Verbatim Mac

Pomo Links

Pomo link and ludics are not material, even if they say they are  We inherently allow for dissemination of theory and overcome barriers to the translation/exportation of theory to the rest of the world

Ebert 5 (Teresa, Professor of Humanities at the College of Arts and Sciences at the University at Albany who specializes in Critical and Cultural Theory, Feminist Critique, Marxist Theory and Globalization Theory, “Rematerializing Feminism” http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/40404228.pdf)//meb

The fact that signs have become plural and the relations between signifier and signified have become relations of relays within relays does not mean the referent is lost. The referent has became plural - it has became more difficult to choose a single referent for a single sign. In place of a single referent, a network of referents - that are in a relationship of playfulness with one another - form the basis for a new theory of referentiality. Like the occlusions of the other "posts" (post-Fordism, postindustrialism, postclass, etc.), I think this postreferential referentiality has reduced the effectivity of language as a weapon of social intervention and has turned it into an object of desire, a site of ludic textuality and signifying play. A new (not post) form of reference is needed. In re-obtaining a more socially effective referent for language, I think the referent will be re-theorized, not so much through the works of Wittgenstein, Austin, Saussure, Derrida, Baudrillard and others, who have subjected language to simply an epistemological critique, but rather through the work of materialist linguists such as Voloshinov. However, Voloshinov himself shows some culturalist lapses, at times, in his own understanding of lan- guage. I therefore think that the most productive way of rethinking the question of the referent will be through Capital, specifically chap- ter 10 of Volume I, in which Marx explicates the working of labor in the working day. In brief, the discussion of the working day provides a very effective frame for establishing a theory of reference in which language is once again put in a relation of materiality to history in the form of labor. The new theory of reference thus will be based on a labor theory of language. Two Notions of Theory I see two contesting notions of theory at the moment. One - which I call "ludic theory," that is, theory as play - regards theory to be essentially an ensemble of strategies of textualization, strate- gies that will demonstrate, through a meticulous rhetorical read- ing, how concepts that are supposed to secure meaning and give it stability are in fact wavering, errant, tropes. As de Man says in Alle- gories of Reading, all concepts are a species of writing. He goes so far as to indicate in his The Resistance to Theory and Aesthetic Ideology that textualizing is itself the most material form of theorizing. This ludic notion of theory - theory as textualization and textualization as a resistance against closure - is, of course, the most rigorous form of deconstructing the idea of theory as a positivist practice (theory as a master formulation that will predict and explain the phenome- non in question). What does challenge theory as textualization (ludic theory) is a materialist theory. However, the very notion of materialism is itself a contested theoretical category for many second-generation post- structuralists, such as Judith Butler and even Slavoj Zizek, for whom materiality is a resistance to the concept: the site of the proliferation of meaning - an excessive play of signification that cannot be con- tained in any singular interpretation. There is of course a vast differ- ence between Zizek, who posits the material (through a relay of Lacan's texts) as the "trauma of the real" (1989) and Butler, who proposes the body and its "citationality" - the "performative" (1993) - as the site of ceaseless signification. In spite of these specific differences over where they locate the significatory excess, they all posit materiality as an opposition to Hegelian conceptuality. This ludic notion of materi- ality, I believe, is itself a rewriting of idealism - at root, all these varia- tions read the material in terms of some form of discourse (meaning). Butler herself, as well as Zizek and a number of other theorists who, following Raymond Williams, call themselves cultural materialists, have tried to minimize this idealism, but their efforts have led (especially in the work of cultural materialists) to what I have called, in various writ- ings, "matterism." In other words, in an attempt to avoid idealism, they have gone back to a Feuerbachian notion of materialism that mis-takes inert matter as materiality. In a historical materialist understanding of theory, theory is not a metadiscourse to be applied; instead theory is a historical grasping of social practices in their complex interrelationship. Theory, in other words, is an understanding of social totality. It is a materialist under- standing because it grasps the social totality in a materialist way. Of course, the "materialism" of historical materialism is fundamentally different from the de Manían notion of materialism, as well as the Butlerian, Zizekian and culturalist versions. In a historical material- ist understanding of theory, materialism is the structure of human labor in its relations to nature and to social totality. In other words, materialism here is neither resistance to conceptuality nor is it inert matter; rather, it is the structure of conflicts in human labor relations. The difficulties, therefore, in "translating," "importing" and "export- ing" theory, as I have tried to indicate throughout, are eventually problems of labor. The reason translations of theories become a problem, and their import from one culture to another creates di- lemmas, is because the theories in question are idealist formulas, and the characteristic of such idealist formulations is to be always at odds with their host discourses. However, if theory is conceived in a his- torical materialist way, it is always grasping the social totalities in his- tory and in labor, and history and labor are always connected to what I call a global history. This means theory is complexly connected to diverse cultures that are themselves linked to global history through the structure of their labor practices - such material connections render the tropes of translation, import, and export of very little significance.

Pomo erases materialism

Ebert 5 (Teresa, Professor of Humanities at the College of Arts and Sciences at the University at Albany who specializes in Critical and Cultural Theory, Feminist Critique, Marxist Theory and Globalization Theory, “Rematerializing Feminism” http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/40404228.pdf)//meb

Beyond the "End of Ideology " In postmodern social theory, especially in the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, ideology is seen as undergoing a "break." In their writings, Laclau and Mouffe, through a heavy reliance on Lacan and Althusser, have erased the materialist theory of ideology articulated in Marx and Engels' The German Ideology and more em- phatically reiterated in Marx's own Capital In order to dramatize the break, they have reduced the classical Marxist theory of ideology to a simple "false consciousness" and with great fanfare have represented Althusserian and post-Althusserian views as groundbreaking concep- tual feats. Ideology after this "break" has become a generalized rep resentation from which no one can escape and in which everyone is condemned to live their social being. One of the consequences of this notion of ideology, of course, has been its erasure of the rigid clarity of class antagonisms and any other binaries (such as true/false, powerful/powerless, exploitative/emancipatory) . This paradox - that in a world in which ideology is one of the fundamental axes of identity and social processes, intellectuals have declared it ended - is caused by the fact that the regime of social relations of production, which the Marxist tradition has explained by the concept of ideology, has not only not ended but instead has intensified its hold on the subject. The most effective way to disentangle the contemporary impasse on ideology is to re-understand the materialist theory of ideology.

Ideology has a very specific and materialist meaning in the Marxist tradition, especially in Marx's Capital (in which, curiously, it has be- come common to say that the notion of ideology was abandoned by Marx). In various chapters of Capital (especially chapters 1, 6, 9, 10, 1 1 and 12), Marx explains the process by which the worker exchanges his/her labor-power for wages. In chapter ten he explains the pre- cise mechanism of the working day, during which the worker pro- duces the equivalent of his wages and also surplus labor. In chapter six he theorizes the difference between labor and labor-power and concludes that labor-power is that particular "commodity whose use- value possess the peculiar property of being a source of value, whose actual consumption is therefore itself an objectification of labor, hence a creation of value" (1977, 270). The exchange, he concludes, between the capitalist and the worker is an exchange of labor-power for wages. This exchange is represented in bourgeois theory as a free, unfettered and equal exchange. In fact, at the end of chapter six, Marx makes a point of dwelling on this "free-trader vulgaris" view of the exchange of wages for labor-power; he concludes that it is anything but an equal exchange - it leaves the worker, Marx notes, "like some- one who has brought his own hide to market and now has nothing else to expect but - a tanning" (1977, 280).

The historical materialist concept of ideology seeks to account for the representations of this exchange as an equal and fair ex- change. This, I want to emphasize, is the core of the materialist theory of ideology: how the relation between wage-labor and capital is rep- resented as free and equal when it is anything but (it is "a tanning") . False consciousness (the bête noir of postmodern theories of ideology) is a "struggle concept" (to adopt Maria Mies' term) by which a mate- rialist understanding marks the consciousness that regards this ex- change to be an exchange among equals and conducted in freedom. It is a false consciousness, because it is seen as unfettered and un- coerced when, in fact, as Marx himself argues, this exchange takes place under "the silent compulsion of economic relations" - a com- pulsion that "sets the seal on the domination of the capitalist over the worker" (Marx, 1977, 899). False consciousness is the conscious- ness that misrecognizes the compulsion of economic relations as free and therefore accepts the exchange of wages for labor-power as equal.

Even a quick look at the post-Althusserian theories of ideology will make clear that, far from being groundbreaking theories, the postmodern notion of ideology is simply an erasure of the material- ist theory of ideology and a marginalization of the role of labor. It ends up essentially legitimizing the relation between wage-labor and capital. To say, as postmodern theories of ideology say over and over again, that there is no space outside ideology is to say that it is impos- sible to mark any relation as a relation of inequality. Because to say that the exchange of wages for labor-power is unequal, according to postmodern theory, is to set up a "true" {i.e., "equal") relation. This is "wrong," according to postmodern theory, because it establishes a binary in which a truthful relation masters a false relation. But this is exactly what happens under capitalism. The relation between wage- labor and capital is an unequal relation, and to simply say that draw- ing attention to its inequality is to fall into binaries is to substitute bourgeois epistemology for social justice. Ideology is not epistemol- ogy: to try to make ideology part of epistemology and then decon- struct it through a maneuver in which right and wrong, correct and incorrect, truthful and untruthful are pitted against each other is to simply relegitimate capitalist relations. The crisis we are witnessing now in the theory of ideology is the crisis of this legitimization of an unjust relation in the discourses of intellectuals who, in their formal theories, declare themselves to be anti-capitalist and friends of the people.