Critical Theory and Science Fiction. Carl Freedman

or “pure” model of the capitalist mode of production much more closely than did the capitalism that actually existed during Marx’s own lifetime; the increasingly “totalitarian” character of capitalism as a world system paradoxically makes it increasingly difficult to feel or even to theorize either capitalism in general or particular capitalist societies as wholes (just as fish, for instance, presumably do not feel wet and, even if endowed with rational faculties, would have great difficulty in producing the concept of wetness).

      Still, the neoliberal objection to totalizing thought looks almost sophisticated compared to the conservative assumption that Marxism is invalidated by the collapse of Eastern European and Soviet Stalinism. The real point here is not simply that authentic critical Marxism has always been antithetical to Stalinism, but also that the long-term incoherence and unworkability of the latter have since the 1920s constituted an object of trenchant Marxist analysis, especially within the Trotskyist tradition (probably the richest variety of Marxist thought insofar as specifically political and political-historical writing is concerned). The actual crisis in Marxism is, however, distantly related to the false problems posed by conservatism and neoliberalism: it is the extremely problematic status of the Marxist theory of revolution. Although Marxism has always maintained an internationalist perspective, and although the world market occupies a crucial place in Marx’s construction of the capitalist mode of production, the late twentieth century does seem to have produced a perhaps fatal incommensurability between the extent of the globalization (or multinationalization) of capital and the economic primacy of the nation-state assumed by the classic model of socialist revolution. Exactly how the proletariat can seize control of the means of production when the latter are, to an ever-growing extent, organized on a transcontinental basis is a problem yet to be seriously addressed. It may prove solvable, and the current crisis is perhaps best seen as one of Marxism-Leninism rather than Marxism proper. Still, if Marxist critical theory is understood as the combination of a science (historical materialism), a philosophy (dialectical materialism), and a politics (scientific socialism), then it must be conceded that the current blockage of the third element is a serious symptom indeed.

      At the same time, however—and any paradox here is apparent rather than real—the fact that capitalism has proved much stronger and more resilient than Marx envisaged also renders the method of critical analysis that bears his name more rather than less pertinent. What Marx achieved (primarily in the three volumes of Capital [1867–1894]) by recasting the historical dialectics of Hegel into materialist form—and whether one understands this recasting in Lukácsian terms, as development, or in Althusserian terms, as rupture—was the method needed for genuine critique of the social field as the latter is defined by the production and reproduction of capital. This is not to suggest that Capital or subsequent critical analysis in the tradition of that founding text are at all contaminated by the economic determinism or economic reductionism traditionally associated with “vulgar Marxism.” But the reproduction of capital does, “in the last instance,” establish the arena in which human activity in a capitalist society takes place, in the sense, that is, that the theory capable of authentic critique of capitalist society as a radically heterogeneous whole must be able to construct and account for the motions of capital. This is the real sense of Sartre’s famous assertion that Marxism is “the one philosophy of our time which we cannot go beyond,”¹² a maxim too often taken to be a voluntaristic (hence, finally, metaphysical) slogan. But Sartre’s point is that Marxism, as the critical analysis of capital and class, cannot be genuinely transcended during the capitalist era (though he was certainly well aware that it is possible to repackage a pre-Marxist idea as the hottest new theory “after” Marxism).¹³ Accordingly, the currently irresistible expansion, both spatial and temporal, of the regime of capital, with all the intolerable self-contradictions attendant thereto, creates greatly enlarged theoretical terrain for the methods of dialectical-historical-materialist analysis. The unprecedented “cunning” that capital now displays on the global stage renders Marxism more urgent than ever. Indeed, the very impasse confronted by Marxist politics demands creative new elaborations of Marxist critique—a demand by no means unmet.¹⁴

      Second only to Marxism as a variety of critical theory I would name psychoanalysis. The two discourses have, indeed, long been felt to be analogous to one another. Both are materialisms oriented toward praxis; that is, toward theoretically informed political or therapeutic work. Both, as Althusser has suggestively maintained, can be understood as “conflictual sciences,” as theoretical discourses of unprecedented critical rigor in areas previously dominated by ideologies more or less in harmony with the rule and general outlook of the bourgeoisie.¹⁵ Furthermore, there has been a whole series of interesting attempts to integrate psychoanalysis and Marxism with one another, beginning with the pioneering social psychology of Wilhelm Reich and attaining most advanced form mainly in work done within the Frankfurt School or by the Althusserians. Though no particular version of Freudo-Marxism can yet claim to be definitive, the hyphen of the term is, I think, indelibly inscribed on the critical agenda: there is now something inevitably archaic in a Marxism that does not somehow try to enlist Freudian theoretical resources to develop the potentially powerful but extremely embryonic concept of subjectivity implied by both the description of commodity fetishism in Capital and the analysis of political representation in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852). Equally, it is difficult to take with full seriousness any version of psychoanalysis that does not somehow (whether in the manner obliquely suggested by Lacan in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis [1973] or otherwise) attempt to historicize the Freudian ego and to go beyond Freud’s own suggestive but sketchy notions as to how the subject of psychoanalysis is formed with respect to the economic and political relations of modern class society.

      What needs to be stressed in the current context, however, is the extent to which the major categories of psychoanalysis—above all the unconscious, of course, but also the drives, the transference, and the Oedipus and castration complexes—are profoundly dialectical. The psyche for Freud, like the social formation for Marx, is a complexly structured whole: neither an assemblage of reified particulars nor a centered unity monocausally determined by some single essence, but a formation governed by the dialectical process of overdetermination (to invoke the term invented by Freud but, significantly, appropriated by Althusser in order to theorize the Marxist dialectic itself); that is, by the causative conjuncture of radically heterogeneous factors, few of which are fully conscious and none of which can be inferred from or reduced to any of the others. Furthermore, what might be called the epistemology of psychoanalysis is radically critical and antirealist. The analyst is engaged in a process of interpretation, a reading of signs (dreams, parapraxes, symptoms, and the like); and these signs must finally be understood as raw material out of which, in that dialectical process of knowing which Freud designates the transference, psychic meaning is (in quintessentially post-Kantian fashion) constructed. It is the de-centering of the subject—this critical interrogation of the human psyche that forever renders unacceptable the notion of the latter as the unproblematically knowable conscious unity of the older precritical psychology—that remains the enduring “scandal” of psychoanalysis, far more than the much advertised emphasis on sexuality (just as, according to D. H. Lawrence, bourgeois taste in painting can welcome any number of conventionally sentimentalized nudes but finds the postimpressionist apples of Cézanne to be profoundly immoral). Though Freudian vocabulary can certainly be appropriated for precritical purposes (for example, a kind of vulgar-Freudian one-dimensional sexual determinism that is the rough equivalent of the economic determinism of vulgar Marxism), psychoanalysis in full dialectical rigor is a critique of almost unsurpassed richness and subtlety.

      Though less important in my view than either Marxism or psychoanalysis, one other area of critical theory deserves attention: that body of work—heavily indebted to Nietzsche, mainly of French provenance, and extremely influential during the past three decades—most strongly instanced by Jacques Derrida’s analyses of cultural, especially linguistic, sedimentation and by Michel Foucault’s investigations of the microtechnologies of power. The common term for such work is, of course, poststructuralism, a designation that is accurate from the viewpoint of intellectual history as narrowly constructed and is in that way superior to such increasingly meaningless rubrics as “postmodern discourse.” A more adequate term for such theory, however, might well be