First Person Reflection: Origins of the Marginal Disposition

Abstract

While writing of the marginalist enterprise from another angle, Craig Ireland has adroitly traced something of its origins to the political and discursive fracas between the British and French Marxisms of the early 1960s. After various political skirmishes, cultural theory emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s as a kind of feral subaltern inquiry that sought to gain ascendancy in the name of a certain politics of identity, an ‘immediate experience’ that ‘can as readily foster progressive subaltern politicking as they can exacerbate regressive, convulsive tribalism’.¹ The British culturalist Marxist E.P. Thompson had savaged the French structuralist Marxism of Louis Althusser, arguing that a true counter-hegemonic political agenda required agency and the specific cultural experiences of its agents to conduct it; the Althusserian structuralist move, he argued, was simply too deterministic to allow for the necessary play of such agency.