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From Marx’s critique of the political economy to ideology and discourse theory there has been a move from the political economy framework in understanding the society. For Marx the level of development of the productive forces determines the social relations of production. The Legal, political and other aspects of society are derived from these production relations and so is the consciousness of the individuals in the society. By this I mean for Marx political economy (economics) formed the base and rest all super structure. So Human history fundamentally is a struggle between social classes in which the bourgeoisie control and exploit the proletariat.
ReplyDeleteFurther on Scholars consider that just political economy factors are not enough to understand society and one needs to go beyond. Discourse analysis uses language, life styles, discussions and other aspects of various sections of the society and reads those practices as a text. While in Marxism the priority is class struggle, post-Marxism ideology and discourse analysis shows the sexual, racial, class, and ethnic divisions of modern society. There is a move from the emphasis on social class to one rooted in diverse identities. It shows that the plurality of struggles leads to many subjects who cannot be reduced to just a category of class.
There is a tendency in the Marxist tradition to underplay the role of ideas in the formation of particular social organizations. Marx suggests that it is not consciousness that determines being, on the contrary it is social being that determines consciousness. What this means is that in the first place ideas play a secondary role in social formations. Humans have to respond to the organizational imperatives of capital. Humans are adapting to particular forms of technology or the productive forces which they have created. The laws of market exchange are coercive. Humans at a certain stage of development are obliged to engage in the unplanned exchange of commodities. This generates laws which humans are obliged to obey such as the law of accumulation of capital. Marxism does not regard identity as the driving force of history but regards the economy as fundamental. Ideas or discourse tends to be theorized as a response to material conditions rather than the primary determinant of material reality. For Marxists, “humans make their own history but not in circumstances of their own choosing”.
ReplyDeleteDiscourse theory on the other hand regards discourse as primary in the constitution of human life. Laclau and Mouffe challenge the tendency in certain forms of Marxism to reduce everything to the economic conditions. They attempt to see how the material might be constituted by discourse while not entirely rejecting Marxist ideas. Through an ontological approach they attempt to understand how the being of objects is constituted along with its meaningfulness.
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ReplyDeleteOne way in which Laclau and Mouffe's Discourse Analysis can be connected to Marx's Critique of Political Economy is through their analytic methodology. Marx's Capital is not merely a study of an economic system, but a critique of political economy, because it seeks to analyse political relations in economic terms. In doing so, it tries to understand the political system in terms of a network of relations: forces of production, modes of production, capital, circulation, commodities and so on. This lays the analytical foundation for Discourse Analysis, in which Laclau and Mouffe propose that the world can be understood in a relational manner. Discourse Analysis draws on insights from linguistics (regarding signfication, for instance), as well as from political philosophy and economics. Drawing upon all this, Discourse Analysis appears to be taking Marxian relational understanding to its logical end, in insisting that all objects have meaning and that this meaning is produced socially, through discourse. They describe the discursive as a “theoretical horizon”; this horizon, I think they've discerned using Marx's analytic method, understanding the world in terms of relations, rather than mere objects.
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ReplyDeleteA slogan quite common regarding Marxism is:
ReplyDelete"Marxism is truth because it is science." Such a claim leads to the question is Marxist methodology empirical in nature? Marx arrives at the notion of capital through a thorough examination of one concrete actually existing practice between people which is the exchange of one commodity for another. This approach has an empiricist flavor.(Marx's use of the term 'material', the persuasive nature of the arguments, and the air of universality gives it the look of an empirical inquiry which is deceiving. Marxism shares nothing with empiricism other than the positivist emphasis on experience) I think Marxism is a rudimentary form of discourse analysis sharing many of its feature.(However there is a major point of deviation from discourse analysis which i will probably deal with in the next post.) Marxist analysis works within and around the existing discourse on market; empirical data accessed through observation and experience are rendered meaningful by reading them as signifying practices like producing, buying selling etc. This in a way constitutes a discourse and its reality, providing conditions of possibility of subject formation and their experiencing the world of objects, words and practices.
-sambit
Arun's entry:
ReplyDeleteOne way to connect the Post Structuralists Critique to Marx would be through linguistics and Barthes' contribution to semiotics. The excessive Saussureian involvement in the semantic spaces of discourse analysis of Laclau and Mouffe is evident in the manner in which they attempt to examine a set of relations through the what is perceived in a larger “structuration of meaning”, a semantic field nonetheless.
Laclau clearly argues that the political fields are structured meaningful spaces that enable thought, action and perception using the coinage of Barthes and Saussure before him in a Post Structuralist manner. Which is to say that the production of meaning is possible within certain semantic anchoring of sign(s) in a political field and their relationality to each other. That there is something that is immediate in the signifier & signified which can be anchored into a meaning, but there also exists levels of abstraction that then justifies (if thats an appropriate term) the very practice upon which meaning is anchored thus slipping into multiple (almost endless)orders of signification that is possible. The processes of multiple significations depend on the meaning making that is current in any society. Mouffe (p.8, on the political) can be read similarly when addressing 'the political' and 'politics', the ontic and the ontological, and thus Marx in this trajectory precedes the PS in the examination of the political economy for the signifiers and signifieds that produce cohesive meaning through an examination of the abstraction of this meaning.
Marx in his examination of commodities does something very similar when he examines the abstraction that creates the equivalence necessary for exchange. Marx portrays the abstraction that they examine in the construction and commodofication of commodities, money and labour-time. The levels of abstraction in meaning, in language, in discourses and in practices that justify social relations and practices is what would in my reading connect Marx and the post
structuralists.
To begin with, let me put down the obvious similarities (perhaps a redundant point, but nevertheless) I can see between Post-Marxist Ideology and Discourse Analysis and Marx's Critique of Political Economy. Laclau and Mouffe, coming from the Marxist tradition as it were, draw from Marx’s method of structuring his critique of the capitalist mode of production. Capitalist society creates the class structure, which creates the subject position of the working class, which is then seen as a social agent that gives rise to a class struggle or antagonism. Discourse analysis follows a similar trajectory. However, the centrality or primacy of a particular subject as the determinate agent of change and therefore as the source of a crucial social antagonism is contested in Laclau and Mouffe’s theory.Unlike Marx,when Laclau and Mouffe talk about the idea of the political and presence of multiple social antagonisms that inform this,they seem to suggest the multiplicity of social agents as well, whose struggles constitute political conflict, thus refuting the claim of a particular subject as a ‘determinate agent’ of history.Of course,this understanding of class as agents in Marxism was later criticised by John Rosenthal.
ReplyDeleteAlso, as another point of difference the class struggle I presume here has a teleological character, in that it sees a logical end in a socialist society, thus reaching a point of closure. Laclau and Mouffe specifically steer clear of any point of consensus or resolution; instead they speak for a radical democracy based on agonistic pluralism where different social conflicts can be brought to the forefront and challenged, but not resolved completely