The Edinburgh Companion to Poststructuralism, page 11
and balance of forces in any situation must be analysed in their specificity.
An uncharitable interpretation might characterise this poststructuralist
critique of economism as a retreat into textualism or psychologism – an
obsession with language and desire, to the neglect of concrete socio-economic Untitled-2 72
16/10/2013 16:39:28
from marxism to poststructuralism
59
factors. This interpretation would miss the mark however, for rather than
merely rejecting Marxism’s economism, the poststructuralists carefully
examine and undermine its assumptions. For many of the poststructuralists,
the problems start with Marx himself: they claim that he failed to offer a
radical enough challenge to classical political economy, remaining caught
within its categories and concepts. In The Order of Things, Foucault (1970: 260–262) suggests that Marx’s work is essentially little more than a minor
modification of the work of Smith and Ricardo. Foucault’s discussion of Marx in The Order of Things is both extremely brief and deliberately provocative, but it does anticipate more sustained critiques from other poststructuralist thinkers. Baudrillard (1975: 50) puts it like this: ‘Marx made a radical critique of political economy, but still in the form of political economy.’
For Baudrillard, Derrida and Lyotard, it is Marx’s distinction between
use-value and exchange-value that is particularly problematic. Baudrillard’s critique is interesting because he links Marx’s economic theories to what
he sees as Marx’s residual humanism. According to Baudrillard, Marx
thinks that man will be liberated when he is freed from the alienations of
exchange-value and can fulfil his natural, human needs in the enjoyment of
simple use-values. But for Baudrillard (1981: 132) this whole claim is part of an ‘anthropological illusion’ inherited from classical political economy: the notion of a simple relation between the individual, his needs and the
proper function of objects is all part of a rational metaphysic of utility that Marx never questioned. As an alternative to Marx’s humanist metaphysic of
needs, Baudrillard turns to the symbolic order and the idea of an exchange
of objects that has nothing to do with needs and cannot be conceived in
terms of exchange-value or use-value. In his deconstruction of the notion
of use-value, Derrida similarly turns to the logic of the gift beyond exchange in order to unravel Marx’s conceptual framework. For Derrida, the distinction between use-value and exchange-value is more complicated than Marx
supposes. There can be no pure use-value uncontaminated by exchange,
Derrida argues, because the potential to be exchanged is itself a condition of possibility for the concept of use-value: a use-value can only be a use-value if it is always-already inscribed by the possibility of being used by others at another time, in other words of entering into the circuits of exchange
and commerce. Moreover, exchange-value itself ‘is likewise inscribed and
excluded by a promise of the gift beyond exchange’ (Derrida 1994: 160).
Derrida’s argument in short is that Marx’s conceptual apparatus is deter-
mined by a metaphysical ontology.
For Lyotard (1993: 107), the distinction between use-value and exchange-
value reflects Marx’s nostalgia for a ‘lost consubstantiality of men amongst Untitled-2 73
16/10/2013 16:39:28
60
emergence
themselves and with nature’. The notion of use-value, Lyotard argues, pro-
vides Marx with a vision of lost naturality, a vision that both motivates and orients his critique. In place of this pious search for an uncorrupted region outside capitalism, Lyotard urges us instead to recognise the pleasures
and desires that capitalism generates and incites, asking us to work within capitalism, pressing it to its limits and beyond. The strategy supported by Lyotard is very similar to that proposed in Anti-Oedipus by Deleuze and Guattari (1977: 239), who suggest that the ‘revolutionary path’ may lie
not in withdrawing from the capitalist market but in pushing it further.
In Deleuze and Guattari’s (1994: 101) terminology, ‘revolution is absolute
deterritorialization’: instead of trying to contain capitalism and put a stop to its ceaseless undermining of traditional customs, beliefs and processes, any revolutionary strategy should aim to accelerate these ‘deterritorializations’.
It is perhaps Baudrillard (1994: 152–3) who advances this line of thinking
the furthest: ‘The challenge capital directs at us in its delirium … must be raised to an insanely higher level’. It is in part the advocacy of strategies like these that has led critics to portray poststructuralism as an apologia for capitalism. But the poststructuralists are led to these strategies not because they do not want to criticise capitalism, but because they are wary of basing any critique on nostalgia for pre-capitalist economic forms.
Evidence of Marxism’s preoccupation with economic factors is found by
poststructuralism not only in the tools used by Marxism and the strategies
it puts forward, but also in what we might call the scope of its analyses.
For Marxism, history is the history of class struggle: its social and political critique focuses on the exploitation of the proletariat under the capitalist mode of production. The poststructuralists do not deny the importance of
capitalism and class – but they are concerned about what is excluded by a
too-narrow focus on class. In part this is a question of historical development: since Marx’s day there has been a ‘multiplication of antagonisms’ that are ‘transversal’ to class struggle (Guattari 2000: 32–3), and so although
class oppression cannot be ignored, it cannot be the sole frame of reference for analysis today. Yet there is in addition a question here not only about Marxism’s contemporary relevance – the extent to which categories first
developed in the mid-nineteenth century are still relevant – but also about its theoretical coherence – the extent to which these categories were ever
tenable. For Irigaray (1985: 184), for example, the Marxist focus on class
obscures a more fundamental form of oppression, namely that of women
by men. It is the exchange of women that makes possible the (patriarchal)
social order, the circulation of women enabling men to establish relations
with each other whilst simultaneously excluding women themselves from
Untitled-2 74
16/10/2013 16:39:28
from marxism to poststructuralism
61
the social order that they make possible. Patriarchal exploitation is prior to class exploitation. Irigaray’s work is a good example of the way in which poststructuralism has tried to highlight the plurality of power relations
irreducible to economic relations of exploitation.
From Marxism
There was, then, a conscious effort on the part of poststructuralists to
distance themselves from Marxism. They rejected what they saw as its sci-
entific pretensions, its humanist assumptions and its economistic leanings.
It should not be assumed, however, that poststructuralist criticisms are fatal for Marxism, nor that the poststructuralists intended to destroy Marxism.
The diversity and flexibility of Marxism makes it robust enough to withstand many criticisms. A repudiation of Marxist humanism, for example, may rule
out the Marxism of someone like Lukács, but it concurs with Althusserian
Marxism. In addition, the poststructuralists do not just reject Marxism:
they undertake a careful critique that in itself is a kind of use of Marxism, and their criticisms must be taken as a serious engagement with Marxism,
quite different from the kind of facile dismissal offered by the nouveaux philosophes. It could even be said that the poststructuralist subversion of Marxism takes its bearings and resources from Marxism. For example, when
Marxism is criticised for maintaining certain anthropological assumptions in its concept of value, the charge might be read as an accusation that Marxism has failed to live up to its own standards: it has naturalised that which must be socially and historically contextualised – ‘it takes for granted what it is supposed to explain’, as Marx (1975: 271) himself said of classical political economy. Finally, poststructuralist thinkers are not uniform in outlook or
attitude: what is rejected by one thinker is sometimes embraced by another, and certain thinkers change their minds over time. For these reasons, the
points of conflict listed above can be counterposed by points of contiguity: the status of Marxism, its approach to subjectivity and the nature of its
analyses are all the focus of poststructuralist criticisms – yet they are also, in different ways, a source of inspiration for poststructuralism.
As I have suggested, this is in part because there is no single poststructuralist take on Marxism. So although some poststructuralists are suspicious of Marxism’s claims to scientificity – because it seems to draw on the authority of science without interrogating the nature of scientific truth – others have sought to emulate the science of Marxism. For example, Kristeva (1986: 79)
claims that semiotics ‘unites with the scientific practice of Marx to the extent that it rejects an absolute system (including a scientific one), but retains a Untitled-2 75
16/10/2013 16:39:28
62
emergence
scientific approach, that is, a development of models doubled by the theory underlying the very same models’. Kristeva thus takes Marxism not as a
‘grand narrative’, but as a critical, reflexive science, and thus as an appropriate model for the type of semiotics she wishes to develop and defend.
At the same time, Marxism itself does not offer a uniform model. Alongside
its claims to be a science – with all the implications of detachment, objectivity and systematicity that this carries with it – Marxism has claimed to be a political philosophy, with the aim not of producing a disengaged set of truths but of responding to and inspiring material and revolutionary struggles – not of interpreting the world but of changing it. Marxism undertakes a radical politicisation, in at least two ways. It exposes the relations of power and domination inherent in supposedly ‘natural’ processes and institutions
– challenging, for example, the bourgeois notion of the free market as a
realm of spontaneous harmony. At the same time, Marxism acknowledges its
own historical contingency and explicitly offers itself as a form of political commitment. In this sense, poststructuralism is very much in the tradition
of Marxism: poststructuralism offers a re-politicisation of theoretical discourse that both denaturalises and interrogates various concepts and themes (gender, the body, language, etc.) and recognises its own contingent and
politicised status. Derrida (1994: 87; 1999: 221) suggests that this re-politicisation, and even politics itself, will be impossible if we are not ‘faithful to a spirit of Marxism’ – a fidelity which in turn demands a re-politicisation of Marxism and the legacy of Marx. In seeking to reaffirm the political character of Marxism (against its scientistic interpreters), Derrida thus calls for a particular reading of Marx’s texts and the Marxist canon – not as totalising theory that we must apply wholesale, but as a series of political interventions that provide us with a range of sometimes contradictory positions and theses from which we can select.
There are many Marxisms and we have to choose between them. There is,
for instance, more than one model of subjectivity to be found in Marxism:
Althusser’s work makes it clear that there are other alternatives to Marxist humanism. Althusser’s entire output could be characterised as an attempt to forge an anti-humanist Marxism, and in this sense he clears the ground for
a poststructuralist engagement with Marx. Althusser’s work on subjectivity
also has limitations, however: if it can be described as a ground-clearing
exercise then this is not only because its novelty opens up new possibilities, but also because it seems more concerned with dethroning the sovereignty
of the humanist subject than with developing its own alternative theory of
the subject, destroying existing preconceptions without necessarily erecting anything in their place. It can be said that in Althusser’s work the subject Untitled-2 76
16/10/2013 16:39:28
from marxism to poststructuralism
63
is eliminated rather than rethought: he claims, after all, that the merit of the dialectic that Marx inherits from Hegel is precisely that it is a ‘process without a subject’ (Althusser 1972: 185). When Althusser does consider
the constitution of subjectivity, rather than its simple effacement, he does so in a curiously ahistorical manner – or, rather, in the ahistorical manner typical of structuralism. In his well-known essay on ideological state
apparatuses, Althusser (1971: 160–2) claims that the function of ideology is to constitute concrete individuals as subjects, and that it does this by hailing or interpellating the individual. But not only is there a lack of detail about how the process of interpellation works, Althusser has already made it clear that ideology in general has no history: its ‘structure and functioning are immutable’ (Althusser 1971: 152). As such, in Althusser’s work the process
of subject formation is divorced from historical considerations.
In poststructuralism, in contrast, far more attention is paid to the historical conditions and processes necessary for the constitution of subjectivity. It could be argued that it is the poststructuralist – rather than the Althusserian
– conception of subjectivity that is closest to Marx: unlike Althusser, Marx does not simply displace or dissolve the traditional humanist subject; instead, he investigates the ways in which different types of subject are produced,
which is exactly what poststructuralism will do. The references and tributes to Marx found in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (1977), with its genealogy of the Oedipal subject, and in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1977), with its analysis of the obedient yet productive subject, are thus entirely appropriate: both books follow in the footsteps of Marx’s Capital, which traces the creation of the different types of individual that are required for the capitalist mode of production to function.
It is not only a concept of the subject that poststructuralism takes from
Marxism. Critical of the economistic tendencies of Marxism’s analyses,
poststructuralism does nonetheless draw upon those analyses in other ways.
Baudrillard (1975) argues that Marx remains tied to a concept of production that he never adequately criticises. Other poststructuralists, however, have accepted the model of production and have sought to adapt or extend it.
Kristeva (1986: 85) posits a ‘semiotics of production’ that will ‘emphasize the dynamics of production over the actual product’: an analysis of production prior to exchange or meaning. Kristeva offers this in explicit contrast to Marx, whom she claims examined production only from the perspective of a
final product that is circulated and exchanged as a value. Yet at the same time this is a kind of immanent critique of Marx, for according to Kristeva (1986: 82) it is Marx himself who ‘clearly outlines another possibility: another
space where work can be apprehended without any consideration of value’.
Untitled-2 77
16/10/2013 16:39:28
64
emergence
So Kristeva departs from Marx, but she presents this departure as the
development of an unrealised possibility within Marx’s own work. What is
offered by Kristeva as an immanent potential within Marx’s work is affirmed with greater force by Deleuze and Guattari (1977: 24), who argue that what
we find in Marx is precisely an examination of the processes of production
prior to the product: an analysis in which ‘the specificity of the product
tends to evaporate’. Drawing heavily on Marx, Anti-Oedipus foregrounds the concept of production, with the authors claiming that ‘everything is
production’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 4).
Deleuze and Guattari also draw upon Marxism’s specific analysis of
capitalism. Rather than simply condemning capitalism, as other socialists
have done, Marx recognised that capitalism is a revolutionary as well as
a reactionary social form: it destroys ancient prejudices and ties of bond-
age, yet in their place it enforces ever more brutal relations of exploitation.
Capitalism is thus to be welcomed and condemned. As the Marxist critic
Fredric Jameson (1993: 47) has put it, for Marx ‘capitalism is at one and the same time the best thing that has ever happened to the human race, and the
worst’. It is Marx’s theorisation of the unique dynamic of capitalism that
is picked up by Deleuze and Guattari – but instead of understanding it in
dialectical terms (as a thinker like Jameson might), Deleuze and Guattari
(1977) transcribe the insight into their own terms: capitalism is constantly deterritorialising – sweeping away traditional beliefs and institutions – and reterritorialising – desperately trying to control and rechannel the forces unleashed by the market. This fundamentally Marxist insight is also evident in Lyotard’s (1993) claim that capitalism has both a destructive drive (towards innovation and speculation, creating new desires) and a reproductive drive (towards repetition and reproduction, annulling desires in a law of exchange).
Viewed in this light, it can be seen that the poststructuralist strategies
outlined above – pushing capitalism to its limits and beyond – are not so distant from Marxism. Far from offering an endorsement of capitalism, those
strategies can be located within the Marxist tradition. It can be said that for both Marx and the poststructuralists, the aim is not to place restrictions
An uncharitable interpretation might characterise this poststructuralist
critique of economism as a retreat into textualism or psychologism – an
obsession with language and desire, to the neglect of concrete socio-economic Untitled-2 72
16/10/2013 16:39:28
from marxism to poststructuralism
59
factors. This interpretation would miss the mark however, for rather than
merely rejecting Marxism’s economism, the poststructuralists carefully
examine and undermine its assumptions. For many of the poststructuralists,
the problems start with Marx himself: they claim that he failed to offer a
radical enough challenge to classical political economy, remaining caught
within its categories and concepts. In The Order of Things, Foucault (1970: 260–262) suggests that Marx’s work is essentially little more than a minor
modification of the work of Smith and Ricardo. Foucault’s discussion of Marx in The Order of Things is both extremely brief and deliberately provocative, but it does anticipate more sustained critiques from other poststructuralist thinkers. Baudrillard (1975: 50) puts it like this: ‘Marx made a radical critique of political economy, but still in the form of political economy.’
For Baudrillard, Derrida and Lyotard, it is Marx’s distinction between
use-value and exchange-value that is particularly problematic. Baudrillard’s critique is interesting because he links Marx’s economic theories to what
he sees as Marx’s residual humanism. According to Baudrillard, Marx
thinks that man will be liberated when he is freed from the alienations of
exchange-value and can fulfil his natural, human needs in the enjoyment of
simple use-values. But for Baudrillard (1981: 132) this whole claim is part of an ‘anthropological illusion’ inherited from classical political economy: the notion of a simple relation between the individual, his needs and the
proper function of objects is all part of a rational metaphysic of utility that Marx never questioned. As an alternative to Marx’s humanist metaphysic of
needs, Baudrillard turns to the symbolic order and the idea of an exchange
of objects that has nothing to do with needs and cannot be conceived in
terms of exchange-value or use-value. In his deconstruction of the notion
of use-value, Derrida similarly turns to the logic of the gift beyond exchange in order to unravel Marx’s conceptual framework. For Derrida, the distinction between use-value and exchange-value is more complicated than Marx
supposes. There can be no pure use-value uncontaminated by exchange,
Derrida argues, because the potential to be exchanged is itself a condition of possibility for the concept of use-value: a use-value can only be a use-value if it is always-already inscribed by the possibility of being used by others at another time, in other words of entering into the circuits of exchange
and commerce. Moreover, exchange-value itself ‘is likewise inscribed and
excluded by a promise of the gift beyond exchange’ (Derrida 1994: 160).
Derrida’s argument in short is that Marx’s conceptual apparatus is deter-
mined by a metaphysical ontology.
For Lyotard (1993: 107), the distinction between use-value and exchange-
value reflects Marx’s nostalgia for a ‘lost consubstantiality of men amongst Untitled-2 73
16/10/2013 16:39:28
60
emergence
themselves and with nature’. The notion of use-value, Lyotard argues, pro-
vides Marx with a vision of lost naturality, a vision that both motivates and orients his critique. In place of this pious search for an uncorrupted region outside capitalism, Lyotard urges us instead to recognise the pleasures
and desires that capitalism generates and incites, asking us to work within capitalism, pressing it to its limits and beyond. The strategy supported by Lyotard is very similar to that proposed in Anti-Oedipus by Deleuze and Guattari (1977: 239), who suggest that the ‘revolutionary path’ may lie
not in withdrawing from the capitalist market but in pushing it further.
In Deleuze and Guattari’s (1994: 101) terminology, ‘revolution is absolute
deterritorialization’: instead of trying to contain capitalism and put a stop to its ceaseless undermining of traditional customs, beliefs and processes, any revolutionary strategy should aim to accelerate these ‘deterritorializations’.
It is perhaps Baudrillard (1994: 152–3) who advances this line of thinking
the furthest: ‘The challenge capital directs at us in its delirium … must be raised to an insanely higher level’. It is in part the advocacy of strategies like these that has led critics to portray poststructuralism as an apologia for capitalism. But the poststructuralists are led to these strategies not because they do not want to criticise capitalism, but because they are wary of basing any critique on nostalgia for pre-capitalist economic forms.
Evidence of Marxism’s preoccupation with economic factors is found by
poststructuralism not only in the tools used by Marxism and the strategies
it puts forward, but also in what we might call the scope of its analyses.
For Marxism, history is the history of class struggle: its social and political critique focuses on the exploitation of the proletariat under the capitalist mode of production. The poststructuralists do not deny the importance of
capitalism and class – but they are concerned about what is excluded by a
too-narrow focus on class. In part this is a question of historical development: since Marx’s day there has been a ‘multiplication of antagonisms’ that are ‘transversal’ to class struggle (Guattari 2000: 32–3), and so although
class oppression cannot be ignored, it cannot be the sole frame of reference for analysis today. Yet there is in addition a question here not only about Marxism’s contemporary relevance – the extent to which categories first
developed in the mid-nineteenth century are still relevant – but also about its theoretical coherence – the extent to which these categories were ever
tenable. For Irigaray (1985: 184), for example, the Marxist focus on class
obscures a more fundamental form of oppression, namely that of women
by men. It is the exchange of women that makes possible the (patriarchal)
social order, the circulation of women enabling men to establish relations
with each other whilst simultaneously excluding women themselves from
Untitled-2 74
16/10/2013 16:39:28
from marxism to poststructuralism
61
the social order that they make possible. Patriarchal exploitation is prior to class exploitation. Irigaray’s work is a good example of the way in which poststructuralism has tried to highlight the plurality of power relations
irreducible to economic relations of exploitation.
From Marxism
There was, then, a conscious effort on the part of poststructuralists to
distance themselves from Marxism. They rejected what they saw as its sci-
entific pretensions, its humanist assumptions and its economistic leanings.
It should not be assumed, however, that poststructuralist criticisms are fatal for Marxism, nor that the poststructuralists intended to destroy Marxism.
The diversity and flexibility of Marxism makes it robust enough to withstand many criticisms. A repudiation of Marxist humanism, for example, may rule
out the Marxism of someone like Lukács, but it concurs with Althusserian
Marxism. In addition, the poststructuralists do not just reject Marxism:
they undertake a careful critique that in itself is a kind of use of Marxism, and their criticisms must be taken as a serious engagement with Marxism,
quite different from the kind of facile dismissal offered by the nouveaux philosophes. It could even be said that the poststructuralist subversion of Marxism takes its bearings and resources from Marxism. For example, when
Marxism is criticised for maintaining certain anthropological assumptions in its concept of value, the charge might be read as an accusation that Marxism has failed to live up to its own standards: it has naturalised that which must be socially and historically contextualised – ‘it takes for granted what it is supposed to explain’, as Marx (1975: 271) himself said of classical political economy. Finally, poststructuralist thinkers are not uniform in outlook or
attitude: what is rejected by one thinker is sometimes embraced by another, and certain thinkers change their minds over time. For these reasons, the
points of conflict listed above can be counterposed by points of contiguity: the status of Marxism, its approach to subjectivity and the nature of its
analyses are all the focus of poststructuralist criticisms – yet they are also, in different ways, a source of inspiration for poststructuralism.
As I have suggested, this is in part because there is no single poststructuralist take on Marxism. So although some poststructuralists are suspicious of Marxism’s claims to scientificity – because it seems to draw on the authority of science without interrogating the nature of scientific truth – others have sought to emulate the science of Marxism. For example, Kristeva (1986: 79)
claims that semiotics ‘unites with the scientific practice of Marx to the extent that it rejects an absolute system (including a scientific one), but retains a Untitled-2 75
16/10/2013 16:39:28
62
emergence
scientific approach, that is, a development of models doubled by the theory underlying the very same models’. Kristeva thus takes Marxism not as a
‘grand narrative’, but as a critical, reflexive science, and thus as an appropriate model for the type of semiotics she wishes to develop and defend.
At the same time, Marxism itself does not offer a uniform model. Alongside
its claims to be a science – with all the implications of detachment, objectivity and systematicity that this carries with it – Marxism has claimed to be a political philosophy, with the aim not of producing a disengaged set of truths but of responding to and inspiring material and revolutionary struggles – not of interpreting the world but of changing it. Marxism undertakes a radical politicisation, in at least two ways. It exposes the relations of power and domination inherent in supposedly ‘natural’ processes and institutions
– challenging, for example, the bourgeois notion of the free market as a
realm of spontaneous harmony. At the same time, Marxism acknowledges its
own historical contingency and explicitly offers itself as a form of political commitment. In this sense, poststructuralism is very much in the tradition
of Marxism: poststructuralism offers a re-politicisation of theoretical discourse that both denaturalises and interrogates various concepts and themes (gender, the body, language, etc.) and recognises its own contingent and
politicised status. Derrida (1994: 87; 1999: 221) suggests that this re-politicisation, and even politics itself, will be impossible if we are not ‘faithful to a spirit of Marxism’ – a fidelity which in turn demands a re-politicisation of Marxism and the legacy of Marx. In seeking to reaffirm the political character of Marxism (against its scientistic interpreters), Derrida thus calls for a particular reading of Marx’s texts and the Marxist canon – not as totalising theory that we must apply wholesale, but as a series of political interventions that provide us with a range of sometimes contradictory positions and theses from which we can select.
There are many Marxisms and we have to choose between them. There is,
for instance, more than one model of subjectivity to be found in Marxism:
Althusser’s work makes it clear that there are other alternatives to Marxist humanism. Althusser’s entire output could be characterised as an attempt to forge an anti-humanist Marxism, and in this sense he clears the ground for
a poststructuralist engagement with Marx. Althusser’s work on subjectivity
also has limitations, however: if it can be described as a ground-clearing
exercise then this is not only because its novelty opens up new possibilities, but also because it seems more concerned with dethroning the sovereignty
of the humanist subject than with developing its own alternative theory of
the subject, destroying existing preconceptions without necessarily erecting anything in their place. It can be said that in Althusser’s work the subject Untitled-2 76
16/10/2013 16:39:28
from marxism to poststructuralism
63
is eliminated rather than rethought: he claims, after all, that the merit of the dialectic that Marx inherits from Hegel is precisely that it is a ‘process without a subject’ (Althusser 1972: 185). When Althusser does consider
the constitution of subjectivity, rather than its simple effacement, he does so in a curiously ahistorical manner – or, rather, in the ahistorical manner typical of structuralism. In his well-known essay on ideological state
apparatuses, Althusser (1971: 160–2) claims that the function of ideology is to constitute concrete individuals as subjects, and that it does this by hailing or interpellating the individual. But not only is there a lack of detail about how the process of interpellation works, Althusser has already made it clear that ideology in general has no history: its ‘structure and functioning are immutable’ (Althusser 1971: 152). As such, in Althusser’s work the process
of subject formation is divorced from historical considerations.
In poststructuralism, in contrast, far more attention is paid to the historical conditions and processes necessary for the constitution of subjectivity. It could be argued that it is the poststructuralist – rather than the Althusserian
– conception of subjectivity that is closest to Marx: unlike Althusser, Marx does not simply displace or dissolve the traditional humanist subject; instead, he investigates the ways in which different types of subject are produced,
which is exactly what poststructuralism will do. The references and tributes to Marx found in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (1977), with its genealogy of the Oedipal subject, and in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1977), with its analysis of the obedient yet productive subject, are thus entirely appropriate: both books follow in the footsteps of Marx’s Capital, which traces the creation of the different types of individual that are required for the capitalist mode of production to function.
It is not only a concept of the subject that poststructuralism takes from
Marxism. Critical of the economistic tendencies of Marxism’s analyses,
poststructuralism does nonetheless draw upon those analyses in other ways.
Baudrillard (1975) argues that Marx remains tied to a concept of production that he never adequately criticises. Other poststructuralists, however, have accepted the model of production and have sought to adapt or extend it.
Kristeva (1986: 85) posits a ‘semiotics of production’ that will ‘emphasize the dynamics of production over the actual product’: an analysis of production prior to exchange or meaning. Kristeva offers this in explicit contrast to Marx, whom she claims examined production only from the perspective of a
final product that is circulated and exchanged as a value. Yet at the same time this is a kind of immanent critique of Marx, for according to Kristeva (1986: 82) it is Marx himself who ‘clearly outlines another possibility: another
space where work can be apprehended without any consideration of value’.
Untitled-2 77
16/10/2013 16:39:28
64
emergence
So Kristeva departs from Marx, but she presents this departure as the
development of an unrealised possibility within Marx’s own work. What is
offered by Kristeva as an immanent potential within Marx’s work is affirmed with greater force by Deleuze and Guattari (1977: 24), who argue that what
we find in Marx is precisely an examination of the processes of production
prior to the product: an analysis in which ‘the specificity of the product
tends to evaporate’. Drawing heavily on Marx, Anti-Oedipus foregrounds the concept of production, with the authors claiming that ‘everything is
production’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 4).
Deleuze and Guattari also draw upon Marxism’s specific analysis of
capitalism. Rather than simply condemning capitalism, as other socialists
have done, Marx recognised that capitalism is a revolutionary as well as
a reactionary social form: it destroys ancient prejudices and ties of bond-
age, yet in their place it enforces ever more brutal relations of exploitation.
Capitalism is thus to be welcomed and condemned. As the Marxist critic
Fredric Jameson (1993: 47) has put it, for Marx ‘capitalism is at one and the same time the best thing that has ever happened to the human race, and the
worst’. It is Marx’s theorisation of the unique dynamic of capitalism that
is picked up by Deleuze and Guattari – but instead of understanding it in
dialectical terms (as a thinker like Jameson might), Deleuze and Guattari
(1977) transcribe the insight into their own terms: capitalism is constantly deterritorialising – sweeping away traditional beliefs and institutions – and reterritorialising – desperately trying to control and rechannel the forces unleashed by the market. This fundamentally Marxist insight is also evident in Lyotard’s (1993) claim that capitalism has both a destructive drive (towards innovation and speculation, creating new desires) and a reproductive drive (towards repetition and reproduction, annulling desires in a law of exchange).
Viewed in this light, it can be seen that the poststructuralist strategies
outlined above – pushing capitalism to its limits and beyond – are not so distant from Marxism. Far from offering an endorsement of capitalism, those
strategies can be located within the Marxist tradition. It can be said that for both Marx and the poststructuralists, the aim is not to place restrictions
