Critique of Political Reason, and: The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (review)

144 the minnesota review Lippard has just been fired from the Voice for "bad writing . . . narrow subject matter . . . fuzzy politics . . . lack of aesthetic judgement and principle . . . boring content . . . predictability " (The Village Voice, June 1, 1985, p. 92)—in other words, for not being a nice conventional art critic, for resisting the Voice's own slide away from politics to unfettered yuppie-dom, together with its audience. She and her column will now recamp at In These Times, while of course continuing her work with Heresies. My advice for readers of this review, then, is not only to buy and read this book, but to join her wherever she is—Lucy Lippard is an essential movement resource, arguably the most powerful, provocative, engaged and open voice calling and working for a popular political art in the U.S. today. FRED PFEIL Critique of Political Reason by Regis Debray. Trans. David Macey. London: Verso Editions , 1983. 361 pp. $11.50 (paper). The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge by Jean-Francois Lyotard. Trans. Geoff Bennington & Brian Massumi. Foreword by Fredric Jameson. Theory and History of Literature, Vol. 10. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. xxi + 1 10 pp. $8.95 (paper); $19.50 (cloth). "Are you a Marxist?"—What kind of question is that? For Régis Debray, it is symptomatic of the status of Marxism. Imagine asking a physicist whether s/he is an Einsteinian: the question doesn't make much sense; science, discourse without a subject, forgoes the guarantee provided by the proper name of its founder in favor of guarantee by technique. The fact that the question "Are you a Marxist?" is asked—and can be answered—means that Marxism is more than just a science: it is also an "ideology," by which Debray means a social body of institutions, roles, and discourses organized along the lines of a religious movement. His Critique ofPolitical Reason aims to lay bare the fundamental laws of social organization; as the Kantian (or Sartrean) title suggests, he claims to elucidate the apriori "conditions of existence and functioning of stable human groups" (p. 30). These laws are applicable to nation-states, sororities, political parties, football fans, and guerilla bands alike, but they are most fully developed, according to Debray, in "great world religions" such as Islam and Christianity. Being a "Marxist," then, may have more in common with being a Baptist than with being a physicist; yet a basically religious form of social organization , Debray argues, is an absolute necessity if Marxism (or any other political movement) is to be an effective force in world history. This is not to say that Debray considers Marx's analysis of the political economy of capitalism anything less than scientific; the problems lie elsewhere. As is well known, Marx provided no complete theory of politics or the nation-state, and Debray considers this the single most important blind spot in Marx's theory. What's more, the theory ofideology that Marx did develop is, according to Debray, totally inadequate. Marx and Marxism's first mistake was to conceive ideology cognitively, in relation to science; to consider ideology a set of false ideas compared to the true ideas provided by historical materialism. Once people's illusions were dispelled, so the enlightenmenthumanist argument went, they would be able to act in accordance with their rational selfinterest and change their world for the better. What this vision ignored, according to Debray, is that action is conditioned by belief more than by reason, and belief in turn is conditioned by belonging to a social group. Ideology, as Debray understands it, is thus not primarily a conception of the real world, but rather the cement of social bonds, a mode of organizing individuals into social groups. It is not so much an epistemologica!problem as a reviews 145 practical one, a matter not of rational cognition but of affective belief'and collective passion . In this respect, Debray's concept of ideology most closely resembles that of his former teacher, Louis Althusser (the only Marxist he cites approvingly): ideology is "coextensive with the existence of social relations (even communist social relations)" (p. 1 17), and has nothing to do with truth or accuracy (which...