Thursday, April 11, 2013
Marx and Gramsci
Karl Marx's critique on idealism and abstract concepts on social formation was very enlightening. I am really invested on situated bodily knowledge production. I feel that society and academia have privileged the mind over the body, legitimizing knowledge that comes from institutions that exclude knowledge produced by embodied experiences. Karl Marx's last theses "the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point however is to change it", really resonates with my research project and my ultimate goal. In my research I plan to document the lived experiences of Maquiladora workers in Tijuna. I believe that stories, oral histories, narratives are powerful culture forms that privilege knowledge from the body, enables understanding of individual subjectivity and connects larger historical, political, economic, and social forces that effect these individual experiences. I believe these narratives can produce ways to think about the world differently and deconstruct dominant U.S narratives of globalization. Karl Marx highlights the importance of looking at historical and political conditions that produce ideologies.Women in the maquiladora's exist in the intersection of many categories and ideologies that have gendered and raciaized their bodies and subjugated them to exclusion and violence. The historical process of how ideologies of race, gender, and class were constructed must not be overlooked nor one signifier be privilege from the other because they all work in conjunction with each other and produce material consequences. Therefore, Gramsci moves away from Marx's reductionist way of analysis and opens up a space to think about various social forces that have produced and maintained this global expansion of capitalism. Gramsci highlights how capitalism functions through differentiation and difference in the labor sector composed of racialized and gendered bodies. It is through ideology and historical processes that exploitation and stratification of class are produced and maintained.
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Hi Angelica, this is a very grounded base for the beginning of your research and I envy that haha. Are you developing a methodology yet? I am asking because I am curious as to how you plan on documenting other people's stories and lived experiences. What about the form of representation? Have you ever thought of the neoliberal productionist variable in relation to land/environment and how people's bodies are dialectically engaged with these terrains and how they are shaped through neoliberal policies... Your proposed project got me thinking about the connection of the body to physical landscape... now I am wondering about their relationship to the projects of colonialism, globalization, and transnational corporations. How will public knowledge of these stories matter and how do you and the people you're working with want/need/intend for them to matter? I feel that if this is made mor explicit then it would be more conducive to your work as a whole. I hope these comments are productive for you!
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