Part Three § 1: Reading my Readers

The prepublication review process—whether for journal essays or book manuscripts—is supposed to function as an “objective,” “independent” and just measure of the text’s intellectual worth based on the knowledgeable, well informed and freely developed judgments of reviewers. In the daily practices of the academy, however, the social contradictions—which these assumptions about the “evaluation” of knowledge are devised to contain—constantly break into the open. The readers’ responses (which determine whether a text will be published or not) are not, it turns out, the “autonomous” critical judgments we suppose but rather are (unwitting?) articulations of the prevailing ideology. This is another way of saying that the practice of reviewing is deeply embedded in the ruling social relations of production that the dominant ideology justifies and explains away: the “evaluation” of knowledge work becomes an arena for the local, specific exercise of more systematic power relations underwritten by the existing class domination. This historical and political reality renders “free,” “independent” judgment impossible: the concept of “free” (that is, beyond the social relations of production) turns out to be nothing more than an ideological illusion. The majority of reviewers—in all their seeming diversity, freedom, and individual “difference”—end up as (unwitting?) enforcers of the rules of property-holding encoded in the prevailing ideology, and “reviewing” becomes one of the State Ideological Apparatuses. It acts to suppress oppositional ideas and to close off “other” modes of knowing, especially those that challenge the hegemonic common sense (ideology). This political closure largely goes unmarked since the supposed “autonomy” and “privacy” (the behind-the-scenes nature) of reviewing (that is, the “privileged,” “individual” relation between press and reviewer, which excuses reviewers from accounting for their “conclusions”) shield it from critique-al scrutiny.

However, the editors of College Literature have asked me to respond to my reviewers (see report #1; report #2; report #3); in fact, they have made it a condition for publishing my text. But rather than continue such debates “in private” (behind-the-scenes), where the issues at stake can be easily suppressed, it is important to make these issues public: to open them for critique-al inquiry and debate. The contestation involved between my (oppositional) text and the readers’ responses is not an “individual” matter, but rather is a local site that enacts the larger class struggle over knowledges. The readers, in all their individual uniqueness, are, by and large, voicing the hegemonic discourses; just as my own text is not an “individual” product but rather is participating in a collectivity of theories and praxis called historical materialism. Reading my reviewers, then, is a social and political act: a critique-al engagement with the some of the more pressing social conflicts over knowledge and the way they are enacted in the daily practices of the publishing institutions and through the very details of our everyday lives as writers and intellectuals.

It is quite significant that in late 1993 these “informed” readings of my text—which is a critique of poststructuralism—are putting forth the old clichés of poststructuralist theory (Foucault’s theory of power, Lacan’s notion of the subject of desire, post-marxist fantasies about the disappearance of class struggles) and the banalities of Freirean pedagogy as if they were brand new revolutionary ideas! The writers of these responses, in their eagerness to display the truths of postmodern theory, have not even read my texts carefully enough to realize that my text tries to open up a space beyond these theories: poststructuralism has become the new common sense of the ludic academy and the readers of my text, like all practitioners of the common sense, take any transgression of their view of the real as a mark of non-knowledge (“This essay seems to have missed an entire generation of new thinking on power,” Reader 2; insert #2). It is, no doubt, a mark of the power and prestige of this new common sense that the editors of College Literature have made my response to these readings the condition of publication of my text. What is most frustrating in writing such a response is that the etiquette of academic exchanges requires that I treat these texts—which fall apart under the pressures of their own immanent contradictions—as if they were coherent and sense-full arguments. They are, as I will demonstrate in the following pages, even in their own terms, incoherent discourses and do not provide any rigorous argument or critical explanations. Instead, they acquire a semblance of coherence through the power of postmodern common sense—that is, as an ideological effect. For me to “speak” against the grain of academic common sense, however, means I have to at least adhere to the terms of academic etiquette, that is, I will have to speak in the terms set by these incoherent texts, and thus I will have to spend a great deal of time simply demonstrating how they are fraught with contradictions and how these contradictions are covered up by the ruling ideology. Not doing so, means I will not be “heard” and probably not even given any space in the pages of College Literature. It is the rule of the ludic academy: those who speak in support of the new common sense do not have to bother with any argument; a mere hint is enough—what their “arguments” lack the power of the dominant ideology will provide. But the opposition has to repeat, over and over again, the premises of its arguments, even then it is told, over and over again, that it has no argument, that what it puts forth as an argument is mere “assertion.” For oppositional arguments are, by definition, nonsensical: that is, they violate (quite necessarily) the logic of commonsense. Reason, it seems, is always on the side of those who speak for the dominant knowledges, and thus for the ruling class!

Although the basic premise of poststructuralist theory is “uncertainty” about the (representational) reliability of knowledge, there is not the slightest hint of “uncertainty” about the reliability of poststructuralist knowledges in the texts of my readers. “Certain” about “uncertainty,” convinced of the “truth” of liberating poststructuralist theories, they decide against publishing—in effect, to suppress—my essay, because, as the second reader says, “attentiveness” to these theories “is sorely missing” from my text.

I am not “attentive” to poststructuralist theories because, as I have argued in my essay, these theories are simply the latest idealist maneuvers in bourgeois philosophy which is aimed at diverting attention away from class struggle. Such theories do not provide effective knowledges of subjectivity and history nor do they give an enabling analytical understanding of the pedagogical situation. Rather they substitute “experience” for “knowledge” and displace “concepts” with “tropes.” Instead of being “attentive” to my text, my readers have simply rejected it because it is “inattentive” to the poststructuralist presuppositions and corresponding (reactionary) political agenda they take for granted in the guise of a valid research program. Because I am not only “inattentive” to what they regard to be “new” but also insist on oppositional knowledges, the readers enact the censure of the dominant common sense: suppressing intolerable knowledges and silencing (“punishing”) those who construct them through their recommendations that College Literature not publish my text. Quite anti-authoritarian in rhetoric, they suddenly become very authoritarian in practice! The non-dogmatic open-mindedness and democratic pedagogy that they advocate—and which gives them the commonsensical authority to reject my dogmatic thought—suddenly disappears, and it becomes quite clear that the freedom of thought they advocate is freedom only for thought which is identical with their own. In advocating openness but actually closing the space of theoretical practices, they are, of course, not alone. Recently when Derrida’s text justifying Heidegger’s Nazism was published, with critical comments by the editor, in Richard Wolin’s The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, Derrida managed to suppress the reprinting of the entire book by Columbia University Press by threatening to call the POLICE—in other words, to bring legal action! (“A Normal Nazi,” The New York Review of Books, January 14, 1993; February 11, 1993; March 25, 1993; April 8, 1993 and April 22, 1993).

Rather than staging a traditional “debate” with my readers to determine (as debates are designed to do) who owns the truth (as his/her own private property), I will in the following pages, foreground the conditions of possibility and political consequences of the discourses in question—both theirs and my own. It is, I think, necessary to find out what kind of political interests construct these discourses and what discourses acquire the status of uncontested truth in the postmodern academy, thereby gaining the power to suppress others. Thus, I will first attend to some general issues (mostly their epistemological incoherence) and then address some of the specific points they raise.