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| Part Three § 3: Reading my Readers |  2003-10-29 | Why Now ‘Auto-Critique’ ? |
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The political underside of this “argument” becomes more clear when the second reader, in a mocking tone, says that these days the call for “proletarian revolution” comes “primarily ‘from above’.” In other words, the revolutionary project is false and radical revolutionary intellectuals are hypocrites and fraudulent subjects since they do not really speak from their own class position. They “speak for the other,” and, as such, they are immoral and unethical persons who impose an alien view of the social on the proletariat. The moral person, according to this theory of the social, always speaks honestly from his/her own class position and for herself/himself only—not for the “other.” The “other” must speak for himself/herself with the authority of her/his own experience. If a non-proletarian declares solidarity with the proletarian, he/she is dishonest: she/he is violently appropriating the “experience” of the other. The only honest person with moral integrity is thus the one who speaks for him/herself. According to this logic, the member of the ruling class who speaks for herself/himself, defends his/her own class interests and justifies the exploitation of workers (all as part of his/her own experience) is an honest, moral person. Solidarity with the workers on the part of intellectuals—in this postmodern theory of the social—is an unethical act (it is a call “from above,” a fraudulent practice), but defending exploitation because it is the condition of possibility of one’s own class privileges and experiences is ethical since it corresponds with one’s own class position. Mimesis, in short, is the only authentic social practice, and this support of mimesis from advocates of poststructuralism, of course, just points to the depth of incoherence in the positions taken by my readers.
The bankruptcy of this familiar position—representing revolutionary intellectuals as immoral and fraudulent because they declare solidarity with those outside their own class (the proletariat)—is quite clear. Nonetheless, it remains a powerful position. It continues to be the most popular form for denunciating radical intellectuals in the academy. Revolutionaries are immoral because they “speak for the other,” but exploiters of the labor of the workers are ethical because they speak for themselves.
This mimetic theory of the social, like all forms of mimesis, is founded upon the privileging of experience. The centering of “experience” in postmodern social movements has taken the form of “identity politics.” “Identity politics” is a theory that fragments social solidarity by privileging “difference,” which derives from the different experiences of people as “woman,” “gay,” “lesbian,” “black,” “Latino,”…. It deploys the difference (of experience) to naturalize “pluralism” and “multiculturalism,” and in so doing, conceals the primacy of the social division of labor in the organization of postmodern capitalism.
“Identity politics” is founded upon the assumption that the only authentic mode of political practice is acting on the basis of one’s own unique experience as a woman, a gay, a lesbian, an African-American, an African-American woman, a lesbian African-American woman…. Only an African-American can speak for an African-American; only a woman can speak for a woman, but even this is problematic for a white woman cannot speak for an African-American woman…. Accordingly, an intellectual cannot speak with any legitimacy for the proletariat because he/she does not have the appropriate “experience.” In fact, following the Foucault—Deleuze—Guattari line of ludic politics, speaking for the other is regarded, in postmodern pluralism, to be an act of violence against the other. Any “speaking for” is considered to be “universalist” and “programmatic” (to quote the second reader). A call for revolution “from above” is without experiential authenticity and thus fraudulent. One’s moral legitimacy in politics, in other words, is confined to ones experience and legitimacy disappears the moment one transgresses the boundaries of one’s experience.
As its popularity shows, “identity politics” is a highly useful theory of politics for transnational capitalism. “Identity politics” completely erases “labor” which provides the basis for commonality in all social practices, and in so doing, it obscures the political economy of “production,” which is the main source of exploitation. Before one is a gay, an African-American, a woman, a Latina, one is situated in the social division of labor. Before the emergence of “heterogeneity” (difference), there is “homogeneity” (commonality), and it is “commonality” that is the foundation of all revolutionary praxis aimed at overthrowing not only oppression (the rule of power) but also, and more importantly, exploitation (the rule of economic inequality). It is my emphasis on commonality that the second reader violently opposes and considers to be totalitarian because, unlike him/her, I regard power to be always exercised from above. In other words, I regard Foucault’s notion of power to be an ideological alibi for blurring the line between the “powerful” (the ruling class which owns the means of production) and the “powerless” (the worker who has nothing but his/her labor power to sell). The Foucauldian theory of power posits an all-inclusive power, thus providing the powerless with the illusion that he/she has as much power as anybody else: after all, Foucault assures her/him, power elicits “resistance,” and resistance” is the strongest mark of power. All people (of all classes), according to Foucault, can resist! (This, by the way is the basis for the theory of resistance in the second reader’s text.) But “even a child knows” that there is a fundamental difference between the power (of resistance) of a worker (demonstrated, for example, by absenteeism) and the power of the buyers of labor power. Power is determined in the relations of production.
“Identity politics” obscures exploitation and therefore diverts social struggle away from a revolutionary praxis for socialism and towards mere reforms for capitalism with a more humane face. It reduces solidarity to feelings of sympathy and substitutes the “moral” for the “political”; the “local” for the “global”; “context” for “history,” and “consensus” for “critique.” A radically different theory of the “other” is offered by Marx and Engels in their Manifesto of the Communist Party where they write:
Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the process of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact within the whole range of old society, assumes such a violent, glaring character, that a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands. Just as, therefore, at an earlier period, a section of the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970, 42).
Solidarity, in the work of Marx and Engels, is thus founded upon a historical and “conceptual” understanding (theory) of the social totality and not on “experiencing” the locality of the lifezone of the monadic subject. It is global knowledge—this “comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole”—that is the target of poststructuralist localism as well as postmodern “social movements” (from feminism and environmentalism to queer theory, all of which advocate an “identity politics” founded upon “difference”).
“Identity politics” not only lies behind the statements of the second reader, who thinks the project of revolution is over, but it also informs the recommendation of the third reader that I “take a look at Paolo (sic) Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed.” Freire brings “identity politics” to pedagogy and provides the localist pedagogue with an anti-intellectualism and anti-conceptualism that underwrite populist pedagogy today. He turns “experience” into the unsurpassable horizon of pedagogy.
But “experience”—one has to repeat, even at this late date—is not a direct understanding of the world, as all versions of “identity politics” assume. Experience is always made meaningful not by its immediate contact with the real but through the interpretive strategies of the dominant ideology. To posit experience as the site of truth is to allow ideology to represent the class interests of the ruling class as the real itself. Those who put experience at the center are complicit with the ruling ideology since experience is not a given but a socially produced ideology-effect.
My third reader, whose pedagogy is an embodiment of postmodern populism, carries Freire’s anti-intellectualism and ahistorical experientialism a step further. A correct pedagogy, she/he believes is a pedagogy that does not “dictate” (“Write three papers, read six books: participate in discussion”). This “dictating” is, for him/her, the beginning of dictatorship in the classroom. She/he seems to think that somehow her/his populist notion of pedagogy as a nurturing of “experience” does not “dictate.” But it does dictate, and it dictates in a most pernicious way because it obscures its own “dictating.” By deploying common liberal strategies (openness, geniality, helpfulness), it covers up the fact that “dictating” lies beneath all the play of non-dictating. What he/she “dictates” is a state-supported anti-intellectualism (get rid of theories, concepts, book lists, paper assignments…) that prevents the citizen-subject from acquiring the conceptualities needed to expose the logic of exploitation in a class society and thus turns the classroom into a site for reinforcing the dominant ideology. I insist that the student should “read,” because it is only by reading (“reading” not as “textualizing” but as “conceptualizing”) that the student is placed in a position to test the limits of experience and produce knowledge of the social totality: to realize that “experience” is always already structured. “Is Freire so awful?” asks the third reader. Yes, he is. Why? Because, in the guise of liberation, he oppresses the student and condemns him/her to the prison-house of experience, which is the privileged frame of ideology. Ohmann, Tompkins and others have repeated in their “different” ways this populist pedagogy that fetishizes experience and its anti-intellectualism in the name of “activism.” This form of “activism” is an alibi for reproducing the contradictions of the “everyday” and the incoherences of the common sense that underwrites them.
Reader three wants a democratic classroom; a classroom in which, following the Foucauldian theory of power, there is no power differential between the pedagogue and students. Instead of “books” (abstract “concepts”), he/she wants students to bring to the classroom their authentic “experience.” Her/his classroom (like that of Jane Tompkins) is a classroom without walls: it is a liberationist classroom in which the world outside is suspended and an illusion of equality and shared power is created. Such a classroom, as I have argued elsewhere (Zavarzadeh, “Theory as Resistance,” Pedagogy is Politics: Literary Theory and Critical Teaching, ed. M.R. Kecht, Urbana and London: University of Illinois Press, 1992, 25-47), is a fantasy game organized by adults for the children of the middle class. What is brought to this classroom is not any “authentic” experience of the world, but rather the texts of ideology already inscribed on the consciousness of the ludic subject. The pedagogue of experience participates in this game of let’s pretend there is no power and, by so doing, mystifies the actual rule of exploitation in the real world and, in the name of liberation, actually helps oppression. Power, as I have already mentioned, exists and is produced in the process of production. There is no way it can simply be made to go away by a pedagogical game: the question is to critique it and to provide democracy—not foolishly in the classroom—but in the world of labor. “Is Freire so awful?” Yes, he is. Why? Because he allows the dominant ideology—in the name of liberation, in the guise of “experience”—to saturate the space of pedagogy, thereby bringing into the classroom an anti-intellectualism that has been the main weapon used by the ruling class to defuse class struggle.
Revolutionary pedagogy is a pedagogy aimed at “comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole” and not an expression of one local “different” experience. It is a pedagogy about collectivity, not about cultivating and refining individuality. The goal of a socially transformative pedagogy is to provide people with a historical knowledge of the social totality, thereby helping to produce members of a vanguard party fighting for a society of economic equality, a society in which democracy is not confined to a semiotic democracy—freedom of expression! Revolutionary pedagogy is not about self-expression; it is about emancipation from the regime of exchange and exploitation. Only a new vanguard equipped with historical knowledge and ready for revolutionary praxis can undertake such a task.
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