No doubt I am behind the curve on this one, but if you want to read a book that will make your hair literally stand on end, take a look at David Harvey’s Brief History of Neoliberalism. Harvey deftly traces the history of neoliberalism, showing how contemporary capital systematically deregulated business and dismantled collective labor movements, and how people were convinced that this was in their interests, giving us the marvelous world we have today (I say that sarcastically). Of course, as a function of this, we also witness the rise of identity politics (on both the left and right– nationalist and fundamentalist religious movements on the right, gender and ethnic politics on the left) and postmodern politics. In the meantime, questions of class antagonism become almost completely hidden or clothed (as evidenced by the recent flair up over Obama’s “Bitter” comment, where he hit the true third rail in American politics: class). Books like this make me wonder if theory is asking the right sorts of questions or questions that are even relevant to our contemporary moment. At any rate, I think I need to go drink now.
April 29, 2008
Sad Passions
Posted by larvalsubjects under Antagonism, Marx, Politics, Power, Systems[17] Comments
Larval Subjects . 
April 29, 2008 at 9:02 pm
Frankly, the book isn’t that interesting, unless all of it is completely new to the reader.
Everything in Harvey is heavily prefigured (except they do the actualy detailed case studies where Harvey zooms above such dirty things) by such works as David F. Noble’s Forces of Production or America by Design, Robert Fitch’s The Assassination of New York and a whole boatload of economic sociologists and anthropologists.
April 30, 2008 at 2:24 pm
“Books like this make me wonder if theory is asking the right sorts of questions or questions that are even relevant to our contemporary moment.”
A question that has bothered me for some time. When so much of literary theory concerns itself with matters that are essentially political, how is it possible that outside the window the degradation of the political process we’ve seen over the last 20-25 years seems to be taking place in a separate reality?
April 30, 2008 at 3:31 pm
Some theory is an attempt to grapple with these things, and other theory is an attempt to escape from these things. Then there are just theory domains where this is, or isn’t, the topic.
There’s theory that starts from premises where this stuff is a problem, and theory that starts with premises where this is the solution, and theory that starts with premises where there’s no problem here and no need for a solution.
I am driven once again to the theory that we are what we pay attention to.
April 30, 2008 at 3:56 pm
What I am getting at when I worry over whether the right questions are being asked is a sort of dehistoricization common in a lot of French political theory. For example, in the case of Zizek there is a lot of talk of the signifier, jouissance, and the Act, but little extended discussion and careful analysis of the concrete historical situation we exist in today. Similarly, in the case of Badiou, we get an elaborate theory of the event, subject, and truth-procedures, but again little discussion of the historical situation. Indeed, it is likely that Badiou’s political theory is in fact likely to actively encourage readers to ignore such things as merely belonging to the chaotic structure of situations, such that we should instead focus on what he calls events that depart from any of the codes governing situations. In these cases, there’s a way in which the world disappears or gets reduced to language. Badiou argues in Logiques des mondes, for example, that there are only bodies and language, and seems to put his emphasis on the latter, repeating a set of post-structuralist assumptions. I agree with everything you say in your post, Carl, but my point is that our attempts to locate those sites where change is possible and to thematize and hopefully intensify these tendencies will only be as strong as our understanding of our situation. Contrary to the first poster in this thread, the interest of a book like Harvey’s is the way in which it systematically analyzes the relationships among a number of phenomena unfolding in our world and characterizing our historical moment, allowing us to get a better sense of just what is going on and how it is structured. Burritoboy is, of course, right that a lot of work has been done on this, but any such systematic historical analysis is valuable.
April 30, 2008 at 3:58 pm
And, of course, before people jump all over me I am not dismissing Badiou or Zizek. They have their place in these discussions, but I think that place needs to be properly situated to be valuable or useful. For example, I think Zizek’s focuses far too much on the semiotic strata of contemporary society– he’s very Gramscian in that respect –but without being situated in the broader context of economic, legislative, and historical relations Zizek risks creating a form of practice among his readers that discerns the semiotic as the sole site of engagement.
April 30, 2008 at 4:31 pm
I’m maybe a little more burkeian in my response to change-talk, but I appreciate this focusing of the point and agree completely that the sort of change we might want cannot even (intentionally) begin without rich engagement with what is.
Your point about Zizek is also well-taken. In this respect at least he’s marxism-lite for people who like talking more than working. As a Gramsci guy I’d also agree that the semiotic dimension is what he’s distinctive for and usually what he’s used for in the marxist tradition. But he built that whole ‘superstructural’ analysis on top of an orthodox marxist structural analysis that he gestured at regularly and very much took for granted. Just doing my priestly duty here.
April 30, 2008 at 5:05 pm
I’m actually a huge fan of Burke and think he’s tremendously under-read. Are you claiming that Zizek builds his superstructuralist analysis on an orthodox Marxist structural analysis? And by an orthodox structural analysis do you mean an Althusserian analysis, or more traditional base/superstructure models? I’m not sure that I can agree, given Zizek’s constant references to real change consisting in a change in the coordinates by which situations are framed and his emphasis on the act of naming (all of which are superstructural). In other words, it seems to me that the economic almost entirely disappears in his thought. It hasn’t been until recently with The Parallax View that he’s begun resurrecting the economic, but even there he only points to it– claiming that there’s a parallex between the political and the economic such that we cannot simultaneously view a situation in terms of both –without giving it a decisive role.
April 30, 2008 at 5:17 pm
Dyke, ”Marxism Lite” is one of the better qualifications of dr. Zizek’s opus I heard so far, although I would perhaps go further and term it ”Marxism Zero”.
For example, in the case of Zizek there is a lot of talk of the signifier, jouissance, and the Act, but little extended discussion and careful analysis of the concrete historical situation we exist in today.
Dr. Sinthome this is very shy, very timid, almost impotent. There is a very concrete and precise reason why dr. Zizek doesn’t get into an extended and careful discussion of the historical situation from whence his teaching springs; his teaching is meant to OBSCURE this situation so that it can fit into the global totalitarian consensus according to which Serbs are the new Jews and Slovenlians have restored their role as Austro-Hungarian grooms. If you haven’t grasped this so far, I’m afraid our analysis will have to continue for another two years.
April 30, 2008 at 7:22 pm
@ls, sorry about my ambiguous syntax. I was contrasting Gramsci, who had structure always in view (for better or worse), with Zizek, who does not. So my point is that Zizek is only partially (and perhaps partisanly, as parodycenter argues) gramscian. Zizek is far from alone in this truncated reading of Gramsci, which upsets the priesthood enormously.
My money sez that Zizek will eventually come to Jesus and find the economy after all. The path has been blazed by Derrida. History will repeat itself yet again as farce.
April 30, 2008 at 7:46 pm
Gotcha. And, of course, Zizek’s Hegelianism is a dead give away. There has been a strange trajectory coming out of those that followed Gramsci’s route. Somehow all the cultural came to dominate, and the economic disappeared almost entirely. Laclau anyone? I’ve scratched my head as to why things occurred in this way. There was, of course, the issue Gramsci was trying to respond to: why didn’t the revolution occur despite all the conditions being there. Yet I wonder if something else hasn’t been at work as well. That said, I’m not suggesting that there should be a return to the old base/superstructure model. That, I think, rightly needs to be complicated, but in a way that doesn’t occlude the economic altogether as in the case of Marxisms such as Adorno, Laclau and Mouffe, Zizek, Ranciere, Badiou, etc.
April 30, 2008 at 9:19 pm
Dr Sinthome dr Zizek followed the Gramsci route because he’s a burgeois snob who’s ridden the Communist cock harder than Madonna on the rodeo disco machine, while the Communists had money to pay his critique of Communism. Then when the Communists phased out he simply turned his gaze to the Austrian Alps! It’s the same route that all Commie aparatchiks took, from Yeltsin to Milosevic, what the buggery bollocks is so special about dr. Zizek???
May 1, 2008 at 12:43 am
Attention has been directed elsewhere to this recent Badiou essay and some may find it wanting in crucial respects, but on the level of “pep talk”, I found it very inspiring.
http://www.newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=2705
May 1, 2008 at 11:12 am
Hi Larval,
I tend to think you are correct about the (worrying) disappearance of class politics as other preferences became dominant in academia. I was under the Gramsic spell a few years ago. Although I do think there has been a tendency to remove Gramsci from his historical assemblage and produce work discussing the cultural hegemony of today. People would then study the hegemonic discourse. The problem of this approach is we reach the proposition of LacLau and Mouffe that everything is a discursive formation. Even Foucault was able to identify the importance of the non-discursive. Thankfully I picked up Claire Colebrook’s introduction to Deleuze and was ‘saved’ from LacLau and Mouffe.
In terms of bringing class to the forefront could we not return to Deleuze and Guattari’s plateau on ‘Geology of Morals’, which discusses the dynamic production of strata? This would mean class divisions are strata machinically produced, but should not be considered as essential, or atemporal, features. If I remember correctly Manuel DeLanda adopts this position in his book A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History.
May 1, 2008 at 1:09 pm
I think this is the way to go. I do, however, find DeLanda’s criticisms of Marx to be strange. I take it that this is what Marx was doing all along and never thought of class in essentialist, atemporal terms.
May 1, 2008 at 3:03 pm
“Contrary to the first poster in this thread, the interest of a book like Harvey’s is the way in which it systematically analyzes the relationships among a number of phenomena unfolding in our world and characterizing our historical moment, allowing us to get a better sense of just what is going on and how it is structured. Burritoboy is, of course, right that a lot of work has been done on this, but any such systematic historical analysis is valuable.”
The problem I have with Harvey is precisely that he didn’t (at least, in A Brief History of Neoliberalism) engage closely enough with actual cases to show us the complexities of neoliberalism that we need to understand. Books like Fitch’s The Assassination of New York give us much finer grained and much more detailed understanding of the micro-structure of neoliberalism than Harvey does. Not that – as an introductory text – Harvey is a bad place to start. But I would hope people move quickly beyond this book of Harvey’s. Obviously, there’s a conflict between producing a global history (Harvey) versus a local or more focused one (Fitch, Noble, Carruthers’ City of Capital, etc) – but I think Harvey flies too high on the generalities even for an introductory global text.
May 1, 2008 at 3:20 pm
Fair enough.
May 11, 2008 at 8:25 pm
Buritoboy, can you expound on what you think the next steps post-Harvey in terms of reading might be? I’ve looked up the books you mentioned and saved them for future reading, but any more suggestions would be gratefully received.
Thanks