MARX AND THEORY (Call For Papers for Issue 64)
"Bad Subjects issue 64 on Marx and Theory seeks to complicate --even
interrogate--the way Marxism has been misappropriated by the academic left's
over investment in poststructural theory and over-investment cultural
studies, an investment that ultimately betrays Marxism's fundamental
interest in a material economy. Leftist critiques are currently filled with
buzz-concepts such as “resistant peformativity”, “alternative citizenship”,
“discursive political praxis”, “mimicry”, “radical hybridity”, to name only
a few.
The editors wonder, to what end? Can theories based on an immaterial
conception of cultural production, language, and politics “really” offer
forms of social critique and resistance? Essays might also critique theories
from the left that presuppose the text-as-reality in which the production of
different literatures of resistance--from genre bending Musicscapes,
graffiti,genre-bending, tattooed/pierced bodies, performance art, football
or literary texts--are viewed as all the resistance necessary for a
meaningful politics. Can cultural phenomena that resist “mastery” really
work as sites of resistance and as modes of political intervention? Or are
these theories simply participating in capitalist modes of production and
consumption that have no substance, or if there is substance, is it one
invested in a masculinist ontology, a colonial metaphysics of “Whiteness”,
or an elitist academic performance? When cultural discourse IS politics,
what are the implications for “real” coalition building among the working
classes world wide to ensure the right of all citizens to equal access to
education,coalition-building, world-wide medical care, common
transportation, and communication?
Essays might also explore the dangers of the notion of power as not
locatable, a notion that directs the understanding of the actual
concentration of power away from a state that oppresses and exploits those
at the margins of class, race, sexuality, and gender “norms”. In the ironic
and textually playful world of a so-identified Marxist poststructuralism,
power exists in the hands of no one social class nor any specific state
institution. Without a state or collective at the locus of power, power
becomes purely fluid and symbolic. Is a solely symbolic intervention
satisfactory? Submit articles--without footnotes/endnotes--to issue editors
Frederick Aldama [aldamaf@hotmail.com] and Robert Soza
[r_soza@uclink.berkeley.edu]. Issue deadline: December 1st, 2002.
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