The Anality of Evil: From Marx' Merde to Mass Murder
onan the vulgarian writes: ennui is an under-engaged element in terms of issues around evil, it seems to me. but can anyone doubt that the writer of the following would be prepared to do to human beings what he does to the english language? ennuology, or the scientific study of bores and boredom, doesn't appear to exist so far. as the son of the canadian ambassador to belgium (♂) and the belgian ambassador to canada (♀), i may be able to do something about that.....
Theorising race and anticommunism in the Cold War
Introduction: Theoretical Approach
This work, as befits a marxist research project, inhabits a tension between the nomothetic and idiographic. The epistemological commitments of historical materialism are not exhausted by its inventory of nomological concepts. Indeed, the historical determinacy of laws in Marx’s research project points to the need for concrete investigation to determine “the boundaries†of the articulation of “productive force and relation of production†at any given conjuncture. (Banaji, 2010, p. 47) When Marx turns his attention to concrete situations, for example in the Eighteenth Brumaire, his approach is far from the positivist attempt to validate laws already supposedly established by historical data. On the contrary, he sets out to discern the lineaments of class and political formations, the shifting valences of ideological cynosures, the class alliances and mutating allegiances: this highly conjunctural analysis pays off with the emergence of concepts such as ‘Bonapartism’, or the ‘praetorian state’. (On the text’s relevance for the analysis of political power and the state, see (Jessop, 2002)). As we will see, the practitioners of historical materialism – above all, Gramsci and Althusser, both in their different ways ‘Machiavellian’ marxists, and Poulantzas, whose research project articulated the former pair – have also developed a series of conceptual operations designed to capture the specificity of concrete situations. Gramsci insisted, against a certain ‘economist’ reductionism, on the analysis of the “conjunctureâ€, of “situationsâ€, of the “socio-historical moment†which is never “homogenousâ€, but which is “rich with contradictionsâ€. (Sassoon, 1981, pp. 180-193)
Althusser, the poetaster of ‘aleatory materialism’, likewise focused on conjunctural analysis, the multiple determinations and levels of determination in a given situation, the “accumulation of contradictions†within it, and ‘overdetermination’ - the condensation within each point of the structure of the effects of the whole situation. In keeping with this aleatory materialism is the distinction he made between the ‘mode of production’ (certain abstract combinations of forces and relations of production) and the ‘social formation’ (the concrete site on which these forces and relations of production are realised, a site of overdetermined complexity). In my research, it is the conjuncture, and within it the social formation, that is the object of analysis. (Althusser, 1999; Althusser, 2005; Lahtinen, 2009)
But the term ‘conjuncture’ can be used in a different way, to refer to precisely the tension described above: a conjunction of the general and the particular. This conjunction means that the general, referring to a set of constants which recur in different situations, varies in its precise content depending on its relation to the particulars of a situation. (Lahtinen, 2009, p. 9) A persistent topographical feature of marxist assay, then, is its descent from the abstract to the concrete[1], with each approach to the concrete characterised by the introduction of new theoretical determinations. Consistent with this, each section of this argument begins with the clarification of some general concepts, abstractions which address historical problems prompted by my research questions. As the discussion proceeds, however, the thesis descends from the abstract to the concrete, from structural to contingent, particular and sometimes subjective factors.
In section I, I begin with a discussion of anticommunist practices in general, before proceeding to a discussion of their operation during the Cold War, and their particular application in the Southern racial state. ‘Practices’ is used here in the sense intended by Althusser, viz.: “all the levels of social existence are the sites of distinct practices: economic practice, political practice, ideological practice, technical practice and scientific (or theoretical) practice. We think the content of these different practices by thinking their peculiar structure, which, in all these cases, is the structure of a productionâ€. (Althusser & Balibar, 1997, p. 58) At the most general level, the structure of production has three stages: i) raw materials are brought into relation with one another; ii) a labour of transformation is performed using some means of production; and iii) an end-product results. The determinant moment in this process is the labour of transformation itself; it is this which decides the kind of practice involved. When investigating anticommunist practices, I will give due attention to the specific levels (economic, political, ideological) on which they take place - though I will treat these levels as distinct (and thus ‘relatively autonomous’) aspects of a unitary structure in difference, rather than as an articulation of different structures - as well as to production process they are involved in. The generic category ‘anticommunism’ is a convenience, but inhibitive if left undifferentiated.
Theorising race and anticommunism in the Cold War
“The true independent is he who dwells detached and remote from the little herds as well as from the big herd. Affiliating with no group or cabal of mice or monkeys, he is of course universally suspect.†—
The Black Book of Gore Vidal.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 24 Feb 12 | 05:26AM by treycelement.