Old Wine in New (Left) Skins

Why do the regular contributors to The New Left Review so doggedly insist on a thoroughgoing politicized subjectivity? Is it simply the intransigence of hidebound Marxist-Leninists which is to blame? The absolute centrality of the political in the constitution of subjectivity has been dead in the water for at least a decade and a half now, especially in light of recent innovations in the areas of emergence and self-organization. Recent hypotheses about the genesis and etiology of neural net assign great importance to “mirror” neurons, which allow human to develop theories of other minds. Networks of mirror neurons develop at such an early time in lives of people that researchers believe they develop a sense of others even before they develop a sense of themselves as discrete entities. The brain’s plasticity and acute receptiveness to stimuli may just mean that moral decisions that have organized themselves in response to stimuli of a certain sort. Instead of presuming, then, top-down ideological interpellation from the get-go, one can say with equal plausibility that certain attitudes and conventions of behavior tend to dominate, and in turn tend to give rise to moral agents who tend to make similar moral judgments.

In their prolonged May-’68 hangover, however, which would be quaint if it didn’t tend to produce retrograde currents of thought, The New Left Review crowd seems on the one hand to reject top-down, administrative notions of individuation, à la Althusser, but at the same time, and rather reductively, insists that the subject is always-already political. Their musings never fail to strike me as a variations on a theme established by Pierre Bourdieu: that the actions of an individual both produces and is produced by determinate structures. This idea seems to me to hedge on notions of causality. In the perspectival shift from actor to context, from the individual to the social, something does appear to get lost, to elude expression. A discourse capable of addressing the complex, nonlinear situation of the actor in the social field would be of tremendous value here, and would perhaps lead us away from Bourdieu’s shoulder-shrugging structuralism, which I suspect is the result of a certain intellectual impasse, namely, that the political is the only paradigm on which a responsible materialist theoretician may hang his hat—an assumption that to my mind is beset by uninterrogated aporia of its own. It seems, then, that the folks at the NLR like to take us for a ride on the same carousel, only we don’t recognize it as the same because the carousel’s creatures have been painted different colors since our last ride.