Rethinking is a doozy
Attended the Rethinking Capitalism conference at UC Santa Cruz this past weekend. It's actually the first time I've sat through basically every session of a weekend-long conference; for various reasons, it was kind of an intense experience, and between that and being social most of yesterday in different ways, I feel like I'm just now returning to an equilibrium.
As for the conference itself, what stands out in retrospect? A friend remarked, and I paraphrase, that post-2008 the cultural studies left in the academy, defined around a poststructuralist structure of thought and an ethical commitment to thinking through difference in certain ways, found itself in crisis, and that this moment of theorizing capitalism / capitalist crisis was filling that space; he added that there were very positive things about this moment, but there was a danger in recreating a caricature of yesterday's Marxism, replicating the worst old obliviousness around gender and race. That dynamic was certainly noted about the conference, both in terms of who were featured speakers and in terms of a lack of feminist analysis and analysis of the racial dimensions of capitalism.
The closest thing to a feminist analytic dimension was provided by a few anthropologists on various panels. In part due to time constraints (as discussants or moderators), they tended to raise a rather abstract banner of "the specific" rather than actually performing a different kind of analysis. (The basic point being that, instead of positing a broad theoretical matrix for understanding capitalism that is abstracted from historical and local specifics, we should theorize in a way that is alongside and more intermeshed with those specifics.)
Given that this particular debate has been raging at Santa Cruz for several years, it would have been nice to see an entire panel devoted to it - maybe with Anna Tsing and others who do this kind of work in interesting ways presenting, and political economists as discussants. The conversation does seem to replicate a weird set of gender dynamics in an intellectual debate, oftentimes, in the way that, at this conference, the political economists just ignored the anthropologists. It was very much a "this business about the specific is nice, dear, but we're having serious economic conversation here" kind of vibe.
For that matter, there's a whole arena of feminist political economy that was completely missed, as well.
An interesting debate from the standpoint of the kind of work I do broke out in one of the final sessions. Wendy Brown was facilitating. First, she complimented UC Santa Cruz undergrads, in a slightly patronizing but nevertheless generous way. Then a couple of additional undergrads spoke, basically asking the panelists to speak to the question of how their analyses of capitalism related to our struggle to save the university. Wendy Brown rebuked them, saying that their approach was tantamount to saying that knowledge needed to be immediately useful, and that this replicated the instrumentalist logic of neoliberalism. A subsequent speaker rebuked Brown, but the whole moment felt like a theory-praxis moment missed.
I asked a parallel question, actually; I was so nervous about speaking in front of this particular grouping of 200 people that I think I sounded like a complete idiot. (I've *mostly* recovered my equilibrium, but there may still be some lingering embarrassment.) What I was trying to get at was kind of a basic, related point about the relationship between analysis and strategy. If we believe, as I do, that one of the living things in Marx is the notion that "the point is to change it," that is, the point of what we're doing isn't contemplation of the world but revolutionizing human practices, consciously, then we should think explicitly about how these different analyses of capitalism and its crisis relate to different strategic commitments. The situation of the public education did come up, but the strategic possibilities presented were pretty minimal and under-nuanced: "communization," "go to Sacramento."
I have been leaning on some negatives here, and haven't mentioned some of the positives of this conference. For one thing, it is one of the first times I've been in a room with Marxists and some mainstream economists, even an accounting professor. The "mainstream" was decidedly the minority at this conference, and even though some sessions created better conversations than others, the possibility of that kind of conversation seemed worthwhile. Secondly, this conference did actually develop a set of conversations in an ongoing way over the course of the weekend, and the majority of the main panelists seemed interesting in engaging with each other for the purpose of common understanding. That is actually quite a rarity in academic conferences; usually when I go to conferences, I get the sense that each speaker is there for very individualistic purposes, to show off his knowledge and network, and sometimes there isn't even an attempt to communicate.
I suppose all of this anecdote is a prelude to thinking about any of this substantively, and I'm not sure whether I can manage that or not. Maybe not right now. I suppose I am still sitting with this idea of economic projection. I've long felt that Marxist economics are dysfunctional because of a certain perpetual, one-note crisis-mongering. Affectively, it tends to go into waiting around for The Crisis which will be the salvation of the Left, and the damnation of all these stupid sheep. Doing the work it would take to not only understand economic theories, but have an opinion on which ones should actually guide our understanding, seems like an enormous effort, and I've shirked that effort. However, I do think that one can be rightly critical of a certain affective stance that gets wrapped up with crisis theory while failing to take on some real, underlying issues, which are as much about the current dynamics of capitalism as they are about some kind of crystal-ball-gazing. This conference was provocative for me around those issues.
As for the conference itself, what stands out in retrospect? A friend remarked, and I paraphrase, that post-2008 the cultural studies left in the academy, defined around a poststructuralist structure of thought and an ethical commitment to thinking through difference in certain ways, found itself in crisis, and that this moment of theorizing capitalism / capitalist crisis was filling that space; he added that there were very positive things about this moment, but there was a danger in recreating a caricature of yesterday's Marxism, replicating the worst old obliviousness around gender and race. That dynamic was certainly noted about the conference, both in terms of who were featured speakers and in terms of a lack of feminist analysis and analysis of the racial dimensions of capitalism.
The closest thing to a feminist analytic dimension was provided by a few anthropologists on various panels. In part due to time constraints (as discussants or moderators), they tended to raise a rather abstract banner of "the specific" rather than actually performing a different kind of analysis. (The basic point being that, instead of positing a broad theoretical matrix for understanding capitalism that is abstracted from historical and local specifics, we should theorize in a way that is alongside and more intermeshed with those specifics.)
Given that this particular debate has been raging at Santa Cruz for several years, it would have been nice to see an entire panel devoted to it - maybe with Anna Tsing and others who do this kind of work in interesting ways presenting, and political economists as discussants. The conversation does seem to replicate a weird set of gender dynamics in an intellectual debate, oftentimes, in the way that, at this conference, the political economists just ignored the anthropologists. It was very much a "this business about the specific is nice, dear, but we're having serious economic conversation here" kind of vibe.
For that matter, there's a whole arena of feminist political economy that was completely missed, as well.
An interesting debate from the standpoint of the kind of work I do broke out in one of the final sessions. Wendy Brown was facilitating. First, she complimented UC Santa Cruz undergrads, in a slightly patronizing but nevertheless generous way. Then a couple of additional undergrads spoke, basically asking the panelists to speak to the question of how their analyses of capitalism related to our struggle to save the university. Wendy Brown rebuked them, saying that their approach was tantamount to saying that knowledge needed to be immediately useful, and that this replicated the instrumentalist logic of neoliberalism. A subsequent speaker rebuked Brown, but the whole moment felt like a theory-praxis moment missed.
I asked a parallel question, actually; I was so nervous about speaking in front of this particular grouping of 200 people that I think I sounded like a complete idiot. (I've *mostly* recovered my equilibrium, but there may still be some lingering embarrassment.) What I was trying to get at was kind of a basic, related point about the relationship between analysis and strategy. If we believe, as I do, that one of the living things in Marx is the notion that "the point is to change it," that is, the point of what we're doing isn't contemplation of the world but revolutionizing human practices, consciously, then we should think explicitly about how these different analyses of capitalism and its crisis relate to different strategic commitments. The situation of the public education did come up, but the strategic possibilities presented were pretty minimal and under-nuanced: "communization," "go to Sacramento."
I have been leaning on some negatives here, and haven't mentioned some of the positives of this conference. For one thing, it is one of the first times I've been in a room with Marxists and some mainstream economists, even an accounting professor. The "mainstream" was decidedly the minority at this conference, and even though some sessions created better conversations than others, the possibility of that kind of conversation seemed worthwhile. Secondly, this conference did actually develop a set of conversations in an ongoing way over the course of the weekend, and the majority of the main panelists seemed interesting in engaging with each other for the purpose of common understanding. That is actually quite a rarity in academic conferences; usually when I go to conferences, I get the sense that each speaker is there for very individualistic purposes, to show off his knowledge and network, and sometimes there isn't even an attempt to communicate.
I suppose all of this anecdote is a prelude to thinking about any of this substantively, and I'm not sure whether I can manage that or not. Maybe not right now. I suppose I am still sitting with this idea of economic projection. I've long felt that Marxist economics are dysfunctional because of a certain perpetual, one-note crisis-mongering. Affectively, it tends to go into waiting around for The Crisis which will be the salvation of the Left, and the damnation of all these stupid sheep. Doing the work it would take to not only understand economic theories, but have an opinion on which ones should actually guide our understanding, seems like an enormous effort, and I've shirked that effort. However, I do think that one can be rightly critical of a certain affective stance that gets wrapped up with crisis theory while failing to take on some real, underlying issues, which are as much about the current dynamics of capitalism as they are about some kind of crystal-ball-gazing. This conference was provocative for me around those issues.