(This is a reposting of a message I sent last week; I did not see it come
on the network, so I assume it got lost the first time around).
Alan Isaac,
two points in response to your concerns:
If I thought a pomo perspective would make it impossible to argue against
exploitation, I would certainly reject it altogether; but, on the contrary,
I think it can allow me to strengthen the argument against exploitation.
Pomo does not tell me that I cannot have an identity as a worker, that
there cannot be a community of labor, for which exploitation is a key
analytical and moral/ethical issue. rather, it only says that people
have--or are subject to, or can participate in--a number of different
identities. To go back to the example of gender, one can argue that the
joining of class and gender (exploitation and patriarchy) makes the
struggle against both (also egainst exploitation) stronger; for, if I can
argue that the relation of capital, the subsumption of labor, is and was
historically constituted through metaphors of patriarchal construction of
labor/nature/order, then it seems to me that, to the extent the argument is
persuasive, I will be doing something to bring into the struggle against
exploitation people who may have started out being concerned about
patriarchy but not about exploitation (and it must work the other way
around too, or it will not work at all). That, seems to me to be a more
politically sensible and respectful way of trying to convince people who
are not where we are to begin with, concerned with exploitation, that they
should also be concerned with it (and viceversa, again)--the alternative is
to tell them what? that they should be concerned with exploitation because
. of what? because WE think it is important? who are we? because when we
end exploitation, we will also end other forms of oppression? that was
tried once and will no longer hold.
There is also a second line of thinking about exploitation that is relevant
here: I'll just mention it. There are many roots to Marxism; the one that
thinks about exploitation as a matter of justice referring back to a
certain construction of the human subject (the laboring subject who
produces value in the state of nature) is a Lockean root: it itself is
infused with many bourgeois notions of property, of justice, etc.. [and I
think that Marx, although he used it, also criticized it--especially in the
section on commodity fetishism]. So, the critique of exploitation that
needs to be based on a notion of the subject is also a critique that shares
some grounds with bourgeois notions of justice. I have no qualms with using
such an approach at times; but I think we cannot reduce Marxism, and the
critique of exploitation, to only this line; we must go beyond it, and if
pomo can help philosophically to get us beyond bourgeois notions of the
subject (and construct a different notion of humanity and of duties, one
based on a recognition of difference, rather than sameness), that's why it
can be very helpful. We can then be able to radically differentiate
democracy and community from the bourgeois (I mean this in its
philosophical sense) constructions of the same terms.
Antonio
>Antonio,
>Well I am at least persuaded that you have found pomo thinking
>personally useful, and useful in a way that I can begin to
>sympathize with. For example, I can accept that modernism
>(which I take to be the Enlightenment heritage) has had a
>tendency to seek ahistorical explanatory frameworks, which
>can hinder analysis. For example, I think we can say that
>neoclassical analysis has no theory of capitalism for this
>reason. (I probably shd note that for me this circumscribes
>neoclassical analysis rather than completely vitiating it.)
>However, I fear that pomo throws out the baby with the bath water
>when claiming that the subject is _radically_ historical.
>(And let me say that I find your distinction between a
>discursive/prescriptive concept and a metaphysical
>presumption to be a mighty fine conceptual line that is
>unlikely to amount to anything in practice.) Cutting to
>the chase, from a pomo perspective I do not see how to
>explain why exploitation is unjust (except to attempt to
>persuade people to use the word justice this way). In
>contrast, Enlightenment thought persistently hung on to
>the notion that _the very fact of our humanity implied
>certain duties toward each other_. --Alan G. Isaac
Antonio Callari
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