From lennox@german.umass.edu Sat Oct 3 16:31:48 1998 MatFem@csf.colorado.edu; Sat, 3 Oct 1998 18:31:44 -0400 (EDT) Date: Sat, 03 Oct 1998 18:31:40 -0400 From: Sara Lennox Subject: cultural materialism To: MatFem@csf.colorado.edu I have a question for the list. In the introduction to _Materialist Feminism: A Reader in Class, Difference, and Women's Lives_, Rosemary Hennessy and Chrys Ingraham say: "While many post-marxist feminists insist that their analyses are materialist and may even present themselves as materialist feminists, post-marxist feminism is in fact cultural materialism. Cultural materialism rejects a systemic, anticapitalist analysis linking the history of culture and meaning-making to capital's class system" (5). I am very curious to know how "cultural materialism" is being defined here: I know it as a term deriving from Raymond Williams and picked up by Dollimore and Sinfield. I'm also be curious to know who exactly Hennessy and Ingraham include under this category. Can anybody out there help me? Thanks a lot!--Sara Lennox From aaustin@utkux.utcc.utk.edu Sat Oct 3 16:47:32 1998 Date: Sat, 3 Oct 1998 18:47:27 -0400 (EDT) From: Andrew Wayne Austin To: MATERIALIST FEMINISM Subject: Re: cultural materialism In-Reply-To: Sara, Marvin Harris has also advanced an influential perspective he calls cultural materialism. Andy On Sat, 3 Oct 1998, Sara Lennox wrote: > I have a question for the list. In the introduction to _Materialist > Feminism: A Reader in Class, Difference, and Women's Lives_, Rosemary > Hennessy and Chrys Ingraham say: "While many post-marxist feminists insist > that their analyses are materialist and may even present themselves as > materialist feminists, post-marxist feminism is in fact cultural > materialism. Cultural materialism rejects a systemic, anticapitalist > analysis linking the history of culture and meaning-making to capital's > class system" (5). I am very curious to know how "cultural materialism" is > being defined here: I know it as a term deriving from Raymond Williams and > picked up by Dollimore and Sinfield. I'm also be curious to know who > exactly Hennessy and Ingraham include under this category. Can anybody out > there help me? > > Thanks a lot!--Sara Lennox > > > From dsiar@feist.com Sat Oct 3 18:43:37 1998 Date: Sat, 3 Oct 1998 19:42:30 -0500 (CDT) To: MatFem@csf.colorado.edu From: dsiar@feist.com (David Siar) Subject: Re: cultural materialism Sara, Although I can't speak for Professors Hennessey and Ingraham, I wrote something on (Williams') cultural materialism several years ago--as part of a longer essay focusing on Jonathan Dollimore's work--that I suspect shares some common ground with their views on the subject. I leave it to them, though, to comment on the applicability of the following criticism to "post-Marxist feminism": ______________________________________________________________________________ (beginning of excerpt) In _Marxism and Literature_ (1977) Raymond Williams presents a position that, in his words, "differs, at several key points, from what is most widely known as Marxist theory, and even from many of its variants": "It is a position which can be briefly described as cultural materialism: a theory of the specificities of material cultural and literary production within historical materialism. Its details belong to the argument as a whole, but I must say, at this point, that it is, in my view, a Marxist theory, and indeed that in its specific fields it is, in spite of and even because of the relative unfamiliarity of some of its elements, part of what I at least see as the central thinking of Marxism." (_Marxism and Literature_, 5-6) Like a number of other writers who have sought to break with what they perceived to be a deadening or misguided Marxist orthodoxy, Williams announces that what may appear to be new or revisionist in his work is in fact consistent with "the central thinking of Marxism." Williams is referring here to his belief that the whole social process, and cultural production in particular, is material. For Williams, this fundamental point was lost somewhere "in the transition from Marx to Marxism" (77). Recovering it, however, requires the rejection of one of the most frequently employed analytical tools of Marxist theory: the base/superstructure concept. In one of the more controversial chapters of Marxism and Literature, Williams argues that culture is not merely the ideological "epiphenomenon" of a "more real" material base but is itself material: "[T]he force of Marx's original criticism [of bourgeois idealist thinking] had been mainly directed against the separation of 'areas' of thought and activity (as in the separation of consciousness from material production) and against the related evacuation of specific content--real human activities--by the imposition of abstract categories. The common abstraction of 'the base' and 'the superstructure' is thus a radical persistence of the modes of thought which he attacked." (78) Although Williams claims warrant for his position from Marx himself, Terry Eagleton, among others, has raised some strong objections to Williams' criticism and apparent abandonment of the base/superstructure concept. In a recent essay on this subject, Eagleton asks: "If everything is 'material,' can the term logically retain any force? From what does it differentiate itself?" ("Base and Superstructure" 171). More importantly, Eagleton argues that in giving up the notion of an economic base which is determinant in the last instance, Williams deprives Marxism of its power to explain historical change and promote revolutionary praxis (168-69). Williams does indeed say at one point in Marxism and Literature that "[d]etermination . . . is in the whole social process itself and nowhere else: not in an abstracted 'mode of production' . . ." (87). However, he also believes, along with orthodox Marxists, that there are such things as class-divided societies, in which dominant groups exert "pressures" and set "limits" on subordinate groups. Paraphrasing Gramsci, Williams notes that in times of crisis, dominance (or "rule") in these societies is coercively "expressed in directly political forms"; however, "the more normal situation is a complex interlocking of political, social, and cultural forces" (109) that may "be seen as the lived dominance and subordination of particular classes" (110). This "more normal situation" is that of "hegemony," a concept that Williams believes explains the social process far better than the abstract, mechanical notion of base/superstructure. It also provides "a whole different way of seeing cultural activity, both as tradition and as practice": "Cultural work and activity are not now, in any ordinary sense, a superstructure: not only because of the depth and thoroughness at which any cultural hegemony is lived, but because cultural tradition and practice are seen as much more than superstructural expressions--reflections, mediations, or typifications--of a formed social and economic structure. On the contrary, they are among the basic processes of the formation itself and, further, related to a much wider area of reality than the abstractions of 'social' and 'economic' experience. . . . [A]ll . . . active experiences and practices, which make up so much of the reality of a culture and its cultural production can be seen as they are, without reduction to other categories of content, and without the characteristic straining to fit them (directly as reflection, indirectly as mediation or typification of analogy) to other and determining manifest economic and political relationships. Yet they can still be seen as elements of a hegemony: an inclusive social and cultural formation which indeed to be effective has to extend to and include, indeed to form and be formed from, this whole area of lived experience." (111) For Williams, Marxist "reflection" theory and its variants, "mediation" and "typification," are the offspring of the base/superstructure concept. Abandoning that concept therefore obviates the need for the kind of theoretical acrobatics engaged in by earlier Marxists such as Lukács, Adorno, and Goldmann, who strained to relate literature, either directly or indirectly, to economic determinants. Although Williams clearly believes that hegemony is the answer to a Marxist theory gone astray, one could also claim that a vestige of the base/superstructure model remains visible in his work in that he retains the Marxist notion of the class struggles that occur within the relations of production. But while he "found[s] the unity and directedness of a social formation on the dominance of an 'intending' class-subject," as Eagleton has commented, he fails to answer the classical Marxist question of "what then determines this domination, for determinacy and domination are by no means identical" ("Base and Superstructure" 170). Of course, the orthodox Marxist answer to this question is: ownership of the means of production. Given his working-class background, and his life-long commitment to socialist politics, Williams certainly understands that one's insertion within the mode of production has everything to do with one's class status. And I will also note that, when pressed in an interview (conducted several years after the publication of _Marxism and Literature_) to defend his argument that "all elements of the social order are equal because they are all material" (Williams, _Politics and Letters_ 351), he conceded that "there are forms of material production which always and everywhere precede all other forms." Nevertheless, he also maintained that "cultural practices are forms of material production, and that until this is understood it is impossible to think about them in their real social relations--there can only ever be a second order of correlation" (353). _______________________________________ (end of excerpt) Regards, David Siar From lennox@german.umass.edu Sat Oct 3 21:59:19 1998 Sat, 3 Oct 1998 23:59:13 -0400 (EDT) Date: Sat, 03 Oct 1998 23:59:04 -0400 From: Sara Lennox Subject: Re: cultural materialism In-reply-to: To: MatFem@csf.colorado.edu Thank you, David, your explanation of cultural materialism is very helpful. Where is your piece published? I'd like to read and cite the whole thing. So now I have another question for the list. Are other soi-disant materialist feminists being criticized in Materialist Feminism: A Reader, because they too are arguing for the materiality of culture? AND, if that is the case, how is what they are doing different from Hennessy's repudiation of economism and arguments for the "materiality of discourse" in Materialist Feminism and the Politics of Discourse? Again, thanks for everyone's help!--Sara From hennessy@cnsvax.albany.edu Tue Oct 6 10:06:08 1998 From: hennessy@cnsvax.albany.edu To: MatFem@csf.colorado.edu Date: Tue, 6 Oct 1998 12:06:07 -0500 Subject: Re: cultural materialism In-reply-to: This is a reply to a post from Sara Lennox on two questions1) what constitutes "cultural materialism" in relation to marxist feminism and 2) what Chrys and I mean in the "Introduction" to Materialist Feminism: A Reader when we say that that some so-called "materialist feminists" are in fact "cultural materialists." I found David's reply very helpful in sorting our Raymond William's contribution to the concept "cultural materialism." Generally, as his piece indicates, cultural materialism is related to the New Left effort to abandon the base-superstructure explanation of social life and direct theoretical attention to the materiality of culture. The benefit of this shift was that marxist social theory could move away from a reductively determinist understanding of the relationship between the division of labor and cultural forms under capitalism (economism) and begin to develop (via Gramsci especially) more complex understandings of the materiality of culture in its relation to capitalist economic (and political) structures. The downside has been a retreat from class entirely so that the materiality of culture substitutes for the materiality of social life. As David indicated, some of the dabates over the base-superstructure metaphor turn on what is meant by "materiality." Whether Williams is seen as finally promoting this post-marxist disjoining of culture from class depends on how you read him. My own sense, like Davids's, is that there remains a strong bottom-line connection between class and culture in Williams, and that his arguments for the materiality of culture can and need to be read/appropriated from that thread in his work. One of the reasons the term "materialist feminism" has become for me--and some other feminists--a less useful term than it once was is that it is being and has been used by feminists who embrace it to signal repudiation of capitalism's economic base and an alternative move toward over-riding cultural analysis that abandons any effort to connect culture to class. Materialist feminism can be read, in other words, as 'post-marxist" feminism. And in the work of some feminists it is precisely this: Judith Butler uses the phrase to describe her own work, and a host of other feminists, many of whom were once identified as socialist or marxist feminists have moved in this direction regardless of whether they use the label "materialist Feminist": Michelle Barrett, Chantal Mouffe, Zillah Eisenstein, Nancy Fraser--to name a few. Landry and Mc Lean's Materialist Feminisms (Blackwell 93) endorses this post-marxist materialism. While capitalism may be mentioned in this work, the link between culture and the economy is not addressed. At times this is so because the "materialism" is a Foucauldian or post-structuralist materialism grounded in discourse and repudiating the possibility of any non-discursive material reality as is the case for Butler, for instance. Since writing Materialist Feminism and the Politics of Discourse, my own thinking has shifted from calling for an interdeterminate "systemic analysis" to stressing more the need to develop causal analyses that can more clearly connect cultural forms to economic processes under capitalism. This need not mean a return to a reductive economism, but rather developing analysis that acknowledges capitalism fundamentally relies on the extraction of surplus value and explains of the historical role of cultural forms in that process. This shift is evident in my contribution to the Introductory essay in the Reader--beginning with its title. The reason for this shift in emphasis in my work is that it has seemed to me in the intervening years that the rush to post-marxist cultural materialism has become a very suspicious and even conservative mainstream of academic feminism. Or, to put it another way, it has seemed to me imperative for feminist workers in the over-industrialized world to make visible the relationship between cultural forms (and politics) and the violent relationships of exploitation capitalism necessarily and persistently relies on precisely because there is so much ideological invitation/pressure to keep them invisible, and because many of us, as middle-class academics, get lulled into thinking that exploitation does not touch our lives so it is no longer relevant. The phrase "marxist feminism" conveys the need for class analysis more than "materialist feminism." In fact, we wanted to title the reader "marxist feminism" but ran into objections from the publisher. "Marxist feminism" has its own problems as a signifier. One way around one of them is to use the lower case "m." I hope these comments are useful, Sara. And thanks Mine for sending this post on to me! Rosemary Hennessy@cnsvax.albany.edu From dhenwood@panix.com Tue Oct 6 11:28:46 1998 Date: Tue, 6 Oct 1998 13:28:33 -0400 To: MatFem@csf.colorado.edu From: Doug Henwood Subject: Re: cultural materialism hennessy@cnsvax.albany.edu wrote: >Since writing Materialist Feminism and the Politics of Discourse, my >own thinking has shifted from calling for an interdeterminate >"systemic analysis" to stressing more the need to develop causal >analyses that can more clearly connect cultural forms to economic >processes under capitalism. What do folks here think of Bourdieu's notion of a field of cultural production as a way of allowing for partial autonomy and "ultimate" determination? Doug From pvh@leftside.wcape.school.za Tue Oct 6 12:38:40 1998 id 0zQc0B-0005Eh-00 Date: Tue, 6 Oct 1998 20:35:21 +0200 (SAT) From: Peter van Heusden To: MATERIALIST FEMINISM Subject: Re: cultural materialism Following on from Rosemary Hennessey's explanation of her analysis of "materialist feminism" as a shift away from a class basis from analysis, I've got another question: If we take seriously the challenges posed by making culture an important part of our work in transforming society, and we accept the argument that culture (in its creation, etc) is related to the way production is structured (in our case, damn viscious capitalism), how do we analyse the structure of the current 'intellectual milieu' - how is it related to the class struggle, and what are the most urgent tasks in this regard? I ask this question both on the level of 'formal' intellectual work in academia, and also on the level of 'popular culture' (are the shifts in the professional intellectual layer impacting on 'popular culture' and if so, how?). What I really am trying to get at is probably best explained by analogy - Antonio Gramsci spent a lot of time pondering the legacy of culture that he had to deal with, its social base, and how to address it. Specifically, he looked at the question of Benetto Croce's place in Italian culture, and how to address (and attack) this legacy. In today's environment, what similar questions should be posed? How can we take forward these questions in our organisations? Peter P.S. to give a very simple example, I think things like the ideology of the Oprah Winfrey show (the fave talk show in South Africa) need to be addressed in the paper I write for - I'd be interested in where to start on things like this. -- Peter van Heusden | Its the 90's, and collective action is STILL cool! pvh@leftside.wcape.school.za | Get active in your union today! From lennox@german.umass.edu Tue Oct 6 17:01:54 1998 MatFem@csf.colorado.edu; Tue, 6 Oct 1998 19:01:35 -0400 (EDT) Date: Tue, 06 Oct 1998 19:01:31 -0400 From: Sara Lennox Subject: Re: cultural materialism To: MatFem@csf.colorado.edu, Hennessy@cnsvax.albany.edu Thank you so much, Rosemary--your response is very helpful and clarifies a lot, including what I had already perceived as a shift from your 1993 book to the reader. If anyone is interested, I'd like very much to continue discussing these issues (though I'll be out of town from tomorrow noon till Sunday, so don't expect an immediate reply from me.) (I've been somewhat bemused by the flood of messages that pour in every day from the Marxist feminist list and the silence from MatFem--maybe because everyone's STILL confused about what MatFem is?) I think I'm particularly interested in two questions: first, what do you all think about post-Althusserian postmodern marxism, the notion of overdetermination, and the renunciation of the sole determining power of the economy even in the "last instance"?--here in Amherst it is of course that is quite a popular position, a la the journal Rethinking Marxism. And secondly, what does "material" or "materiality' actually mean (as in e.g. the "materiality of discourse") for marxist/materialist feminists in the nineties, and how far can we stretch that term before it ceases to have any meaning? (AND, if those questions get solved, I'd also be interested to know how a return to an emphasis on the economic affects the conception of the discursively-constructed subject?) Knowing some of my friends who subscribe to this list, I KNOW there are people out there who can make interesting contributions to this discussion! Best, Sara At 12:06 PM -0500 10/6/98, hennessy@cnsvax.albany.edu wrote: >This is a reply to a post from Sara Lennox on two questions1) what >constitutes "cultural materialism" in relation to marxist feminism >and 2) what Chrys and I mean in the "Introduction" to Materialist >Feminism: A Reader when we say that that some so-called "materialist >feminists" are in fact "cultural materialists." > >I found David's reply very helpful in sorting our Raymond William's >contribution to the concept "cultural materialism." Generally, as >his piece indicates, cultural materialism is related to the New Left >effort to abandon the base-superstructure explanation of social life >and direct theoretical attention to the materiality of culture. The >benefit of this shift was that marxist social theory could move away >from a reductively determinist understanding of the relationship >between the division of labor and cultural forms under capitalism >(economism) and begin to develop (via Gramsci especially) more >complex understandings of the materiality of culture in its relation >to capitalist economic (and political) structures. The downside has >been a retreat from class entirely so that the materiality of >culture substitutes for the materiality of social life. As David >indicated, some of the dabates over the base-superstructure metaphor >turn on what is meant by "materiality." Whether Williams is seen as >finally promoting this post-marxist disjoining of culture from class >depends on how you read him. My own sense, like Davids's, is that >there remains a strong bottom-line connection between >class and culture in Williams, and that his arguments for the >materiality of culture can and need to be read/appropriated from that >thread in his work. > >One of the reasons the term "materialist feminism" has become for >me--and some other feminists--a less useful term than it once was is >that it is being and has been used by feminists who embrace it to >signal repudiation of capitalism's economic base and an alternative >move toward over-riding cultural analysis that abandons any effort >to connect culture to class. Materialist feminism can be read, in >other words, as 'post-marxist" feminism. And in the work of some >feminists it is precisely this: Judith Butler uses the phrase to >describe her own work, and a host of other feminists, many of whom >were once identified as socialist or marxist feminists have moved >in this direction regardless of whether they use the label >"materialist Feminist": Michelle Barrett, Chantal Mouffe, Zillah >Eisenstein, Nancy Fraser--to name a few. Landry and Mc Lean's >Materialist Feminisms (Blackwell 93) endorses this post-marxist >materialism. While capitalism may be mentioned in this work, the >link between culture and the economy is not addressed. At times >this is so because the "materialism" is a Foucauldian or >post-structuralist materialism grounded in discourse and >repudiating the possibility of any non-discursive material >reality as is the case for Butler, for instance. > >Since writing Materialist Feminism and the Politics of Discourse, my >own thinking has shifted from calling for an interdeterminate >"systemic analysis" to stressing more the need to develop causal >analyses that can more clearly connect cultural forms to economic >processes under capitalism. This need not mean a return to a >reductive economism, but rather developing analysis that >acknowledges capitalism fundamentally relies on the extraction of >surplus value and explains of the historical role of cultural >forms in that process. This shift is evident in my contribution to >the Introductory essay in the Reader--beginning with its title. >The reason for this shift in emphasis in my work is that it has >seemed to me in the intervening years that the rush to post-marxist >cultural materialism has become a very suspicious and even >conservative mainstream of academic feminism. Or, to put it another >way, it has seemed to me imperative for feminist workers in the >over-industrialized world to make visible the relationship between >cultural forms (and politics) and the violent relationships of >exploitation capitalism necessarily and persistently relies on >precisely because there is so much ideological invitation/pressure to >keep them invisible, and because many of us, as middle-class >academics, get lulled into thinking that exploitation does not touch >our lives so it is no longer relevant. The phrase "marxist feminism" >conveys the need for class analysis more than "materialist feminism." >In fact, we wanted to title the reader "marxist feminism" but ran >into objections from the publisher. "Marxist feminism" has its own >problems as a signifier. One way around one of them is to use the >lower case "m." > >I hope these comments are useful, Sara. >And thanks Mine for sending this post on to me! > >Rosemary >Hennessy@cnsvax.albany.edu From md7148@cnsvax.albany.edu Wed Oct 7 11:16:26 1998 Date: Wed, 07 Oct 1998 13:17:36 -0400 (EDT) From: md7148@cnsvax.albany.edu Subject: Re: cultural materialism To: MatFem@csf.colorado.edu Reply-to: md7148@cnsvax.albany.edu mine writes: could somebody please clarify to which list we are subscribed? mat-fem or m-fem? i am subscribed to both, but as i see some people from m-fem read rosemary's post before i distributed to the list(like peter and doug). these people are either subscribed to the mat-fem list or the messages sent to mat-fem also go to m-fem list? i am confused... sara wrote: >If anyone is interested, I'd like very much to continue discussing these >issues (though I'll be out of town from tomorrow noon till Sunday, so >don't >expect an immediate reply from me.) (I've been somewhat bemused by the >flood of messages that pour in every day from the Marxist feminist list >and >the silence from MatFem--maybe because everyone's STILL confused about >what >MatFem is?) right, we should activate mat-fem. let's continue discussing cultural materialism. i like the topic.. >I think I'm particularly interested in two questions: >first, >what do you all think about post-Althusserian postmodern marxism, the >notion of overdetermination, and the renunciation of the sole determining >power of the economy even in the "last instance"?--here in Amherst it is >of >course that is quite a popular position, a la the journal Rethinking >Marxism. actually i was also thinking about that. we can compare the marxist position of williams to that of althusser's for instance. this base-superstructure distinction is again confusing me. if i correctly understand rosemary and david, williams draws attention to the 'primacy' of culture by trying to escape from the orthodox marxist position which conveys the idea that material forces shape our cultural perceptions. his aim is to avoid economic determinism and a causal explanation of a cultural phenemonen (which i do not think it exists in marx. yeah, it depends on how you read him) he, instead, argues that culture is 'itself' material, and we should blur the classical distiction between culture and economy. this approach is useful in the sense that it uncovers the 'latent' idealism in marxist thinking-- namely that superstuctures will wither away with the demise of capitalism. in that sense, williams is right in arguing that culture is important even more than the orthodox marxists beleive it is. making culture visible is okey but the problem here is that how can williams even talk about the 'materiality' of culture by minimizing the role of material forces. how can 'cultural' be 'material' without having a material basis? is eliminating the distinction between culture and economy always useful? especially for political purposes? (the same argument can be done with respect to sex and gender, which andy and i were debating). i am also not quite sure whether williams is totally abondoning this distinction (base-superstructure) like most of the post-structuralists of our age who tend to reduce everything to discourses or social construction. is that correct? i have to run now, i will continue later? bye, mine albany/new york From kekula@aloha.net Wed Oct 7 12:21:56 1998 From: kekula@aloha.net In-Reply-To: Date: Wed, 7 Oct 1998 08:26:13 -1000 To: MatFem@csf.colorado.edu Subject: Re: cultural materialism I'd like to unsub to both or either... anyone want to help out? At 1:17 PM -0400 10/7/98, md7148@cnsvax.albany.edu wrote: >mine writes: > >could somebody please clarify to which list we are subscribed? mat-fem or >m-fem? i am subscribed to both, but as i see some people from >m-fem read rosemary's post before i distributed to the list(like >peter and doug). these people are either subscribed to the mat-fem list >or the messages sent to mat-fem also go to m-fem list? i am confused... > >sara wrote: > >>If anyone is interested, I'd like very much to continue discussing these >>issues (though I'll be out of town from tomorrow noon till Sunday, so >>don't >>expect an immediate reply from me.) (I've been somewhat bemused by the >>flood of messages that pour in every day from the Marxist feminist list >>and >>the silence from MatFem--maybe because everyone's STILL confused about >>what >>MatFem is?) > >right, we should activate mat-fem. > > >let's continue discussing cultural materialism. i like the topic.. > >>I think I'm particularly interested in two questions: >>first, >>what do you all think about post-Althusserian postmodern marxism, the >>notion of overdetermination, and the renunciation of the sole determining >>power of the economy even in the "last instance"?--here in Amherst it is >>of >>course that is quite a popular position, a la the journal Rethinking >>Marxism. > >actually i was also thinking about that. we can compare the marxist >position of williams to that of althusser's for instance. > >this base-superstructure distinction is again confusing me. if i correctly >understand rosemary and david, williams draws attention to the >'primacy' of culture by trying to escape from the orthodox marxist >position which conveys the idea that material forces shape our cultural >perceptions. his aim is to avoid economic determinism and a causal >explanation of a cultural phenemonen (which i do not think it exists in >marx. yeah, it depends on how you read him) he, instead, argues that >culture is 'itself' material, and we should blur the classical distiction >between culture and economy. this approach is useful in the sense that it >uncovers the 'latent' idealism in marxist thinking-- namely that >superstuctures will wither away with the demise of capitalism. in that >sense, williams is right in arguing that culture is important even more >than the orthodox marxists beleive it is. making culture visible is okey >but the problem here is that how can williams even talk about the >'materiality' of culture by minimizing the role of material forces. how >can 'cultural' be 'material' without having a material basis? is >eliminating the distinction between culture and economy always useful? >especially for political purposes? (the same argument can be done with >respect to sex and gender, which andy and i were debating). > >i am also not quite sure whether williams is totally abondoning this >distinction (base-superstructure) like most of the post-structuralists of >our age who tend to reduce everything to discourses or social >construction. is that correct? > >i have to run now, i will continue later? > > >bye, >mine >albany/new york From mikashy@yorku.ca Sun Oct 18 10:55:07 1998 Date: Sun, 18 Oct 1998 12:57:39 To: MatFem@csf.colorado.edu From: mikashy@yorku.ca Subject: Strategies of Critique 13 - Call For Papers Please post, copy, and/or forward to listservs, distribution lists, friends, colleagues and the like. Thanks for your help and your interest, and we apologize in advance for any duplications. Mike Palamarek Chair, Social and Political Thought Graduate Students Association * * * The Graduate Programme in Social & Political Thought announces its annual graduate student conference: Strategies of Critique 13: Superstition March 26, 27, 1 999 / York University, Toronto, Ontario Between knowledge and belief, at the crossroads of science and myth, is born an epistemological hybrid -- 1/2 method, 1/2 ritual -- that mediates historical and political practices. What critical exorcisms, whose manifestations, and which metamorphoses haunt the site of SUPERSTITION? 13 session ideas: Political Prognostications Necromancy of the Nation Epistemological Auguries Lust for the Apocalypse The Gender of the Beast Rites of the Subject Parapraxes Semiotic Spells Conjuring Evidence Sacred Technologies Spectres and Speculations Possessions and the Dispossessed The Rational Kernel in the Mystical Shell Graduate students are invited to submit a 200-word proposal for a paper, performance, or video presentation by Tuesday, December 1st, 1998. All proposals will be blind reviewed. Presentations should be approximately 20 minutes. Send all proposals and inquiries via email, fax or mail to: STRATEGIES OF CRITIQUE 13: SUPERSTITION c/o Graduate Programme in Social & Political Thought York University Room S716 Ross Building 4700 Keele Street Toronto Ontario Canada M3J 1P3 Email: Mike Palamarek, mikashy@yorku.ca Fax: (416) 650-8075 http://www.yorku.ca/org/spot/ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Mike Palamarek Ph.D. Candidate Graduate Programme in Social and Political Thought York University Toronto, Ontario mikashy@yorku.ca ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ From dsiar@feist.com Fri Oct 23 19:04:27 1998 Date: Fri, 23 Oct 1998 20:04:19 -0500 (CDT) To: MatFem@csf.colorado.edu From: dsiar@feist.com (David Siar) Subject: Re: _Cultural Logic_ review Dear Doug, I know you don't know me from Adam, and I certainly don't want to seem pushy; nevertheless, I wanted to ask you if you've had a chance to glance at our Website and/or given any thought to my offer about doing that review of _Historical Materialism_. Regards, Dave Siar