Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
and Wolff
Author(s): Robert Miklitsch
Source: Social Text, No. 45, (Winter, 1995), pp. 167-196
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/466680
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The Rhetoric of Post-Marxism
DISCOURSE AND INSTITUTIONALITY IN LACLAU AND
Like the map of Africa before the great explorations, [the theory of the Robert Miklitsch
superstructure] remains a realm sketched in outline, with its great mountain
chains and rivers, but often unknown in detail beyond a few well-known
regions. Who has really attempted to follow up the explorations of Marx
and Engels? I can only think of Gramsci.
-Louis Althusser, "Contradiction and Overdetermination"
[If] error is serious in historiography, it becomes still more serious in the art
of politics, when it is not reconstruction of past history but construction of
present and future history which is at stake. In this case . . . the snake bites
the snake-charmer ...
-Antonio Gramsci, The Modern Prince
What can the above locution mean but, to invoke the apocalyptic Krokers,
Marxism "in the age of Lenin in ruins,"' which is to say Marxism after the
fall of communism, a brave new world where the mot d'ordreis capital.
The May 1991 cover title of The Economist is appropriately economic:
"From Marx to the Market."2A rich legend.
Not from central planning or command economy to the market. Nor
from Marx to Smith (Adam Smith, that is). But from Marx to the market,
where the market is not only the last word in a long war of words, but a
concept-the market-that is the absolute Other of Marx the man and
myth, everything Marx the proper name signifies (that is, Marxism,
socialism, communism).3 In fact, the concept of the market insinuates a
neonarrative that abolishes, in a word, the master narrative of Marxism.
The big story, then, is not from capitalism to socialism and beyond, but
from socialism to capitalism, where capitalism, not communism, is the
omega of history. In sum, the banner "From Marx to the market" invites
a double reading, at once rhetorical and historical.
In some sense, of course, all of this is very old news indeed. Both cap-
italism and socialism have been pronounced DOA more times than one
cares to remember. ("Active forgetting," as Nietzsche knew so well, is the
Social Text45, Vol. 14, No. 4, Winter 1995. Copyright ? 1995 by Duke University Press.
sine qua non of that abuse-intensive discipline which goes by the name of
"history.") Still, to give the champions of capitalism their due, there does
appear to be something world-historical, something climacteric, some
would even say grave, about this most recent of crises for socialism.
It is writ large in, among other things, the suddenly not-so-liberal
elite print media. Though John Kenneth Galbraith is characteristically
circumspect in his account for the New YorkReview of Books, even he
begins with the "common sense" sense of things: "In the common refer-
ence communism having failed, capitalism is triumphant."4In the Times
Literary Supplement, David Selbourne enlists the grand disenchanting
rhetoric of The Tempest:"profound changes in intellectual perspective are
under way on the Left; but few, if any, will own up to them. These Pros-
peros of ours have abjured their rough Marxist magic and buried their
staffs in earth, but you would not know it."5
It is only a small step from the Selbourne-which would make a late
capitalist of Caliban-to Morton Kondracke's indictment in the New York
Times:"Now that communism is in disgrace and its systematic devastation
of people, the environment and simple truth is being made plain, there
ought to be a political reckoning in the West. No one should be lined up
against the wall, but. ..."6 The bad Orwell impersonation aside ("The
simple truth being made plain"), Kondracke appears to have forgotten
about the custom of civil rights in the West, though he eventually comes to
his senses, reflexively affirming the First Amendment: "The First Amend-
ment protects the right to rant" (his own included, of course).7 Yet not
unlike that hackneyed moment which from time immemorial has been
indispensable to Hollywood courtroom dramaturgy,the damage has been
done; the McCarthyist note has been struck and, presumably, the above
insinuation has been registered by the reader, that jury of the last instance:
the American demos.
So goes the case against Marxism, a trial straight out of Kafka. Which
brings me to the issue at hand: the relationship between the "political"
post-Marxism of Laclau and Mouffe (hereafter abbreviated as L&M) and
the "economic" Marxianism of Resnick and Wolff (hereafter abbreviated
as R&W).
Robert Miklitsch
both analytical Marxism and materialist collectivism are outside the scope
of this paper, I want to focus here on the remaining two strains of Marx-
ism: critical philosophism, which derives, according to the Chilcotes, from
the early Marx and includes the Frankfurt School and, more recently,
Habermas, Bowles and Gintis, and L&M; and Marxist structuralism,
which might be called the "school of Althusser" and which comprises the
work of Poulantzas and R&W. My working hypothesis is that the similar-
ities between critical philosophism and structuralism-between, that is to
say, L&M and R&W-are at least as great as their differences. In order to
determine the very real differences between L&M and R&W, though, it is
first necessary to figure their relationship to political economy.
The opening sentence of Hegemonyand Socialist Strategy,which rec-
ollects the Jena Hegel as well as the early Marx (especially if one registers
Habermas's recollection of this trope in the Philosophical Discourse of
Modernity9), asserts the critical character of L&M's intervention: "Left-
wing thought today stands at a crossroads."10This crisis or conjuncture
is, for L&M, a function of two "events" that have challenged the "'evi-
dent truths' of the past" (HSS, 1). The first event is on the order of a
negative and corresponds to those "failures and disappointments" with
which the Marxist Left is only too familiar. Indeed, this particular series
of events constitutes that narrative of negativity for which the proper
name "Marx" is the metaphor in the locution with which I began this
essay: "From Marx to the market." Hence L&M's via negativa: "from
Budapest to Prague and the Polish coup d'etat, from Kabul to the sequels
of Communist victory in Vietnam and Cambodia" (HSS, 1). The second
"event" that has necessitated a rethinking of Marxism and its "classical
forms of analysis and calculation" (HSS, 1) is that "whole series of posi-
tive new phenomena" which, for the sake of convenience, I will refer to as
the "new social movements" (though the latter term is even more hetero-
geneous, as L&M recognize, than its ostensible conceptual double,
class).
The slow, very public, and very painful death of Marxism-Leninism
and the sudden birth of the "new social movements" constitutes, then, the
terrain of post-Marxism. Behind us is the dismal landscape of revolution,
its "Jacobin Imaginary" scattered about the ruins like so many bloody
body parts. Ahead is the future which, for all its enlightened post-Enlight-
enment promise, nonetheless remains something of a "dark wood."
L&M's figure of choice is not, however, Dante but Descartes.
"[W]hen one enters new territory," Descartes observes, one must follow
the example of
Robert Miklitsch
of langue," the "hegemonic relations" associated with the second, anom-
alous narrative are "facts of parole" (HSS, 51). One might well want to
problematize L&M's recourse to Saussure here (where the political is
effortlessly translated into the linguistic), but according to Hegemonyand
Socialist Strategy, even Trotsky's storied reading of the Russian social-
democratic problematic was ultimately dictated, like Lenin's (not to men-
tion Pokrovsky's), by the synchronic master narrative of Capital:
Precisely because Gramsci, like Althusser, was unwilling to take the next
step-to make, that is, an absolute break with philosophies of essentialism
(say, "absolute historicism")-his own "work was largely negative," aim-
ing as it did to "distance" Marxism from its assimilation to bourgeois
theory (KC, 78).
Though this critique of Gramsci/Althusser is, to say the least, moot
(see, inter alia, Althusser's critique of Gramsci in Reading Capital19),
R&W's reading of Gramsci is especially contrary, it seems to me, since
that work was anything but "negative," whether this negativity is under-
stood as a form of critical destruction or deconstruction. In fact, one
"affirmative" direction of Gramsci's work devolves from his constructive
engagement with the material institutions of civil society.20
Unfortunately, the concept of civil society was worse than beside the
point for Althusser. The following passage from Reading Capital ("The
Object of Political Economy") is symptomatic in the strict sense of the
term:
This description of the so-called cultural process not only draws labo-
riously on Althusser's statist conception of ideology (that is, "ideological
Robert Miklitsch
society. (Hence the accent in Gramsci on the institutions of civil society as
"culturalintermediations."33)As Gramsci puts it: "Between the economic
structure and the State with its legislation and its coercion stands civil
society" (SPN, 208). In other words, while a determinate dialectical rela-
tion obtains among these various spheres or structures, civil society
retains, true to Gramsci's double "declaration of independence," a semi-
autonomy from both the economy and political society.
With respect to the former (the economic), Gramsci states that civil
society is "resistant to the catastrophic 'incursions' of the immediateeco-
nomic element (crises, depressions, etc.)" (SPN, 235; italics mine). More
importantly, this civil-social resistance to the economic34 intimates that a
hegemonic revolution or "war of position" must be distinguished from
that "immediate," "catastrophic" transformation of the economy associ-
ated in classical Marxism with the concept of Revolution or, for Gramsci,
"war of manoeuvre."35 Again, though there is a perhaps irreconcilable
ambiguity in Gramsci between "war of position and "war of manoeuvre"
(for example, not only the genetic, "tactical" question of which moment
comes first, but the larger, "strategic" question of whether both moments
are necessary),36 I want to insist here on the historical specificity and sin-
gularity of the "war of position" which, for Gramsci, assumes its signifi-
cance only after the "events of 1917" (SPN, 235).
As for political society, Gramsci's formula-"State = political society
+ civil society" (that is, "hegemony protected by the armour of coercion"
[SPN, 263])-reflects his position that, "in concrete reality, civil society
and State are one and the same" (SPN, 208),37 a "general," "integral"
position that is reflected in Althusser's distinction between the Repressive
and Ideological State apparatuses (the ISAs and RSA respectively [LP,
141-48]). Against the latter, statist conflation of civil and political society,
though, I want to argue that civil society is not only distinct from the
economy and political society but refers,explicitly, to the "'private' appa-
ratus of 'hegemony"' (SPN, 261),38 which "private apparatus" refers in
turn to the "ensemble of organisms" or, for Althusser, "body of institu-
tions" ("religious apparatus," "educational apparatus," "communications
apparatus," et cetera. [LP, 150]).
Yet if Althusser is clearly concerned to elaborate the material charac-
ter of ideologies ("Thesis II: Ideology has a material existence" [LP,
165]), the point is to attend not so much to ideology as to the body or
materiality of the above civil-social institutions, as Althusser himself does
in the following passage from "Ideology and Ideological State Appara-
tuses": "ideology always exists in an apparatus, and its practice, or prac-
tices. This existence is material" (LP, 166). As my recourse to the concept
of the Law of Culture is intended to suggest, I also want to emphasize-
against both L&M and R&W-the cultural as opposed to economic or
While it is certainly possible to enlist the above, rich passage from the
Grundrisse,as I have elsewhere, as an instance of Marx at his most com-
plex (for example, consumption is not simply determined by produc-
tion),42 I am unwilling as a reader to grant that Marx's formulation here
RobertMiklitsch
ultimately breaks, as R&W claim it does, from a productivist problematic
(this last in the strict, Althusserian sense of the term).43Marx may, despite
his own famous disclaimer, have been a Marxist, but whatever he was, he
was no Marxian.
Unlike R&W's post-Althusserian or, more precisely, post-Hindess-
Hirstian take on classical Marxism, L&M's post-Marxism problematizes
the above patronymic lure as well as those quasi essentialisms, such as the
category of class, which continue to haunt R&W's discourse. That is,
L&M's post-Marxism is not a "new interpretation of what Marx 'really
wanted to say"' (NR, 203), which is not to say that post-Marxism is an
"ex-Marxism."44In fact, the political and intellectual tradition of Marxism
is anything but irrelevant to Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, as Laclau
notes in "Theory, Democracy, and Socialism":
In this passage, the difference between L&M and R&W asserts itself
since, despite a certain procedural sameness, L&M insist not so much on
the antiessentialism of Marxianism (as in R&W) as on the history and
ambiguity, the ambivalent historicity, of the discourseof Marxism. Still, the
insistence in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy on discourse rather than,
say, the institutional is by no means unproblematic, which brings me to
the second point.
Two: The point of le point de capiton. The impossibility of what L&M
call an "ultimate fixity of meaning" presupposes the existence of partial
fixations, since as L&M themselves observe, even in order "to differ, to
subvert meaning, there has to be meaning" (HSS, 112). Unlike Deleuze
and Guattari, then, L&M recognize the necessity of signification: "a dis-
course incapable of generating any fixity of meaning is the discourse of
the psychotic" (HSS, 112). Hence the indispensability, for L&M, of
Lacan's notion of the points de capiton,45which constitute the "privileged
discursive points" of the "partial fixations." But what is the status of these
"nodal points" in L&M's discourse?
In Hegemonyand Socialist Strategy at least, the emphasis is firmly on
the fictional and differential "nature" of these "partial fixations." For
instance: if the "practiceof articulation . . . consists in the constructionof
nodal points whichpartially fix meaning,"the "partial characterof thisfixa-
Here, one might say, is the crux of the problem with respect to both
the question of institutionality and L&M's project in general. While on
one hand it may be productive to focus on the differential structure of
institutions, one really has to wonder about the theoretical, not to mention
political, use-value of describing institutions such as the market or trans-
national corporations as "systems of differences."51Such a hyperdiscur-
sive description of institutionality evacuates, it seems to me, any and every
"trace" of that materiality which distinguishes mass-media institutions
(say, Time Warner) from this or that art-commodity (say, a Madonna
video), since the latter text is also arguably a system of differences.52
Though the class-based analysis of "enterprise" in Knowledge and
Class is problematic on a number of accounts-the analysis of advertising
as a cultural process leans, for instance, on a simple notion of ideology as
rationalization (KC, 169)53-R&W, unlike L&M, do produce a sustained
and relatively integrated examination of the "fundamental" institution of
capitalism. In fact, R&W's critical disaggregation of the notion of profits
from the problem of exploitation as such54should be required reading for
those Marxists who believe that there is a necessary rather than sufficient
relation between capitalism and commodification. This last point-trans-
lated into the adjacent domains of media and cultural studies-could well
have a salutary effect on the study of the complex relations between cul-
tural and commodity production as well as the more general, and gener-
ally neglected, issue of institution vis-a-vis ideology critique.
Robert Miklitsch
To be fair, in "This Book's Political Position," the final part of Knowl-
edgeand Class, R&W bravely endeavor to respond to the question that lies
like a fault beneath the prosaic, superexpository surface of their text:
"Why choose class as an entry point rather than racial or sexual oppres-
sion?" (KC, 279). The short answer to this question is, as I have sug-
gested, Marx(ianism): "What Marx sought and we continue to seek to
contribute to struggles for social change are not only our practical ener-
gies but also certain distinctive theoretical insights. The most important of
these for us concerns class" (KC, 279). The longer and more persuasive
answer to this question is that the concept of class was a "'repressed' ele-
ment in the consciousness of [Marx's] time" and, as such, represented a
"critical lapse in the knowledge of society" (KC, 279).
Now, inasmuch as class arguably remains the unconscious of Ameri-
can society, one would think that R&W's valorization of class in Knowl-
edgeand Class would have a certain theoretical, not to mention polemical,
force. The irony, though, is that R&W's deployment of poststructuralist
discourse in Knowledgeand Class effectively re-represses or re-domesticates
the issue of class by attempting to square it with Marxist discourse at its
most classical and by failing to articulate it with those other discourses
and practices which, however "minor," tend to dominate the national
consciousness: race (the L.A. riots), sex-gender (the Clarence Thomas
hearings), et cetera.
For all its surrealist epistemological allure, then, R&W's marriage of
Marxian economics and poststructuralist discourse theory-a conjunc-
tion which sometimes seems like the critical equivalent of an "umbrella
and sewing machine on a dissecting table"-looks, in the end, all too
familiar. At the end of the odyssey that is Knowledgeand Class, we are, like
Odysseus himself, back home (oikos), back at the beginning.
Five: The embarrassmentof "enriched"Gramscianism.57If all roads for
R&W lead back, despite the postmodern twists and turns, to Marx,
L&M's Cartesian peregrination comes to something of the same dead
end.
The irony of Hegemonyand Socialist Strategy is that at the end, the
"only path" left open to L&M is the one that they have been traveling all
along (and, not so incidentally, which they reproach H&H for having
pursued): "a logical pulverization of the social, coupled with a theoreti-
cally agnostic descriptivism of the 'concrete situations"' (HSS, 104). In
this passage, L&M subject themselves to an implicit, and devastating,
self-critique. For what else is L&M's deconstruction or, more precisely,
destruction58of the socius-embodied in the concept of "post-society"(NR,
193)-than a "logical" and, ultimately, super-rationalist "pulverization of
the social"? Furthermore, L&M's epistemology, sophisticated as it is, is
ultimately as vulnerable to the charge of "cognitive agnosticism" as H&H
or R&W's,59since in Hegemonyand Socialist Strategy, the "concrete situa-
Unlike both L&M and R&W, Slavoj Zizek effects an explicit return to
Hegel by way of Lacan: "the only way to 'save Hegel' is through Lacan."62
Indeed, in The Sublime Objectof Ideology,Zizek maintains that the Haber-
mas-Foucault debate masks another, more originary couple: Lacan/
Robert Miklitsch
Althusser.63 Accordingly, elaborating on the Lacanian-Althusserian axis in
the introduction to They Know Not What They Do, he defines the "three
centres of gravity" of his work as "Hegelian dialectics, Lacan's psychoan-
alytic theory, and contemporary criticism of ideology."64 Hence the rele-
vance, for me, of the following formula or reformulation: Gramsci after
Hegel/Lacan/Althusser. Or: Gramsci after Ziek.
I rehearse this mini-genealogy of Zizek's work because in his critique
of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, "Beyond Discourse Analysis" (which
is appended to Laclau's New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time), he
radically misreads the real lack at the heart of L&M's project and thereby
threatens to deepen the already by no means negligible problems that
attend their project. Bluntly, the "beyond" of "discourse analysis" has
less to do, pace Zizek, with the "subject as an empty place correlative to
[social] antagonism" or with "social fantasy as the elementary ideological
mode to mask the antagonism" (NR, 259) than with the "culture of cap-
italism," which Law of Culture, as I have argued above, refers to those
civil-social institutions that have always already sutured the capitalist
Imaginary.
In other words, it is time to return to the referent (where the institu-
tional constitutes one, critical referent for that metadiscourse which is
Marxism).65
Along just these lines, Eagleton argues in "Discourse and Ideology"
that the "semiotic model" that governs H&H's practice and, a fortiori,
L&M's is the structural-linguistic one between signifier and signified (read
metadiscourse) rather than the one between sign and referent (read mate-
rial discourse). The result is that two very different meanings of discourse
are conflated in L&M's metadiscursive model:
those which are said to constitute our practices [material discourse] and
those in which we talk about them [metadiscourse]. Ideology, in short, goes
to work on the "real" situation in transformative ways .... [F]or if our dis-
courses are constitutive of our practices, then there would seem to be no
enabling distance between the two in which this transformative labour could
occur. And to speak of a transformative labour here implies that something
pre-exists this process, some referent, something worked upon, which can-
not be the case if the signifier simply conjures the "real" situation into being.
(IA, 209)
Notes
1. Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, Ideology and Power in the Age of Lenin in
Ruins (New York: St. Martin's, 1991).
2. Editorial, "From Marx to the Market," Economist, 11 May 1990, 11-12.
3. Drawing on linguistics, Fredric Jameson notes that the "word market,with
its various dialect pronunciations and its etymological origins in the Latin for
trade and merchandise, is printed as market; on the other hand, the concept, as it
has been theorized by philosophers and ideologues down through the ages, from
Aristotle to Milton Friedman, would be printed <<market>>" (See "Economics:
Postmodernism and the Market," in Postmodernism,or, The Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991], 260).
4. J. K. Galbraith, "The Rush to Capitalism," New YorkReview of Books, 25
October 1990, 51-52.
5. David Selbourne, "The Light that Failed," TimesLiterary Supplement, 10
May 1991, 7-8.
6. Morton Kondracke, "Leaning on the Left," New YorkTimesBook Review,
15 March 1992, 16.
7. Ibid., 16.
8. Edward and Ronald Chilcote, "The Crisis of Marxism: An Appraisal of
New Directions," RethinkingMarxism 5 (summer 1992): 84-106.
9. Jirgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. F G.
Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), 74.
10. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy:
Towardsa Radical DemocraticPolitics (London: Verso, 1985); hereafter cited in
the text as HSS. When discussing Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Laclau fre-
quently speaks for his partner, Chantal Mouffe. I will adopt this convention,
however problematic, unless otherwise indicated, in which case I will speak of
Laclau in the singular.
For the Mouffe, see her "Radical Democracy: Modern or Postmodern?" in
UniversalAbandon: The Politics of Postmodernism,ed. Andrew Ross (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 31-45; and her "Democratic Politics
Today" and "Democratic Citizenship and the Political Community," in Dimen-
sions of Radical Democracy:Pluralism, Citizenship, Community, ed. Mouffe (Lon-
don: Verso, 1992), 1-14 and 225-39 respectively.
Robert Miklitsch
Critique of Political Economy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); here-
after cited in the text as KC. In addition to the postscript, see also R&W's "Read-
ings of Althusser" (KC, 99-106) as well as the critical debate conducted in the
footnotes (esp. 304-05 n. 165-172). For another take on H&H, see Terry Eagle-
ton, "Discourse and Ideology," in Ideology: An Introduction (London: Verso,
1991), 203-18; hereafter cited in the text as IA.
17. For what I take to be the source of this trope, see Gregory Elliott, "The
Odyssey of Paul Hirst," New Left Review, no. 159 (September-October 1986):
81-105.
18. Ibid., 94.
19. Louis Althusser, "Marxism Is Not a Historicism," in Althusser and Eti-
enne Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books,
1970), 118-44, esp. 126-37.
20. See "On Education," in Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and
trans. Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International,
1971), 26-43; hereafter cited in the text as SPN. Among many possible exam-
ples, I will limit myself to what I take in the context (i.e., academic journal) to be
a particularly apposite one: Gramsci's response to the so-called Gentile Reform,
which was instituted in 1923 under the sign of the Mussolini regime.
On this topic, see also "The People, Intellectuals, and Specialized Knowl-
edge," the postscript to Anne Showstack Sassoon's Gramsci'sPolitics (Minneapo-
lis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). See also n. 27 below.
21. Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital, 162.
22. Gramsci himself cites Marx's famous critical trope: "the mystification
which the dialectic suffers in Hegel's hands by no means prevents him from being
the first to present its general form of motion in a comprehensive and conscious
manner. With him it is standing on its head" (Sie steht bei ihm auf dem Kopf). For
the Marx and Gramsci, see "Marx and Hegel," SPN, 231-32 and 518-19.
23. Lacan's influence on L&M and R&W appears to be a mediated one,
especially in the latter case. For instance, L&M's invocation of the points de capi-
ton-which they translate as "nodal points"-is a parenthetical one (HSS, 112).
On L&M's employment of the concept of "suture," which derives from Jacques-
Alain Miller and Stephen Heath, see the interview with Laclau, "Theory,
Democracy and Socialism" (NR, 210-11).
For good or ill, whatever influence Lacan has had on the work of R&W
appears to have been completely mediated by Althusser (see, for example, KC,
18 and 81).
24. For a trenchant critique of Gramscianism in, inter alia, British Cultural
Studies, see David Harris, From Class Struggle to the Politics of Pleasure (London:
Routledge, 1992).
25. Louis Althusser, "Freud and Lacan," in Lenin and Philosophy,trans. Ben
Brewster (New York:Monthly Review, 1971), 209; hereaftercited in the text as LP.
26. Althusser, "Ideology," 127-86. For a brief but incisive critique of
Althusser's statism that is especially relevant to the concerns of this essay (e.g.,
"civil society"), see Jean L. Cohen and Andrew Arato, "Excursus on Gramsci's
Successors: Althusser, Anderson, and Bobbio," in Civil Society and Political Soci-
ety (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992).
27. On the relation between the state and public education, see "A Marxian
Theory of the State" (KC, 232, 235-236, and 254-255). For R&W's antistatist
caveat, see KC, 312 n. 58.
Robert Miklitsch
233 n. 14). The crucial passages in the Selected Prison Notebooks are, respec-
tively, 193 and 204.
37. The question of the State vis-a-vis civil society in Gramsci is a particu-
larly vexed one. The standard discussion in English is Perry Anderson, "Antino-
mies of Antonio Gramsci," in New Left Review, no. 100 (November-January
1976-1977): 5-78. See, however, Cohen and Arato, who argue that despite
Gramsci's critique of "statolatry," his "progressive version of statism" (where
civil society absorbs the state, and not vice versa, as in fascism or Jacobinism)
betrays a certain "left totalitarianism" (Civil Society, 154). That the last is not
inconsistent with Leninism-or at least a certain reading of Lenin-is, I believe,
very much to the point.
38. As Charles Taylor notes, civil society-as in Hegel (Sittlichkeit)-is not
identical with the "private sphere" in general or the family in particular. This is a
crucial reminder as it opens up the whole question of the relation between civil
society and the "public sphere." See Taylor, "Modes of Civil Society," Public
Culture 3 (fall 1990): 110-111.
39. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere (Turin: Einaudi, 1975), 1124. Cited in
Sassoon, Gramsci'sPolitics, 111.
40. For my understanding of realism as a philosophical strategy as well as for
an important critique of Althusser, see Ted Benton, "A Defence of Epistemol-
ogy," in The Rise and Fall of Structural Marxism (New York: St. Martin's, 1984).
41. The question of the "name of the father" (nom-du-pere) in Lacan is a
complicated one, though I think it is fair to say that the symbolic "father" I am
invoking here (Marx) is, true to Lacan, mort-which does not of course imply a
diminution of the former's discursive power (quite the opposite, in fact).
42. See Miklitsch, From Hegel to Madonna: Towardsa General Economy of
"CommodityFetishism" (Albany: State University of New York Press, forthcom-
ing [1996]).
43. In "Marxian Epistemology," R&W ask that the "reader consider the
plausibility of [their] reading and reflect with [them] upon its implications in per-
mitting an original resolution to the economic determinist debate within the
Marxian theoretical tradition" (KC, 62). Though I believe critiquesof Marx can
help us resolve the above problem, I must insist here on the implausibility of
R&W's reading of Marx, an insistence that is consonant with my argument in this
essay for a post-poststructuralist epistemology and the sorts of truth/false claims
and determinate reading protocols associated with the latter, critical-strategic
realism.
44. Laclau, "Politics," 77. For a critique of Hegemonyand Socialist Strategy,
see Norman Geras, "Post-Marxism without Apologies," New Left Review, no.
163 (May-June 1987): 40-82; see also L&M's response to this critique in "His-
tory of Marxism," New Left Review, no. 166 (November-December 1987):
79-106, esp. 97-99. For by no means the last word in this debate, see Geras,
"Ex-Marxism without Substance," New Left Review, no. 169 (May-June 1988):
40-82. For a reading of this "interchange" and, in particular, its rhetoric, see
Harris, "Post-Marxism," Class Struggle, 32-36.
45. For a sense of this concept in Lacan, see his "The Agency of the Letter
in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud," in Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan
Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 154.
Though the concept of le point de capiton is only alluded to in Hegemonyand
Socialist Strategy, it is crucial to any understanding of "suture," as the work of
Robert Miklitsch
relativist-epistemological stance. For R&W's position on this last, see "Every-
thingism, or Better Still, Overdetermination," New Left Review, no. 195 (Septem-
ber-October 1992): 124-26.
56. The "fundamental" class process refers, as in the Marx of the Grun-
drisse, to the historical forms in which surplus value is performedand extracted
(i.e., slave, feudal, ancient, capitalist, etc.). Unlike these fundamental processes,
"the subsumed class process refers to the distribution of already appropriated
labor or its products" (KC, 118). R&W also distinguish between class posi-
tions/processes (hence the virgule). For these distinctions, see "Classes: Funda-
mental and Subsumed" (KC, 117-24).
57. For the term enriched Gramscianism,see David Forgacs, "Gramsci and
Marxism in Britain," New Left Review, no. 176 (July-August 1989): 86.
58. I use the Heideggerian word destructionin the strict sense: "This new
field is one which may be characterized as 'post-Marxist' and is the result of a
multitude of theoretico-political interventions whose cumulative effect in relation
to the categories of classical Marxism is similar to what Heidegger called a
'destruction of the history of ontology"' (Laclau, "Psychoanalysis and Marxism"
[NR, 93]).
59. For my sense of "cognitive agnosticism," see Benton, "Epistemology
and Relativism," in Rise and Fall, 180.
60. See Jameson, "Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan," in The Ideologiesof
Theory:Essays 1971-1986 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988),
1:75-115.
61. For Laclau's inflected sense of these Husserlian terms (i.e., "sedimenta-
tion" and "reactivation"), see "New Reflections," 33-36.
62. Ziiek, Sublime Object,7.
63. Ibid., 1.
64. Zizek, For They Know Not What They Do, 2.
65. One might call this-pace Lacan, Althusser, and Zizek-a return not to
Freud, Marx, or Hegel, but to the "referent" (in quotations). Need I add that to
invoke the referent is not to repeat some prediscursive, phenomenological ges-
ture? As Jameson puts it in his reading of Lacan: "The study of the referent... is
the study, not of the meaning of the text, but of the limits of its meanings and of
their historical preconditions, and of what is and must remain incommensurable
with individual expression" ("Imaginary and Symbolic," 108).
66. On a positive appraisal of the relation between Gramsci and discourse
theory, see Sue Golding, "The Continuing Search," in Gramsci'sDemocraticThe-
ory: Contributions to a Post-Liberal Democracy (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1992), 132-4 and 186 n. 3.
67. For L&M and R&W on the issue of the referent, I would only cite,
respectively, the following representative passages: "The structure of any decision
has a discursiveoutside as its intrinsic point of reference" (NR, 244; initial italics
mine); "We are not bothered by the nature of [the] infinite regress of meaning-
production, by this complete rejection of a reference that is independepent of
these 'interdependent terms' [Saussure] and that may serve as an ultimate ground
of truth for these meanings" (KC, 28).
68. For my sense of realism, critical realism, and the notion of the "intransi-
tive" in particular, see Roy Bhaskar's restatement of his position-developed in,
most recently, Realism and Human Emancipation (1986) and Reclaiming Reality
(1989)-in "For Critical Realism," in Philosophyand the Idea of Freedom(Oxford:
Blackwell, 1991), 137-85. On Gramsci's epistemology, about which Bhaskar is
Robert Miklitsch