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What remains of "left” politics in the West is increasingly a post-al politics—a politics that is based on the assumption that the history of the West has entered a new phase. This phase, it is said, can no longer be made sense of in terms of such concepts as “production," “ideology," and “class," but must be simply described in terms of its incommensurate and proliferating language games. The game of consumption, for instance—with its innumerable variables, variables that are themselves the effect of a post-Fordist game of distribution—rather than class is now seen as constituting the main arena of identity. Ideology, with its binary logic of “truth” and “falsehood," to give another example, is assumed to be displaced by the ceaseless permutations of discourse games: games in which the bipolarity of ideology is problematized by the undecidability of all binaries. In the post-al situation, as might be expected, the very idea of politics as a praxis of social transformation is put in question by the language game of cultural representations in which the goal is more to displace the existing meanings of social signs than to bring about a new socioeconomic order. The idea of politics as transformative, in other words, is seen as based on a totalitarian notion of the adequation of signifier and signified—a valorization, ultimately, of use-value over the game of exchange-values.

Feminist theory, like all contemporary theoretical practices, has entered its own post-al phase. For reasons that I have elaborated on at length elsewhere, I mark this mode of feminism as “ludic feminism” (Ebert 1995a). Ludic feminism, which is founded upon poststructuralist assumptions about linguistic play, difference and the priority of discourse, has taken the lead in retheorizing politics in terms of series of “post-alities”[1]: post-Marxist, poststructuralist, post-class, post-emancipatory, post-foundationalist, post-history, post-gender, post-dialectical, post-teleological, post-totality, post-essentialist, post-patriarchy.... At the core of this post-alization of politics is the displacement of material reality (the non-discursive) by the discursive, and the substitution of ethics and semiotic subversions for the project of emancipation.

What is at stake here for feminism, and the left more generally, is not only the question of how to effectively bring about social change but what constitutes social change? These are especially pressing questions when ludic theorists are commonly arguing, as Ernesto Laclau does, that “society” itself “is an impossible object” (Laclau 1993, 40-41), and ludic feminists, such as Judith Butler (following Laclau), declare the “unrealizability of 'emancipation'" because its “foundations are exposed as contradictory and untenable” (Butler 1993b, 8). This discursive post-al politics “discredits” historical materialism and confines the scope of politics strictly to the arena of the superstructure: reducing it, in effect, to simply a cultural politics concerned with intervening in and changing cultural representations, signifying practices and textualities. Post-al politics is the means for realizing the ludic priority of semiotic freedom: which seeks the liberation of desires through the “free," unconstrained play of codes, multiple significations, and pluralities of differences.

In contrast, transformative politics—which is the project of a new Red Feminism (Ebert 1995c)—involves radical interventions in both the prevailing relations of production and its superstructural forms. It seeks to end exploitation and divisions of labor; to abolish private property and to restructure social relations to meet the needs of all people. It is based on a historical materialist theory and praxis, and works dialectically, engaging the interconnections between base and superstructure; between relations of production and signifying practices. I am, of course, aware that the concepts of base and superstructure, labor, needs, and the priority of class, have been so discredited by ludic postmodern and feminist theorists as to become largely “unsayable” in these post-al times. But these are precisely the times in which we have to reclaim the basic precepts of historical materialism; to rethink what has become unthinkable in the post-al logic, and to build a Red Feminism in the international struggle against patriarchal—capitalism. Red Feminism does not reject the cultural or discursive as sites of political struggle but rather argues that these need to be understood in their specific historical connections to the relations of production and the class struggle in order to open up a space for an emancipatory politics to end the exploitation of women and all people globally.

In order to develop a transformative politics in postmodernity, we need to radically critique the way it has been supplanted by post-al politics and to intervene in the ludic logic that supports post-ality. The crux of all ludic postmodern and feminist theories is the rewriting of the social as largely discursive (thus marked by the traits of linguistic difference), local, contingent, asystematic and indeterminate. The consequences of this idealist move are made clear by Laclau, who develops a ludic social theory “identifying the social with an infinite play of differences” (Laclau 1993, 39). Following Jacques Derrida, he argues that “to conceive of social relations as articulations of differences is to conceive them as signifying relations"—that is, as discursive or semiotic processes. Not only is the social “de-centered," according to Laclau, but social relations, like all “signifying systems," are “ultimately arbitrary” (Laclau 1993, 40-41). As a result, they cannot be subjected to such determining relations as exploitation and thus no longer require emancipation. The other side of this logic is the de-materialization of social relations as they are cut off from the material relations of production and turned into a superstructural matrix of discursive processes, narratives and the textual play of differing significations. Postmodern reality, for ludic theorists, becomes, a “crisis of narratives," as Lyotard has called it (Lyotard 1984, xxiii). It is a crisis in which all “texts” and signifying activities—including all social relations--can no longer provide reliable knowledge of the real. This textualized “real” (e.g. “society," “history") becomes unreliable, indeterminate, “impossible," because meaning (signification) itself is seen as self-divided and undecidable. Those entities we take to be the same--that is, identical with themselves and marked by their differences from (between) others—are shown instead to be supplementary to their others and different within themselves. As a result, politics, for ludic postmodernists, can no longer be grounded on clear identities and oppositions nor can it be situated in a reality “outside” representation as a “referent” for action. Any transformative or materialist politics—any emancipatory politics—based on the struggle against hierarchies of differences (such as the class struggle; peasant or worker's movements; women's liberation movements, anti-colonial movements; civil-rights movement,) [sic.] are seen as foundationless.

While many left thinkers may consider themselves far removed from the textualized politics of ludic theorists, the ludic logic has had an inordinate and pervasive influence on progressive politics across the spectrum: from Laclau and Mouffe's post-Marxism to the demise of socialist feminism and socialism, more generally—as feminists as diverse as Zillah Eisenstein, Michele Barrett and Donna Haraway and leftists, like Stanley Aronowitz, are “nailing [their] colours," as Barrett says, to the discursive “mast of a more general post-Marxism” (1991, vii) and a generalized radical democracy.

Among the more sophisticated articulators of post-al politics are such ludic feminists as Drucilla Cornell—with her synthesis of a Lyotardian theory of the social as language games, Derridean deconstruction and feminist l'ecriture feminine—and Judith Butler, whose work provides a complex development of deconstructionist textuality; a Foucauldian analytics of power and the peformatics of queer theory. These two exemplary theorists also demonstrate especially clearly the problems and limitations of post-al politics. I will take up Judith Butler's erasure of emancipation later in this essay, but first I want to address some of the core problems of post-al politics as articulated by Lyotard and as developed by Cornell—both of whom “textualize” politics, turning it into an arena of local language games and semiotic subversions.