Marxism and Deconstruction: A Critical Articulation (review)

150 the minnesota review Michael Ryan. Marxism and Deconstruction: A Critical Articulation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982. xvi +232 pp. $18.50 (cloth). IrondaUy, it is at the very moment that it is opening itself up dialectically to the field of critical thought that Marxism is coming under attack as a reification of thought, a static codification, an anachronism. Even more ironically, Marxism's attackers often run for authority to figures who themselves see thdr own engagement with Marxism as open, ambivalent , in process (e.g., Foucault, Barthes, Derrida). Michael Ryan's Marxism and Deconstruction is important as one demonstration of the possiWUty of interactive contact between various camps of contemporary radical investigation . Although he begins his study with an avowed Marxism within which deconstruction will function as a local tactical tool (his word), the trajectory of the book is such that Marxism and deconstruction emerge transformed at the end, mutated into a new practice of analytic attack and ideological démystification. Ryan's book is a contribution to the development of that ongoing tradition that has come to be known as Western Marxism: a tradition that overthrows economist definitions of sodai reaUty to argue instead the multiply determined and determining force of social practices (whether of base or super-structure, as they are classically constituted in the economist discourse). Western Marxism focuses as much on poUtics, culture, ideology, desire as on "laws" of economic production; for such a focus, it makes necessary recourse to nonMarxist methods of critical analysis. Echoing Alvin Gouldner's study of the "Two Marxisms ," Ryan argues that one sort of Marxism should indeed become an anachronism: economist, centrist, authoritative, sdentistic Marxism. By emphasizing means of production (the technirist control of a resistant nature) rather than relations of production (the ideological investments in work, the tensions of class), this Marxism, Ryan argues, cannot account for the poUtics of sexuaUty, race, everyday Ufe, cultural representation, except by repressing the specificity of these spheres (so that, for example, as Ryan, quoting Shdla Rowbotham, notes, British soriaUsm has a history of telUng feminism that attention to the struggle of women will come after economic struggle). Against a sdentific Marxism that would encode social reaUty within the limits of ostensibly iron-clad laws (and, consequently, would erect certain figures—for example, a vanguard party—as the authoritative interpreters of the law), Ryan suggests that French deconstruction might help Marxism maintain an open-endedness, an attention to those poUtical margins too often ignored by centrist forms of poUtical practice. Using deconstruction's reading strategy of suggesting that terms in hierarchies actuaUy infiltrate each other, Ryan provides a number of exemplary readings (of, among others, Habermas, Lenin, modern liberalism, commodity fetishism) to show how a deconstructive politics could show up the fictiveness, instabiUty, and vulneraWUty of hierarchies. For example , in reading Habermas' call for a politics of transparency, a dialogue ofunambiguous redprodty, Ryan echoes Derrida's critique of speech-act theory to argue that, like such theory, Habermasian politics can only make its call for discursive clarity by repressing what strikes it as aberrant, eccentric (which can indude a politics of the unconsdous, of desire, of the body as non-discursive practice). Ryan does not argue, though, that deconstruction is an automatically radical strategy. As he well notes, its utilization in America has all too often been conservative in form; for example , in uterary criticism (as in the work of J. HiIHs Miller or Joseph RiddeU), deconstruction has served as a new form ofaesthetidsm, an ideological promotion ofaesthetic activity as ostensibly the sole activity to break from dominant signification towards its margins. To be able to use deconstruction radically, Ryan suggests, requires a historirizationof its categories and precepts. As Ryan notes, deconstruction too often seems to reject economic explanation only to faU for another sort of determinism: a superstructural one in which concepts, philosophical ideas, are believed to have a determining Ufe and force of thdr own. In contrast, Ryan caUs for a deconstruction that would be an analysis of the institutionaUzation of concepts, their embedding in particular situations. Indeed, one of the 151 reviews strong points of Marxism and Deconstruction is the concrete and detailed analysis that Ryan provides of...