"My trajectory as an artist-scholar began in the mid-1990s and was concerned at that time with what Donald Horne referred to as 'the great museum,' or the city as museum and contested space of representation. Along with radical geographers and critics of postmodernism, I was drawn to the work of Henri Lefebvre and wrote the first study of his aesthetic theories. While I was informed by feminist and radical democratic critiques of spatial theory, the interventions of Slavoj Žižek provided a much-needed rejuvenation of dialectical materialism, leading the academic left out of the valley of postmodernism. These interests prompted me to do doctoral work in visual and cultural studies at the University of Rochester.
"Since then, my work in radical art and politics has developed two paradigms with which to make sense of both the promise and the limitations of contemporary culture. On the one hand, Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of taste allowed me to see that today’s habitus and sense of classlessness is dominated by the contradictory class location of the global petty bourgeoisie, which I view as divided between its activist and creative class sectors. On the other, I applied Jacques Lacan’s Four Discourses to the field of cultural production, which allows us to appreciate how modernist (master), activist (hysteric), critical (university), commercial (capitalist) and avant-garde (analyst) practices differ.
"The overall setting for this cultural production is contemporary post-politics and the institutional bankrupting of the radical left through various tendencies, some of them identitarian and others along the lines of new social movement methodology. While the activist sector has made a great deal out of the concept of infrastructures, the organizational imperative that even Hardt and Negri called for has not had very many lasting expressions. In this general context, I have written Marxist critiques of network theory as well as recent 'woke' trends in scholarship, including privilege theory, intersectionality, critical race theory and decoloniality. Occasional essays in film studies add a creative intellectual dimension to my cinephilia."
Marc James Léger is an independent scholar based in Montreal. He is the author of Class Struggle and Identity Politics: A Guide (2024).
