Part Three § 2: Reading my Readers

What seems to be the most offensive aspect of my text for all the three readers is my mode of inquiry. I have dispensed with the mystifications of an accommodationist “tone” as well as the eclectic logic of the “scholarly essay,” which evolves around a series of “on the one hand, on the other hand” expositions and suturing of various positions. Eclecticism has been naturalized as “subtlety” and “accommodation” has been constructed as “nuance,” and is thus seen as a mark of knowledgeability and depth of perception. However, these are not features of knowledge but rather alibis for a political move to reinforce the prevailing logic of status quo pluralism and to prevent the construction of any effective conclusion in theoretical and intellectual discourses. Conclusions are the beginning of praxis—opening new spaces for change. However, for those who benefit from the status quo, nothing is more unacceptable than “concluding.” Thus it is, as I shall argue, the privileging of “uncertainty” in poststructuralist theory which enables your readers to reject my essay. My essay is too “certain” of its own understanding of the social, and its understanding is in radical opposition to the class interests the readers’ positions support. I do “conclude” and, following the dominant ideology of the postmodern academy, my readers reject my insistence on reaching a “conclusion” as a closure and exclude it from the realm of truth by naming it “dogmatic,” “orthodox” and “out of date.” The power of postmodern pluralism is such that my readers do not find it necessary to explain why “dogmatism” is unacceptable. To them it is an “obvious” truth.

Why shouldn’t my text be “orthodox,” “out-of-date” and “dogmatic”? What is “wrong” with being “dogmatic”? What is that makes “dogmatism” bad and non-dogmatism acceptable? What is presented, with seeming neutrality and disinterestedness as a commitment to rigorous knowledge in these responses is a cover up for a liberal politics that underwrites postmodern capitalism. After all, what is called “dogmatic” are the very discourses (Marxism in particular) that question the legitimacy of the liberal hold on the power (of publishing, hiring, firing, promoting…) in the work place. In short, “dogmatic,” “out-of-date” and “orthodox” in the bourgeois academy are the common-sense names for the zone of radical opposition that has displaced “conversation” (deferring conclusions) with “critique” (providing guidelines for action).

Read even in their own terms, however, the readers’ responses collapse under their own contradictions. The very premises of poststructuralism that they deploy as the “new thinking” (in rejecting my “dogmatic” thinking) render their responses to me groundless: for their very denunciation of my discourses as foundationalist (grounded in the primary principle of class) undermines their own conflicting appeal, at the same time, to such primary principles as “up-to-dateness,” “nondogmaticity,” “non-orthodoxy,” “new thinking,” “Freireian pedagogy,” “specificity”…. While they reject primary principles in my discourse, they acquire their own authority as “readers” to reject my essay through an appeal to a different set of primary principles in their covert reliance on the ludic common sense of the postmodern academy. This raises the question: why one set of primary principles (theirs) are any more correct than the other (mine)? Why is their contradictory practice not visible—even, it would seem, to the editors of College Literature, who have taken their readings seriously enough to make my response to them the condition for publishing my text?

The answer seems to be that what they have done is quite typical of the protocol of “argument” in the bourgeois academy: the spokespersons for common-sense positions and presuppositions—which operate on behalf of ruling class interests—are exempted from the need to support their positions or to be “logical,” to use their favorite term. All they have to do is to simply state or merely imply (as a marker of subtlety) their views. What their discourses lack by way of logic, the ruling class provides through its economic and social power. My readers do not give me one single reason why I should not be “dogmatic,” “orthodox,” and “out dated”? Why “new thinking” is epistemologically more accurate than “dogmatic” thinking? What are the measures of “accuracy” here? Why are “orthodoxy,” “dogmaticity,” “out-of-dateness” as modes of knowing unacceptable but their form of knowing is beyond question? Their texts are, in short, contradictory: if primary principles are not allowed, then all principles (“new thinking” as well as “orthodox thinking”) are equal, and neither can be used to violently reject the other. As liberal pluralists they have no case; as pluralists they would have to provide me with as much space as they provide other discourses. But instead they rely on power (the power of the dominant knowledges and the class power behind them) to authorize their own principles—such as “pleasure”—and legitimate their dismissal of my writing and their judgment that the editors of College Literature should not publish my text.

Also at stake here is what is represented as “new” and “up-to-date,” which are the privileged values of the bourgeois university. But such values depend on the marketability of commodity-discourses, which in turn depend on the effectivity of the “new” to legitimate the capitalist relations of production. This means that the academic who intends to remain in the market (like the capitalist who cannot afford to be undersold by his competitors and thus have his rate of profit reduced) must always and at all times “keep up” with the latest technologies: in this case, technologies of “reading”—strategies for producing interpretations that limit the boundaries of acceptable intelligibilities for those “meanings” that underwrite the ruling social relations. For the post-1968 academy, the new justifications of capitalism have, by and large, taken the form of (post)structuralist theories which legitimate the subjectivities necessary for the high-tech labor force (Zavarzadeh & Morton, Theory as Resistance).

The profit from commodities, of course, is not realized until the commodities are actually “sold”—that is, until they find a consumer. Similarly, in finding a market for their new “textwares,” petty bourgeois cultural and social theorists deploy the same marketing strategies that U.S. capitalists use. Like them, U.S. academics extend their markets by removing those discourses that provide historical and effective knowledge of the social totality and serve the needs of the community through their use-value. Such (academic) acts of repression thus involve considerable violence, which is legitimated through the institutional apparatuses of power (editing, administration, hiring, promoting, firing…) and under the alibi that these discourses are “obsolete” and “new” ones should be circulated in their place. “Class analysis,” for example, which provides global, systematic guidelines for praxis is represented as “obsolete” and thus suppressed. Moreover, this violent suppression—as in the practices of U.S. capitalists—is obscured and represented as the outcome not of violence but as a response to the autonomous “desire” of the postmodern subject of knowledge who, seduced by the “pleasures” of knowing, has abandoned old-fashioned “class analysis” in favor of the new, post-al analytics of what Laclau-Mouffe call “hegemony,” in order to make sense of a brand new historical situation. There is, of course, nothing “new” about the contemporary historical situation: it is, as it has been for a very long time, a class society divided by two antagonistic classes.

Thus through an appeal to the imaginary of the academic-consumer—who, in order to overcome his/her social alienation (produced by the relations of capital and wage-labor), resorts to the consumption of the “new,” “unique” and, that ultimate marker of (restored) individuality, the DIFFERENT—the post-al academic represents his/her new textwares as so different as to be on the “cutting edge” of an emergent society. But this post-al new society, as I have already suggested, is itself more a virtual reality (produced in the imaginary of the upper classes) than an actual one. The commodification of the “new” obscures this similarity. U.S. academics, in short, have learned from U.S. capitalists that the most effective way to extend the market for the new textwares—which mystify the interest of the ruling class as the demands of a new, post-al society—is to use the exchange values of (new) desires to displace the effective use-value of global knowledges.

Given the power of the “new” in the discourses of the post-al academy, whenever these academics encounter resistance from oppositional discourses they denounce them, almost as a matter of reflex, as “obsolete”: as no longer capable of satisfying the desires of the academic-consumer for self-difference. Following the practices of U.S. capitalists, now relegitimated by such theorists as Baudrillard, they have substituted the exchange value of discourses (do they make one feel different?) for their use-value (do they fulfill a “need”?). Consequently, knowledges in the post-al academy are no longer evaluated by their effectivity in bringing about social arrangements which place human “needs” at the center but by their capacity to satisfy the “desires” of those whose “needs” are (as the result of the existing class relations) already fulfilled and who are now pursuing more and more “different” discourses. In short, the presentation of the oppositional as “obsolete” relies heavily on the practices of U.S. capitalists in search of new markets. The equation has achieved the status of such “obviousness” that the (academic) merchants of new textwares do not even have to argue for it: a mere “hint” will do the job. The most “obviously” obsolete of all discourses is, of course, Marxism.

Marking the oppositional as “obsolete” and, therefore, not “desired” is the primary but not the only strategy of containment in the post-al academy. Whenever they are faced with the rigorous opposition of radical knowledges, U.S. bourgeois academics, like U.S. capitalists, discredit these resistance knowledges as un-“democratic,” dogmatic and thus “totalitarian.” Any critique of the interests of the ruling class, in other words, is represented as one-sided and thus as inherently inimical to democratic pluralism. No questions, however, are raised about the politics of pluralism and the exclusionary interests that are served under its seemingly open accommodation.

Theoretical rigor, which is privileged in conservative discourses as the incontestable mark of “deep” thinking, is treated as the surest sign of closure when dealing with oppositional knowledges. If one insists on the priority of the market, one is rigorous, subtle, open-minded and democratic but if one argues for the centrality of need over profit one is closural, crude, undemocratic and dogmatic. By calling resistance knowledges undemocratic, these academics put them beyond the range of acceptable intelligibilities. The code deployed to situate radical knowledges as unacceptable is the sign: “dialogical.” Radical knowledges are coded as non-dialogical. The non-dialogical is an appellation meant to dismiss the discourse in question as narrow, single-minded and closural, but it is also an ideological alibi for discrediting those discourses that do not accommodate pluralism and instead call pluralism and “conversation” (dialogics) into question—arguing that these are part of the strategies deployed to keep the existing power/exploitation relations intact. The dialogical mode substitutes conversation (freedom of speech) for critique and, by so doing, covers up the ruse of bourgeois democracy that substitutes “freedom of speech” (semiotic democracy) for economic equality.

Oppositional knowledges aim at “collective” praxis. “Cutting edge” knowledges aim at maximizing the uniqueness of the individual: her/his own subjectivity and pleasure. Oppositional knowledges aim, in other words, at meeting the “needs” of the collective, while “cutting edge” knowledges aim at providing “desires” for difference.

Since I have raised the question of “democracy” here, it might be helpful to bring in the reading of the third reader who names Freire (“is Freire so awful?”), Ohmann, Tompkins… as representatives of a democratic pedagogy designed to develop a democratic classroom. What is a democratic classroom? The pedagogy of pleasure considers the classroom to be a “democratic” space. By a democratic classroom, both humanists (Freire, Ohmann…) and poststructuralists (Tompkins…) mean a classroom in which free “self-expression” by students is the main mode of teaching/learning. The teacher is a mere catalyst in this process. Such privileging of self-expression is, however, founded upon the notion that the individual “naturally” arrives at knowledge, through his/her “experience”/ ”consciousness”/ ”desire.” All a pedagogue has to do is to provide a democratic space in which this unique knowledge/vision can be “expressed.” The pedagogy of critique (what reader three calls “complaint”), on the other hand, regards knowledge to be above all an economic and social question of access to concepts and practices (“education”), and not an individual and private matter (the question of experience/ consciousness/ desire). In the name of a democratic classroom and free self-expression, the pedagogy of pleasure gives free reign, not to the individual, but to the conservative common-sense and oppressive dominant ideology that construct the experience of the individual—his/her consciousness and desires. Thus, my response to the third reader, who suggests that I am saying what “Jane Tompkins, or Gregory Myers, or Dick Ohmann,” are, is: No, “they do not say much the same thing” as I am saying. The pedagogy of critique is committed to a critique-al (not “experiential”) democracy. Therefore, by democratic classroom it does not simply mean the populist notion of democracy—the equality of expression of experience—but equality of access to knowledge: which is another way of saying that the purpose of such a classroom is to enable all students to obtain access to transformative knowledges and to realize that their “experience” (like all other supposedly “natural” phenomena) is not autonomous but is an effect of their position in the social relations. Change on the personal level (contrary to the pedagogy of pleasure), in other words, is a trivial change that does not change anything on the level of the social totality.