About the Cover (Around the Image)

Poststructuralist scholarship thrives on the perception of ironic incongruities. I can think of no more ironic incongruity, however, than the situation of poststructuralist scholars who affirm the latently self-critical capacities of bourgeois culture while their campus administrations are recruiting students for the CIA or training officers to lead working-class G.I.’s into battle in Central America [or Somalia or Iran or Serbia etc. —S.T.] — or, on the more mundane level, preparing the new generation of business leaders to meet the challenge posed by an increasingly multicultural work force. (“Subversion and Oppositionality in the Academy,” College Literature, Double Issue 17. 2/3, 1990. 64,65).

Further, at S.U. itself, Mas’ud Zavarzadeh and Donald Morton have supplied the resistant theorization that explains the dominant ideology of “multiculturalism” in such a way as to enable an understanding of the ways in which to counter its locally limited “reformist” policy — that functionally legitimates global exploitation — from within its relations. As they contest, the academy serves as the prime site for the (re)production of late capitalist ideology. To engage in a resistant practice, they stress, one must intellectually grasp the structural necessity that the academy serves within the ideological (re)production of capital:

The academy has always played an essential role in the production of the labor force: not only by teaching practical skills (engineering, medicine, pharmacy, law, etc.) but also by producing the appropriate subjectivities for the labor force. In the social division of labor of capitalism, it is the “job” of academic intellectuals to serve capital by providing the practical and theoretical skills it needs to reproduce itself. (“A Very Good Idea Indeed: The (Post)Modern Labor Force and Curricular Reform,” Cultural Studies in the English Classroom, 1992. 69).

This month’s cover, then, is an oppositional mode of theoretico-spatial praxis that occupies the reformist oriented liberal forums of the capitalist class, a liberal newspaper funded by the university, and is the graphic approach of a resistant theory to the concept of political “disorientation,” which depends upon the (re)presentation of popular political figures juxtaposed in such a way as to disorient, or alienate, the viewer from the common-sensical relation she may have to these figures (and the political positions they bear), situating them within a more encompassing and inclusive structural orientation of world historical socio-economic scope. This expanded theorization of political disorientation, insofar as it is not to be merely a formal practice of “intellectual complexity,” a density of concepts that would reproduce the opacity of spatial representation, must necessarily expand into the historical dimension of the given conditions of production that underlie the various social mechanisms this article interrogates. This piece will necessarily demand more than the usual time being spent on reading/writing/thinking , if it is to surface the commonly expected boundaries of reading/writing/thinking a “newspaper-piece-about-the-cover.” Thus, there is already, fundamentally, a disorientation of concepts of the reading subject ( a qualitatively different theorization of the reader) immediately at the level of form by the necessity of the introduction of revolutionary concepts, as these concepts necessarily conform to, and problematize, the present conditions of the possibility of knowledge production. The fundamental abstraction of a conceptual intervention of this type that constructs the subject in such a way so as to be available for political/theoretical engagement, elicits a non-normative response so that it may be engaged at the conceptual level of theoretical totality and decisiveness — that accords with the produced and progressively rationalized content of the cultural/political conditions outlined here — and in addition that there may be investigated the political stakes involved in the problematic of “image” to “concept,” or, theory in practice, in order to produce effective interventions oriented toward global social change.

In both versions of the dominant interpretation of “disorientation,” the conservative’s reaction of essential political purity and the liberal’s celebratory gesture of radical experiential coalitionalism, the theory of “disorientation,” deployed here so as to contain Marx’s labor theory of value as an implicit methodological standard, is absorbed by a process of (mis)recognition: the process by which the qualitatively different is mystified and displaced from its actual conditions of production and is merely “seen” according to common-sensical frames of reference without there having been necessitated a displacement of political alliance and a corresponding shift of intelligibility. In both of the common-sense specular relations to the revolutionary status of “disorientation,” the repulsed as well as the celebratory, what is revealed through an ideology critique is that they both assume that an experiential base is that which constitutes all knowledge and, as well, motivates its articulation. Ideology critique is capable of its maneuver outside of the ideology of this “knowing” subject (whose experience understood as transparent to itself legitimates present social relations as naturally unalienated/alienated), as it uncovers the epistemological claims — that is, the conditions of knowledge production of all popular reading/writing/thinking practices — and situates their articulated (implicit as well as explicit conceptuality; the “silences” as well as the “speeches” that constitute a given discourse) politics according to the social extent to which ideology functions in historical and materially determined capitalist relations, that it may re-produce these relations in order to theoretically assess the most effective modes of resistance. However, to the extent that all theories are political and all politics is struggle, the self-generating (i.e. immediately posited) definition of epistemology just given must be problematized (mediated through theory) and assessed of its (ideo)logical conservative elements which, when unpacked, will be countered by its progressive (socio)logical elements. This dialectical process will further fulfill a pedagogical function that will be the productive content and surplus-consciousness of the immediately spectacular effects that the cover accentuates and elicits but explicitly revealed and available for oppositionally oriented appropriation.

The reader shall find that within these pages the word/concept “epistemology” is prominent. In order that the oppositional method of disorientation may exceed the normative boundaries of “image” to “text” in the sense that I have theorized it above, that is according to the expected representational status of bourgeois politics and/as aesthetics, there must be interrogated the immanent conditions of production or the possibility of knowledge as such. What does it mean to re-understand in a qualitatively different sense that epistemology designates the conceptual re-production of the conditions of knowledge production? To the extent that the problematic of epistemology is, at the least, engaged within these pages testifies to a commitment on the part of A.O. contributors to further the practice of theoretical and political explanation at the immanent borders of the “the authority of meaning” for the concept of epistemology immediately engages these issues, but, when the demand to interrogate the conditions of epistemology itself surfaces, that is, concern about the wider conditions of the immanent conditions of knowledge production take precedence, then the normative individual borders of the production of knowledge must itself be expanded to interrogate the social and economic possibilities of “knowing” as such. For it is ultimately these socio-economic conditions that formulate the extent to which the social demand for knowledge is produced under pressure from the contradictions of the unequal distribution of individual “need.” The question of the epistemological problematic then transforms qualitatively into a revolutionary demand whose politics extends beyond the borders of formal representation (aesthetics/politics) to engage directly into the class struggle, i.e., the socio-political struggle over the theoretical resources needed to counter the dominant relations of production and revolutionize the means of social and economic freedom.

If “epistemology,” as a concept, is defined as the preconditions under which one knows what one knows it basically remains formulated as an interrogative statement: “How do you know?,” i.e., by what authority and right do “you” claim to know? Formulated in this fashion, which is the standard common-sensical understanding of the word, the concept merely questions the formality of cognitive authority and normatively positions the subject as the autonomous and juridical subject of conscious “responsibility,” i.e., the subject is engaged immanently as the “moral” and “ethical” ideal of the propertied subject of bourgeois legality. To expect that reality is a conglomerate of empirically sovereign individuals with volitionally willed actions, as is the case in the subject of/to private property, and furthermore, is a reality that is equally accessible and transparent to participants positioned within it, is to reify the actual conditions of the production of knowledge/consciousness. For immediately, we must acknowledge the fact that insofar as any “knowledge” is a social process and system of signs and their meanings (both connotative and denotative) we must concede the fact that any given meaning necessarily exceeds the volitional and sovereign attempt to monopolize it, and/or access it, on the part of any given subject. In other words “knowledge” is a contestable and unequal field of social relations. Knowledge is socio-political. Furthermore, to expect that all actions and behaviors are a reflection of an essentially moral and ethical self is to radically misconstrue the real relation of social forces that construct such things as “domestic” violence, the racial stratification of class, the predominance of drug abuse and gang formation among the economically disenfranchised, and, in fact, serves the ideological legitimation needed to regulate these crisis according to the interests of the ruling class — prison and death for the “immoral,” “unethical” and “irresponsible” working class and unemployed.

To both inter-classes of the petty bourgeois, the reactionary conservative (e.g. Rush Limbaugh) and the conservatively reformist (Michel Foucault, who is the dominant figure on this cover and according to a Marxist relation to bourgeois democratic ideology must necessarily be situated as the most theoretically progressive aspect of the ideology of co-operative reformism, while Malcolm X is positioned as its most popularly [mis]represented candidate), politics is ultimately a lived experiential relation between real human beings. In both cases what has been agreed upon is the epistemological criteria by which the value of the “human being” (or the “being” of “human” value) is judged. Both factions assume an essential ideological kernel, an atomist and privileged term, that seemingly functions outside of political economy as the core (the impetus) of “human” reality, in order to legitimate the present relations of that reality. The first as an internal and continuous nature that actively creates its chosen field of possibilities and the latter as the relative nexus of experienced culture as an empirically based and contingent “point of view” that, even so, remains as individualistic and (incredulously) sovereign as the first. When dialectically theorizing the essential mainsprings of the historically limited bifurcation of bourgeois ideology into its progressive and conservative modes it is necessary to situate them according to the epistemological effects that they have in real social relations and not immanently according to their given and professed intention which is incapable of regulating the political economy of meaning-making production in any case. Thus, in delineating the formal political differences between conservative and liberal positions, generally speaking, the dividing line falls between a “naturalist” discourse of inherent and present-to-itself (meaning-full) reality in the first case, and a “structuralist” discourse of the "arbitrarily ” based social construction of all cultural practices — not in the inessential thematics that a “Limbaugh” or “Foucault” might use to legitimate their various knowledge claims. However, to clarify the thesis of an ideology critique, and further heuristically develop the broader synthesis of its object of engagement — the commodification of radicalism — the following will serve to specify these positions.

In the case of Foucault specifically the essentialist conceptions of Enlightenment humanism that presupposed an empirical relation between the essential subject of “Man” (exemplified by Descartes’ cogito , “I think, therefore, I am.”) and the object of knowledge (the prime relation to knowledge that Limbaugh yet assumes is inherently natural and not socio-historical), is descriptively re-inscribed through his political thesis of “knowledge” as produced according to historical institutions of “power.” This is because the motivation to subject (categorize) the human “body” is economically mystified by Foucault as a sadistic Nietzschean “will to power” that allows Foucault the ability to theoretically preserve the ideology of “man,” by his theoretical dependence (epistemological adherence) upon its image, as an empirical thematic device. The essentially conservative position of Foucault’s politics is, of course, implicitly contained within his professed methodology. In Discipline & Punish (a text that students are sure to encounter in some academic context as it is a major conceptual component of the “new” (post)structuralist literary canon [and postmodern curriculum]), Foucault deploys an epistemology of empiricism whose object is philological history as recovered from the sign of the textual (as institutional-ized) “body”; (i.e., marginal philological history as recovered from a phenomenological relation to texts whose referents are empirical):

I would like to write the history of this prison, with all the political investments of the body that it gathers together in its closed architecture. Why? Simply because I am interested in the past? No, if one means by that writing a history of the past in terms of the present. Yes, if one means writing the history of the present. (30,31).

To Foucault “politics” is not a matter of the various ways in which classes (and inter sub-classes) struggle over all existing natural and cultural resources within an international system of capitalist exchange — as overdetermined presently by the extent to which these relations have permeated the globe and colonized subjectivity (as codified in the conditions of subjecthood that Foucault describes [re-inscribes; torture, madness, prison etc.] but functioning within the present). Instead, Foucault understands “politics” as the “matter” of “power” over the “body”; i.e. a localist and empiricist conception of the “body,” as the transcendental term outside of the contingency of history, whose political investments are not economic but ultimately a biologically motivated sadism of the obsessionaly taxonomic type. By mystifying the actually present socio-historical and material conditions of production — the political and economic production of the “body,” “knowledge,” “power,” “desire” etc. — and the global configuration in which the political economy of capitalist exploitation depends upon the limited knowledge of those subjugated to capitalism, Foucault can salvage his own “volitional” ideal of subjecthood and its “interest” (that one is compelled to suppose represents the return on the “libidinal investments” of theory as de-politicized) and continue on with the pragmatic project of the petty-bourgeois functionary of capital who legitimates political alliance to the ruling class on the basis of Freudian “sublimation”: the process whereby he “gains” the freedoms allowed within the limits of capitalist class relations (“I would like to write… ”) by serving its ideological ends (“I am interested in… writing the history of the present”). This is of course Foucault’s theoretical justification for abdicating “writing the history of the past in terms of the present” conditions of exploitation and is contained in the academically renovated status of apolitical literary pleasure, the sexual/textual “Death of the Author.” Foley, however, situates Foucault’s “Death of the Author” political stance according to the social logic for which it was deployed: as a radical “canon-buster” that renovated the technologically defunct “knowledge” of the “humanist” curriculum and not according to its professed intention of personal “non-intentionality” (or literary “jouissance”):

Indeed, in its extreme form this politics of decentering and marginality becomes a politics that actually enshrines impotence as a positive good. For the “refusal of mastery,” apparently an act of heroic disengagement from the epistemology that fosters oppression, can lead to a kind of defiant passivity. This passivity may console the conscience of the individual, but it forecloses in advance the possibility of engagement in a praxis that will encounter hegemony on its own turf… What starts out as a radical refusal to engage in the co-opting discourse of power can easily enough end up as a resort to the solaces of the word-processor and the conventional prestige rewards of the profession (74).

It is Foucault’s pragmatic theory of the subject, the individual and sovereign subject of ideology, that is the basis for the reproduction of capitalist relations of production. Outlining the historic necessity, in the overdetermined political conditions of the present, of the construction of this pragmatic “word-processing” subject Morton and Zavarzadeh explain:

Digitalism, in our analysis, is used not as the cause of changes in contemporary capitalism and labor force. It is, rather, deployed here more as a mediating concept that, in a rather economical manner, points to the shift in the superstructural discourses and practices which are involved in constructing (post)modern subjectivities and “consciousness skills” needed for the rising labor force of late capitalism. . . . The class character of the changes in the curriculum we are describing here become partially clear if we bear in mind that the changes we are marking are taking place not in all U.S. universities and colleges but only in the “elite” ones; that is, in those universities and colleges which, for the most part, produce the managers for the advanced high tech labor force. The traditional curriculum remains in effect in the universities and colleges which, in the social and academic division of labor, continue to supply the workers of that part of the U.S. labor force still deployed in more traditional (and, in terms of labor skills, backward) industries. As the new mode of production and exchange becomes the dominant mode, the curriculum of these colleges will also change… We are, in other words using the notion of digitalism to describe an uneven development in contemporary capitalism (68).

There is also a historico-political logic to the renovation of knowledge production that Foucault himself mystified, which, when (re)covered, helps explain the (ideo)logic of his texts. This amounts to applying Foucault’s professed methodology to the historic conditions of his own knowledge production but encompassing the wider social whole of class contradiction outside the limits of Foucault’s ostensible discourse, but, within the totality of the wider conditions of the actual production process.

Foucault’s “radical refusal” of co-optation by the “establishment” in post-’68 Paris consisted of countering the naturalized hegemony of the prime industry of knowledge, the academy and its ideology of the “free” apolitical pursuit of knowledge, by re-inscribing its hegemony to be a “matter” of personal subjugation, a bureaucratic discipline imposed/constructing the historico-empirical “body” (of “knowledge”). Foucault’s discourse reflects a now superseded ideology of State nationalisms as experienced by intellectuals in the midst of the foremost political crisis to ever shake First World capitalism within its own borders — May ’68. Threatened as it was internationally, on the one hand, by the Cold War nationalisation of the class struggle (Stalinism) and the mismanagement of bureaucratic socialism’s aid to Third World anti-imperialist liberation movements — and the permanent occurrence of these revolutions nevertheless (the Algerian resistance of French colonialism and the Vietnamese and Cuban revolutions against U.S. imperialism etc.) — and on the other hand, nationally supported by the reformism of “Eurocommunism” attempting to revise the internationally defunct Stalinism into a social-democratic eurocentrism that would maintain the popular political unrest within the limits of bourgeois democracy (non-economic democracy), First World imperialism was compelled to grant national political concessions to mitigate the crisis of legitimation it faced. Within the above delineated political lines, positions were taken by radical student movements as interpreted through their own relation to the crisis culminating in their revolt against the dominant racial and gender separatist oriented ideology of the academy. Writing at the time of these socio-economic conditions Althusser theorizes:

We should not… be too surprised that the combined effect of the prestigious examples of the victorious struggle against imperialism, on the one hand, and the void opened by the virtual defeat of bourgeois ideology, on the other, should have opened up a vast battlefield for the ideological revolt of the student and intellectual youth… In addition to this, if one considers the tendential development of the economic crisis of imperialism, which affects the material existence not only of the increasingly exploited working class, but also and perhaps especially, for the first time, directly that of the petty bourgeoisie , even in its relatively well-off strata (intermediate cadres, engineers, teachers, researchers, etc.), one will not find it surprising to see one’s own children, distressed by the unemployment that they know is waiting for them, hurl themselves directly into the battle. Politically, economically and ideologically, the death-agony of imperialism has created the conditions for an attack by petty-bourgeois youth on certain capitalist apparatuses of the State, first among these being the apparatuses of ideological indoctrination, where bourgeois ideology now shows its incurable weakness: the educational system (Letters from inside the Italian Communist Party to Louis Althusser, 1973. 314).

By maintaining the imperative to “read” the political as a spatial relation of “power” Foucault merely subjectively reflects the total crisis of capitalist ideology as a crisis of cultural “phallogocentrism” (a subjectivist but historically determined ideology of “white-male/knowledge-power” supremacy) and thus, helps contain the emergence of revolutionary consciousness within the borders of academic studies, within the given objects of that study, the [re]productive [re]form of the “disciplines.” In May 1968 Foucault served to manage the political desire of the student population — whose contact with the media was already sensationalized as a libidinal revolt of apoliticized “desire” — against joining the 11 million striking workers of France from throwing the validity of the whole objective system into question while instituting a total transformation of the dominant mode of production and its ideological practices. In doing so Foucault merely aetheticized politics and, thus, reified the conditions (or politics) of his own discursive production. This in turn necessarily effected his discursive production in such a way as to limit the radicality of its critique to within bourgeois epistemological borders; i.e. within the confines of the personal “body” and its experiences. Foucault represents the dissatisfaction of the oppressed intellectual experienced through the contradictions of his class position as mediated by the privilege (knowledges) the market accords to them. For Foucault, and others of his class, a “crisis of knowledge” was experienced, i.e. of knowledge as such, understood as a certain given relation to “texts” (institutions ). Thus, in limiting his critique to the experiential limits of his specific classed demands Foucault implicitly set himself up to reform the system insofar as to account for the way that the system supported him and represented his class experiences. That is why the current representatives of the petty- bourgeois class, professors such as David Halperin, use Foucault and the (post)structuralist method of the pluralist-oriented (eclectically “undecidable”) relation to “texts” (the self-reflexively mediated relation to the “new [a]political” status of literature) as an authoritative example of proper political realism. Halperin writes that, “If Michel Foucault had never existed it would have been necessary to invent him” (One Hundred Years of Homosexuality ; Routledge, 1990. 119). Taking into account, however, that politically, “Foucault” can only ever be an “invention” of various social inscription systems, a conglomerate of various institutional discourse, that are historically limited, and this according to Foucault’s professed methodology that Halperin elides, and furthermore, that these systems necessarily function within an overdetermined position of development at the extreme point of a specific history in which social relations are organized in such a way as to (re)produce the uneven distribution of the means of existence, we find it necessary to counter the repeated attempts of opportunist reformers (now degenerated into theoretical revisionists) such as Halperin with the decisive logic of an ideology critique that may throw up sloganistic statements that represent its position graphically: “As “Foucault” is not yet (politically) dead, it is still necessary to (intellectually) kill him.” We may add that, as the authors of “The Death of the Author” position (Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, etc.) were never politically alive (class conscious) (rather, they were a still birth that symptomatically feigned their class impotence to preserve their “own” socially produced “needs”), “Foucault” was always already politically dead for the working class of global toilers — the class that embodies the structural potential of revolutionary change.

Therefore, the radical intellectual by adopting a locally complicit epistemology of personally experienced oppression, inevitably is marked by the inability to disengage from political complicity with the dominant dictates of ideology (“self-reliance” or, in other words, market competition “by any means necessary”) that currently dominate the realm of theory by way of the complicit acceptance of the (auto)methodology of local and partial political self-reflexivity — the discursive political correctness of (post)structuralist cultural studies. The radical Left in supplying innovative specular negations to the position of the conservative Right maintain (legitimate) bourgeois democracy’s ideological function of containment by privileging an empiricist/subjectivist relation to discourse and, therefore, a priori rule out as “excessive” the totalizing logic of a revolutionary marxian position (which is [mis]recognized as “totalitarian”), whose socio-historical referent includes the critique of transcendentally based (“mystically” produced) discourses. Liberal intellectualism inherits a formalist aversion to the pressure of decisive materialist concepts as instances of “totalitarianism” which is equated and informed by their class prejudice against a totalizing conceptuality which explains their political complicity as a socio-historical determination of fetishized “agency.” They are thus incapable of successfully delineating the total extent to which ideological epistemology has saturated experience and its corresponding legitimation of present globally exploitative labor relations as they fetishize this very inability as the mark and boundary of acceptable theory/politics. They therefore preclude the possibility of supplying a more inclusive method of engagement which is what is presently needed to organize a truly democratic oppositional alliance on a materialist theoretical/political base that would include all factions of radicality according to their material effectivity in the objective parameters of the class struggle. Thus, they a priori exclude a substantial practice of democracy and formally preclude the possibility of working toward the principle political economic force of globally organized labor, armed with the consciousness of its socio-historical transformative role.

It is the popular controversial relations and arguments that split the petty-bourgeois class that obfuscates the only “other” option that dialectically opposes the binary logic that supports their inter-class dialogic hegemony: the revolutionary critique-al subject (of knowledge), the social subject (the collectivized “body”) that actually stands to resist the regime of competitive individualism. It is basically the spectacular “radicalism” of the progressively proletarianized elements of the petty-bourgeois class from which the formally innovative developments of bourgeois ideology evolve and reproduce the exploitation of wage-labor. Lenin wrote of these individuals the most penetrating characterization to date:

For Marxists it is well established theoretically — and the experience of all European revolutions and revolutionary movements has fully confirmed it — that the small proprietor [who in 1993 is merely a vicarious “owner” of the most advanced commodities, VCR, car, etc., as these social necessities are primarily loaned to her on credit, this is a crucial component of the concept “proletarianization,” —S.T. ], the small master, who under capitalism suffers constant oppression and, very often, an incredibly acute and rapid deterioration in his conditions of life, ending in ruin, easily goes to revolutionary extremes, but is incapable of perseverance, organization, discipline and steadfastness. The petty bourgeois, “driven to frenzy” by the horrors of capitalism, is a social phenomena which, like anarchism, is characteristic of all capitalist countries. The instability of such revolutionaries, its barrenness, its liability to become swiftly transformed into submission, apathy, fantasy, and even a “frenzied” infatuation with one or another bourgeois “fad” — all this is a matter of common knowledge. (“Left-Wing” Communism, an Infantile Disorder, 17).

The dominant ideology of “multiculturism,” as premised upon the curriculum of experientially based cultural studies, attempts to posit Lenin’s vacillating subject of liberal democratic oppression and indecisiveness as the inherently “undecidable” subject of experienced (relative) difference, plurality and heterogeneity, that is, as inherently constitutive of the most radical political oppositionality capable of transforming the given cultural “real” of (post)modern capitalism. To experiential cultural studies, Malcolm X’s significance corresponds to its revival of the normative standard of the humanist subject its (post)structuralist theoretical presuppositions were supposed to have transformed: the individual understood as naturally suspended within his eclectic personal beliefs and experienced transformations. For instance in the major conservative journal of academia, The Chronicle of Higher Education , Malcolm X is constructed in such a way so as to bear the marketable interests of the academy as an “apolitical” place for the intellectual fulfillment of the individual. Under the title “A Lifetime of Transformation” Ellen Caughlin common-sensically positions the subject of knowledge as a humanist individual whose experience determines the extent of its pragmatic theory:

Over his lifetime, he transformed himself so dramatically, so many times, that his story permits any number of interpretive spins (Oct. 7, 1992, Vol. xxxix, #7, p.A8).

Under the (neo)humanist paradigm of experience, the most progressive aspect of Malcolm X’s theory/politics that one would assume is the most obvious cultural intelligibility about X, the fact that he “was” (his “image” now is read as ) directly a site of political contestation, is elided in order to contain the political threat he ultimately bears into the normative space of consensual (uninterrogated) “human reality” — the personal (private) space (property) of the ([re]privatized) subject of experience (propriety) — to occlude the revolutionary marxian analysis of global exploitation and counter organization.

Attempting to revive the political Malcolm X from humanism’s sentimental mourning of “the death of the author” — Malcolm X as a volitional and intentional “human being” now politically “dead” — the progressive liberal journal Social Text attempts to position him within a nexus of social forces that it posits as constitutive of it’s agenda which encompasses the political eclecticism of canonical (post)structuralism’s celebration of “undecidability” as inherently variable within the heterogeneous paradigmatic shifts of (post)modern experience. Ultimately, what is produced from this differential pluralism is the same ideological result of (re)inscribing the individual as the limit of knowledge and this knowledge as inherently experiential and fragmentary:

Malcolm X was too complex a historic figure, the movements he led too variable and contradictory, the passion and intelligence he summoned too extraordinary and disconcerting, and the forces that produced him too formidable for his career to be viewed through a monocular theoretical gaze or narrow cultural prism (Dyson, Michael. “X Marks the Plots: A Critical Reading of Malcolm’s Readers.” Summer 1993, 26).

Michael Dyson, by assuming Foucault’s methodology of the immanent “genealogy of the conditions of knowledge production,” essentially posits the ostensible “real” product of this method as invariably, again, the self-reflexive (ethical) individual “writing the history of the present” according to an anachronistic historicism that is ideologically blind to the facts of its own premises, i.e., that all “knowledge” is an instance of political “power” which as such is contestable . In so far as “the past” is being “written,” that is assessed and reconfigured, from a position within the nexus of present cultural codes and conventions, it inevitably is mediated by the social, political and economic conditions of its production that the “individual” bears historically. The supposedly progressive (socio)logical theory of experiential cultural studies which privileges representations of oppressed and marginal subjectivities to be used/viewed by/for the petty-bourgeois class, some of whom historically have not been granted the minimal amount of legal and economic rights ideally reflected in Western democracy’s judicial constitution, is (ideo)logically the same old experiential pragmatism of the apolitical “individual” on which the capitalist market still depends for it’s (re)production. The subject-ed “individual,” as bearer of labor-power, is historically premised upon the legal superstructure of the State, that, in turn, insures by law that the “individual” may sell their labor upon the “free” market. Thus, the discursive inclusion of the marginal, that is currently valorized as “a kinder and gentler” democracy, the precondition of a reformed capitalism with a “human face,” is actually the historic inevitability of the fact, that having reached its saturation point, capitalism is determined to find ever new configurations of socially necessary labor markets to manage the crisis of its mode of production. The multicultural work force is the “new” (neo-colonialist) basis for this surplus-labor (profit) and experiential cultural studies, functioning within the forum of a now defunct State democracy in the age of the multinationals, the ideology that manages its integration.

Foucault’s genealogical historicism, that the pedagogy of experiential cultural studies privileges, (re)inscribes the integral “individual” of capitalist production through a Nietzschean “techné of the self” mode of interpretation (interpellation) in which Malcolm X’s “body” of “knowledge” is constituted by various contradictions and slippages, marks and aporia, that do not, indeed cannot, be decisively resolved. By abdicating the responsibility of taking a rigorously critique-al conceptuality to Malcolm X’s life, which would consist of (re)cognizing at the level of theory the contradictions of Malcolm X’s political theories as theories which reference social contradictions and not subjectivist experiences, Dyson abdicates the opportunity of taking a conscious political position and, therefore, abdicates the (socio)logical responsibility for his class position by placing under erasure the fact that “others” (such as Malcolm X) have progressed beyond the bourgeois limits of experiential politics. Dyson’s conceptual liberalism effectively attempts to posit an “open” and “plural” space of democratic consensus that will successfully negotiate the contradictions of socio-political injustice. However, what this assumed theory of the democratic ideal of consensus is failing to account for, but is the inequity that it is actually constituted upon, is the fact that the theory of formal democratic representation is merely formal and does not address the per-locutionary economic inequities that filter oppositional resistances through the mediation of discursive (re)inscription systems that privilege “the freedom of speech” but erase the possibility of its critique. The bureaucratic negotiations of undecidable dialogue/debate, for instance the “controversial” exchanges between (neo)humanists and (post)structuralists, are necessary to insure that politics is the continual and ineffective mode of negotiating rhetorical value ( the specular status) of discursive exchange: it is the dominant mode of political containment that must position as “undecidable rhetoric” those discourses that are politically decisive as they are absolutely uncompromised by these debates and, therefore, unacceptable. The decisiveness of Malcolm X’s political life — the fact that he ends up at a marxian theory/practice of permanent revolution — is erased under the hegemony of democratic propriety as it is traversed by historical inconsistencies (Stalinism) that allow a “controversial” exchange-value to be applied to it in order to render it sociologically “undecidable” and thus harmlessly included at the level of formality. It is these world-historical inconsistencies that the pedagogy of experiential cultural studies collapses into the (re)privatized space of Malcolm X’s thought/experience. It bases its politics of plural and undecidable “ironic incongruities” upon this ideological basis in order to ensure that the “peaceful coexistence” of “multiculturalism” continue. To Dyson it is well established political realism to assume that, “Of course, many treatments of Malcolm’s life and thought transgress rigid interpretive boundaries” (26) because “a certainty about Malcolm… is clearly unachievable” (50). Contrarily this paper revives the politically dead Malcolm X — as the revolutionary X — and takes up a partisan position of political (re)alignment through the theoretical mediation of his radical “image” which I argue is ultimately a decisive politics of revolutionary propaganda not dependent upon the authority or non-authority of Malcolm X’s intention, but according to the actual extent to which the global conditions of the class struggle have progressed historically.

Malcolm X’s life is oppositionally read here as the theoretical/political progression of knowledge through historically limited frames of intelligibility. Malcolm X supplies the best example of the dialectic supersession of the experientially based radical intellectual and the only historically realistic understanding of the repressive necessity for capital to inflict political “death.” Contrary to the Foucault/Nietzsche genealogy, and their lesser (post)structuralist progeny which constitute the pacifist hegemony of the “new” ideological rationalization of the intellectual’s political abstinence (“Death of the Author” politics), Malcolm X stands for the effective status of revolutionary knowledge which does not abdicate the power of conceptual decisiveness (opposition political “life”) but must necessarily have it taken from him according to the dictates of a repressive State apparatus geared toward maintaining the privatized basis of experienced necessity (capital’s object of power; control of the market and it’s dominance of “personal life” and “liberty”) and its corresponding necessity of an experientially legitimated ideological episteme (capital’s subject of knowledge; the ideology of the individual’s “desire” and “freedom”) that will identify with the authoritative examples of capital(‘s) punishment. It is the (mis)recognition that Malcolm X represents an incipient “totalitarianism,” which I read oppositionally here as the a priori anti-democratic repression of a decisive theoretical explanation committed to the formation of a revolutionary alliance that crosses all identitarian fetishes of experienced propriety, that ultimately decides that Malcolm X be positioned with the revolutionary forces of resistance represented by Leon Trotsky (assassinated by a Stalinist agent), Charlemagne Peralte (Haitian Revolutionary leader shot by U.S. marines), and Ernesto Ché Guevera (killed by the CIA) pictured on this cover.

One can trace through the speeches given by Malcolm X (Malcolm X Speaks , Ed. George Breitman. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990) a progressively emerging logic regarding the actual basis underling all local and apparent differences of social oppression. From concentrating on local/national “civil rights” Malcolm X later attempted to deploy more encompassing criteria by which to galvanize political opposition. This emerged as an international discourse of “human rights” premised upon that very term on which the knowledge of exploitation is denied within the forums of national/State legality; that is to say one cannot experience exploitation under the rubric of a violation of “human rights” as it is exploitation that constitutes the necessity of the historical conception of “equal rights” in the first place, and this exploitation continues. In other words, the surplus-labor exploitation that is the core of the work-day in capitalism does not readily enter consciousness as a violation of “equal rights” as these rights themselves have developed from the organization of society upon the principle of this politically unconscious exploitation. It is within the borders of Malcolm X’s “black nationalism” that Malcolm X is made to support an inherently identitarian racial legitimation of national patriotism which in turn naturalizes the common-sense experience of appealing to State legality which then serves to justify the accepted “unalienated nature” of capitalist cultural (political) experience as it provides the space for the direct outlet of experientially based opinion, as translated into the immediate language of outrage, which cannot explain the material basis of oppression and, therefore, cannot intervene in the oppressive legitimation of capitalist relations. Under a “racial” paradigm of knowledge the conditions of knowledge production are understood to be ultimately a relative and undecidable trait of panhistorical commonality that is ultimately only accessible to atomized and unorganized individual experience, but that yet may be transformed to political intelligibility as a mode of knowing dependent upon the experiential cultural milieu that is the (ideo)logical underside to experientially based institutional politics of capitalist legitimation. The “unalienated” (unmediated) experiential subject, whether of literary pleasure or “racial” pain, revives the transcendental mysticism of depth ontology (the phenomenological core of being) as the exemplary instance of democratic liberty by which mere discursive production asserts the popularly fetishized “freedom of speech” as the most progressive and realistic political configuration to date. It is in this sense that the ideological value of including Malcolm X into the “multicultural” curriculum was once again rehearsed in the March 11-17 (1993) issue of The Black Voice published on this campus. The article, entitled “The Black Thinker”, had this to theorize as the most progressive aspects of Malcolm X’s political opposition to racist oppression and exploitation:

What WE are to DO is: Suck-up all the knowledge within this institution! Question: Do you see the Asian students at every party? No they’re in the library! [A]nd you laugh at their appearance… but they will be your boss!! . . .Also, you (WE) need to begin harnessing your (OUR) skills & talents for the betterment of self & race! This means to: DO FOR SELF!! SELF-SUFFICIENCY! To work for YOURSELF — to eventually work to OWN your OWN business!!! . . .[N]ot to work for someone else for ALL your life!! . . .What is OURS, justifiably by right will have to be HARDER than ever fought for & GOTTEN by: ANY MEANS NECESSARY!! (20).

The author of this piece went on to (re)inscribe the “racial” theory of experiential knowledge through warning of the dangers of obfuscating this essential knowledge by the biological contaminate called “jungle fever.” It is the theoretically unfounded and experiential base of a politics such as this, which is currently instituted and disseminated through Foucauldean based cultural studies, that works in conjunction with the existing forums of national State reform, currently configuring the present socialization of labor (Clintonomics), which helps construct a rudimentary version of National Socialism with all of its incipient petty-chauvinisms and class-prejudice. For instance, under this racial paradigm the capitalist expropriation of surplus-labor South of the national border under NAFTA is capable of being negotiated ideologically with American workers at a very mundane and unquestioned level of national patriotism. However, even more incipient and barbaric is the racial nationalism that supports the imperialist slaughter of Third World people of color. One need only remember the “yellow ribbon” campaign that celebrated the massacre of Iraqis. To the extent that any essentially definable “black” identity, or any other “racially” based discourse, is constructed under certain socio-historical conditions of oppression, to base an oppositional politics upon it without taking into account the prime material basis of this systematic oppression — exploitation, i.e. the maintenance of an underdeveloped resource of labor for international imperialism and cheap labor market within national capitals — is to posit a “false” basis for local (national) coalitional activism. That is why in clarifying his revolutionary program of “positive neutrality, non alignment” (“At the Audubon,” 1964. 132) that was to be based upon a materialist logic that would be incapable of being ideologically “compromised,” Malcolm X concluded, “You can’t take a racist position and defend it. No, you don’t have anything to base it on” (“Last Answers and Interviews” 1964, 215). This is because the identity of oppression cannot supply a base of engagement that would be inclusive of the global extent of exploitation and as such fractures the organization of working class solidarity into a petty national chauvinism, thus making it incapable of intervening against the only international standard of material equivalence: the multinational exploitation of labor-power, the driving force of the law of value — profit accumulation — which inscribes the theoretical discipline needed for capital’s historical supersession.

Although the predilection to base “human rights” on an abstract concept of “equality” could immediately engage those subjugated to the blatant discrepancy between their experience of oppression and the democratic rhetoric of “human rights,” it could not expand an oppositional political base beyond this direct experience on to those sectors of the oppressed not directly marginalized to sub-proletariat level (“white” unemployed) or to the privileged sectors of the American population who experienced the privileges of racial oppression (racist workers) but are nevertheless economically exploited, or even to the internationally exploited Third World. In an attempt to address these contradictions, Malcolm X’s theory/practice of “human rights” splintered into a more egalitarian application of localist-oriented abstractions that attempted to pragmatically correspond to the given conditions of the rhetorical moment of the social context he found himself in instead of on a principled and rigorous theoretical accounting of these discrepancies as the limited historico-economic contradictions that exist between a strictly racial and/or class based political agenda of social transformation. At the base of an effective theory of organizational solidarity is the dialectical materialist method. The question of how to unite these discrepancies, that are, after all, real material contradictions between class subjects, was the principle problematic of Malcolm X’s political trajectory. It was to unify these political contradictions — rather than dialectically position them as already a historical unity in developmental contradiction — that for a time Malcolm X would revert to transcendentally based moral projections such that the validity of the Muslim religion was to serve as the embodiment of the spiritual values needed in a future society were it to be just. Ultimately this vacillation was decisively resolved:

It is incorrect to classify the revolt of the Negro as simply a racial conflict of black against white, or as a purely American problem. Rather, we are today seeing a global rebellion of the oppressed against the oppressor, the exploited against the exploiter… [The Western industrial nations have been] deliberately subjugating the Negro for economic reasons. These international criminals raped the African continent to feed their factories, and are themselves responsible for the low standards of living prevalent throughout Africa… . I believe that there will ultimately be a clash between the oppressed and those that do the oppressing. I believe that there will be a clash between those who want to continue the systems of exploitation. I believe that there will be that kind of clash, but I don’t think that it will be based upon the color of the skin, as Elijah Muhammad had taught it (“Last Answers and Interviews,” 1965. 216, 217).

Eventually, “outside” of ideology to Malcolm X was a qualitatively different organization of social and economic forces and he espoused this just as decisively and consistently as his previous eclectic pragmatism; “What they use to solve the problem is not capitalism” (121-122); it is socialism. Socialism would be an equitable distribution of wages/commodities. As such, it is proposed by its advocates as capable of being viably implemented by either reforms to the system or violent revolution: “by any means necessary.” However, this paper critiques the “binary logic” methodology of dialogic practice that would discursively posit an alternative plan of volitionally organizing production, as deployed within the (post)modern moment of advanced First World capitalism, as an ideological mystification (a Habermasian dream of “communicative action”) serving the maintenance of the crisis ridden regime of exploitation and thus also serving the needs of the capitalist and his version of democracy albeit under a different guise: as the representation of the “radical” negation of the State (anarchism) coupled with the “rational” content of reformist oriented co-operation among classes fundamentally antagonistic to each other according to their diametrically opposed material interests. In the words of Marx this strategy, which posits the rational basis of socialist society, represents the “dream of experimental realization of… social Utopia” where “history resolves itself… into the practical carrying out of… social plans” (The Communist Manifesto . Reprinted in The Marx-Engels Reader. Ed. Robert C. Tucker. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. 1972. 360,361).

The propaganda approach of alternative (binary) information (logic) dissemination and its corresponding ideology of political consciousness-raising aligns itself with the ideology of the market merely as an activist slogan to be consumed along side of all other commodities that interpellate the individual as a volitional subject. Rather than engaging the subject within the historical consciousness of the limited extent of the socio-economic field that constitutes the relative effectivity of any social maneuvering, and thus, materially intervening in capitalist relations of production within the present moment in order to produce organizational effectivity, what occurs instead is the attempt to communicate and/or intellectually convince an abstract individual, that is, “the individual” as if it existed transhistorically under the conditions that ideology depends upon — as a conceptually autonomous and free subject who can decide to volitionally change the given conditions they find themselves in by their own creative inventiveness — and not as a subject (socio)logically bound to individual market competition and the personal dependency upon it for their existence. This is basically the moral political subject that bourgeois ideologues claim is ultimately responsible for her own conditions of existence within a market that can account for everyone equitably if they are just willing to persevere, a moralist’s dream of a “pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps” type-of-subject that corresponds to the ideology of an historically defunct stage of liberal competitive capitalism. To base an oppositional political agenda upon ideological knowledge claims is actually deferment of the qualitatively different status of consciousness produced by a thorough historical material analysis of global capital and its law of motion. In other words, interventionary ideology critique coupled with the pedagogy of economic causality is the only way that class-structure becomes class-formation at the level of theory and thus within the ranks of the managers of crisis problematizing their organizational knowledges and revealing the limits of bourgeois democracy. While taking theory to the very limits of the possible, praxis appropriates ideology as a means of production — i.e. language as the raw material of thought configured in concepts deployed as institutional/organizational knowledge — within the present exploitative mode thereof. Materialist praxis imparts the method that accounts for the motive forces of global crisis; it therefore supplies the knowledge needed to resist ideological inscription and the reproduction of market logic in the realm of theory. In doing this it re-configures organizational knowledge and indicates the material conditions needed to eradicate exploitation by revolutionary practice. The graphic mode of theory-as-propaganda distribution is necessarily deployed, along with the widened epistemology of social democratic discourses designed so as to contain the perpetual crisis of capitalist production, to engage the most progressive agents capable of adhering to a truly revolutionary transformation of the mode of production. This is the political use-value of praxis: theory as praxis.