Towards a Critique-al Practice
[and Against the (Re)vision-ism of the (Post)modern Liberal Ethos]
A.J. Sahay
| Revision History | ||
|---|---|---|
| • September 1993 | Newspaper: Funded by Syracuse University students. | |
| The Alternative Orange: Vol. 3, No. 1 (pp. 6-7,20-21) | ||
| • September 20, 2000 | Webpage:  . | |
| DocBook XML (DocBk XML V3.1.3) from original. | ||
As an introduction concerning the politics of knowledge production this article positions itself in regard to what might constitute effectively oppositional subjects in the (post)modern academy today. That is, subjects who are capable of intervening in the ideological construction of subjectivity as it takes place within the broader confines of the (re)production of capitalist relations of production, through intervention in the (super)structural determination of (post)modern subjectivity. However, it is first necessary to clarify that the intervention that is here being theorized is a critique-al practice of actively contesting, through a process of re-location of their ideological valence, the normative discourses/practices structurally functioning to produce an acquiescent labor force through a dislocation /displacement of its contradictory relation (of subjection) to the means of production. As such it is dependent upon a notion of the dialectical relations of the base to the superstructure such that an understanding of the subject as Träger (or “bearer” of economic interests) is the fundamental condition of its own possibility. Far from arguing for an “empty” subject such an understanding is invoked in order to pressure dominant conceptions of the subject in an attempt to resituate the political subject as the subject of/for trans-formatory change as opposed to the subject of/for capitalist re-form.
As such a project stands to engage those positioned in the academy it demands a level of complexity that takes as given that these representatives, far from coming to such an intellectual space as “individuals” incapable of/unwilling to enter into such a theoretical space, are already in it. Thus while the epistemological choice is over an understanding of the social effects of theoretical production, that is, the effects it stands to have in producing affective intelligibilities, subjects who think, act and produce in specific ways, the political choice is not between theoreticity or a-theoreticity but between theory and anti-theory theory; over a theoretics which argues for the economic, political and ideological significance of concepts and an experientialism which reifies the social conditions of capitalist production through the production of artificial moments of (post)modern rupture with which the subject “identifies”, even as the loss of “Identity” (corresponding to an increasingly fragmented production process) produces a crisis in normative identifications.
Necessarily however, these “choices” cannot be understood as operating within the voluntarist paradigmatic of democratic “choice” as such. That is, they presuppose real interests in the maintenance of the status quo, interests which extend beyond the desiring practices of individual subjects to reconstitute themselves as hegemonic alliances working in the interests of capitalist appropriation in the (now) global factory. First World academicians/intellectuals, in so far as they maintain a privileged position in regard to the (re)production of capital, also maintain a privileged position in regard to the production of knowledges. That is, in a totality of social relations characterized by a division of labor, they stand positioned to produce knowledges, or rather as the designated producers of knowledges. The knowledges that they produce are not abstracted from the social arena by virtue of their segregated production within a particular cultural site, rather they are dialectically constituted within the mode of production so to reinforce the larger social relations of which they form but a part (through the dissemination of cultural intelligibilities), simultaneously as they are themselves produced as a function of these very social relations: as emblemizing the cultural intelligibilities needed at any given historical moment to (re)produce an operative and passive labor force.
Thus the fact that the notion of an immanently discursive production of the categories of “race, class, gender, sexuality” has at this historical juncture become the prime mode of political intelligibility, ostensibly signifying the politicization of the discursive, points not only to the appropriation by dominant discourses of historical contradictions that need to be examined in light of the totality of capitalist social relations, but also to the mode of academic/intellectual appropriation of these contradictions which relegate their political potential in opening up a space for their explanation to a fetishized space of contextual dependency which heightens the experiential differences of their local discursive articulation. In other words there results a concentration on the heterogeneous experiences of these unequal power relations (in texts, in language, in the factory, at one’s job, etc.,) without a comprehensive, totalizing theorization of how these power relations work-in-relation, although differently, as an intervention in (group and thereby individual) labor relations. This move away from the materiality of these constructs (and the displacement of the material on to language as the matter-iality of the sign ) thus reconstitutes what is meant to be an investigation into ideology as itself ideological if one remembers that the ideological is that which suspends the primary contradiction of capitalism, increasing exploitation/ oppression in conjunction with an increase in productive possibilities, as beyond the reach of — a revolutionary — history.
As the material exceeds the discursive, constituting the condition of possibility of its existence, it provides the co-ordinates for an ideology critique which locates the boundaries/limits to knowledges and examines the field of knowledges in an attempt to ascertain not only what it is (the how of meaning) but why it is that certain knowledges make “sense”, that is “common” sense as constituting the historically contingent acceptability of “meaning”. It is in an effort to produce a radically different understanding of the (socio)logical significance of the discursive that this article proceeds to make visible the ideological line of continuity between humanist discourses and (post)structuralist discourses, co-existent in the (post)modern academy, in terms of the similar discursively generative and legitimatory effects of their practices and not the presumed intentions of their practitioners.
This is of course already to reconstitute the theoretical margin in terms of a discourse which doesn’t “respect” the symbioticism of the various interdisciplinary knowledges, but rather re-locates the reified differences in “area of study” as being the sign of a conservative pluralism preserving a notion of the “irreducibility” of knowledges/practices (the theoretical embodiment of a multicultural democracy) within the confines of the new (instituted) hegemony of the Foucauldean dream: a reconciliation of le savoir de gens (popular, i.e., experiential knowledge) and scholarly erudition (82; Power/Knowledge). A trans-disciplinary epistemological filter understands this post-’68 coalition as symptomatizing the necessity for an extension of bourgeois democracy — as the right to representation — to an emergent labor force (women, African Americans, ethnic communities, etc.,) previously subject to modern as opposed to (post)modern forms of capitalist oppression/exploitation. That is, this “insurrection of subjugated knowledges” (ibid., 81) as being a requisite component in the shift to multinational capitalism in as much as serving to legitimate the emergence of the various social sub-communities/interest groups and their integration into world capital based on an innovated production process engendering a higher standard of living, the apparency of an quantitative increase in First World middle-class status and the correspondent “post-class/post-labor” technocraticism of late capitalist ideology. The coincident alliance between the “popular” intellectual and the “intellectual” populace is then merely a refraction of this “middle class” status transmitted through a heightened surface tension to the media- ting commodity in the (post)ontological, neo-phenomenological era of informatics and super-communication and, it is significant to note, is itself anachronistic in the face of an increasing rate of proletarianization in the Third World as well as in the economies of the First World.
Recognizing that this theorized space of trans-disciplinary critique is open to political subsumption by the “post-epistemological” pan-textualism of deconstructive immanence and/or the resolute indifference/hostility of both the “avant garde ” and the reactionary elements in the academy I immediately situate the production of this text within the larger set of practices/discourses constituting its conditions of production. I claim as one of its conditions of production the very fact that in this eclectic and accommodating intellectual arena some discourses are de facto excluded from the realm of the sensible/the intelligible, not incidentally those very discourses which maintain a rigorous emphasis on inequitable production relations and the role of the academy in supporting these relations. Furthermore, insofar as it occupies the formal space of the mise en scéne of capitalist ideology in the spatial sense of the concrete-historical (as opposed to the concrete-theoretical) conditions of its possibility: in the form of an article written by a “member” in/of the petty-bourgeois domain of institutionalized production (student publication), and as such is open to being consumed through the very devaluation of that (“pre”)intellectual space, it seeks to provide the closure of a sure line of demarcation of its own (constructed) conceptuality and not only as an attempt to fulfill its epistemological/political allegiances but to provide through this space, which overtly marks its own (principled) boundaries, the possibility of theoretical engagement by/with others who such an exposition must necessarily serve to position.
Such a pedagogical endeavor then will not proceed according to the framework of an “alternative information” political strategy, nor a social-realist pedagogical mode which understands its own agenda as the re- articulation of historically “proven” modes of argumentation/presentation and, sedimented in the (re)production of a formulaicized logically progressional conclusivity, (mis)recognizes the historical possibilities and limitations to/in the production/dissemination of oppositional “struggle concepts” (see Teresa Ebert: “Ludic Feminism…” following Maria Mies: Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale). This is neither to appropriate the bricoleur -like tactics of the intellectualized petty-bourgeois knowledge producers now so widely acclaimed for their “cutting-edge” theoretical legitimations of the historically positioned vacillating/opportunistic tendencies of their class alliance nor to indicate an affiliation with the innovative neo-formalism of (post)modern textualisms. Rather it is to (re)cognize the historicity of meaning-production which allows one to engage in theory as, in Althusser’s theorization, it is situated as a site of class struggle and thus to make available those knowledges/conceptualizations which stand to be most progressive while recognizing that it is their location in regard to other contesting knowledges/conceptualizations that stand to make them so.
Since the usage of terminology, as, for example, the use of the term ‘critique-al’ has already positioned both the reader and the writer in a somewhat unfamiliar (disorienting) conceptual space it seems necessary to use this conjuncturally differentiated term (that is, a term theoretically overdetermined in regard to the historico/politico/economic contradictions it addresses) as exemplary in a theorization of the emergence and political use-value of what I have above referred to as “struggle concepts” or those concepts which stand to produce resistance to dominant (i.e., ideologically valorized) notions of what constitutes the political. The significance of critique (hence critique-al ) however, does not follow along the trajectory merely of introducing a theoretical vocabulary specific to a discursive practice which has as its aim the de-construction of normative understandings of representation. Indeed through this understanding of all representation as (ideo)logic-al deconstructive discourses may themselves be construed as a (liberal) for(u)m of (bourgeois) ideology-critique constituting an institutionalized “radical” practice of updating modes of intelligibility through indicating the (form-al) limits to “old” humanist (that is, dysfunctional) knowledges without a systematic political theorization of their historico/economic content. Rather, as a concept produced from within a specifically Marxian critical genealogy in the (post)modern moment (see Zavarzadeh Seeing Films Politically and Morton and Zavarzadeh Theory/(Post)Modernity/Opposition) it stands as a marker of the departure from both the critical mode practiced by traditional literary and social theory — interpretive criticism as the un-self-reflexive mode of classifying what is, in fact, a process of knowledge production (of the real) according to transcendentally thematic value considerations exemplified by Author, Reader, Intention, Inspiration, etc., and dependent upon a notion of the transparency of Meaning, and that practiced by the discourses of (post)structuralism — discourse analysis, deconstruction, etc., which self-reflexively engage in a critical practice dependent upon a different set of interpretive axes — textuality, the body, différance, slippage, excess, supplementarity, etc., (de)centered upon a notion of the opacity of meaning.
In opposition to these frames of intelligibility, which it understands as functioning, dissimilarly but co-operatively, to produce versions of the real which occlude anything other than (re)presentational change, critique positions the essentially social character of ideology as serving to maintain, through the discursive interpellation (Althusser), or recruitment, of constructed subjects, the ideological, political and economic hegemony of ruling class interests. It is in locating and situating the economic/political co-ordinates of knowledge production that the “text” (that is, the instance of textual and/or discursive production) emerges and is produced as, not a self-contained and/or immanent-to-itself entity but one which is symptomatic of social struggle within capitalist relations. Thus, whereas knowledge in both the humanist and (post)structuralist frameworks is, ultimately, intrinsically bound to the object of knowledge such that knowledge production is, in the first case, the process of extraction (by the “individual”/reader) of an uncontestable/referentially constituted knowledge, located in the object of analysis (empiricism), and, in the second case, the speculative (re)marking (by the theorist/subject) of the processes of signification/meaning-production (undecidable/differentially constituted), still immanent to the (context-ualized) object of knowledge (neo-empiricism), a Marxian theoretic of critique-al practice understands the sphere of knowledge production as coincident with the sphere of ideology whereby different knowledges, bearing (often) radically opposed economic and political interests, contest over what constitutes knowledge in any given historical period.
In order to sustain its conceptual rigor, in Marx’s words, its practical potential for being realized as a “ruthless critique of everything existing”, thus serving as a vehicle of materialist praxis in the multiform struggle for social change, a critique-al epistemology emphasizes the conceptual apprehension and explanation of diverse and often seemingly disjointed and incommensurable phenomena, as well as a theoretical “partisanship” (Lenin) which understands its historical role as intrinsically pedagogical, that is, actively articulated to a revolutionary (re)production of the real (as the real-concrete), in theory (as the concrete-in-thought) and hence political. Contrary to an (old)cognitivist understanding of epistemology as capable of being a-politically objective in a contestatory arena and to a (neo)cognitivist understanding of epistemology as being necessarily a site rift by internal incoherences and thus incapable of providing a coherent theoretical base for political struggle such that all “theory” is, eventually, just a “resistance to theory” (de Man, J.Hillis Miller), such a position understands the very contestation over the possibility of an epistemology based on conceptual decisiveness as being a site of struggle over the production of knowledges which function to empower exploited and oppressed social groups by demonstrating the systematicity (and not the auto -maticity) with which dominant epistemologies function (through theory) to reproduce an (experiential) world of inequitable social relations.
Centrally configured as an attempt to contribute to the revolutionary dissolution of bourgeois “democracy” as predicated upon inequitable labor relations fundamentally grounded upon the maintenance of a class binary and the integrally contributing totalizing structures of hierarchically organized race, gender and sexual relations, such a practice, with its emphasis on explanation, takes, as its epistemological basis, the theory of dialectical materialism which corresponds to and explains the essential movement of history as the contradictory progression of the relations of production and the forces of production and their conflictual collisions in the form of periodically recurring ideological, political and economic crises. However, as dialectical materialism itself stands inscribed within historical materialism (the theory of the totality of capitalist relations as they stand within the history of class struggle), which locates the logic to history through a scientific apprehension of the mediations between the local and global economic/political relations as they stand determined within the mode of material production, it is itself subject, in its specific conceptual modality, to a historicity which demands that it account for the philosophical/intellectual movement of social struggle within an ever shifting ideological terrain producing different versions of (idealist) history. Which is to say that dialectical materialism, which constitutes the epistemological basis of historical materialism, is itself dialectically engaged by historical materialism such that the latter constitutes, in (as a theoretics of) the last instance, its most progressive (because most practically available to a revolutionary proletariat) aspect and thus provides it with the material coordinates to map the crucial sites of the class struggle.
Within the Western academy — as re-located as the prime labor-skilling site in the thoroughly commodified moment of the late capitalist tendency towards universalized commodity production where subjects learn not only the appropriate practical skills to meet the requirements of the market but, simultaneously, the appropriate intelligibilities whereby they can effectively be interpellated as pragmatic functionaries of capital — those fighting for a revolutionary transformation of the imperialist and neo-colonialist “New World Order” cannot afford not to engage in the political struggle currently being fought along the ideological frontiers of influential discourses such as multiculturalism and populism. Thus, for instance, multi-culturalism, having been theoretically legitimated by the epistemological neo-territorialization of (post)modern intellectual production by the discourses of (post)structuralism, most notably deconstruction, serves, through the underwriting of global economic and political conflict as international inter-communitarian “differences” replicated on a local scale as group “diversity”, as cultural filters of political legitimation for the promotion of First World “helping hand” economic intervention for the profit maintenance purposes of a free market dominated by international capitalist coalitions (against the world proletariat) in the form of multinationals. Further, multiculturalism with its logic of extension of the benefits of capitalist exploitation to previously excluded groups and populism with its nationalist/culturally affirmative sensibilities may be seen as dual sides to the coin of capital accumulation: the ideological promulgation of the notion of a heterogeneous yet co- operative world middle class and the simultaneous integration of more and more sections of the world population into proletariat and sub-proletariat classes requiring a direct affirmation of intra-national (geo-spatially confined) sensibilities as being in order to counter the effects of an increasing objective socialization of the means of production directly resulting from the increasing concentration and centralization of capital.
In the (post)modern then, as “the cultural logic of late capitalism” (Jameson), a theoretically necessary (post)deconstructive epistemology locates the (socio)logic-al valence to the deconstructive aporia or space of excess which emblemizes the “impossibility of the possibility of knowing” (Derrida), re-cognizing the socio- political function of this produced ‘limit’ to theoretical investigation as being, in fact, a decisive ideological move towards the containment of progressive interventionary possibilities dependent upon an objective status to the referent: these possibilities corresponding to the dialectically expansive movement of theory itself in conjunction with the materiality of production relations. Thus the end of the possibility of theory as such as the production of a certain knowledge is collapsed into the impossibility of an historical qualitative change in the mode of production as this latter extends into both the textual/historical past and the textual/historical future immanently decentered and displaced by the collapse of meaning. Moreover, a politics of globality re-articulates the specialization of political theory and practice around the decentered axes of “race”, “class”, “gender” and “sexual orientation” [now ideologically misconstrued as corresponding to“différ(e/a)nce” ] promoting community based understandings of solidarity and struggle against political, social and economic oppression and/or exploitation as being both incapable of producing, beyond the (manipulable) boundaries of representation, a fundamental change in the produced and integrative structures of capitalist hegemonies, as well as implicitly conforming to an anachronistic localist/nationalist immanency which denies the logic of capitalist expansion and reproduces the regional (activist) subject of an historically (mis)recognized “state monopoly capitalism” (see Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism), now transnationally configured.
At the local site of political organization, the agenda being the inculcation of conscious political subjects capable of participating in the production and not merely the assimilation and (re)privatization (through subject oriented discourses) of resistant knowledges, what becomes crucial is the dissemination of oppositional frames of intelligibility that serve to counter-publicize the experiential immediacy of the easily accessible and grasping structures of ideological identity-making/constructing. Significant among these are reactionary institutional bodies and functions which include student-faculty “mentor-ships”; “orientation” programmatics; “difference” based activist groups, etc., and extend to a consolidation of familiar modes of “communication” with the implicit function of producing, in different tactical ways, acquiescent subjects to local/global capitalist relations of hegemonically configured material and cultural possibilities locally dependent upon identificatory and other post-collectivist coalitional strategies. As a radical departure from the normative strategies of (political) propagandistic/pedagogical, information/activity based practices as encountered within university classrooms, newspapers, social events, institutions, etc., which act upon a non-theorized (i.e., experiential and hence atheoretical) base of non- acknowledgment of their essentially propagandistic/ pedagogical function in the construction of subjects, critique-al engagement/ practice endeavors to systematically produce subjects capable of contestation with the dominant ideology at its most significant epistemological and political boundaries.
There are of course real socio-historical limits to such an agenda, such as, for example, institutional and ideological alliances against interventionary organs and practices which would include at its most simple level a demand for a “popular” (i.e., easily appropriable) “language” (see Katz “Accuracy and Ideology” A.O. Vol 2, No. 7) devoid of the necessary and difficult theoretical deployment of oppositional struggle concepts required for a rigorous and sustained investigation of cultural/political/economic phenomena through a location of their conditions of possibility. The imbricated discourses of “progressive” politics in the academy, marked by an emergent multiculturalism with its emphasis on alterity, on pluralism as a liberal strategy counter-poised against the conservatism of a now outdated humanism, thus serve to attenuate the radical possibilities of ideology critique through the subsumption of radicalism into a space of democratic articulation which insists on a consensual model of what constitutes the acceptable: variously — “how is it effective if no one understands it ?” (i.e., translate it into the common-sense so we can identify with it)/”I don’t agree with you or your “mentors” (i.e., your political alliance is a form of brain-washing whereas mine is “authentic”/”creative”)/ “you just have a problem with women!” (i.e., you’re not privileging my marginal status) and other such charges of “unintelligibility” and “excessiveness” leveled against theory[1] which attempts to explode the myth of equivalence between the (legal) right to (self) representation through the discursive channels of race, gender, sexual orientation, etc., (itself a function of a constitutive change in the labor force corresponding to multinational capital) and the (political/economic) right to collective self-determination in the sphere of production .
Dialectically however, inasmuch as radical oppositional discourses open up a space of critique of implicit as well as explicit contradictions it is precisely the [(ideo)logic-al] appearance of their “failure” according to the parameters of bourgeois regulations, marshalled by the dialogical authority of populist inclusion, and policed by the “professional radicals” in the petty-bourgeois classroom of conservative/”democratic” solemnities, that mark their “success”. Thus it is precisely those discourses that cross the boundaries of acceptable radicality, that in their consignment to the margin, not only in theory but in material practice, such as the receiving of unjustifiably low grades, the denial of credibility on the grounds of fanaticism and over- intellectualism, the refusal of recommendations without explanation, the “decision” to deny tenure, the difficulty in being published, etc., serve to detail the limits of (petty) bourgeois democracy and particularly to publicize the normative edge of “theoretical” practices in the academy today.
These practices however, it must be noted, are not merely to be understood at the level of the institution in question but must, in their implications, be seen as symptomatic of a larger global social agenda in the reproduction of capital and capitalist (producing/consuming according to the dictates of commodity rather than collective production) subjectivities. To collapse them into the local conditions of their production, or to infer them as volitionally constituted by subjects able to map the socio-political valence of their own necessity is precisely to negate their ideological significance. Thus for example the space of the “politically unaware” (the privileged subjects of capitalism) as well as the space of the “politically activist” (those interpellated by the political) can be read, against their own common-sensical relation to each other as “radically different”, as in fact being aligned in/by the interests of capital through their implicit or explicit pedagogy of the private.
For instance, the significance of a recent “advertisement” for an ETS 200 level course called “Living Writers and Dead Pals” which endeavors to introduce students through “private readings” to their “favorite writers” as well as the significance of a “materialist feminist” (politically engaged) pedagogue refusing another politically engaged student a recommendation to apply to graduate school in the same university (for “personal” and not “academic” reasons) must be seen as reflecting the more general contradictions of capitalist relations.
In the first case not only does the “advertisement” in question signify a blatant regression from the presumable requirements of a (“progressive”) theory-based English department insofar as it emblemizes the celebrated return to theoretically superseded understandings of reading/writing/thinking along the lines of outmoded “literary” concepts such as “inspiration” (indeed one could argue that the so-called departmental shift was never quite as thorough as it claimed-see Morton and Zavarzadeh “A Very Good Idea Indeed: The (Post)Modern Labor Force and Curricular Reform” Cultural Studies in the English Classroom, 1992) but more importantly it signals a return to individualist “reading” practices which reproduce the “private” consumer of late capitalist Western democracy. That is, what it is really teaching, through the sensation-alization of knowledge production, is the necessary reproduction of experiential frames of understanding, frames which inculcate the specular subject of dominant ideology and (re)produce the classroom as merely just another instance of commodity consumption, thus eliding its conditions and relations of production which mark it as a contradictory space, refracting the social sphere, of unequal and uneven development.
Such a tendency, furthermore, and I am here reading this particular instance as symptomatizing the general trend towards a return to conservative pedagogy in the guise of the sensational, cannot effectively be understood as being merely a reaction to the liberal pedagogy of the “Left-sympathetic” theorists of (post)structuralism. Rather it has critical implications in regard to the fundamental problematic of (post)structuralism and its most brilliant avatar in the form of Derridean deconstruction. Thus although the anti-experiential conceptual modality which deconstruction claimed as an innovation over the residual humanism of Heiddegerean phenomenology as still preserving a notion of the authenticity of the reading subject as having access to a (radicalized) experience, served to de-legitimate the transcendentalism of the experiential, it has revived it as a (post-humanist)experience dependent upon notions of the performative subject/text as in the later work of Derrida, and other lesser progeny such as Judith Butler (see Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Teresa de Lauretis (“The Violence of Rhetoric”), and Avital Ronell (The Telephone Book). The result of the wide circulation of such popular “high” theory with its reinscription in a “new” (and more acceptable) form of the necessary (to capitalist reproduction) category of a spontaneous experience has been a revival in the sensational as an immanent and local auto-intelligibility- effect capable of providing that individualizing excess that extends beyond the inherently (socio)logical and connective, structuration effects of the discursive. Thus the internal logic of the subject/text (posited as) “becoming” (self)constitutive at the level of form disrupts its own logic thereby providing the excess as that which cannot be accounted for conceptually. This “cutting edge” mode of theoreticizing experience through emphasis on the form-al properties of significatory repetition and disruption has of course been widely disseminated with the result that even the most reactionary theories can now claim the legitimacy of “theoretical” justification for their experience-based practices.
In the second case, far from being an act of petty personal vengeance — directed against a student the professor “didn’t like” precisely because of her being pressured in regard to maintaining the same level of theoretical coherency in a university classroom as would be deemed necessary in the “Academic” forum (as that elite site of the circulation of “theory” as such) — such an inconsistency in a materialist feminist practice would seem to point to a (more significant) theoretical gap. To a Marxian feminist working from within a rigorous understanding of materiality as constituting the determinant excess to ideology (signification/discourse), the objective conditions of production as opposed to subjective production within the superstructure, the actions of this professor indicate a failure to theorize and account for the contradictions located at the site of the personal (“likes” and “dislikes”) and how these are intrinsically related to the sphere of the public - social struggle between contesting subjects along the lines of class, race, gender and sexual orientation. That is, materialism, if it is not to fall into idealism, recognizes the personal/subjective as a primarily ideological site, replicating at the level of discourse, but not constitutive of, the objective sphere of classed, raced and gendered production relations and, correspondingly, does not depend upon the personal as being a reliable basis (or not) for theoretical/political solidarity or theorize it as the teleological extent of intervention (“liberatory” possibility for (the) petty-bourgeois theorist(s) on a local/individual scale).
Such an “individualist” encounter then, points to the careerist adoption of theoreticism as such, in accordance with dominant “Leftist” notions of politicity as centered around the experiential body, for e.g., ‘I grew up in a working class home, thereby I can identify with the proletariat’ - which, even if formally abandoned in theory, nevertheless stand to be reactivated in practice - ‘you make me nervous, therefore I cannot support you’. This kind of discrepancy, is one of the ways in which the experiential is repeatedly reinscribed in the sphere of the conceptual as trans-coding it: that is, as ultimately bringing all political questions down to an engagement between “different” individuals, incapable of working together on the basis of a political and not a personal alliance. This in turn ultimately serves to fragment an understanding of the proletariat as a revolutionary collective objectively constrained by the exploitative structures of the capitalist mode of production and, as such, capable of dismantling them through counter organization. Instead, it produces a notion of the very impossibility of internationalist organization for global change by reinscribing individuality and the decisive incompatibility of personal — that is, private — interests and works in tandem with the ideological necessity for (ostensibly) delimiting the space of entry into discourse (pluralism) while maintaining the rigid boundaries of private ownership of the means of production and the consequent necessary (re)production of a complacent labor force through ideological innovation (multiculturalism/populism) which forecloses upon the possibility of sustained contestatory engagement.
It is, furthermore, in this light that the contradictory charge of “totalitarian exclusion” against those very destabilizing discourses/practices, such as critique, which are systematically excluded from entry into this “all- inclusive” “democratic” space of articulation, must be considered. Insofar as critique stands to problematize the very (theoretical) basis upon which the normative, “everyday” practices of capitalist life are conducted, that is, to defamiliarize the familiarity of the dominant ideology (inclusive of race, gender, sexual and textual politics in the (post)modern) and to demonstrate its complicity in preserving the status quo, it stands to materially intervene in the regulated (re)production of capitalist relations of production according to an international classed division of labor and is thus marginalized as a target by counter-revolutionary interests. Such interests inevitably invoke charges of totalitarianism, elitism, sexism, fanaticism and alarmism counterposed against an affirmative populist politics.
In an exemplary populist text, Technoculture, the editors Andrew Ross and Constance Penley distance themselves (and their colleagues) from “the tradition of left cultural despair and alarmism” (xii) articulating their agenda of promoting local resistance’s to the monolithic devices of “social control” through the harnessing of the “liberatory fantasies” of “ordinary men and women” (xiii). Following the thesis that these “ordinary” people must be allowed to imagine a personal autonomy that they are “somehow in charge” and that a “more democratic kind of technoculture” (xiii) is indeed possible through a “local, decentralized, community activism” (xv) managed by the “cultural critics” [not too critical, of course] who will “say how, when, and to what extent critical interventions in that process are not only possible but also desirable” (xiv-xv), Ross and Penley locate themselves as emblemizing the academic space in which advanced “theory-as-anti-intellectualism” and economic interests come together in the “persons” of petty-bourgeois crisis managers who stand to effectively marginalize the interventionary possibilities of radical critique.
As against such a project of the dissemination of social democratic, nationalist and populist sensibilities in order to maintain the crumbling ideology of autonomy and democracy in First World capitalism as it stands more and more obviously linked to a global division of labor, and the corresponding promulgation of philosophically idealist theories of an “affirmative” resistance to the exigencies of global capitalism by managers of the status quo, I would like to offer critique as an alternative-ly resistant practice based upon the revolutionary social ideal of proletarian democracy; on global equal access to the means of material and cultural production. I maintain that a project based upon rigorous and critical theoretical intervention in knowledge production is not “idealist” in the sense of philosophical ideal-ism which believes that it can produce change through an evolutionary process of political activism in the sphere of experience (“today we’ll talk, tomorrow we’ll march”). Rather, it claims intervention in the sphere of conceptuality, through a process of demonstrating the extent and limits to reactionary knowledges; in producing theoretical subjects of revolutionary politics and social ideals who thereby move to a position of critique-al intervention in the mode of knowledge production as public intellectuals.
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