Showing papers in "Social Text in 1990"

Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy

Abstract: One important object of interpublic contestation is the appropriate boundaries of the public sphere. The civic republican model stresses a view of politics as people reasoning together to promote a common good that transcends the mere sum of individual preferences. The idea is that through deliberation the members of the public can come to discover or create such a common good. In the process of their deliberations, participants are transformed from a collection of self-seeking, private individuals into a public-spirited collectivity, capable of acting together in the common interest. The rhetoric of domestic privacy seeks to exclude some issues and interests from public debate by personalizing and/or familiarizing them; it casts these as private-domestic or personal-familial matters in contradistinction to public, political matters. The public sphere, in short, is not the state; it is rather the informally mobilized body of nongovernmental discursive opinion that can serve as a counterweight to the state.

Cyborgs at Large: Interview with Donna Haraway

Abstract: Andrew Ross: Many people from different audiences and disciplines came to your work through "A Manifesto for Cyborgs," which has become a cult text since its appearance in Socialist Review in 1985. For those readers, who include ourselves, the recent publication of Primate Visions and the forthcoming Simians, Cyborgs, and Women provides the opportunity to see how your work as a historian of science was always more or less directly concerned with many of the questions about nature, culture and technology that you gave an especially inspirational spin to in the Cyborg Manifesto. So we'd like to begin with a more general discussion of your radical critiques of the institutions of science. Although you often now speak of having been a historian of science, almost in the past tense, as it were, it's also clear that you have many more than vestigial loyalties to the goals of scientific rationality among which being the need, as you put it, in a phrase that goes out of its way to flirt with empiricism, the need for a "no-nonsense commitment" to faithful accounts of reality. Surely there is more involved here than a lingering devotion to the ideals of your professional training? Donna Haraway: You've got your finger right on the heart of the anxiety some of the anxiety and some of the pleasure in the kind of political writing that I'm trying to do. It seems to me that the practices of the sciences the sciences as cultural production force one to accept two simultaneous, apparently incompatible truths. One is the historical contingency of what counts as nature for us: the thoroughgoing artifactuality of a scientific object of knowledge, that which makes it inescapably and radically contingent. You peel away all the layers of the onion and there's nothing in the center. And simultaneously, scientific discourses, without ever ceasing to be radically and historically specific, do still make claims on you, ethically, physically. The objects of these discourses, the discourses themselves, have a kind of materiality; they have a sort of reality to them that is inescapable. No scientific account escapes being story-laden, but it is equally true that stories are not all equal here. Radical relativism just won't do as a way of finding your way across and through these terrains. There are political consequences to scientific accounts of the world, and I remain, in some ways, an old-fashioned Russian nihilist. My heroes are

Living Borders/Buscando America: Languages of Latino Self-formation

Abstract: "My grandparents didn't get special language instruction in school. In fact, they never finished high school because they had to work for a living." Latinos hear this and similar statements every time the question of bilingual education comes up. Such statements highlight an important difference the maintenance of another language and the development of interlingual forms-between this "new" immigrant group and the "older," "ethnic" immigrants. The fact is that Latinos, that very heterogeneous medley of races, classes and nationalities' are different from both the "older" and the "new" ethnics.2 To begin with, Latinos do not comprise even a relatively homogeneous "ethnicity." Latinos include native-born U.S. citizens (predominantly Chicanos Mexican-Americans and Nuyoricans "mainland" Puerto Ricans) and Latin American immigrants of all racial and national combinations: white including a range of different European nationalities Native-American, black, Arabic, and Asian. It is thus a mistake to lump them all under the category "racial minority,"3 although historically the U.S. experiences of large numbers of Mexican-Americans and Puerto Ricans are adequately described by this concept.4 Moreover, both of these groups unlike any of the European immigrant groups constitute, with Native-Americans, "conquered minorities."' If not outright conquered peoples, other Latin American immigrants, heretofore inhabitants of the "backyard" over which the United States claims the right of manifest destiny, have migrated here for both political and economic reasons, in part because of U.S. intervention in their homelands. From the time of Jose Martf, who lived in New York for over one third of his life during the 1880s and 1890s, slowly establishing the foundations for the Cuban independence movement, to the 1980s sanctuary movement for Central American refugees, U.S. actions (military incursions as well as economic sanctions) in Latin America have always generated Latin American migrations. The policies of U.S. finance institutions (supported by the U.S. government and, at times, by its military), moreover, have brought enormous foreign debt to Latin America and with it intolerable austerity programs that have induced many to seek a living in the United States.6

Identity, Meaning and The African-American

Abstract: ...this independent Negro Movement is able to intervene with terrific force upon the general social and political life of the nation, despite the fact that it is waged under the banner of democratic rights, and is not led necessarily either by the organized labour movement or the Marxist party. C.L.R. James, "The Revolutionary Answer to the Negro Problem in the U.S." (1948) In the industrial era, El Dorado is the United States, and the United States is America. Eduardo Galeano, Memory of Fire, vol. 3., Century of the Wind (1988)

For a Practical Aesthetics

Abstract: The neoconservative agenda to dismantle the National Endowment for the Arts is, unsurprisingly, part of a larger strategy to reverse the gains made in the past two decades by gays and lesbians, racial and ethnic minorities, women, and other subordinated and subaltern groups. Why attack the aesthetic at this point in time? With civil rights on the retreat, the relatively protected sphere of the aesthetic has become the terrain of political contestation, of addressing crucial ethical concerns in ways that the mass media are disinclined to adopt. It is easier to withdraw advertising from a T.V. station to pressure it to change its programming than it is to convince a panel of experts on what criteria to judge what is or is not art. In any event, the understanding of art itself has been undergoing great changes. With the politicization and commodification of art, few people today can seriously identify the aesthetic with the realm of freedom. The new contestatory movements have provoked a counter-offensive by various sectors of the Right: fundamentalists (anti-obscenity and antiabortion), nationalists (anti-flagburning and English Only advocates) and political conservatives (anti-affirmative action and anti-civil rights). Having learned from the new social movements that the personal and the cultural are political, the Right has openly declared itself the ideological foe not only of subaltern groups seeking enfranchisement but also of liberal, humanistic expressions of universality, such as the "aesthetic," that guarantee freedom of practice to their enemies.' In what follows, I focus on the reasons why these political, moral and economic issues have converged on the question of the aesthetic, a dimension of social practice which the social sciences have largely ignored. I also pay particular attention to how current conservative attempts to achieve hegemony do so at the expense of gays and lesbians, who in turn have repoliticized their cultural practices. The conservative backlash to the politicization of sexuality and other "intimate matters,"' reached the pinnacle of high-handedness last summer when Jesse Helms proposed a ban on public funding for "'obscene and indecent' art and for any work that 'denigrates, debases or reviles a person, group or class of citizens on the basis of race, creed, sex, handicap, age or national origin."'3 The motive was, as everyone no doubt remembers, the offense that Mr. and Mrs. Helms took at the flagrant display of homoeroticism in an exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe's

Unifying Discourse: City College as a Post-Modern Public Sphere

Abstract: In this essay, I shall be concerned with the public sphere as a site for political activity. The strength of Habermas's vision of the public sphere lies, I think, in his emphasis upon the political role of the public sphere. Critiques of Habermas tend to lose this focus upon the political significance and meaning of public sphere activities. There is a great deal to criticize in Habermas's vision, of course, insofar as he seems nostalgically committed to a rationalistic conception of the public sphere originating in an 18th Century European variety of republicanism, and appears unwilling to entertain the possibility that a radically different model of a political public sphere might be necessary today. I shall propose such a radically different model of a political public sphere, distinguishing between the relatively universal and apolitical public sphere of mass media entertainment, and the vast numbers of de-centered yet highly politicized public spheres currently existing within specific institutional contexts. Within the concrete institutional contexts of schools, employment sites, and so on, I will argue, one finds the engaged publics which often need the support of a socially transformative public sphere. In such contexts, I will further argue, the qualitative requirements for effective political discourse are somewhat different than construed by either Habermas or his recent critics. I shall claim that the contemporary phenomenon of diverse and conflicting class, race, and gender-based interests within such institutional settings creates the need for discursive articulations of the grounds for common social projects. That is, I will propose a model of a political public sphere in which the primary goal is to formulate unifying discourses capable of providing the basis for consciously chosen communities, in the face of myriad and conflicting interests. By contrast with Habermas's universalistic ideal of a public sphere in which Reason reveals itself, and by contrast also with contemporary

"The Very House of Difference": Race, Gender and the Politics of South African Women's Narrative in Poppie Nongena

Abstract: Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest reformism. It is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives. Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdependency become unthreatening. Only within that interdependency of different strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and

Marxism(s) and "The Withering Away of the State"

Abstract: It is not some unavoidable real world, with its laws of economy and laws of war, that is now blocking us. It is a set of identifiable processes of realpolitik and force majeure, of nameable agencies of power and capital, distraction and disinformation, and all these interlocking with the embedded short-term pressures and the interwoven subordinations of an adaptive commonsense. It is not in staring at these blocks that there is any chance of movement past them. They have been named so often that they are not even, for most people, news. The dynamic moment is elsewhere, in the difficult business of gaining confidence in our own energies and capacities. ... It is only in a shared belief and insistence that there are practical alternatives that the balance of forces and chances begins to alter. Once the inevitabilities are challenged, we begin gathering our resources for a journey of hope. If there are no easy answers there are still available and discoverable hard answers, and it is these that we can now learn to make and share. This has been, from the beginning, the sense and the impulse of the long revolution. Raymond Williams3

When Black Elk Speaks, Everybody Listens

Abstract: popularity in the United States and Canada, and a good part of Europe, risks touching the nerves of those who today hail Black Elk as a true prophet of a universal way of thinking about the world far beyond the boundaries of the Pine Ridge reservation where he lived most of his life. But, though nerves may be touched, even exposed, my critique is not so much of a man who lived through the classic period of Lakota history and culture, but of the disciples who were to follow him, praise, him, adulate him, idolize him, deify him, and frequently misunderstand him and the culture in which he lived at the time of his interviews with Neihardt.

The West German State Derivation Debate: The Relation betweeen Economy and Politics as a Problem of Marxist State Theory

Abstract: In order to understand the peculiarities of the West German state discussion since the late 1960s, especially the state derivation debate (Staatsableitungdebatte), it is necessary to review the historical preconditions of that country's social trajectory. First, the critical and thereby also marxist tradition, which had been blossoming in the Weimar period, was interrupted by the Nazi terrors and then to boot by the postwar Stalinist vulgarization, so that the more recent marxist discussion found little to connect up with. For decades the Frankfurt School offered the most important theoretical reference point for the maturing critical left aside from a few isolated scholars who considered themselves to be working within the marxist tradition (Wolfgang Abendroth, Leo Kofler, and Ernest Mandel, the lastnamed having done much for the preservation of marxism in the Federal Republic). Second, West Germany did not live up to the many leftist predictions of economic collapse and progressive impoverishment. In particular, it did not live up to the prognoses of the Communist Party circles, which adhered closely to the line of the official socialist camp. Instead, West German society experienced an "economic miracle" in the 1950s and 60s. The political development of the Federal Republik into an anticommunist, authoritarian democracy under Chancellor Adenauer in the 1950s was thus sustained by a broad consensus. This consensus made possible the marginalization, indeed criminalization, of the left (best expressed in the outlawing of the Communist Party in 1956). Third, in the course of these events the Social Democrats [SPD] adjusted to the demands of restoration, an adjustment consummated in the famous "Bad Godesberg Turn" of 1959. Yet this adjustment was a thoroughly active one in the sense that they developed a distinctive political project of "domestic reform" coupled with detente in foreign affairs (Brandt's Ostpolitik). After a long period of neoliberal economic policy, they put forth what might be called an enlightened Keynesianism, geared towards full employment and redistribution of income for the benefit of the broad masses.

Interview with Craig Owens

Abstract: I did this interview together with Gregorio Magnani in February 1987 for a book project of ours that was to introduce the American debate on postmodernism in Italy. As is often the case with Italians plans, mysterious and vexing circumstances prevented the almost completed collection from actually appearing. Alas, had it done so, Craig's contribution would not have been included. For he was supposed to correct the present text but agonized so much over it that he never managed to do it. I ran into him in Milano during the summer and by then he had become evasive about the whole thing. Exasperated I gave up; it was just too much trouble. Eventually I forgot about the matter, only to remember it when I heard of his tragic death this summer. Looking at it again, I realized that, even unfinished, it contained much of value. What follows here, then, is the 'second' version of our conversation, the version beyond mere transcription that I normally give the interviewee as a basis for expansions and subtractions and corrections of silly things said. I have edited it a bit to eliminate obviously garbled passages, but the result is still rather raw. It can stand as an oral history (rather than an interview), and as a document of sorts. Some of Craig's conversational brilliance comes out. And the problems he deals with, amusingly at times, acerbically at other, but always engagingly, are still very much with us. We publish it as a tribute to someone who was associated with our journal (all too briefly, since we, and I in particular, did not quite know how to include him), to someone whose voice is already deeply missed. /AS, New York, Nov. 1990.

Interdisciplinarity in Public: The Rhetoric of Rhetoric

Abstract: In The Trial of Socrates (1988), the late I.F. Stone addressed a chapter to "Socrates and Rhetoric." Speaking on behalf of the Athenian public, he took sides against Socrates and for rhetoric. Rhetoric, he said, was a skill enabling citizens "to protect their interests in the assembly and in the law courts" (90), hence an essential tool of Athenian democracy, and that was what the anti-democratic Socrates most mistrusted about it. "The unspoken premise of the Socratic assault on oratory was disdain for the common people of Athens" (92).1 In academic departments in the humanities and social sciences, the defense of rhetoric against a universalizing Platonic or scientific reason is not news. Among the many who have lately been trying to move rhetoric, in Stanley Fish's words, "from the disreputable periphery to the necessary center," one can cite the historians Hayden White and Dominick LaCapra, the economist Donald McCloskey, the sociologist Jean Baudrillard, and literary critics as otherwise diverse as Bakhtin, de Man, Wayne Booth, Terry Eagleton, and Fish himself.2 In anthropology, communications, philosophy, political science, law, and even medicine, and especially in interdisciplinary projects that connect them, the revival of rhetoric has been proceeding for some time. Unfortunately, one cannot conclude from Stone's eloquent non-specialist defense that there has been a sudden conjunction of academic high theory with the common sense of the general or extra-academic reading public, which has heretofore tended to take the term rhetoric as a slur, a synonym for deceit, manipulation, and propaganda, for the tyranny of words unchecked by the truth of things.3 This essay will explore a more modest hypothesis: that Stone's grounding of rhetoric in the democratic polis or public offers a significant but also troubling analogy to the rehabilitation of rhetoric in the university, which much contemporary opinion, left and right, of course opposes to the public as specialized, professionalized, private. In brief, I will argue that if the interdisciplinary move toward rhetoric moves scholarship in the direction of the public, and as such is politically desirable, the phrase "the public" that I and others plug into our politico-disciplinary arguments at value-laden points like this is also a piece of rhetoric, and as such to be examined carefully for its multiple, devious, and perhaps even unintended persuasive effects.

Selections from Public Opinion and Practical Knowledge: Toward and Organizational Analysis of Proletariat and Middle Class Public Opinion

Abstract: One of the defining characteristics of the empirical public sphere of the working class, both of the maximalist positions as of the communist and socialist democratic parties of Western Europe, consists in the fact that it views society as divided into two great camps. Such a division does indeed exist. It is in part called for by the ruling classes. What concerns us is not how this division can be overcome but to demonstrate that the

Language Poetry and Linguistic Activism

Abstract: The emergence of a politically sophisticated radical poetry in the United States, a poetry popularly known as "Language Poetry," has been one of the most exciting cultural developments of the past two decades. Not since the thirties has there been such a sense of aesthetics and politics converging in explicit projects, whether poems, publishing, or dialogues with those engaged in other more evidently political struggles. Many of the poets have helped construct a formidable body of theoretical discussion that not only situates the work and its interventions, but provides a form of resistance to its easy consumption as an object in need of external mediation by institutions of interpretative validation. The recent article published here in Social Text' was one more example of the importance these poets attach to the reception of their work, and the commitment of some of them to a socialist politics in the cultural field. Even the calm, measured tone of the article, which distinguishes it from so many of the manifestoes* of earlier avant-gardism, the surrealist claims to new sources of transformative power, or the Dadaist outrage committed on well-presented argument, is characteristic of the seriousness with which these writers approach their potential readers and appropriators. They want their texts to be useful. Yet a doubt remains in the face of this article's good behaviour. Isn't this the statement of a linguistic delinquent who is only pretending to good language use? Or was the linguistic madness only "mad by craft," as Hamlet put it? Are these writers disowning responsibility for vandalising intelligible poetry by saying that the crimes against the state of language were inevitable society was at fault? Take the article's sentence: "For anyone following American poetry over the last decade, it is evident that there has been an intense and contradictory response from enthusiasm and imitation to dismissal and distortion to our work"2. Intensities and contradictions are just what we expect of a modern capitalist society, but this remark, which is designed to draw the reader in to a sympathetic response as the "anyone" who has been keeping up with his or her homework, sets against the contradictions this other space where identity remains intact, where "we" can speak of "our" work to an "anyone." The essay itself recognises the need to elucidate the inclusiveness of the collective pronouns by specifically identifying the poets referred to, but continues on in this friendly mode of one subject addressing another. The experiments of the poets themselves are placed outside this circuit of achieved intersubjectivity,

The simulation syndrome: From war games to game wars

Abstract: After the informational euphoria of 1989, the first week of February had the feel of a morning after. Media dealerships handed out bromides when President Mikhail Gorbachev yet again did the unthinkable, proposing an end to the Soviet Communist Party's monopoly on power. News junkies hardly twitched when President George Bush once more responded with the predictable, calling a five minute time-out during a war game at Fort Irwin's National Training Center to let the soldiers know the good news. Kitted out in a photo-opportunistic ensemble of camouflage jacket, pin-stripe trousers, and wing-tip shoes, Bush used a radio link to tell the 2,689 players spread-out over the Mojave Desert that "we are pleased to see Chairman Gorbachev's proposal to expand steps toward pluralism in the Soviet Union." Inspired, the "Soviet" 197th Krasnovian Motorized Rifle Regiment made borscht out of the U.S. Third Brigade of the Ninth Infantry Division, and then headed for the ridge from which Bush had pledged not "to let down our guard against a worldwide threat." But Bush clearly impressed by the power of fictitious forces over real ones had already left for a briefing tour of the Livermore Labs, birthplace and incubator of Star Wars. Of course, making the unthinkable predictable is Bush's number one job. But is it an historical irony or just the dumbness of imperial decline that should suddenly make war games such an attractive diplomatico-strategic tool for the job? Perhaps it is simply a matter of centennial coincidence. In 1889 Major William Livermore of the Army Corp of Engineers joined William McCarty Little and Rear Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan at the Naval War College to set up our nation's first modern system of war gaming. Spurred by the success of the expansionist Prussians who had used Kriegsspiel ('war play') before their victories over the Austrians at Sadowa in 1866 and the French in 1870, these early advocates of American war gaming found their positions strengthened when Japan achieved a stunning victory over the Russians in 1904 a victory plotted out beforehand with newly created war games. Long before Bush made his trip to the Mojave, war gaming had sallied from the battlefield, emerged from the basements of the War Colleges, leaked out of the high security rooms of research centers like RAND and BDM International, and entered if not seized the public imagination. One reason for the shift is the computerization of war gaming. Just as the art of warfare has undergone radical changes, so too has the art of gaming.

The Trojan Horse of Universalism: Language as a "War Machine" in the Writings of Monique Wittig

Abstract: One must understand that men are not born with a faculty for the universal and that women are not reduced at birth to the particular. The universal has been, and is continually, at every moment, appropriated by men. It does not happen by magic, it must be done. It is an act, a criminal act, perpetrated by one class against another. It is an act carried out at the level of concepts, philosophy, politics. Monique Wittig

Nightmare in the Mirror: Adolescence and the Death of Difference

Abstract: The teenager is an orphan among cultural representations. Nobody wants him. For decades now, of course, he has caused a nervous culture one embarrassment after another. Youths wild in the streets, werewolves, longhairs, lunatic bikers, slavering idiots unable to do arithmetic or find Mississippi on a map. . .thirty years of such images have spewed from the culture industry's maw. Now, however, a new twist has appeared. Instead of the adolescent rampaging against adult society, we have the adolescent as dull neurotic introvert, a gnawing problem even to himself. Angst and bouts of suicidal despair distinguish this gloomy figure; terror, taunts, and insecurities are the seasoning on modern salad days. Adolescence has become unbearable. Who needs this horrible interim of self-doubt? And how did it get to be so bad? One expects a certain clarity to come from admitting that the teenager is a representation: adolescence is a fake. The rhetoric of its sublime liminality merely drowns out the clatter of its making. A marginal moment when the subject stands between two worlds, poised with innocence on the one hand and experience on the other none of this has the universal validity it claims. The teen years are an invented transition between two carefully constructed norms, childhood and adulthood: adolescence as we know it is not ontological and invariable, a permanent feature of the human animal, but a relative category created to organize an otherwise inchoate experience. It is a construct generated largely during the last two centuries, defined and regularized by cultural needs and discursive operations. The social requirements behind its construction, the reasons beneath its contradictions, should ideally become clearer in the course of recognizing it as such. What happens, though, is the opposite: new questions arise, about why the image of the teenager is still promulgated, still driven home. That image seems to have no purpose. The artificiality of isolating a four-to six-year period as "adolescence," quarantining a quadrennium under a category, imposing on it an identity and a prescribed range of behaviors: there is no clear reason why all this continues. Exactly what function does the teenager still serve? Suicidal kids in movies or on TV all wonder what it means to be a teen; through their ventriloquial voices, one may speculate, culture as a whole is pondering the same thing.

Gender, Fucking, and Utopia: An Essay in Response to John Stoltenberg's Refusing to Be a Man

Abstract: "Pornography," according to John Stoltenberg, "tells lies about women. But pornography tells the truth about men." Here on my desk is the Leatherwomen 89 calendar, created by lesbians and given to me by one of the pictured women who happened to be a member of FACT (Feminist Anti-Censorship Task Force) while it was active. It is open to April: a close-up photo of a leather-vested, barebreasted woman whose hand is gloved in another woman's ass, her cunt also visible with two rings through her labia. "Pornography lies about women," so file this image under "Lies." Does this image fit the definition of pornography spelled out in the Civil Rights Anti-Pornography Ordinance created by Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon, and defended at length in Stoltenberg's book? Using terms from the Ordinance and Stoltenberg, it is "graphic" and "sexually explicit," to be sure. But does it portray "specific genital acts?" Well, no. Does it portray "sadomasochism?" If we call the act fist-fucking it may or may not be in the repertoire of certain sadomasochists; but those who enjoy the act as a form of anal yoga quite distinct from SM prefer to call it hand-balling. Is this a depiction of "the act of making subject or subservient?" Perhaps, though these women acted in mutual consent. Are these women presented "dehumanized as sexual objects, things or commodities?" Any and all image-making dehumanizes human models to some degree; and to some degree humanizes the material film, ink, paint, paper, canvas, clay, stone, whatever it may be. Are these women "presented as sexual objects who enjoy pain or humiliation?" Their faces aren't visible, but would their feelings be unambiguous even if we saw smiles or grimaces? Are these women "reduced" to "body parts?" The sense of sight itself is selective and reduces all bodies into parts less than wholes; the real world is always partly opaque and hidden; pure transparency would leave no visible forms.

Writing Labor's History

Abstract: The history of capitalism has, typically, been written as a series of narratives unified by the themes of accumulation: mercantile and imperialist interests seeking fresh sources of investment; the scientific and technological revolutions that have driven growth; international rivalries over territory and labor supplies and the multitude of conflicts among fractions of capital that take political forms, such as the struggles for power among capital's personifications or wars mark this history. In these accounts, workers enter the theater of history as abstract labor, factors of production, dependent variables in the grand narratives of crisis and renewal. Writing modern history from capital's standpoint has not been exclusively the wont of liberal and conservative historians whose conceptions may be traced to their worldview. Those who adopted marxist perspectives also wrote such histories and their work seemed to be grounded in no less an authority than Marx himself. After all Capital may be plausibly read as the story of the penetration of the commodity form into all corners of the social world, the transformation of use value into exchange value which, as labor-power is the movement from concrete to abstract labor. Marx intended this account to be a critique of political economy, not a revolution in economics that is, he intended to demonstrate that the epistemological foundation of economic science was the standpoint of capital. That his work should not be construed as an alternative descriptive science in correspondence to an objective material reality, completely eludes the literal-minded. There is no detailed treatment of concrete labor, of use value. In Marx's discourse, concrete labor is the raw material from which the "real abstraction" is derived just as exchange value is presupposed by use value. But, the three volumes of Capital are written from the point of view of capitalist accumulation. While concrete labor as a use value constitutes the necessary condition for capital formation, this is not Marx's concern in these texts.

Fragments on "Wings of Desire" (Or, Fragmentary Representation as Historical Necessity)

Abstract: This film has a circus, at its center. It is unannounced. We first catch sight of it from a distance, through one of those tunnels which often in cities run across and under elevated roads or highways. We approach the circus, slowly, lured by its melancholy music, and when we emerge from the tunnel we are already inside the tent, where Marion is swinging high on the trapeze, wearing wide angel wings. When Karl Rossman, in Kafka's Amerika, emerges from the underground station at Clayton, in search of the Nature Theater of Oklahoma, what he finds is an itinerant caravan of racetracks, platforms and employment bureaus, which closely resembles a circus. He is lured into this travelling show by "the noise of many trumpets," which are being blared by women on high pedestals, "dressed as angels in white robes with great wings on their shoulders."' These two very different circuses constitute the foci of an elliptical narrative of the ever-present European concern with America. In the film a reversal is enacted, and a return. After a series of itinerant films engaging with America, its roads, and spatial movement, in Wings of Desire Wenders returns to the European stage by dealing with a single location and with temporal movement (Berlin and its history). Within this return, the circus in Wings of Desire becomes a reversal of the Nature Theater of Oklahoma. Max Brod writes that "Kafka used to hint smilingly, that within this 'almost limitless' theater his young hero was going to find again a profession, a stand-by, his freedom, even his old home and his parents.2" If Kafka has a utopian moment with the Nature Theater of Oklahoma, where we see Karl Rossman re-enacting and fulfilling, on the new American continent, his past and his childhood, Wenders, on the other hand, takes this theater back to the most devastated of post-war European scenarios, and makes it into a circus which shuts down as soon as we enter it, thereby putting an end to Marion's childhood dream of becoming a trapeze artist. Wenders' return to Europe does not complete or fulfill Kafka's project, which needs to remain unfulfilled if it is to retain "its peculiar beauty," since, as Walter Benjamin reminds us, this is "the beauty of a failure.3" The

The Cultural Politics of (Sexual) Knowledge: On the Margins with Goodman'

Abstract: It is a commonplace of contemporary thought that the significant differences between theorists concerned with alterity (whether of race, class, gender...) evolve around the issues of essentialization and naturalization and, furthermore, that once the supposed naturalness of any particular sexual (or indeed other cultural) practice is abandoned, the chances for political change are decisively improved. Yet, as the discourses proliferating in today's reformist academy amply demonstrate, the political optimism based on the interrogation and dissolution of those conceptual entities called "essence" and "nature" as the ultimate "explanations" for normative hierarchies has been premature. Those traditional "opacities" (let us call them this to mark them as the concepts beyond which argument presumably need not go) have been readily replaced today by others which produce equally mystifying effects. In 1989, even while seeking to evade the concept of a feminine "essence" under the influence of deconstruction and Lacanian analysis, many prominent feminists, American and European, continue to represent woman as a site of opacity, as an unknown and indeed perhaps unknowable difference, inviting the implication that other alterities may be similarly understood.2 Such a strategy has the distinct disadvantage not only of leaving "opaque" to the dominant system what the dominant system has already designated as opaque, but also of accepting "opacity" as such as a part of the strategist's own "self-understanding." Considering these limitations, such conceptual maneuvers stand forth more and more markedly as complicitous with the status quo. When, furthermore, to serve the ideological needs of the dominant academy, this intellectual occlusionism is stretched to its outer limits, it results in such remarkable statements as that by Eve Sedgwick, who writing recently in Raritan concludes that "the array of analytic tools available today to anyone thinking about issues of homo/hetero/sexual definition is remarkably little enriched from that available to, say, Proust." 3 The present inquiry aims to illuminate the ways in which the texts of a relatively "forgotten" cultural critic of the recent past, Paul Goodman, constitute a still relevant intervention in today's knowl

The Ordinary, the Awful, and the Sublime: Beit Sahur in Year II of the Intifada

Abstract: A ten minute drive from Bethlehem, Beit Sahur is a labyrinthine village of solid new concrete structures rising out of a deep valley with terraced hills. Its fifteen thousand, mostly Christian, residents inhabit a universe poised between the traditional and the modern, the balance moving tentatively but steadily towards the modern, however. A married woman is still expected to live with her husband's family and give her full attention to them; but, the marriages are not arranged and she is not expected to wed until her early twenties (women in the last generation were often married off in their early teens). Nidal's father-in-law was visibly shocked that I was still not married and didn't even live with my parents. "But, who makes them breakfast in the morning?" he wondered. A married woman's first responsibility is still the family hearth but more and more married women are joining the workforce along with unmarried women. Seeing me do the dishes one night, Nidal's six-year-old son Bassam remarked that it was a "sin" for men to do housework (at least, so said his grandmother), but on housecleaning days he happily joined in with his mother and sisters. The career ambitions of the teenage girls and boys in my English class were nearly the same doctor, lawyer, chemist with virtually all the girls believing that husbands should assist with domestic chores and fully fifty percent of the boys agreeing (only a few of their fathers did help out, however). Women wear bikinis at the beach but their husbands still anxiously watch for furtive leers. It is not a hyper-libidinous culture, but not an exceptionally repressed one either. Women and men sport the most stylish, if not the most titillating, fashions. Men do not typically ogle women and women do not typically primp for men. Teenagers are paired off but they are not yet sexually obsessed or jaded; there is about them a salubrious innocence, a refreshing wholesomeness. A husband working abroad may allow an unmarried male to be the guest of

Dossier on Women in Eastern Europe

Abstract: In the following three interviews made from April-August, 1990 we discuss the impact of recent political changes in Eastern Europe on women, and the political organizations women have formed to confront these problems. Tatiana Bohm and Ines Koenen are both from the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) and were both in the Round Table of November, 1989-March, 1990, which was the effective decision-making body formed after the uprising in Fall, 1989 in the GDR. They were also in the former GDR Parliament and are also active in the Independent Women's Alliance (Unabhaingige Frauen Verband) of the former GDR. In the interview with Slavenka Drakulic, a Yugoslav writer and feminist, we turn to the conditions of women in Yugoslavia and a general overview of women in Eastern Europe. We must be sensitive to the question of difference when looking at women in Eastern Europe. Whereas middle class women in the West wanted greater participation in the economic and public sphere, as well as reproductive rights, women in Eastern Europe have long been working outside the home. Unlike the West, abortion was often with the exception of Rumania and Bulgaria available in Eastern Europe. Unlike the women's situation in the West, in which the second wave women's movement had to fight for the recognition of rights, women in the East will often have to fight to try to hold onto that which they already had under "really existing socialism" especially reproductive rights. In the GDR that included: the right to first-trimester abortions, and guaranteed protection from being fired for women who raised children alone, the right to a shorter work week (40 hours instead of 43 3/4) to take care of household duties if there were two children or more, one paid day off a month for women over 40, married women, mothers of children under 16 years of age,' a paid year off at about 80% pay after birth ("baby year") with guaranteed return to the job, 1000 marks, i.e., a month's pay for each birth,2 state financial support of about 80% pay to unmarried moth-

The Crisis and Upheaval in Eastern Europe

Abstract: The dramatic upheavals in Eastern Europe, in the face of democratic pressures from below and long overdue reforms and liberalization from above, highlight the general crisis of the state "socialist" systems ruled by Communist parties. Political and economic reforms have pushed the prolonged low level systemic crisis of the East European state socialist systems into apparently terminal crisis. The East European state systems, their differences notwithstanding, permit us to speculate about a general question: the limits and possibilities of change in the Communist regimes. A number of the proposed Soviet reforms have been experimented with for over two decades on the much smaller scale which individual East European countries afford. Comparisons have to made with caution since the East European Communist regimes have been imposed on these states from the outside and were in any case more recent than the Soviet one. The order of scale itself is also important. However there are sufficient similarities for Eastern Europe to be a cracked mirror of the Soviet Union's possible future, or at least the most probable future. The fate of these societies and political systems has a direct bearing on any prospects of the socialist project since it was in good part the flawed and perverted experiences of the Soviet and East European communist politocrasies that put the very idea of socialism in question everywhere. Whatever democratic socialists and various native intellectual dissidents say about these societies not having been genuinely socialist and therefore not a valid test of the possibility of socialism for the vast majority of the world those experiences do bear on the validity of some major assumptions shared by socialists in general. AL the very least, they cast a very negative light on the performance of highly centralized command economies at other than early industrialization stages of development.' There is also some distorted family resemblance and a partly similar vocabulary. The Prague Spring in 1968 had been greeted with joy and relief by activists in the mass Communist parties of the industrial capitalist democracies since it seemed to show that communism in power could regenerate itself. Two decades later the Gorbachev reforms raise hopes among a far wider political public, although (or perhaps because) they occur under conditions of a visible moral and ideological crisis of both Communist politocratic regimes and the general socialist project. The hope for internal redemption and transformation remains a powerful one that all the sacrifices and brutalities under these regimes will not

The Future of Socialism

Abstract: On Sunday evening February 4, the largest Soviet protest demonstration in more than seventy years was held in Moscow to demand the end of the Communist party's monopoly over political power. Naturally, one cannot fail to have noticed that the event was called on the eve of the opening of a meeting of the party's Central Committee, where President Mikhail Gorbachev was widely rumored to plan to call for the end of the one party state. At the demonstration of 200,000, some people carried signs with the simple phrase "February, 1990, " an unmistakable reference to the February, 1917 revolution. 1 Some Russians were hoping that the unfulfilled promise of that democratic uprising, cut short by the Bolshevik October would be redeemed. Nevertheless, even if the demonstration was not oppositional to the leading party group's program, recalling the February revolution in which the popular goal was to establish a republic, a multiparty political system, civil liberties, and greater popular participation in processes of governance implied a severe critique of the Great October Revolution, which introduced the principle of proletarian dictatorship, a complex doctrine in whose name the Soviet state and party oligarchy ruled in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union. Gorbachev's call for a multiparty political system and for the return of limited market relations has followed a year during which all of the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe collapsed. The explanations for this astonishing turn of events are, by now, fairly well known: the palpable failure of really existing socialist economies to meet the basic needs of the underlying population, especially after the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund eliminated loans to many countries in the mid '80s; visible corruption by a decrepit oligarchy softened by generations of largely unchallenged power; the disaffection of intellectuals after Khruschev's downfall in 1964 and, more comprehensively, after the brief spark of Czech "socialism with a human face" was ruthlessly snuffed out by Soviet tanks in 1968; and, of course, the surfacing of the unresolved nationalities question, particularly within the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Most of these weaknesses might have been controlled and displaced if the working classes of Eastern Europe had not demonstrated their own impatience and protest. Beyond the well-known Polish Solidarity movement which holds majority government power today, Soviet Miners and Czech and East German workers developed their own grievances which became the basis for strikes and demonstrations.

Representing the Viewer

Abstract: Until August 3, the United States had been a bystander in relation to the dramatic series of international events which had been shaking up the world order, for months on end. President Bush was receiving kudos as a pragmatic facilitator of other nations' transformative acts, but for the first time since WWII, the continuing geo-political centrality of the United States seemed open to doubt. With his invasion of Kuwait, Saddam Hussein provided President Bush with an irresistible opportunity to reenter the global spotlight. Indeed, the immediate bipartisan support in Washington for the decision to send American troops to the Middle East is most readily explained in terms of a general enthusiasm for the idea that the United States was once more taking a position of world leadership. Moreover, this was world leadership of a sort previous Presidents could only dream about. This was a post-cold-war Hollywood global "cominander in chief" role. That brave western everyman, George Bush, and his American troops would quell the Darth Vader of the Middle East. After 45 years of thankless military interventionism, inured to local ingratitude and international condemnation, a US military action was being welcomed by almost everyone, and hailed for its moral purposiveness. The once serious risks that any such conflict would escalate into bi-polar hostilities and nuclear war were now merely a bad memory. With communist systems in self-flagellating eclipse throughout the world, the Gulf Crisis was just the occasion to experience what may be termed the "virtual political unity," ensuing upon the historic demise of binary ideological positions. The gulf crisis is exciting from the perspective of political epistemology insofar as it is one of those quite rare events which are so sudden and unforeseen that we can experience their coming into existence as co-temporal with our first thoughts about them. This makes it possible to suppress the naturalistic assumption of a metaphysical difference between the actual event and our later awareness of it. We can better analyze the very existence of this event as constituted by our particular relationships to it, noticing its different reality for those with different relationships to it.