CENSORED
Staff
| Revision History | ||
|---|---|---|
| • Winter 1993-1994 | Newspaper: Funded by Syracuse University students. | |
| The Alternative Orange: Vol. 3, No. 2 (pp. 40) | ||
| • September 24, 2000 | Webpage:  . | |
| DocBook XML (DocBk XML V3.1.3) from original. | ||
Following our extended theorization of graphic praxis (Alternative Orange Vol. 3, No. 1) this “image” text consists of appropriated ideological material which has been politically re-narrated to reveal the political assumptions at work in its deployment. Upon “discovery” of this particular re-narration (copies of which were made publicly on the copier machine reserved for student organizational use) the president of the Student Government Association informed an A.O. staff member that we were not to publish this polemical re-narration
…He did not offer any information as to why this should be the case, or further attempt to speak to an A.O. editorial coordinator in regard to this issue, rather assuming as given that such an authoritarian gesture (as, without a corresponding explanation, the status of the “warning” must remain as such) might impel this student collective into acquiescence to the common-sensical dictates of managerial functionality as articulated in the interests of the dominant status-quo. As opposed to initiating a consultation with A.O. staff members in the attempt to promulgate a principled negotiation process between the Student Government Association as a “public” decision-making body and the A.O. as a student organization directly affected within its sphere of influence, the president re-privatized this relation as to be non-negotiable.
When the A.O.’s graphics coordinator was informed of these conditions he attempted to elicit an explanatory account from the president of SGA whose “decision” ostensibly seemed to conflict with SGA’s institutional function within the (supposedly) liberal-democratic boundaries of “multicultural” representation. When asked to explain his position the president stated that SGA reserved the right to the use of its letterhead thus merely reiterating the common-places of socio-political authority without regard to an explanation as to the “why” of this authority. In other words, when the authoritarian legitimacy of representational democracy is itself contested as a non-equitable relation—this disciplinary hegemony being understood as the (im)“proper” relation maintained between the dominant’s representation of the “freedom of speech” (“RESPECT, DEMAND IT!”) and the marginalised social strata’s acquiescence to this moralistic “freedom” as the freedom of the free-market (in specular relation to the investment ethics of entrepreneurial capital whose interests are preserved in this conjunction: “Your Student Fee Demacs It” i.e. money = representation |“you pay, you play”|)—the authority of private ownership is revealed as the “limit text” of bourgeois democracy.
When reminded that the members of the A.O. also pay “$50 FOR AN HOUR OF CLASS?”, would, therefore, expect to have significant access to any channels of counter-representation concerning what is offered by the academy as a “proper-liberal-education” and was, in fact, attempting to respond specifically to the minutes of “The Ad Hoc Undergraduate Committee” which had called for greater attention to “the experiences of undergraduate students” (the directive of the re-narration of this graphic) the president refused to acknowledge the validity of this claim. It is, needless to say, in the (coalitional_ interests of the dominant ideology that the “respect of experience” is fetishized as the limit of politics. When told that in the English Dept. “proper” political representation often consists of the instructor’s wielding of “respect” as a limit text by which to check oppositional contestation on the part of theoretically bound and politicized students (note, for instance, the “rules and regulations” of classroom protocol contained within several course listings in the current English Dept. newsletter—which we shall address more thoroughly in a later issue) the SGA president regardless maintained that the graphic would be “mis-leading” (a bad example?), and cause representational “confusion” (disrupt authority?) thus “privately” reversing the right to be Right.
In a further attempt to negotiate a compromise our graphics editor offered to erase the SGA letter-head but was told that this was not sufficient: the Alternative Orange was not to publish the said text in any way, shape or form, with reiteration of the possibility that it was liable to cause “confusion.” It was, however, the graphics editor who was “confused” as to the president’s “reasoning” as it was the possible mis-reading of the graphic as a political alliance between SGA and the “Alternative Orange” that had been at issue in the president’s argument thus far. Ostensibly with the letterhead blocked out and the text re-narrated it remained a foregone conclusion that any readers who might possibly have been otherwise “mislead” would conclude that this alliance was unfounded and improbably thus ensuring that SGA’s “respect of experience” and its institutional legitimacy remain intact. It is however clear as to the logic informing this (non)negotiation—the ideologic of the conservative “right of right”|the right to be Right|—and, as though in explicit confirmation of just this argument, when asked what would be the possible repercussions upon the “Alternative Orange” in resisting this (ideo)logic we were informed that SGA may “take you [sic] up on charges, or remove your funding.”
This incident can then, perhaps, be most evidently read as symptomatizing “the institutional relationship” (or the relationship of the institution to its “members”) as it is informed by the exigency that must necessarily traverse the contradiction of the “private” coordination of socio-political collective life under U.S. capital as this relation stands projected onto organizational possibilities within the domain of state-managed local relations: the institution must reproduce this relationship with its inequitable force-field as the constituted given of relational possibility. Framed within the academic location (situated so to train subjects with the managerial skills needed in late capitalism to “resolve” the conflict of interests between labor and management owners) such an “incident” (which surely retains its “incidental” status only by virtue of its isolated entry into the immediate discourse of this particular institution—and which raises crucial questions about the operational modality of “respect” as circulated herein) enacts its dialectical relation to the cover graphic of this issue in delineating the boundaries to “democratic inclusivity” (“discursive pluralism”) in the “liberal” institution.
