Comment on DeGenova's "Management of Quality": Flight of the unfixed

• Main Author: HARNEY, Stefano
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2010
• Subjects: Arts and Humanities; Business
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/lkcsb_research/5561; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/lkcsb_research/article/6560/viewcontent/Comment_DegenovaMgtQuality_2010.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Nick DeGenova’s study does more than expose the poverty of intersectionality—that sociological theory that posits the importance of considering race, class, and gender and sexuality together as they interact with each other as independent variables. It allows us to move from the most common and least correct criticism of intersectionality, that it is a theory that contains class within a functionalist sociological universe, to a much bolder contention. The contention is this: class contains. It is class that contains the surplus, the commons, of race, gender and sexuality. It is class that tames. This is because class is the category in capital that is not, and it marks life, and energy, and matter, as limit. Of course, much of our own Marxist analysis has had trouble with this limit, denying it either by filling it with sociology, as Erik Olin Wright did for instance, or demanding of it utopian transformation, as in the recent turns of Slavoj Zizek or Alain Badiou. But this Marxist analysis is not true to Marx. For Marx, class contained.