II

Contestations over how to theorize the social and social change play of course a crucial role in contemporary redefinitions of subjectivity and political practice, which are being most rapidly generated in the sphere of “cyber-space”. While cyber-space is enabled by the deconstruction of totality, which reduces the social into a Deleuzian “assemblage" (an a-totality the elements of which exist with only contingent connections); the textualization of the material as a structure of conflicts which results in the im-materiality of a simulated “virtual real” as self-caused and self-perpetuating (characterized by the independence of discourse); and the displacement of class struggle with ideological struggle, it also takes these notions further. This “taking further (which is in actuality merely an up-dating of of the dominant intelligibility) takes the form of embracing that mode of dominant (post)modern “avant-garde” cultural theory which is currently deploying what are in fact changes in the mode of production (accelerated expansion of the technologies available for use in the production process—including the rapid development of increasingly sophisticated communication and information technologies in accordance with the growing integration of the world market), and consequent changes in the culture of late capitalism, to signal that “First World” technologies have surpassed the “organic” (associated with industrial capitalism) and moved into a new “post-industrial" and “technocultural” cyber-zone of processed “information” and simulated consciousness, which is both (post)natural and, most significantly, “post-labor”. Whether it is theorized as a space of pure immanence more amenable to the aleatory workings of subjectivities driven by the operations of an autonomous desire, or as a space in which “mass culture... in which consumer goods, film, television, mass images amd [sic.] computerized information become[s] a dominant form of culture throughout the developed world” (Kellner 181), cyber-space translates technological developments as a productive power for capital into consumption possibilities for “First World" (post)modern subjectivities. It thus marks the end in the dominant academy of a revolutionary theorization of the political as the struggle over the material resources of society and its subsumption into “the aesthetic dimension—the dimension of desire that is fulfilled in the aesthetic experience [and is] fundamental in configuration of a world” (Laclau, 22).

In ludic (post)modern theorizations cyber-space becomes the means of theorizing an up-dated notion of the post-political subject (appropriate to this new zone) as “cybersubject”. As the trope “cyber” (from cybernetics) suggests this subject is being understood as a “dynamic” subject, conceived along the lines of Kristeva/Butler's notion of the “subject-in-process”, who takes her moment-to-moment (discursive) self-constitution ("performance") as the simulacral non-“ground” of her own “free” being and a mark of her own “self-invention”. The master-figure of cybersubjectivity is of course Donna Haraway's allegory of the “cyborg”: a “chimerical” “hybrid of machine and organism” (149) narrated in a tone which blurs and blends a “New Age” experientialism ("affinity") with a rhetoric of “imaginative” techno-liberation which naturalizes the contradictions of daily life under late-capitalist relations of production as a sign of living on the radical edge of “mutations” in subjectivity. Haraway frames her account of the subject-as-cyborg in terms of what she says are “fundamental changes in the nature of class, race and gender..." following upon the claim that “we are living through a movement... to a polymorphous information system” (161), a system characterized not by exploitation but by the “informatics of domination”. It is necessary to add here that emphasis on domination is a (post)modern orthodoxy in social and cultural theory precisely because it allows for the articulation of “power” relations as distinct from relations of exploitation. In this way, the underlying picture of the world that emerges is that every social site is subject to such a multiplicity of determinations that “domination” as an explanatory concept which articulates the class link of relations of power to relations of exploitation is obscured and absorbed through its transformation into a purely descriptive and, most importantly, a reversible (depoliticized) category.[1] What follows from the introduction of domination into cultural theory is that resistance to domination occurs always at the local level of superstructural practices in the mode of “autonomy”. Consequently, the question of politics becomes not one of collectively overthrowing the structures of exploitation but one of (individual) “autonomy” from domination.

The trope of autonomy as Haraway theorizes it is, following the example of prominent ludic (post)structuralist's such as Barthes and Lacan (jouissance), “pleasure”. The “cyborg” is above all an “argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries” (150), the disposal of politics (as a “totalizing” enterprise) and the beginning of a subtle ludic “ethics” of “boundary confusion”. As the negation of normativity (the political “norm” of a society based on collectivity), the cyborg is the trope for an idealist deconstruction of all the binaries which found class societies by virtue of her “excessive” desires ("the monstrous"): the “cyborg simulates politics” (163). The consolidation of a simulated politics: “ethics”, as a post-foundational practice of rendering all binaries indeterminate, for “politics”, which relies on binaries for its explanatory force, is of course part of the larger move in ludic (post)modern theory to ensure that all social practices are read locally and immanently (contingently) on their own terms and never understood as in a necessary relation to the structural and hierarchical (binary) global organization of production relations. Making such connections, is in ludic theory, rendered as “totalizing” and an act of violence which should be resisted at all costs. Thus Gayatri Spivak's statement that "'politics as such' [is] the prohibition of marginality... implicit in the production of any explanation. From that point of view, the choice between particular binary oppositions is... in each case, the condition of possibility for centralization, and, correspondingly, marginalization” (113). Such an argument however, is ultimately aimed at rendering any explanation of the logic of social practices in class societies as unintelligible; and in reducing political praxis to a mode of particularized and local activity undertaken by the ethical subject. The ethical subject is of course the embodiment of the bourgeois consumer subject, for whom shifts in the post-war international division of labor—whereby it is overwhelmingly the subjects of the “Third World” who are the primary producers of the commodities sold in the “First World"—are the condition of possibility for her “undecidable” ethical and reformist activities.[2] For the “Third World” proletarians (as for all the working people) who are marginalized by the social division of labor, binary oppositions are not “totalizing” and “metaphysical” epistemological constructs which should be done away with, they are the material conditions of their very existence as classed, raced, and gendered subjects. Moreover, the ludic propagation of the notion of binaries as a residue of “metaphysics” signals the way in which in the post-al moment metaphysics has become the ideological dumping ground for the very concept of “opposition” itself (and the transformative understandings it entails) and its substitution by a post-political Heideggerean “in-between"ness. Yet, as Robert Albritton clarifies, “the binary oppositions of metaphysics do not simply and magically appear in discursive formations... The arch “metaphysican” is capital itself. The binary oppositions of metaphysics arise in a social context conditioned by capitalist production relations... [I]t is capital itself that continually reproduces invidious distinctions between those who are privileged and those who are exploited, oppressed, marginalized, and silenced” (83).

On this view, Haraway's call for “a subtle understanding of emerging pleasures, experiences and powers with serious potential for changing the rules of the game” (173), is merely a means to shift the scene of social change to the domain of (upper middle-class) subjectivities (those who have the leisure time for “pleasure"), a position which rearticulates the (reactionary) Deleuzian thesis that is not the “objective” (need) which is the basis for revolutionary change but the subjective: desire. "[D]esire is revolutionary in its essence... no society can tolerate a position of desire without its structures of exploitation, servitude and hierarchy being compromised” (Deleuze and Guattari 116). Yet, as Marx writes to the contrary, revolutionary change is not produced as the function of a-social subjective desire but must have an objective social basis. It is “by virtue of an inexorable, utterly unembellishable, absolutely imperious need, that practical expression of necessity" that the proletariat has revolutionary force ("Alienation” 134).

Stuart Moulthrop, however, takes this moment as an opportunity to claim that “revolution”, as the praxis of overthrowing of private property relations, is itself “out-dated”. That "[c]hanges in technology portend [not only] in Mark Poster's phrase, “the end of the proletariat as Marx knew it” (129); they suggest possibilities for a reformulation of the subject, a truly radical revision of identity and social relations” (299-300). Extending Haraway/Deleuze's argument for the machinic subject as site of a desiring a-sociality Moulthrop argues for a vision of “a long dream of a new culture... less a revolution or overturning of the old order than it is an ecstasy, an attempt to stand outside any stable order, old or new” (300). Moulthrop's argument is of course a rearticulation for the 1990s of the quite standard project of ludic theory codified in Barbara Johnson's deconstructive meta-statement of the 80s that “Nothing could be more comforting to the established order than the requirement that everything be assigned a clear meaning or stand” (30-31). This war on the order of the signified (the established meanings of culture) in favor of the signifier, understood as a mark of the absolute autonomy of a nomadic subjectivity from the social ("ecstasy"), is thereby given renewed legitimacy in its integration into the virtual world view of cyber-space. Seeing the new information technologies (to which of course only those whose basic needs have already been met have access) as the exemplary vehicle for realization of the “ecstasy” of autonomy, Moulthrop's project is quite clear: “We will create structures which we will then deconstruct or deterritorialize and which we will replace with new structures... [and then again] starting the process anew” (316, emphasis mine). The class character of this “we”, whether it appears in Moulthrop, or in Donna Haraway's claim to “the tools that we need for reinventing our own lives” ("Interview” 7), functions to occlude revolutionary change with ideological (immanent) change conveyed through a (post)political “ecstasy” and conducted by the privileged layers of the middle class. This class “we” locates the new technologies, “instruments” of “liberation” in the continual re-invention of bourgeois subjectivity, as yet another weapon in class warfare against the meeting of social and collective needs—which is finally nothing more than a justification for a continuation of the profit-directed economic practices of capital.

At the forefront of this desire for “continual re-invention” are of course the post-al writings of Gregory Ulmer, who, over the last two decades, has consistently advanced the anti-conceptual understanding that pedagogy should be focused on the interminable proceduralism of the deconstructive “how”: knowledge as the zone of aesthetic pleasures (the “puncept") and autobiographical self-invention ("mystory"). In his latest book, Heuretics: The Logic of Invention, Ulmer takes the project of “mystory"—"designed to simulate the experience of invention” (xii)—one step further through the promulgation of a full-blown “method” of “electronic cognition” ("chorography") which takes its inspiration from hypermedia technology and the cultural “avant-garde”. At one level, Ulmer's emphasis on invention (conveyed through “mystoriography”, “chorography”...) is nothing more than a justification for the contemporary (re)understanding of “knowledge” as “invention”: a space of self-fashioning and vertiginous experience for the idealist subject. This experience, moreover, is understood not as the traditional “humanist” (direct) experience (of things) but as “simulation” of/as “experience”. This up-dated experience (of a simulacral world) is what provides a post of intelligibility for the (deconstructed) subjectivities of cybercapitalism and brings into existence for those at “the most recent [computerized] frontier of knowledge... a virtual if not a literal world” (27). But this ""virtual” world, and its creation of a field... within which might emerge the surplus value of a revelation or an innovation... " (48) is in fact the effect of the “literal” world which continues on on the basis of the surplus value of labour which constitutes the foundation for the “surplus experiences” of the more privileged class fractions. At this level then, “invention”, participates in the larger agenda of erasure of the “literal” (surplus labour) by the “virtual” (knowledge) which is supported by all those who argue—from cutural [sic.] conservatives like Alvin Toffler (Powershift), to postmodernists like Lyotard (The Postmodern Conditon), [sic.] to leftist commentators such as Stanley Aronowitz (The Jobless Future) to bourgeois economists such as Schumpeter (Business Cycles)—that it is knowledge (science/technology/innovation) and not labour which is the driving force of history. Behind all of the writings of these theorists is of course the notion that capitalism can/has “invent/ed” itself out of its dependence on labour and—for those who are “ethically” concerned with (in Ulmer's inane formulation) “mak[ing] life better for all humanity” (20)—that the exploited and oppressed can similarly “invent” themselves out of their exploitation and oppression!

As opposed to this bankrupt notion of knowledge-as-invention a materialist understanding of knowledge is to be found in Capital (Vol. 1). Here, Marx clarifies that although science (=knowledge) “appears to be the direct off-shoot of capital (since its application to the material process of production takes place in isolation from the knowledge and abilities of the individual [average] worker” it is, in fact, “the general intellectual product of the social process” (1053). Indeed, it is only because “society is marked by the exploitation of labour by capital [that the] development [of knowledge] appears to be the productive force of capital as opposed to labour." “Invention”, then, is the concept which cuts knowledge (scientific development/technology/innovation, etc.) off from its historical conditions of possibility in the form of exploited social labour. “Invention” posits the “creative” power of capital as the negation of the creative power of collective labour.

Yet, on another (philosophical) level, it is not the attempt to account for the development of the productive forces but the effort to account for social change through its own multiple versions of an “ethical” cyber-materialism which governs the invention of the concept of “invention” in idealist “avant-garde” social theory: what Homi Bhabha articulates as the question of “How Newness Enters The World” (193). On this level, the historical and materialist understanding of social change as an effect of the movement of the forces of production and the class struggles over the resources of society is (re)configured as the effect of the self-motivated hybridization of discourse (repetition with a difference) which opens “new means for thought and action” (Heuretics 20) without recourse to the intentionality of the transcendental subject. Change, in other words, is construed as an effect of the inadvertent and aleatory resignifications of discourse and invention is the theory of change for the cyborg-subject: the “post-biological” (post-need) subject of a transclass “becoming” who in her perpetual “self-difference” (Haraway; "Postscript” 22) allegorizes the non-closural movements of a (non-identical=non-transformable) capitalism-without-borders. The appeal of this class theory of change is made clear in the words of one critic who is already anticipating and celebrating another century of “inventive” capitalism. “This possible tomorrow” is the time when “the physical body is intertextual and endlessly recombinant... The next century, a teratologist's wildest dream of magical beings morphed by technology, seems not a bad place to be” (Dery 520-522).

As a pleasured hybrid of human and machine, the cyborg (the fin de siecle embodiment of Deleuze's and Guattari's trope of unlimited consumption: the “body without organs" ["desiring machine"]) is helping to construct the space of late twentieth and twenty-first century social subjectivities as one always characterized by a desiring “partiality” and unconscious libidinal motivations ("intensities") such that the space of radical intervention into the status quo—which demands above all a conscious and committed rational politics—is supplanted by the irrationality of “invention”. Cyborgian (cyber)subjectivities are indeed more appropriate to the ethical and reformist model of semiotic (and not economic) change which the (cyber)materialists are advancing.

Of course it will be argued that not all the knowledges which are currently addressing the question of technology support the definitions and understandings of subjectivity and the idea of social change promoted by ludic cyber-materialism. That contemporary cybercultural writings do not necessarily subscribe to the notion of a post-industrial capitalism where knowledge and not labor has become the driving force of history, or where an ethics of desire and not a politics of need is of primary concern. One contemporary theorist putting forward what seems like such an argument is critical theory's Douglas Kellner who, rejecting ludic (post)modernist arguments as “tend[ing] to describe developments in contemporary society in abstraction from political economy” (146), promises a more historical materialist theory of “techno-capitalism” to allow for the recent changes in the mode of production. Kellner argues that

...commodity production and wage labor for capital still exist as fundamental organizing principles [of society] . . while knowledge and information play significantly more central roles within techno-capitalism, they are still subject to processes of commodification, exchange, profitability and control by capital and should therefore be conceptualized within the framework of a theory of contemporary techno-capitalism (177-186).

Of course, this is not to deny that “the machine is a means for producing surplus-value”, but this is only because “like every other instrument for increasing the productivity of labour, machinery is intended to cheapen commodities and, by shortening the part of the working day in which the worker works for himself, to lengthen the other part, the part he gives to the capitalist for nothing” (Capital 492, italics mine). In other words, the machine is not the “source” of surplus value. It is merely the mediation by means of which ever greater quantities of surplus value are extracted from the worker. Machines, in other words, are part of the political economy of the basic relation of exploitation between capital and wage labour and "mechanization" (for instance, the emergence of computer-mediated work), far from signalling a radical "break" with the logic of capitalism, is itself the structural outcome of the historical level of accumulation of capital. In Kellner, to the contrary, through the purely tropic mediation of “machine”, “exploitation” gets articulated not as something which occurs at the level of the “base” but at the level of the “superstructure”.[3] Exploitation, in other words, becomes an expression of the “unequal distribution” of commodities, which can be redressed through their more equitable distribution, a notion which focuses on relations of consumption and leaves production relations (ownership of the means of production by one class) intact, bracketing the project of social revolution for social justice.

It is politically significant that despite differing epistemological positions bourgeois theories eventually converge around the same basic ideological position: to erase class differences at the level of production in order to delegitimate class struggle and argue that it is the “cultural-ideological” level (consumption of discourses and commodities) at which resistance to capitalism should be launched. So, for instance, what in Kellner's terms is equivalent to “devising strategies and tactics of subversion in consumer practices” (166) in relation to the new “techno-commodities” of techno-capitalism, strategies that would function as “ways in which technologies could be used against capitalist interests and relations” (181), reappears in the hyper-ludic techno-text Data Trash by Arthur Kroker and Michael Weinstein as the techno-ethics of the “body electronic” (3)—harnessing "[t]he informational technology of the Internet as a new force of virtual production [which] provides the social conditions necessary for instituting fundamentally new relations of electronic creation” (8, original emphasis).

In other words, while Kroker and Weinstein offer their understanding of a new “pan-capitalism"—organized by a new “virtual class” which has incorporated both the proletariat and the bourgeoisie and has collapsed into the de-materialized utopian imaginary of the digital culture of “virtual reality” as a “dream of pure telematic experience” (1)—in an utterly different (pop-Baudrillardian) register from that of Kellner's (modernist) argument for techno-capitalism, they both eventually privilege the “creative” (entrepreneurial) subjectivity as the avant-gardist bottom line of resistance in contemporary social and techno-cultural theory. Thus Kellner's notion that “individuals are quite inventive and creative in their consumer activities” is quite in sync with Kroker and Weinstein's position that “the wireless body... a moving field of aesthetic contestation... [is] the leading edge of critical subjectivity in the twenty-first century” (18). They are eventually both positions which advance and reaffirm the reactionary subsumption of the political into the supposedly autonomous space of the “aesthetic” (creativity/invention), which has always been the alibi of bourgeois theory for delegitimating the political.

This (ideo)logic of the “creative” and the “inventive” is not, moreover, limited to the ("high") cultural “avant-garde” but also informs the intelligibility of more “popular” versions of cyberculture. In a recent special cyber-issue Rolling Stone magazine devoted a substantial amount of space to interviews with some young up and coming entrepreneurs of what it calls “CyberNation”: communities of “webheads” and Internet programmers such as the “Cyberorganics” who are on the frontline of producing such “alternative” cultural sites as the “Cyberorganic Cafe” “a hip, funky utopian outpost at the corner of reality and virtual reality” (Goodell 4). The Cyberorganic Cafe does, in the space of popular culture, what the cyborg does in the space of cybertheory: it is the synechdoche for the blurring of all the rigid boundaries of capitalist existence and for the breakdown of all the categories which can explain (and thus participate in transforming) this existence. Cyberorganic Cafe is “a weird hybrid that's hard to grasp in a single sentence—its a cafe, a Web site, an Internet provider, an educational center, a community center—there's no paradigm for it” (4). Cyberorganic Cafe is a space of such excessiveness that it breaks the logic of the binary and becomes the creation of a “third plac[e]... “not home, not work, but something in-between” (4). Like the neither/nor materialism of Judith Butler it signals a hybrid borderline existence beyond the logic of the daily (material realities of a society of exploitation) and encodes the space of the everyday as bounded by a communitarian ethic of creativity conjoined with the pragmatic: “I think this whole idea is much less about some far out utopian ideal and much more about what you can do today with the tools we have” says one of the young entrepreneurs (4). “What you can do today”, is of course always what you can do from the “inside”, it is in other words, what the system allows you to do within the existing relations of production: “what you can do today” is the post-al anthem for the bricoleur-subjects of the “cybernation”.

Aside from this pragmatism of the “inside”, however, are other ideological lessons that the dossier in Rolling Stone teaches. One of these lessons is that of an anarchic libertarianism evoked through the image of the World Wide Web (a product of the Defense Departments Advanced Research Projects Agency dating from the 60s which is now marketed to “ordinary” computer users) and the Web user's ability to “freely” travel from one web site to another, interacting with the various pages and programs (many of which are advertisements) in any way she wishes. The Republican content of this libertarianism—as an alibi for the current destruction of the welfare state and the valorization of the “benefits” of a deregulated free market—is made clear in the evocation of the “Internet user who would rather the market decide than the government” (Virshup 15-21). The Internet is, moreover, also the metaphor for the Republican agenda of a “direct democracy” (of satisfaction of desire) through the “electronic plebiscite” (21). It is the embodiment of bourgeois individualism ("every person for herself") in the cyber-90s of a post-representational democracy where “self-representation” has become the ideological touchstone for dismantling the (very limited but still existent) meeting of collective needs by the liberal state in favor of a vision of a new post-al state operative according to the pulsational workings of a radical-semiotic-information-democracy of desire (polls). This is, not incidentally, the same vision of democracy being sold to post-al academics in the writings of cybertheorist George Landow whose eulogies to the “instantaneous gratification of one's intellectual desire” (18) posit the new information technologies as the means to a new semiotic electronic/electoral-ocracy. A post-al social order of the subordination of the general interest (need) to the particular, encapsulated in the rhapsodic invocation of the “converted endnote become equal in importance to the block of text to which it refers"! (Landow 15).

Yet, perhaps the most important ideological tenet that is deployed by Rolling Stone to construct the cybercultural imaginary is that very same post-al lesson taught by cultural theorists such as Constance Penley and Andrew Ross (among others): to collapse consumption into production by positing that (creative) consumption is in actuality an act of production and resistance to the dominant. This post-al “desiring production” is affirmed in an exchange during one of the interviews with Marc Andreeson, the programmer for the “web browser” Mosaic (the first of its type) who is now worth $58.3 million and speaks for definite class interests. In response to the interviewer's question as to whether now (after the information technologies) “we're all going to be producers as well as consumers of... information” (Herz 22) Andreeson responds in the affirmative: "I think that's dead on... [everyone will] be able to create what they want to create” (22). In this populist version of information “democracy” creative consumption becomes the trope of displacement of the logic of production (class) and a means to shift attention away from the global conditions of production onto the local circumstances of consumption. In the space of this indeterminism the class divisions are obscured and the primacy of desire of the consumer ("everyone will be able to create what they want") is understood as overdetermining the need of the producer.

Penley and Ross are of course more “sophisticated” providers of this populist imaginary. Part of this sophistication is the fact that in their discourse the so-called “liberatory” aspects of technology are presented in terms of a more “balanced” approach which seeks to “provide a realistic assessment of the politics... that are currently at stake in those cultural practices touched by advanced technology” (xii). However, as it quickly becomes clear, this “realism” is ultimately aimed at reproducing that central feature of cyber-space (symptomatic of all post-al materialisms), which is to substitute “agency” in the space of the “everyday” for agency in the space of the daily. This shift, then, is legitimated in the name of an “ironic” post-al realism which, although it recognizes that “the large-scale deployment of the new technologies tend[s] to perpetuate capitalist modes of production and accumulation, the expropriation of cultural and technical skills, the international division of labor...", nevertheless supports the populist claim that “the kinds of liberatory fantasies that surround new technologies are a powerful and persuasive means of social agency, [whose] source to some extent lies in real popular needs and desires” (xii-xiii).[4] As it turns out, this post-al irony, the “irony” of the sophisticated logic of “on the one hand"/"on the other hand”, is, not much more than an ideological smokescreen deployed to cover over the non-ironic misery of the majority of men and women in the world and to “redefine” this misery in terms of a techno-textual “activist” ethos of “resistance”. It is, in other words, a means of displacing a materialist resistance (revolution) with a techno-resistance ("communications revolution” xvi), and the class agent of social change (the proletariat) with the subjects of cyber-space: “high-tech office workers, Star Trek fans, Japanese technoporn producers, teenage hackers, AIDS activists, political artists, rock stars, and science fiction writers” (xvi).

The point of course is not to replace this celebratory populism with the kind of conservative romanticism advanced by writers such as Kirkpatrick Sale who, on the eve of the twenty-first century, wants to “Set Limits On Technology” through ahistorically proposing the learning of “Lessons From the Luddites” (785). Neither is it to practice a version of a rather orthodox (post)structuralist “skepticism” (Markley 438) in relation to the ideologies of cyber-space which is advanced in the several essays collected in the “Dreaming Real: Cyberspace, Virtual Reality, and Their Discontents” recent issue of the new journal of “Literature, Science and Technology”, Configurations.[5] Neither Sale's moral approach to the question of technology, nor the understandings of the “material" which are variously presented in Configurations—ultimately approaches which understand the material only in terms of “a material semiotics” (Markley 494), or at the very most, as the instrumental “materiality” of “hardware, software, communication networks, institutional and corporate structures, support personnel and so on” (Grusin 476)—are of much use to contemporary historical materialist theorizations of the new technologies and the new cyberculture. Any such analysis will have to begin to investigate the status of technology in contemporary cybercapitalism from the vantage point of capitalist social relations of production, relations which continue to be fundamentally structured by the fact that “production for profit remains the basic organizing principle of economic life” (Harvey 121). Only such a historical materialist beginning--which far from reifying the capitalist everyday by abstracting it from structural social relations works to historicize it through theorizing its relation to the working day--is capable of avoiding what Marx calls a “crude materialism." This “crude materialism” (supported by all the diverse forms of the current tendency of cyber-materialism), never gets beyond regarding as “the natural properties of things what are social relations of production among people, and qualities which things obtain because they are subsumed under these relations”. It is, thereby, “at the same time just as crude an idealism, even fetishism, since it imputes social relations to things as inherent characteristics, and thus mystifies them” (Grundrisse 687).

As against this crude materialism it is necessary to bring back into the arena of contemporary cultural and social theory the “militant” historical materialism (Lenin 186) of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and Luxemburg. A “militant” materialism capable of critiquing the ideological series whereby the cultural “avant-garde” becomes the motive force for social change, and of demonstrating its ideological complicity with the imperatives of capital in its status as a retarding force in the struggle for a classless society. What is theoretically necessary in forging such a militant materialism is not the regressive ideas of the social and social change put forward in the “radical democratic” writings of ludic (post)marxists such as Laclau, Mouffe, Butler, Zizek... Not the self-fashioning strategies and discourses of the “radical new” offered by Haraway et al. which make the incoherences of capitalism look so “different” that the question of who owns the means of production is obscured... And least of all the techno-ethics of Kellner, Kroker, Weinstein, Penley and Ross... in their dream of a capitalism beyond revolutionary justice. What is needed, in other words, is not the “inventionism” of the cultural avant-garde, but a political vanguard who will participate in producing global, critique-al knowledges of social totality as an inaugural contribution to the struggle for social emancipation of the working people of the world.