Rethinking Marxism (Vol. 21 No. 3)‏

RETHINKING MARXISM
a journal of economics, culture and society

Vol 21 No 3
JULY 2009
IN THIS ISSUE:
Editors’ Introduction
BOOK SYMPOSIUM:Gramsci's Politics of Language: Engaging the Bakhtin Circle and the Frankfurt School by Peter IvesGramsci as Theorist of PoliticsJacinda SWANSON
This paper briefly discusses some of Antonio Gramsci's contributions to the theorization of politics that Peter Ives elucidates in Gramsci's Politics of Language. I also highlight a few of the many illuminating aspects of Ives's in-depth but accessible exploration of Gramsci's approach to language and politics, such as Gramsci's distinction between regressive and progressive forms of hegemony and his antiessentialist and antipositivist theorization of social and linguistic practices. I end with a few questions about Gramsci's positions on faith and political unity as well as the similarities of his approach to poststructuralism.
Ives and Gramsci in Dialogue: Vernacular Subalternity, Cultural Interferences, the Word-thing InterdependenceStefano SELENU
Peter Ives's Gramsci's Politics of Language (2004) constitutes one of the most relevant and stimulating recent contributions on Gramsci. In this paper I will review the book, showing the relevance of placing Gramsci in dialogue with a constellation of numerous thinkers and ideas. Then, I will focus on three of Ives's ideas in order to problematize them. First, considering Ives's use of Gramsci's statements on Sardinian, I will deal with the political significance of Gramsci's claim that Sardinian is a language. Second, I will discuss the connection made by Ives between the nonparthenogenetic origins of languages and the idea that languages develop through cultural and linguistic conflicts. Finally, I will deal with Ives's notion of vernacular materialism in Gramsci, and I will discuss his interpretation of Gramsci's ideas on meaning production and metaphor.
Ethical Hegemony
P. Kerim FRIEDMANDrawing upon Peter Ives's book Gramsci's Politics of Language, this article examines the linguistic origins of Antonio Gramsci's theory of hegemony. This is then compared with Pierre Bourdieu's theory of the habitus, with a particular focus on how the two theories conceptualize social change. Ives shows that Gramsci understood language standardization as either democratic or repressive, depending on the nature of the standardization process. Ives uses this to argue that the opposite of repressive hegemony is not the absence of hegemony but a progressive hegemony grounded in democratic processes. While Bourdieu's emphasis on social reproduction over social change makes his work less useful for conceptualizing such a progressive hegemony, this paper argues that his theory of symbolic capital (including linguistic capital) offers us a unique insight into the obstacles faced by agents of progressive social change and, in so doing, sheds light on the limitations of Gramsci's approach.
Prestige, Faith and Dialect: Expanding Gramsci's Engagement
Peter IVESThis essay attempts to respond to and advance the dialogue initiated by contributions to this symposium by Jacinda Swanson, Kerim Friedman, and Stefano Selenu concerning my book, Gramsci's Politics of Language: Engaging the Bakhtin Circle and the Frankfurt School. It emphasizes the importance of all three authors in creating further space for interaction between Gramscian scholarship and other areas of Marxism and social theory, specifically the work of the Association for Economic and Social Analysis (AESA), political theory generally, Pierre Bourdieu, sociolinguistics, and philosophy. I discuss the concepts of prestige, labor, faith, conflict, interference, and dialect, as presented by the other contributions. One of the links that ties together these discussions is my emphasis on Gramsci's insistence that language is not approached as a topic or type of activity that can be divorced or sharply distinguished from other human activity: it does not constitute a separate or separable realm.
ART/ICULATIONSIdeology, Iconoclasm, and the Wunderkammer of Berlin
José María DURAN
The aim of this paper is to make a critical reading of the dismantling process of the Palast der Republik in Berlin. The demolition of the Palast, the prestige building of the former German Democratic Republic, can be seen as the final step in the process of reassessing the East German past. It shows how the space in the center of Berlin has been (re)appropriated from above (i.e., by state power and its ruling class) and redefined according to the new social and cultural undertakings of the German Republic. The International Commission of Experts (Internationale Expertenkommission) appointed to validate through “scientific” arguments the demolition of the building produced in its final report an appropriate, site-specific cultural value that has colluded with both the purely economic valorization of the place and the construction of national symbols. I suggest that these three aspects—cultural value, economic valorization, and national identity—jointly contribute in this concrete case to shape an entrepreneurial quality that the city of Berlin has embraced as a showcase of the reunified Germany. Through this critical reading, I demonstrate that the demolition of the Palast der Republik should be examined as a symbolic construction of state power that requires a form of iconoclasm.ALSO IN THIS ISSUE
A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy of the Transnational Informational CapitalismChristian FUCHS
Concepts like knowledge society, information society, postmodern society, postindustrial society, Internet society, and network society fail to grasp the dialectic of the continuity and discontinuity of society. These concepts take the changes associated with new media as radical novelties and ignore the continuing dominance of capitalist structures. Contemporary capitalism is highly antagonistic and requires a dialectical analysis. Transnational network capitalism and transnational informational capitalism are used as key concepts for grasping the importance of information technologies and knowledge and their role in a transnational and flexible regime of accumulation. One important principle for gaining profit from information commodities is that goods are sold at prices that are much higher than their value.ART"The Illegal Lives": Art Within a Community of OthersYoung Min MOON and MIXRICESince 2002, Mixrice, the artist collective, has pursued social interventionist activities and collaborative projects with a group of undocumented Asian migrant workers in South Korea. Utilizing photographic and media recordings, comics, murals, and texts in the form of exhibitions, publications, and the Web, they engage the question of the Other within the context of an ostensibly monoethnic South Korean culture. Through their critical practice of working with members of a transnational community, Mixrice probes the issues of human rights and the ethics and roles of the artist in a volatile sociopolitical environment.A Marxian Theory of the Subject: Commodity Fetishism, Autonomy, and Psychological DeprivationJohn LUTZThe theme of misrecognition is a common element in the work of Marx, Freud, and Lacan, and it takes as its implicit focus the relationship between autonomy, fetishism, and alienation. Marx's theory of commodity fetishism exposes the mystification of social relations in the commodity as a concealed form of domination that contributes to the creation of alienated subjects. Lacan's ahistorical account of the formation of alienated subjects through their insertion in the symbolic order, while antithetical to Marx's materialist stance, provides a useful framework for exploring the formation of capitalist subjects whose consciousness is shaped by the fetishism of commodities. Lacan's theory of empty speech provides a vehicle for envisioning the full speech that might characterize the consciousness of the socialist subject. POETRYThe Rom ArcaneJack HIRSCHMANArcane is the name for my longer, more structured poems. The Rom Arcane came out of the experience in March 2008 of the pileup of trash in the streets of Naples. This ultimately was connected with attacks on the immigrant and native gypsy camps in Naples and other cities. My poem records the rise in fascism vis--vis the destruction of the Left in many places.Too Little, Too Late: Reflections on Fredric Jameson's Pedagogy of FormTyson E. LEWISThis essay situates Fredric Jameson's theory of pedagogy within his larger project of the aesthetics of cognitive mapping in order to demonstrate the importance of teaching and learning for defining Marxist theory and practice. The article excavates Jameson's pedagogical unconscious, which forms the backdrop for many of his most compelling insights into aesthetic representation. Through a dialectical analysis, the relation between aesthetics and pedagogy is seen as both an advance over certain modes of Marxist pedagogy and also as a retreat from the full examination of pedagogy as a general problem for Marxist theory as such. Thus, the author argues for a renewed emphasis on pedagogy as the most important terrain for rethinking Marxism.REMARX The New Avant-gardePaul MAGEEThis text is a reflection on the ousting of the eleven-year-old neoliberal government in Australia in November 2007. It considers the role that public awareness of climate change might have played in that defeat. This leads to a comment on the new humanities' received attitude toward science and the desirability of revising it. The Amateur Class, or the Reserve Army of the WebVasilis KOSTAKISThis article deals with the transformation of the computer industry that has been inaugurated by the new version of the Web. The advent of the social web—or Web 2.0, according to Tim O'Reilly (2006)—gives rise to the formation of the amateur class and to new modes of exploitation, as the amateur starts to have control over the means of Web production. The function of Web 2.0 within capitalist production is to exploit and valorize the volunteer contributions of amateurs. The argument on which this paper is based is that Web 2.0 exhibits both emancipatory and exploitative aspects, and the role of amateurs should be to foster one over the other.www.rethinkingmarxism.org
yahya m. madra
associate editor / rethinking marxism
http://rethinkingmarxism.org