richard-day-gramsci-is-dead

... and Now 131Butler, while more ‘practical’, seems to have retreated into the kindof postmarxist identity politics associated with Laclau and Mouffe,which I have argued reproduces the hegemony of hegemony andthe politics of demand (see her contributions to Butler, Laclau andŽižek 2000). Thus the question remains: how can we work to createmore opportunities for more people to choose a life of autonomyover one of subservience? How can we provide those who do takea line of flight from the state, capital, heterosexism, racism and thedomination of nature with more places to land, with other placesto land? To begin to answer these questions, I want to recall brieflysome of the well-known aspects of the poststructuralist critique ofcapitalist modernity and provide a more in-depth discussion of somethemes that have been given less attention.ELEMENTS OF POSTSTRUCTURALIST CRITIQUE: BECOMING MINORAlthough it is now widely acknowledged that poststructuralism is atbest a label of convenience, it is also obvious that certain commonthemes are dispersed in the texts of an extremely productive andinfluential generation (or two) of French writers. This nexus wouldinclude figures such as Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous,Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari andJean-François Lyotard. In the English-speaking world—especiallyamong those who are not comfortable with the implications ofpoststructuralist critique—some or all of these thinkers are oftenseen as ‘postmodernists’, that is, as rejecting outright the basic tenetsof European Enlightenment. This label has been applied to Derridaand Foucault for example, despite their repeated protestations ininterviews and textual demonstrations of their indebtedness tomodern theory and philosophy. In ‘What is Enlightenment?’,Foucault declared his commitment to a ‘critical ontology of ourselves’which he associated with Enlightenment critique (Foucault 1997a:319), and Derrida has explicitly situated deconstruction as a criticalengagement with marxism (Derrida 1994). Calling Baudrillard andLyotard postmodernists makes a little more sense, since they havein fact identified themselves with both the sociological claim thata postmodern condition exists as a set of currents running beyond/against European modernity, and have to some extent happily (and ofcourse ironically) taken on the mantle of the ‘anti-theorist’. My ownbelief is that nothing can obviate the need to read particular writersclosely and carefully on their own terms, and to be attentive to the