoretical debates and Caribbean literary texts, to conduct an intricate, instructive, and truly interdisciplinary analysis of "cultural transnationalism." According to Markantonatou, Hitchcock refuses mainstream views of both economic globalization and global multiculturalism and, instead, explores the ways in which literature can be seen as reacting both to the formation of national identities and to the new "postcolonial exploitative forms" associated with contemporary global capitalism. For Markantonatou, one of Hitchcock's most important arguments is that posing a global culture alone as "decisive blow to global modes of economic exploitation" is both idealist and misleading. It remains necessary, therefore, to carefully examine the ways political identity and aesthetic representation continue to be imagined and reimagined in terms of the formation of the Nation.

For readers who are not able to attend RM06 (and for those participants who wish to recapture the moment), the conference web site (www.rethinkingmarxism2006.org) will soon include an archive of texts and photos from the sessions, cultural showings and exhibits, and many other stimulating events that are going to be staged in Amherst. In future issues of RM, we will publish presentations from the plenary sessions as well as book symposia and selected papers from panels and workshops on the extraordinary array of topics that will be taken up by the hundreds of students, scholars, and activists participating in RM06.

The Editors

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