Feminism and Marxism:Questions on the field of struggle

Opening with a discussion of the relationship and tension between Marxism and feminism, the article argues for the specificity of Marxist feminist analysis in relation to other currents of feminism on the left. Drawing on Susan Watkins, the article contends that capitalist strategy has contributed to shaping the intellectual trajectory of feminism as known today. This trajectory developed under a complex hegemony that entailed, among other things, the Cold War and the end of Bretton Woods in relation to postmodernism and cultural imperialism, ideological uses of the ‘middle class’, and technologies that increasingly challenge the clear distinction between production and reproduction. The analysis is specifically concerned with (a) how histories of reactionary but also progressive ideas formed under this hegemony (b) the pull of/to immateriality in a perceived ‘post-industrial’ society, and the relevance of both to feminism. The article revisits the debate of Judith Butler and Nancy Fraser from 1997 as encapsulating the roots of a divide within left feminism – one related to understandings of intersectionality, a popular concept also in Marxist feminism. Intersectionality brings together salient political categories (such as gender, race, class), the question for Marxist feminism being: how? It is argued that intersectionality, coined at a specific moment of American cultural history and in relation to postmodernism’s spatialising imaginary, is not always and necessarily compatible with Marxist feminism’s focus on a social totality forming out of a mode of production and reproduction. To demonstrate this, the article concludes by considering Ashley Bohrer’s influential interpretation of intersectionality. Overall, the article argues for a Marxist feminism that attends closely to the key tendencies, possibilities and contradictions of 21st-century capitalism and what hegemony consists of - as a first step towards re/thinking the priorities and specificity of struggle

Breaking the vicious circle of defeat:The common and the revolutionary practice in the pandemics

To celebrate the 10th anniversary of Praktyka Teoretyczna journal, we have invited our long-lasting collaborators and comrades to reflect once again on the concept of the com-mon and it’s possible futures by posing the following questions: a) what is the most important aspect of the current struggles for the common?; b) what are the biggest challenges for the commonist politics of the future?; and c) where in the ongoing struggles do you see a potential for scaling-up and spreading organisation based on the com-mon? In her reply, Angela Dimitrakaki reflects on possible means of transition to the common as a radically different socio-economic paradigm.Z okazji 10 urodzin Praktyki Teoretycznej zaprosiliśmy naszych wieloletnich współpracowników i towarzyszy do wspólnego rozważenia przyszłości tego, co wspólne. Poprosiliśmy ich o zmierzenie się z następującymi pytaniami: a) co jest najważniejszym aspektem współczesnych walk o to, co wspólne?; b) jakie największe wyzwania stoją w przyszłości przed polityką tego, co wspólne?; c) gdzie w ramach toczonych walk wiedziecie potencjał na rozwijanie i poszerzanie organizacji opartej na tym, co wspólne? Mierząc się z powyższymi pytaniami Angela Dimitrakaki rozważa możliwości przejścia do porządku opartym na tym, co wspólne, rozumianego jako radykalnie różnym paradygmacie organizacji życia społeczno-gospodarczego

How to dis/articulate a system: repetition and difference in the work of Maria Lucia Cattani

The article poses comments on the works by Maria Lucia Cattani, drawing from concepts such as repetition and difference and identification, in which the signs developed in the work reconfigure repetition and difference as two possibly overlapping territories in the space of art, in a work process unfolded in time

Como des/articular um sistema: repetição e diferença no trabalho de Maria Lucia Cattani

O artigo comenta o trabalho de Maria Lucia Cattani a partir de conceitos como repetição, diferença e identificação, em que os signos elaborados nos trabalhos reconfiguram repetição e diferença como dois territórios possivelmente sobrepostos no espaço da arte, em um processo de trabalho desdobrado no tempo

Left with TINA: Art, Alienation and Anti-Communism

Prezentowany artykuł śledzi, w jaki sposób współczesne pole sztuki bywa nawiedzane przez kulturową i polityczną wyobraźnię właściwą dla czasów po 1989 roku, a uchwyconą w powieści Douglasa Couplanda Pokolenie X: Opowieści na czasy przyśpieszającej kultury (1991, 1998). Książka ta okazała się formacyjna z uwagi na prezentowane w niej stanowisko antypracy, jak również narrację wycofania w podziwie dla procesów przyspieszenia, która opisywała, jak zasady produkcji przekładają się na „oszołomione i zdezorientowane” style życia. Uprzywilejowanie przez przedstawicieli Pokolenia X perspektywy „mikrokosmosów” – gdzie wycofanie spotyka się z niskiej częstotliwości kolektywizmem – staje się jeszcze bardziej powszechne w kolejnych dekadach i utożsamione z demokracją realizowaną i idealizowaną w kategoriach polityki „anty” (w tym antyfaszyzmu), co znajduje liczne przykłady w polu sztuki w jego powiązaniu z etyczną lewicą. Stałe i gloryfikowane antagonizmy łączą w tym kontekście liberalne pole sztuki z polem społecznym, każdorazowo przepisując „anty” na TINA – zasadę „braku alternatywy” (ang. „there is no alternative” – TINA). TINA, jak argumentuję, przyjmuje szczególne figuracje w ramach przeważnie lewicowego obszaru sztuki, gdzie praktyki uwspólniania pozostają odcięte od polityki komunizmu, a technofilia – tak na gruncie, jak i poza polem sztuki – jest legitymizowana przez lewicę i prawicę jako substytut pragnienia komunizmu. Główne tezy artykułu prezentują się następująco: (a) opisane wyżej zjawiska są powiązane z politycznym procesem walki, którego głównym efektem jest alienacja – alienacja od wyobrażonego punktu końcowego owej walki; (b) wspomniana alienacja nie może być rozważana oddzielnie od hegemonii przyspieszenia, zwłaszcza w świetle traumatycznego wycofania z komunizmu i wycofania się samego komunizmu oraz stałego dla kapitalizmu przepracowywania prefiguratywnego antykomunizmu.The article traces the haunting of the contemporary art field by a post-1989 cultural and political imaginary captured in Douglas Coupland’s novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991). This was a formative literary work for its anti-work stance but also the narrativisation of withdrawal in awe of processes of acceleration that saw production principles translating into “dazed and confused” lifestyles. The preference of Gen-Xers for “microcosms”, where withdrawal encountered low-fi collectivism, became more prevalent in subsequent decades and aligned with a democracy realised, and idealised, as the politics of “anti” (including anti-fascism) – exemplified in the art field in its association with an ethical left. Constant and glorified antagonisms join the liberal art field to the social field, forever re-scripting ‘anti’ as TINA – the principle that “there is no alternative”. TINA, it is argued, is assuming specific figurations within the largely left-inclined art terrain where commoning practices remain cut off from the propositional politics of communism while, both within and beyond the art field, technophilia is legitimised left and right as a substitute for the desire for communism. The main theses of the article are that: (a) such developments are intertwined with a political process of struggle that delivers alienation as their main outcome – that is, alienation from an imagined endpoint of the struggle and (b) that such alienation cannot be considered separately from the hegemony of acceleration in light of the traumatic withdrawal from, and of, communism and capitalism’s continuous re-working of prefigurative anti-communism

Anti-fascist Art Theory: A Roundtable Discussion

The conversation that follows, among three art theorists whose work focuses on emancipatory politics on the left and who participated together in recent art events in Europe examining the resurgence of fascist politics, poses this question: what might be the connection between the increasing normalisation of a political landscape strewn with fascist elements and the complex positioning of art between (or possibly, across) the status quo and its subversion? Here, ‘art’ is understood as the totality of practices that give us the ‘art field’ rather than just artworks, while the ‘political landscape’ is seen as being articulated, one way or another, through the hegemony of neoliberalism

“I run with the future ahead of me and the cops behind me”: A roundtable on Margarita Karapanou

A roundtable discussion on Greek novelist Margarita Karapanou

Feminist Emergency: The art field

Helena Reckitt contributed to the breakout session ‘The art field,’ moderated by Angela Dimitrakaki (Edinburgh College of Art) and moderated by Kirsten Lloyd, as part of the three-day Feminist emergency conference at Birkbeck, University of London, 22nd – 24th June 2017. Other instigators were Kerri Jefferis (artist), Lara Perry (University of Brighton), and Hilary Robinson (Middlesex University). Panel convenor Angela Dimitrakaki framed the session by noting how, as elsewhere under neoliberal governance, the art field is affected by the normalisation of precarity and austerity and the ‘feminisation’ of labour, even if art is still seen as a terrain for the privileged or, ultimately, of marginal relevance to ‘real world’ emergencies. Art workers are accustomed to suppressed or missing wages and reside at the bottom of the art pyramid; over 3/4 of art students, but 1/2 of art school lecturers, 1/3 of professors, and 1/3 of exhibiting artists; we legitimise antagonism in supporting business-oriented institutions from the museum as a collecting facility to art schools as hubs for entrepreneurial ideology; we participate in a degraded higher education often based on fees, debt, and rampant competition; we have achieved no consensus on whether artworks can be a site of oppositional politics as the structures and institutions in which artworks are encountered, and even produced, are often held responsible for affirming the status quo; our struggles are ridiculed as ‘political correctness’ or delusional utopianism; there is much uncertainty over forms of collective opposition; always short of time; our alternative formations and collectives are hard to sustain; we make do. Is it time to see these conditions as a feminist emergency? The session posed the questions: What does it mean to live, work and struggle as feminists today? Is there really a feminist ‘we’ in the art field in 2017? Following brief introductory comments from the speakers, designed to instigate debate, discussions primarily focussed on structures of work in the art, educational, and academic sectors, rather than art works or their production per se. Issues explored included cultural and academic work under neoliberalism; ways of accessing institutional resources; collective power v. general lack of power; subterfuge and anonymity as feminist tactics; and the shrinking access to art through 'public' education