“History is Necessity.” The necessity of history either sends theory-debates of a previous era packing, or (what might be the same thing) reanimates them with new categories and different stakes. Either way, ideas and the debates are a map of the historical ground from which they emerge. What historical dynamics animated the debates between Marxist and poststructuralist critiques in the 1980s and 90s? How was the ongoing development of these dynamics expressed in a revival of Marxist theorizing after the 1990s – a revival that continues to gather momentum twenty-five years on? Why have theoretical categories such as abstraction, mediation, value and surplus moved to the heart of Marxist theorizing in the course of this revival, largely dissolving the terms that animated those earlier debates? In “Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies” (1992), Stuart Hall saw the “dirtiness of the semiotic game,” and the “worldliness” of the work of cultural studies, as a corrective to the abstraction and false unity of orthodox class analysis. Today, however, what has become of the intervention of the critique of totality, of difference, and the semiotic turn toward the politics of representation as a means of redressing what Hall called the great evasions of Marxism? Did that intervention run its course in the ensuing barbarisms of globalization, neoliberalism and financialization? Or has the critique of totality that once set class struggle against the figure of revolutionary resistance by “new subjects of history of a nonclass type” become the new currency of critiques of racial capitalism? Is the new consensus that capitalism requires group differentiation the reason why contemporary Marxist theory no longer seems to wring its hands over accusations of determinism, economic reductionism, or its status as metanarrative? This paper will turn these questions into some historicizing propositions. (The two unattributed quotations are from Fredric Jameson, “Periodizing the 60s.”)

Dr. Best researches the modalities of contemporary capitalist society and how these are expressed in conventions of perception and representation, dynamics of collective subjectivity, aesthetic ideologies, and cultural forms and practices. Her recent work focuses on the deep value dynamics of capital, as well as the social and ideological formations of that historical process. Dr. Best has also pursued studies of analytical methods such as critical theory, critique of political economy, and dialectics. She has recently published a book on these themes titled, The Automatic Fetish: The Law of Value in Marx's Capital (Verso, 2024).

ASCA Political Ecologies is an annual research seminar for doctoral and rMA students hosted by Jeff Diamanti and Joost de Bloois. rMA students are welcome to join for tutorial credit. 

Lectures are open to all. To sign up for the seminar, contact j.diamanti@uva.nl