An Open Letter to the Editors

I take it that the concluding words of your call to all of us who work in Syracuse University (The Alternative Orange, September 1993, p.2) “to theorize” our “politics” in its “public space,” does not mean that you are seeking only programmatic texts tabulating the “positions” of the writers. I read your statement, therefore, to mean that you are providing “public space” for writers to “theorize” (aspects of) their politics in any mode that they find most effective. You are, I assume, interested in a “public” discourse and are not prescribing any particular form for that discourse. A person thus may choose to send you his/her syllabus as the most effective way in which he/she can “theorize” his/her practices… someone else might want to read the opening section of Stalin’s Marxism and Linguistics in order to take a political “stance” in public.

In the previous paragraph, I wrote “(aspects of) their politics” because I believe no layered “theorizing” of one’s politics can be undertaken in any single text, unless it is a linear tabulation of one’s “positions,” and no such tabulation, I believe, will be helpful to anyone—not even the writer. What, I think, is most helpful (at this moment in the history of contestations in the contemporary university) is to provide a public space for all who work at Syracuse University to speak out and state in unequivocal terms what they as intellectuals, pedagogues, administrators… are doing and, more importantly, why… in other words, to de-privatize the discourses and to

that has mystified the institutional/ knowledge practices in this university.

“Silence” has always been the most effective weapon used by the ruling class and its supporters in the academy to conceal the social contradictions and thus protect their exclusionary class interests. Through silence the ruling class denies the historicity of opposition and, in so doing, represents the social as an organic community without class and free from the social division of labor. The ruling class, in short, deploys silence to represent the “truths” that guarantee its dominance as the truths of all ages. By strategies of silence, the ruling class marks oppositional truths as merely “politics”—as the non-truths of ressentiment. It is a politically urgent task, therefore, to make the theorists for the interests of the ruling class account for its truths (class interests) in specific historical terms… in other words to

And this, of course, is not an easy task. The ruling elite community of administrators and pedagogues in the universities will do anything (as their cliché goes) to avoid “dignifying” the oppositional truths by “comments.” They know very well that as long as they maintain their silence, such silence conceals the social contradictions of the bourgeois university and represents it as a harmonious (organic) community of disinterested scholars seeking a truth beyond politics. Silence, in short, is the device through which the knowledges that affirm the legitimacy of the dominant class are represented as knowledge of the world as such: silence is a denial of the class struggle which goes on within the university. Breaking the silence foregrounds this class struggle and opens up the contradictions of property relations; it demonstrates how the myth of the university as a community of scholars is an ideological apparatus whose function is to legitimate the social arrangements founded upon the asymmetrical exchange relations between capital and wage-labor. The ruling truths avoid engaging with the opposition (they do not dignify it by comments), and, in so doing, give the impression that they are above the daily fray. There is no task more urgent for oppositional knowledge workers than to demonstrate that the ruling truths of the academy are not only not above the daily fray but are in fact the very essence of the daily fray—which has been violently suppressed by the myths of disinterested inquiry. I am writing in response to your call to help to

and open up the concealed social contradictions. In so doing, I will focus on my own workplace—the English Department at Syracuse University.

The most recent reign of silence to dominate the English Department begins in the late 1980’s—an era which opens with the appearance of the signature, “John W. Crowley” on the administrative directives of the Department. The causes of the administrative coup d’état that instituted this silence/signature in my workplace are socially and economically quite complex. Some of them are analyzed elsewhere (Zavarzadeh and Morton, Theory as Resistance: Politics and Culture After (Post)structuralism, New York, 1994). Very briefly, in response to newer developments in the forces of production and in order to train a new labor force for (post)modern capitalism, elite U.S. universities modified their humanities curriculum during the 1980’s. Toward the end of the decade, the right-wing petty bourgeoisie, whose interests were seriously threatened by the advancing forces of production, attempted to retard these changes by appealing to the older relations of production manifesting themselves in such superstructural phenomenon as the reaffirmation of “family values,” the “restriction of immigration,” “overhauling the welfare system,” and “anti-gay” and “anti-feminist” movements. In the academy the superstructural equivalent of “family values” and these other forms of “backlash” has been the attack on “political correctness” and the promotion of such regressive practices as the re-institution of the “author” and the expansion of “core requirements.” In short, the petty bourgeoisie of the late 1980’s embarked on a “cultural war” (Buchanan) against change.

As a consequence of the success of these retarding actions and the drift toward traditional values in my workplace, the gains of the 1980’s have been marginalized and once again it has became necessary to defend such concepts as “difference” in our daily practices and theoretical work. In our memorandum of January 7, 1992 to the Chair Committee of the English Department, for instance, Donald Morton and I—in order to break the hegemony of White Euro-American, patriarchal males, who have become even further entrenched in our workplace—have had to articulate our views on the chairmanship in terms of “difference.” The backlash against progressive practices in the English Department has acquired such a momentum that the only way to prevent the complete return of the ahistorical rationalism of the old regime—which posits the interests of the university’s ruling elite as the interests of all—is to re-deploy “difference.” In the early 1980’s we had foregrounded “difference” in our contestations with the “humanists,” but by the end of the decade it had become possible within the Department to begin a critique of “difference” (and similar concepts) that have had a transitional use in the uneven development of theory in the Department (and the U.S. academy in general). However the success of the retarding actions in the Department (supported by the main administration) have made it necessary to once again foreground the “differential” axis in Departmental practices.

The reign of silence in my workplace has functioned to deploy these retarding, superstructural strategies in the Syracuse English Department—which was perceived as having moved to the left as a consequence of its contestations over the curriculum in the 1980’s and the subsequent opening up of larger social and economic contradictions within the Department. As part of these retarding practices, a “backlash against theory” has lead to a systematic attempt to “re-evaluate” the Department’s new theory curriculum. However, since, the new changes in the “theory” curriculum were formally legislated, it was too awkward and obviously reactionary to annul them: the academy cannot afford to be recognized as “reactionary” since that would undermine its credibility with its clients. Thus an attempt has been made to systematically undermine them from within the new curriculum. One of the strategies for sabotaging the changes in the new curriculum and re-affirming the academic equivalent of “family values” (the return of the author, literary history…) has been an almost total reorganization of the teaching faculty. With the support of Dean Samuel Gorovitz, who has represented the retrograde superstructural backlash against progressive changes in the academy and especially the new English curriculum, most of the faculty members with an active interest in “theory” have been let go. In their place a new teaching staff, whose interests are almost exclusively in traditional literary history has been brought in (“J.W. Crowley” has been on every hiring committee of the English Department since, at least, 1989). This return of bourgeois literary history has resulted in the constitution of a new “cult of experience” in the Department since, in the humanist tradition, history is taken to be simply the repository of experiences. Such a cult of experience relocates the Department back in the debates of twenty years ago and posits a reactionary “identity politics” as the only legitimate site for the discussion of “gender,” “race,” “sexuality,” “ecoracism,”…. It provides an ideological alibi for fetishizing “gender” or “race” or “sexuality” as autonomous “experiences” free from the determinations of the social division of labor and class. This curriculum of experience is exactly the kind that renders the interests of the ruling class legitimate while it mystifies itself through the rhetoric of liberal and democratic (and at times even “left”) reforms of the dominant social relations. “New social movements,” whose bourgeois views are incorporated in “experience” pedagogy, are extensions of the liberal State and complicit in the reproduction of its relations of production. They are—in their “radical” pronouncements on racism, sexism—like the left Hegelians of whom Marx and Engels said: in spite of their seemingly “world shattering statements,” they “are the staunchest conservatives.” Racism, sexism… are not simply effects of experience that can be overcome either by the “prophetics” of ethics or the “performatics” of the body as we are told over and over again by such bourgeois ideologists as Cornel West and Judith Butler. Rather they are the outcomes of the mode of production in class societies. The dominant social relations will not change by merely changing the “power” relations between people of color and whites; between men and women, between the queer and the straight within the existing economic structures since “gender,” “race,” “sexuality” are deployed in class societies to naturalize the socially produced property relations. (“Power” is always used in bourgeois social theory to marginalize the prior social practice: “exploitation” [labor relations]). Social relations will thus be transformed only by overthrowing these structures of “exploitation”: by transferring private ownership of the means of production to public ownership. A non-sexist, non-racist, non-homophobic society will not be possible outside international socialism. The only effective struggle for such a society is transnational class struggle: solidarity not on the basis of gender, race, nationality, sexuality but on the basis of class.

It is symptomatic of the present hegemony of this conservative cult of experience in the English Department at Syracuse University that the “mandate” for a new committee charged with evaluating the undergraduate curriculum asks the committee to “study the experiences of undergraduate students” (Minutes of the Executive Committee of the English Department, September 23, 1993). “Experience” is, in other words, the measure of the success or failure of the curriculum. According to this “mandate,” any historical understanding of knowledge and economic practices; the relationship of knowledge to social contradictions and transnational class struggles or its institutional dissemination are simply irrelevant. This is a “New Age” curriculum whose main purpose is to do what the bourgeois curriculum has always done: to be “affirmative” of the enterprising bourgeois self as a postconceptuality inseparable from “excessive” experience. Consequently the new “theory” curriculum in the Department has been turned into an empty shell. Through the new reign of silence—in which all intellectual contestations have been dismissed as “irresponsible,” “mean-spirited,” and “un-professional”—the administration of the Department has been able to systematically dismantle and reorganize the teaching faculty so as to make sure that no matter what the title of the course and its theoretical articulation in the curriculum, what actually gets taught is the same old bourgeois literary history chronicling authors, their “reception”…. In the same manner that Republican administrations, in the last decade or so, have marginalized social programs by quietly un-enforcing them, the most recent reign of silence in the English Department has quietly undermined the curriculum changes resulting from the intellectual contestations of the 1980’s.

Through the reign of silence in my workplace, the intellectual struggles and conflicts that opened up the underlying social contradictions of the academy have been complacently displaced by bourgeois tranquillity (“family values”). The very idea of the pedagogue as an interrogative intellectual has itself now been discredited by the figure of the academic as a congenial, easy-going softball (team) player. In this reign of silence, to be an intellectual is to be a marginal figure in the Department of English at Syracuse University.

The processes of silencing, marginalization and exclusion in bourgeois institutions are highly subtle: they are not brutally and openly coercive but rather rely on nuanced ideological practices. Therefore, I need to explain how this reign of silence operates: how it suppresses and excludes without being seen as either suppressive or exclusive. Bourgeois institutions, in fact, never “formally” close “discussions” and never openly exclude people from participation. Instead, they blame all of the system’s ills on people’s lack of participation. Following the views of such bourgeois philosophers as Richard Rorty, they all cherish “conversation” as the only mode of democratic participation and citizenship. In actuality, however, there is no public space in bourgeois institutions for open conversation. The gap between the representation of bourgeois institutions as open public space for contestations (or at least open conversations) and their actuality as closed and controlled spaces—in which only arranged conversations can take place—is covered up by very complex institutional arrangements.

The most effective way for me to at least partially demonstrate how this gap is covered up is to analyze a text produced in my workplace. My local text is the response signed “John W. Crowley,” as the chair of the English Department, to Donald Morton and myself when we attempted to break the silence in the Department and bring into the open the social contradictions that it had concealed. When the Department was exploring possibilities for a new chair, Donald Morton and I wrote a short and, by any standards, reasonable, non-controversial “memo” to the Chair committee. In the memo, we argued (within the very terms set by the institution itself which had solicited views and suggestions) that the institutional convention of the “Chair” as one person running the Department was historically obsolete. We suggested that the Department seriously consider a new administrative apparatus: a “collective Chair”—a board of three persons working together to deal with the increasingly complex issues in the theory and pedagogy of the postmodern humanities in advanced industrial societies. In response to our quite reasonable proposal for discussion, “John W. Crowley” signed a violent text in which he compared our proposed three-person collective to the “Three Stooges” and had called me (a person of color) and Donald Morton (a gay man) the two “clowns” most worthy of serving on such a “collective.” It is, of course, a subject of immense significance that in the imaginary of “John W. Crowley”—whose directives as the chair affect the daily practices of hundreds of students, part-time faculty, T.A.’s and faculty members in the English Department—a “collective” is “identified” with the “Three Stooges”… but I leave the politics and psychoanalysis of this identity to another time. “John W. Crowley,” in his text, had also questioned our right to engage in public debates over the affairs of the Department because (and this is ideologically the most telling part of his response) we did not show up in committee meetings.

The assumptions of “John W. Crowley’s” text are the very ideological “obviousnesses” underlying the institutional practices at Syracuse that close off the public space to all but the “good subjects” of the institution. The founding presupposition of “John W. Crowley’s” text is that the only legitimate “public space” for discussing one’s views in a university department is in “committees.” Either one shuts up, as “John W. Crowley” told us to do, or one shows up—comes to committee meetings. Bourgeois institutions have always limited “public space” to committees, because in the committee oppositional ideas could legitimately be excluded and marginalized by approved “democratic” procedures (“voting”). Bourgeois institutions, in other words, never formally close “conversations,” but they make sure that these “conversations” are conducted in safe spaces (in parliament, congress, committee…) and are allowed to continue only so long as they are subject to the internal mechanisms of surveillance and control. Any refusal to confine intellectual discussions to committees and instead to conduct public discourses in other sites is the sure mark of being a “bad subject”—an extremist who has no respect for democratic procedures and the rule of law. The “bad subject” is then legitimately excluded from the public space. The only mode of intervention that “John W. Crowley” recognizes, on behalf of the institution, is intervention from “within.” Intervention, in short, is permitted only for those who begin by accepting the legitimacy of the pre-existing rules and presuppositions governing the institution. Committees are founded upon the primacy of the rule of the “vote.” Thus the right to contest the thematic agenda and vote “no” is merely a formal right with no impact on reality since no matter how you vote, you have voted for voting, and, as such, your vote has primarily reaffirmed the existence of the very institutional structures and assumptions that need to be transformed. By going to the committee one has accepted that “voting” is the only legitimate mode of understanding political issues, and in so doing, one has, in consequence, also accepted that “reform” (change from within the existing structures) is the only acceptable mode for transforming social relations. This is why going to committees (accepting the dominant rules of the game) is made the condition for legitimate intervention in public affairs.

In the reign of silence, oppositional intellectuals have been institutionally positioned in such a way as to have to “choose” either participation in Departmental committee meetings—in which their ideas will be legitimately and democratically vetoed—or suppression, in which they end up being named a “clown” and finding their ideas turned into jokes at private parties. Thus without any formal closure, the daily actuality of the reign of silence insures that no space is available in which ideas can be discussed without being subject to a “vote” (“veto”).

The rationalization of the public space in my workplace has become even more prominent during the current academic year. Sensing a change in the political climate and realizing that the established regimentation of the public space might not be adequate to contain oppositional discourses and also fearing that the debates of the late 1980’s might be renewed, the Department has further bureaucratized the public space by increasing the number of committees. Now, in addition to its regular four committees, the Department has begun the year with six committees. Given the practice of always adding two additional committees later in the semester (salary and hiring committees), a department of a mere 30 or so people will end up by having eight committees structuring its public practices! The ideal seems to be to eventually establish one committee for every possible idea so that no one can speak outside committees.

It is instructive to examine the cycles of membership in these and other College committees. One of the new committees in the English Department is instituted to evaluate the new undergraduate theory committee. It is significant that “John W. Crowley,” whose administration of silence practically dismantled the new undergraduate curriculum, is now on this year’s “undergraduate Committee” to evaluate the shape the curriculum has taken in the last several years under his directives. I write to

As part of breaking the silence in the university, in the classroom, in the institutional practices of publishing… I am sending you a long text composed of three parts. “Part One” is an attempt to break the silence in pedagogical work and ask students to account for their knowledge practices. Most accounts that students provide are “populist” ones based on the ideas of “difference”… which they believe are “democratic” and “empowering.” I sent this part of my text to be published in College Literature . As usual, the editors of the journal sent it out for “peer review” to four “experts.” One of the readers found the text so effective that he immediately picked it up for publication in a book on theory/pedagogy that he happened to be editing at the time. However, the overwhelming majority of the readers, the remaining three, “voted” to reject the essay. I am sending you the texts of these rejections to be published. In “Part Two” I engage these “rejections” and examine their political and theoretical presuppositions.

I am sending you this “archive” of texts because I believe that this long letter addressed to you, as editors of the Alternative Orange, and my three-part text “theorize” aspects of my “politics”—as you phrase it. I think these texts will also point to the possibility of new forms for displacing prevailing discourses and spaces. I am putting in the “public space” private letters of rejection and am engaging them in public to help de-privatize these discourses. The bourgeois subject is taught to value the private and to be “embarrassed” by critique. I believe this archive of texts will open up a different understanding of the private/public and of embarrassment and inquiry in our workplace.