What’s Left of the Dialectic?: A Polemic (original) (raw)
Related papers
Dialogue and Universalism
In a period in which capital has been on the offensive for many years, using debt and financial crises as rationales for wielding austerity to hammer down wages and social services and terrorism as an excuse for attacking civil liberties, it is important to realize that the origins of this long period of crisis lay in the struggles of people to free their lives from the endless subordination to work within a society organized as a gigantic social factory. In both the self-proclaimed capitalist West and socialist East the managers of that subordination, whether in private enterprise or the state, repeatedly found their plans undermined by people who refused to play by their rules and who elaborated activities and social relationships that escaped their control. The refusal of their rules meant crisis for the managers; the elaboration of other ways of beingwhether characterized as the crafting of civil society or as autonomous self-valorizationmeant crisis for and freedom from society-as-work-machine. As always, the capitalist response has involved instrumentalization and repression; basically its managers have sought to harness what they could and eliminate what they couldn't. For a long time instrumentalization was most obvious in the West and repression was most obvious in the East, yet both were always at play everywhere, and everywhere those responses were resisted and often escaped. It was that resistance and those escapes that led to the unleashing of the monetary weapons of financialization and their current employment to convert crisis-for-capital into crisisfor-us. It is in past and present resistance and escapes that we must discover both our weaknesses and our strengths in order to overcome capital's current offensive and to elaborate new worlds. It is the overall thesis of this paper that Marx's labor theory of value still provides vital aid in helping us understand these historical developments. behooves me to note at the outset of these remarks that I have come to the analysis and politics that I will set out here through a personal trajectory that has passed through science and economics on the one hand and a variety of engagements in social struggles on the other. Although I entered college bent on refining my scientific skills, I left it with a Ph.D in economics. The transition from the one to the other came about in response to participation in the American Civil Rights and Anti-war movements which led me out of the laboratory, into the streets and into a search for some intellectual framework for grasping the tumultuous events in which I had been involved. I was drawn to economics because it seemed to deal most directly with the structures against which the civil rights and anti-war movements were struggling: those of an economic inequality organized, in part, through racial hierarchies and those of an American imperialism that sought to extend that inequality globally in a post-colonial world where pacified pools of labor could be pitted against existing militant ones. Unfortunately, economics turned out to provide, indeed to have always provided, since its beginnings in the self-serving writings of the mercantilists, not only a justification for such a world but strategies and tactics for creating and managing that world. What it lacked in the 1960s when I was studying the subject in school, were any direct ways of grasping the struggles against that worldthe struggles in which I and millions of others were engaged. Eventually some economists would try to adapt game theory, operations research, thermodynamics and chaos theory to handle the contestation that repeatedly frustrated the strategies implied by their elegant theoretical modelsbut never with much success. Even before I completed my Ph.D I decided that economics was very much part of the problem and not part of the solution. Casting about for alternative approaches I wound up studying Marx and, to a lesser degree, Hegelboth of whom were familiar with what economists call the classical political economy of the 18 th and 19 th Centuries. My interest in Marx was obviousbecause his entire life and work were dedicated to overthrowing the capitalist grip on the world, he inevitably dealt with the struggles that subverted and threatened to transcend that world. My interest in Hegel was less obvious. On the one hand, a course on the Hegel's Phénoménologie de L'Esprit at the Université de Montpellier had drawn my attention to his analysis of the master-slave relationship, but it was primarily to his Science of Logic and Philosophy of Right that I turned in trying to make sense of Marx's exposition of his labor theory of value in the early chapters of Volume I of Capital. In both cases I discovered how these two authors grasped not only the dialectics of class struggle, but also, in their different ways, the tendencies of capital to infinite expansion and totalization. But whereas I found Hegel's analysis, however critical, to be ultimately accepting of capitalism, I found in Marx not only an analysis of capital's efforts to endlessly reimposed its dialectic but, more importantly, an analysis of the struggles that repeatedly ruptured, subverted and, sometimes strove to create post-capitalist futures in the present. 38 The rationale for such expenditures was provided by studies that demonstrated how much of the early post-WWII growth in the US economy was due to improvements in the quality of both capital and labor. 39 Although, as I have mentioned, capital was able to shape public education throughout the 20 th Century, the student movement of the 1960s seriously reduced the legitimacy of business influence in schoolsa situation corporations have been trying hard to reverse ever since. 40 While the economists discussed, of course, other parts of the government were sending in police and military troops to quell the uprisings. 41 The expenditure of money on hiring workers, of course, is only part of the expenditure by business of money as capital. Other monies are spent on the means of productionfactories, tools, machines, raw materials. In Part I of Volume III of Capital the circuit of capital M-C-M' is expanded in a way that makes this explicit: M-C(LP,MP). .. P. . .C'-M'.
From Dialectics to the Diabolical
Angelaki, 2018
In “Ars Nova,” a short essay written in 1963, Blanchot defends the “new music” of Arnold Schönberg and his school against its critics and hails it as an exemplary contestation of culture conceived as an attempt to conceal the groundlessness of human existence. The fragmentary and dissonant nature of the “new music” has the power to unmask culture’s pretence of order, meaning and harmony. It embodies the potential of modernist art to unsettle all established conventions standing in the way of an authentic, radical interrogation. Blanchot develops his argument by way of a discussion of Adorno’s theory of modernist music. The affinities and divergences revealed in Blanchot’s reading of Adorno’s work shed light on their respective understanding of the disruption enacted by the “new music.” A close analysis of Blanchot’s essay discloses the role of this confrontation with Adorno’s dialectical theory and points to the political and poetic ramifications of a complex and hitherto largely ne...
Rupturing-the-Dialectic-final.pdf
This is the expanded, book-length version of a paper given at a Conference on Hegel, Marx and Global Crisis at the University of Warsaw, Poland, October 22-23, 2012. It is currently available from the AK Press, online catalog: https://www.akpress.org/rupturing-the-dialectic.html Consider this pdf version a "look inside the book" feature, better than that provided by Amazon.com.
Marxism and African Literature
The International Journal of African Historical Studies, 1987
based on the 1971 Cerisy-la-Salle colloquium. However, instead of exploring the problems relating to the New Novel, such as the relationship of the 'nouveau roman" to film, criticism, phenomenology, politics, and so forth, the New York colloquium delineates the present situation of the New Novel within a retrospective framework. It is an excellent addition to the library of all readers interested in the "nouveau roman," innovative fiction, and the "trans-Atlantic refraction"~the name Harry Levin once gave to French-American literary connections.
Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts, 2016
50 Years after The Dialectical Imagination - Interview with Martin Jay by his Translator
New Book Network, 2023
Martin Jay is interviewed by his Chinese translator SUN Yizhou (孙一洲), discussing the book, generational and globalized critical theories and methodology of intellectual history. The 2nd Chinese edition of the book will be published by Shanghai Literature & Art Publishing House (上海文艺出版社) in 2023, the year marks the 100th anniversary of the Institute for Social Research. The recording of this interview is uploading to New Books Network Podcast, whereas the transcript will also serve as the preface of the new edition and published in Shanghai Review of Books.