Editors' Introduction

Keywords:

RM

Abstract:

With this issue we mark the transition in editorship from David Ruccio to the team of S. Charusheela as editor and Joseph Childers, Yahya Madra, and Maliha Safri as sssociate editors. David served as the journal's editor for over a decade (twelve years to be precise—one as co-editor with Stephen Cullenberg, and eleven as the editor). The scope and nature of David's contributions as editor can be seen in the fact that we could not imagine any one person filling his shoes, and thus had to institute the new positions of associate editors working in conjunction with the editor. This transitional moment in the life of the journal provides the occasion for our opening essay, “Rethinking Marxism: Legacies, Crossroads, New Directions.” Not long after the journal was founded, the Berlin Wall fell and Marxism was widely pronounced dead. Twenty years later, triumphal narratives of capitalist inevitability have been shaken by a global financial crisis, and there is once more a space within which Marxian analytical categories and discourses make sense. What should our journal's trajectory be at this moment?

Full Text:

With this issue we mark the transition in editorship fr_though_om David Ruccio to the team of S. Charusheela as editor and Joseph Childers, Yahya Madra, and Maliha Safri as Associate editors. David served as the journal's editor for over a decade (twelve years to be precise—one as co-editor with Stephen Cullenberg, and eleven as the editor). The scope and nature of David's contributions as editor can be seen in the fact that we could not imagine any one person filling his shoes, and thus had to institute the new positions of associate editors working in conjunction with the editor.

This transitional moment in the life of the journal provides the occasion for our opening essay, “Rethinking Marxism: Legacies, Crossroads, New Directions.” Not long after the journal was founded, the Berlin Wall fell and Marxism was widely pronounced dead. Twenty years later, triumphal narratives of capitalist inevitability have been shaken by a global financial crisis, and there is once more a space within which Marxian analytical categories and discourses make sense. What should our journal's trajectory be at this moment?

Reflecting on our work over the past twenty-two years to open space for interdisciplinary, non-determinist, critical Marxian perspectives, we caution against the pull of determinist, capitalocentric narratives at this moment. Lessons about the political limitations of determinist approaches, hard won from previous experience, should not be forgotten. This journal will continue to examine the complex and overdetermined ways in which class intersects with other cultural and political processes. Rethinking Marxism will continue to support conversation among a range of Marxian traditions, with attention to economics, yes, but also to art, politics, culture, and aesthetics.

The special art/iculations symposium on “Kitsch, Class and Political Aesthetics” continues our journal's engagement with artistic and aesthetic politics and production. This is the first time we have produced a symposium under the banner of the art/iculations series. The series' co-editor, Jack Amariglio, opens with a reflective introduction, “Kitsch as Kitsch Can, or Can't: An Introduction to a Symposium on Kitsch, Class, and Political Aesthetics.” This piece, along with the articles by Monica Kjellman-Chapin, “The Politics of Kitsch,” Alexis Boylan, “Stop Using Kitsch as a Weapon: Kitsch and Racism,” and Gary Tedman, “Origins of Kitsch,” undertakes a sustained interrogation of the political limits and potentials of kitsch. This interrogation moves us beyond the boundary-marking modes of 'evaluating' kitsch as good or bad, authentic or inauthentic. This is not a mere undoing of the old modernist boundaries separating high and low art, or a synthesizing of genres to reveal the presence of opposites in each other. Instead, the focus is on the dialectic of boundary formation and dissolution. This focus illuminates shifts in subjective conceptualization and representation in kitsch's aesthetic terrain as it relates to political possibility.

Our authors provide a range of views on whether kitsch offers a space for a potential recovery of the political. Alexis Boylan, highlighting the history of kitsch's deployment of racialized imagery to consolidate and constitute racial logics, denies its radical potential. Boylan's analysis shifts us away from the intrinsic properties of objects that are produced and circulate as kitsch, toward the location of kitsch in the broader representational field of aesthetic racialization. Kjellman-Chapin and Tedman offer alternative assessments of kitsch's locus in aesthetic politics. Their differences reflect divergent understandings both of class and of kitsch's location in class-related aesthetic regulation. The symposium as a whole foregrounds the relations between aesthetic and political logics in relation to class. It thus reflects the tradition of interdisciplinary inquiry which is motivated in and through attention to the critical-political—a tradition our opening essay discusses as both a legacy of Rethinking Marxism and an urgent ongoing task.

The next two pieces in the issue explore the problematic of temporality, albeit in very different ways. In “Agorachronotistics (Speculations on Market Time),” Paul Stephens and Robert Weston undertake a genre-shifting text that explores/explodes the ways temporal registers of 'market' shape relations and elide exploitation. Using “experimental prose genres introduced by Kracauer, Benjamin and Adorno, such as the Denkbild (a term used by Adorno to describe Benjamin's prose fragments), the thesis, the convolute, and found texts,” they undertake a dizzying set of textual shifts that mimic the phantasmatic moves of finance capital and commodity circulation. At the heart of their creation/exploration lies the alienation we experience as we are drawn into the marketization of all elements of life in an era of financialization.

This exploration exposes the limits of cultural strategies of disengagement and observation. The Urdu poet Akbar Allahabadi wrote: duniyaa me.n huu.N duniyaa kaa talab_gaar nahii.n huu.N; baazaar se guzaraa huu.N Khariidaar nahii.n huu.N (In the world but not desirous of it; I have passed through the market, but am not a buyer).1 The alienated self of Allahabadi's ghazal is a spectator/consumer, a flneur staring into shop windows. Stephens and Weston remind us that this flneur who observes and 'archives' the products of capitalism without access to their conditions of production is as incapable of radical rupture as Allahabadi's uncontaminated but, in the end, alienated and ineffective self (is Khaanaa-e-hastii se guzar jaauu.Ngaa belaus; saayaa huu.N faqat naqsh-e-diivaar nahii.n huu.N: I will pass through this life uncontaminated; A shadow merely with no trace on the wall).

Artemy Magun's “Marx's Theory of Time and the Present Historical Moment” continues the investigation into temporality, addressing the increasing alienation of ever-marketized life taken up by Stephens and Weston. His exploration provides a way to make sense of the “widespread sense of ideological exhaustion which coincides with an apotheosis of leisure.” Not surprisingly, both articles derive inspiration from Benjamin's discussion of leisure practices. But where Stephens and Weston's text splinters performatively, Magun pursues Benjamin's insights on the grounds of finite temporality. He reconceptualizes surplus labor (and hence surplus value) on the grounds of messianic time foreclosed from its positive completion.

Magun's discussion of surplus labor shows that the dialectic of leisure/play and the utopian vision of communism rest on rethinking leisure not simply as the 'free time' that comes after necessary labor, but as the space within which we do the labor of thinking about, and reproducing, necessary labor. This time is not simply the quantified 'empty time' of hours and minutes, but philosophical/analytic time. Linking this insight to finite conceptions of time along the lines of Benjamin and Agamben, Magun's essay provides ways to rethink the nature and meaning of collective surplus appropriation and play within communal projects. To suggest a further example, it allows us to think of feminist discussions of household labor politics not merely around labor time, but around the nature and organization of work. It links to the rich literature on caring and reproductive labor by scholars such as Marjorie DeVault who explore the work of cogitating on how to undertake care as an essential component of care work, and helps us imagine the value of labor allotted to discussing, negotiating, reflecting, and deciding how the 'necessary' component of household work should be organized and shared. This insight is essential for any project that seeks to move housework out of the category of alienated drudgery and looks toward creating communal/non-exploitative arrangements for sharing tasks, responsibilities, and rewards.

Pradeep Dalal's “Pamphlet Series No. 7 - Transcripts from the Lothal Roundtable/Bone + Muscle: Lothal, India” reflects on the dead weight of memory and the past and thinks how art may both stage and present strategies to overcome the ever-deferred messianic moment described by Magun. Combining photomontage with the 'genre' of the roundtable, Dalal rounds up architect Edward Lutyens, archeologists Sri Rao and Mortimer Wheeler, art professor and expert Benjamin Rowland Jr., and artist Eduardo Paolozzi for a conversation. This genre-melding 'discussion' locates the production of reading practices surrounding Lothal, a key site for the Harappan civilization, within orientalist and modernist circuits of dismissal or limited admission (the title for the photomontage derives from Sir Mortimer Wheeler's injunction that human figures in archeological photographs are to be included only to provide scale, and should be seen as so many feet of bone and muscle). Dalal leaves visible the act of production, not merely through the aesthetic convention of unfinished elements, but in the ways he breaks the injunctions noted in the roundt able in his photomontages. The intellectual labor that went into the making of the art is thus made visible to the reader, who is invited by this move to partake in generating alternate reading practices. This is surplus conceived in Magun's sense, as the time that comes prior to and exceeds necessary labor, rather than that which comes after it.

Saroj Giri's essay for our Remarx section, “Hegemonic Secularism, Dominant Communalism: Imagining Social Transformation in India,” focuses our attention on the politics of capitalism but through a very different lens. Whereas earlier pieces examined markets, Giri focuses on elements often consigned to the superstructural. Since the impetus for his inquiry comes from the ongoing hold of communalism (religious ethno-nationalism) on Indian politics, he raises questions that are hardly consignable to a murky pre-market past. Giri shows the continuity and dialectical relationship between communalism and secularism in the operation of the Indian State. This relationship constitutes the space of the political even as it obscures the ideological operation of that constitution in relation to class and exploitation. While Giri focuses mainly on the Indian context, his exploration has value for all spaces where the 'secular/modern' is counterposed to an imagined 'fundamentalist/non-modern.'Steve Redhead's piece in the Remarx section, “From Marx to Berlusconi: Lucio Colletti and the Struggle for Scientific Marxism,” like Giri, traces the relation between left and right, but from another vantage point. Redhead traces Colletti's trajectory from key intellectual figure of Western Marxism in the 1960s and 1970s, to member of Berlusconi's Forza in the 1990s. He highlights the value of Colletti's work, especially the way in which, like Althusser, Colletti elaborated a scientific basis for Marxism. Both Althusser and Colletti argued for the central importance of Marx's later works and made the case for reading these works as substantially breaking from the Hegelian dialectic. This move was, of course, crucial for demarcating a position within Western Marxism that critiqued both Stalinism and the market-socialist turn in Eurocommunism. But unlike Althusser, Colletti argued that Marx did not abandon the concepts of alienation and fetishism when he broke with Hegel. Rather, for Colletti, these concepts remained central to Marx's philosophy throughout his later works. In contrast, Althusser used the argument that Marx broke with these concepts as a way to provide an alternate approach to the subject via the theory of imterpellation.

Redhead suggests that rather than reading Colletti's rightward shift as political opportunism, we consider it in terms of his disillusionment with the left in the 1970s, and his sense that Marxism “lived on merely as an academic current in the universities, producing works of purely theoretical scope or cultural reflection.” Redhead argues that Colletti's disillusionment with leftist politics should be read in conjunction with his commitment to political engagement. That, combined with his anti-Catholicism and commitment to separation of Church and State, led him to join Forza over the alternative Christian Democrats in the 1990s. This trajectory suggests the importance of the sustained interrogation of secularism's relation to ethno-nationalism provided by Giri.We are delighted to present a set of articles that demonstrate the power and range of interdisciplinary Marxist conversations. The vibrancy of such conversations was on display at Rethinking Marxism's seventh international conference, “New Marxian Times.” Marking the 20th anniversary of our international gala conferences, the conference was held November 5-8, 2009 at the journal's founding home, University of Massachusetts Amherst. The conference showcased plenaries on economy, art, and politics, and papers and panels that took up the full richness of Marxism. (For a sense of the conference's range, see the program at the conference website, http://rethinkingmarxism.org/conf/index.php/gala/NewMarxianTimes.) We end our introduction by thanking David Ruccio, whose editorship significantly expanded the space in which such conversations can take place.

The Editors

Notes 1Transliterations from http://www.urdupoetry.com/akbar01.html (accessed September 30, 2009) translations by the editors.