#significance despite never situating them in relation to actual political/historical trends/actions etc

[thevividgreenmoss]

For present purposes, it will be enough to cite a particularly compelling example to illustrate how this discourse is now being applied to what used to be called the "Third World." That example is found in the work of Gayatri Spivak, who once remarked that "Class is the purest form of signifier," implying that class is a "pure" linguistic symbol in the sense that it has no concrete referent in the material world.(1) From the vantage point of the sort of linguistic theory on which so many postmodernist discourse analysts draw, the quality of the referent is less important than the location of concepts like class in relation to other "signifiers." So Spivak is able to say, for instance, that "socialism" has "no historically adequate referent" in India, by which she means that Indian socialism did not originate in a truly indigenous tradition of socialist discourse. Aijaz Ahmad has recently commented on this observation in a way that nicely captures the postmodernist notion of "history." To be told that socialism has no "historically adequate referent" in India, he remarks, would come as a big surprise to all those millions of Indians who, for reasons having to do with their own experience of their own domestic capitalism and their own situation in its class divisions, regularly vote Communist. The "historical referent" for Indian socialism, in other words, is not some disembodied imperial "discourse" but Indian capitalism and a political practice "undertaken within India by Indian political subjects."

Other essays in this issue outline the main characteristics of postmodernist "discourse." For present purposes, it will be enough to cite a particularly compelling example to illustrate how this discourse is now being applied to what used to be called the "Third World." That example is found in the work of Gayatri Spivak, who once remarked that "Class is the purest form of signifier," implying that class is a "pure" linguistic symbol in the sense that it has no concrete referent in the material world.(1) From the vantage point of the sort of linguistic theory on which so many postmodernist discourse analysts draw, the quality of the referent is less important than the location of concepts like class in relation to other "signifiers." So Spivak is able to say, for instance, that "socialism" has "no historically adequate referent" in India, by which she means that Indian socialism did not originate in a truly indigenous tradition of socialist discourse. Aijaz Ahmad has recently commented on this observation in a way that nicely captures the postmodernist notion of "history." To be told that socialism has no "historically adequate referent" in India, he remarks, would come as a big surprise to all those millions of Indians who, for reasons having to do with their own experience of their own domestic capitalism and their own situation in its class divisions, regularly vote Communist. The "historical referent" for Indian socialism, in other words, is not some disembodied imperial "discourse" but Indian capitalism and a political practice "undertaken within India by Indian political subjects."

That is one way of summing up the difference between postmodernism and Marxism. It isn't that Marxism is uninterested in language, discourse, or meaning, and the best historical-materialist work deals precisely with the many different concrete referents that words like "class" or "work" can have in specific historical conditions. But here I simply want to underline that Marxism can understand the practices through which meanings are produced in relation to the actions of people on and in the world and not just in relation to other meanings. Practices are undertaken in particular places at particular times by particular subjects in particular conditions, and these have to be studied historically.

Say, for instance, we want to analyze Mexican society, whether viewed through the prism of the Mexican revolution of 1910, or the neo-Zapatista revolution in Chiapas starting on January 1, 1994, or the crisis of the state and the ruling party in recent months. A starting point would be to recognize that Mexico has long been a "postcolonial society." Mexico has moved along temporally - if not developmentally - from an earlier colonial condition for almost two centuries. Yet one of the most striking features of the ways in which political power is organized socially and experienced subjectively throughout Mexico - whether in the "advanced" northern state of Chihuahua or the "backward" southeastern state of Chiapas - is that it is and remains a profoundly colonial or, in a pinch, neocolonial rather than unequivocally postcolonial form of power. Neither the Wars of Independence and the Wars of the Reform during the nineteenth century, nor the revolution of 1910 and the "re forms" of Salinastroika in the period 1988-1994 during the twentieth century, signalled irreversible, radical breaks with the past. Rather, they are moments in a sustained process of transformation. That series of political transformations was associated with a series of economic transformations that established the specific form of Mexican capitalism. The language of "pre" and "post," which pretends to be about historical change, actually disguises these processes of transformation by carving up history into discontinuous and disconnected units.

Nevertheless, the lure of intellectual fashion is so great that scholars who two decades ago worked with peasants in Mexico, and wrote about social movements, rural class formation, and the permanent character of the primitive accumulation of capital in dependent, peripheral states, now author postmodernist essays and books with titles (e.g., Hybrid Cultures) and themes (the metaphor of a salamander to organize reflections on Mexican history) that have more in common with magical realist literature than with historical materialist analysis. This is not to suggest that magical realism - say, the novels of Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Isabel Allende - has nothing to tell us, and that only historical materialism can reveal the Truth. It is only to underline the radical differences between literary and historical ways of relating to social reality.

Perhaps it should come as little surprise that some postmodern/postcolonial critics seem, or pretend, not to know that the arenas of discourse in which their work circulates are at several removes from the social reality they purport to represent. The privileges now enjoyed by intellectuals in the North have been so reduced that many seem to be compensating by providing to themselves an inflated sense of their own importance and the significance of purely intellectual or "discursive" practices. Nonetheless, the distinction between what is being talked about and how it is being talked about remains important. As Gabriel Garcia Marquez is reported to have said to Carlos Fuentes while discussing the turn taken by internecine struggles within the ruling party in Mexico in the early months of 1995, "We are going to have to throw our books into the sea. We've been totally defeated by reality." If a litterateur can get the point, why can't a literary theorist?

[...]

Why not interject some remarks of a Chihuahuan peasant, asked whether people in northern Mexico, followers of Francisco Villa, had joined the revolution in 1910 to recover control of their land? "Put it that we now have land," replied Cruz Chavez in 1986, but that was a fight. And justice? And freedom? When will we get that? Can you tell me? Look, we're gonna die of old age without seeing them, because the more time that passes, justice and freedom only get worse in our country.

Now I can imagine at least two different ways of connecting these remarks to what is happening in Chiapas today. We could simply take Cruz Chavez's words with those of Subcomandante Marcos and measure them both against some abstr-act repertoire of signifiers to find out, for example, whether they are pre- or postmodern discourses. Alternatively, we could consider these discourses historically, comparing the ways in which words like "freedom" and "justice" figure in their respective vocabularies, and how they relate to their concrete and changing historical referents, their material and social conditions, their political practices and struggles. We could consider as well how the labor process in Mexican agriculture has or has not changed since 1910, how political democracy has or has not advanced. And we could explore the ways in which the EZLN is trying in practice to answer the questions posed by Cruz Chavez in a different region of Mexico, under different historica l conditions, and building differently on a long history-including the 1910 revolution-of political struggle.

In the first case, it is hard to see how our objective as intellectuals could be anything else than to appropriate those discourses, to claim them as our own. In the second, we would simply be trying to understand and explain. The latter objective is in some ways more modest. At least it is less likely to exaggerate the power of intellectuals, because it acknowledges that we are talking about social and political practices undertaken by specific people other than ourselves, instead of claiming that our own discourse is the only real practice, our academic discourse the only real politics.

Daniel Nugent, Northern Intellectuals and the EZLN