Gramsci’s Relevance
Hall so well articulates the ways in which classes are racially stratified, against the notion of an abstract dominating format by which subjects are entered in capitalist production. However, I’m wondering why he insists on placing the element of race (and gender, ethnicity, etc) after the definition of class still. Classes exist, yes, but aren’t homogenous; this heterogeneity seems to come after the domination of classes. Is there in Hall’s work, however, a possibility that race is what, before anything else, structures classes themselves? That is, that race as a category precedes (and directly conditions) the consciousness of class? My guess is no, given that one of his most well known quotes is that race is the modality through which class is lived. Am I describing what is known as Afro-Pessimism?
New Ethnicities
Once again, shots fired at old Jacques Derrida, whose difference, is described here by Hall as inimical to the maintenance of a politics when defined as the endless slippage of signifier to signifier. Although, when describing ‘new ethnicity’ of the margin, which locates ethnicity within specific, ever-changing historical coordinates, he is describing deconstruction-as-politics in a very similar way to Derrida (and as early as Derrida’s first essays). Why doesn’t Hall see Derrida’s project as politically useful when it—having been drafted by a French Algerian Jewish writer—seems to not only confirm the necessity of a ‘new ethnicity,’ but is also coming from someone who was undoubtedly, and who repeatedly avowed his own undecidable ethnicity?
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