A Call For a Return to Theoretical Pedagogy

or Why It Is Necessary to Have a “Teach In” on “Misogyny” and “Racism”

Alternative Orange Staff

Revision History
• Winter 1993-1994	Newspaper: Funded by Syracuse University students.
The Alternative Orange: Vol. 3, No. 2 (pp. 3-5).
• September 23, 2000	Webpage: .
DocBook XML (V3.1.3) from original.

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The “Disorientation” issue (Sept. 1993) of the Alternative Orange marked a significant retheorization of the political function of an oppositional publication within the terms of a newly reinstituted resurgence of legitimately conservative politics. This is to say a backlash against “theory” as it stands constituted, in Gramscian terms, as a non-episodic mode of conceptualizing society as a formation of historically produced antagonistic practices. This backlash then, is directed against the potentially destabilizing and demystifying effects of theoretics which fundamentally question and offer modes of explanation for social practices (both within and without the academy) as they remain implicated within a global structure of unevenly and inequitably distributed access to the means of production. Not only symptomatic of intellectual reaction within the Western academy to discourses which foreground the urgency of transforming capitalist modes of subjectivity (privatized subjects), this “resistance to theory” must, in fact, be recognized as resistance to the transformation of the capitalist mode of production (classed production) which these subjectivities are organized to maintain. Such resistance is manifested on the local level according to the tenets of academicist “integrity” which amounts to a valorization of the bourgeois status quo of “respectful” adherence to the law of freedom of enterprise in regard to “community” practice (all are free to enter the market as they see fit/most profitable) thus reproducing the dominant ideology of the market-place in precisely that cultural site elected to be “above and beyond” the necessities of production relations. The dynamics of this alleged “democracy” are then projected as embedded in liberal pluralist discourse which itself serves the interests of two apparently different groups. Those “theorists” on the Right can claim exemption from critical inquiry by invoking the “right” to individual privacy as concerns the projects, methods and social affectivity of their pedagogical/“personal” production and by thus maneuvering into the pluralist space can practically protect their positions (posts) as according to the logic of “difference” which they theoretically disdain. The theorists on the (broad) Left who have been subject to the “crisis in the humanities”, under which rubric they have struggled to enter into the conservative “regime” of academic/intellectual production, have perhaps much more at stake in upholding the premises of liberal-pluralist discourse as the potential threat of a full-blown return to the “pre-crisis” era would immediately result in their expulsion from the institutions in question. This apparent stand-off between two opposed social factions in light of maintaining the possibility of departmental and inter-departmental harmony, as the invocation of an ethical “agreement to disagree” which provides a handy resolution to the problem, is, however, only seriously problematized by the introduction of a third term which brings to a crisis the very possibility of this “awkward” alliance and indicates it to be, rather, a hegemonic consolidation in the interests of the academic “business as usual” of ideology production.

The effectivity of class-based social theoretics which work to desedimentize the elisions that have resulted in the emergence of the liberal-pluralist coalition, that is, the social and historical conditions which provide the possibility of this resurgent conservativism, is perhaps best indicated by their exclusion from this liberal-pluralist inclusionary space under the grounds of not respecting the “rules” of the academic game of a “stand-off” between the Old and the New. Such theoretical practices severely restrict the possibilities of this “game” being played out in the interests of “tradition and innovation” as according to the “natural processes” of evolutionary change, and in fact, ask rather “embarrassing” and “crude” questions as to the informing content of the very “differences” between these two positions which eventually locates them as being very much the same: as reinforcing the continued production of an acquiescent labor force for (diversified) capitalist production.

This contradiction however, is not merely limited to the immanent negotiations of petty-bourgeois individuals attempting to alleviate the tensions in their work-place but, rather, points to the managerial function of the interstitial class position held by the petty-bourgeoisie in relation to the class basis of global commodity production, that is, in relation to the intrinsically more significant tensions between the (multinational) bourgeoisie and the (international) proletariat. Situated, in the academy, as knowledge-producers who provide the mediations which count as knowledge of the social real and which function to produce affective subjectivities, the “intellectual” petty-bourgeoisie has erected a vast apparatus of necessary disjunction between theory and practice (capitalist alienation as a fundamental condition of being) as legitimation for a renunciation of taking a decisive position in relation to the class-struggle. However, within this apparatus, as opposed to the traditionalists who have “opted out” of taking this question at all seriously by virtue of their willingness to openly support their interests as “individual” interests (which translates, in the social, into the interest of the (capitalist/enterprising) Individual), the “innovatory” “radicals” who pride themselves on having introduced the notion of “political” subjectivities have had to enter into a rather difficult space of maintaining this division of theory and practice whilst simultaneously calling for just such a praxical subject. The answer of course has readily been found in recourse to a pragmatic subject who “theorizes politics” and “politicizes theory” while however recognizing that the “real” i.e., the practical realm of bourgeois hegemony (most prominently, in this context, the possibility of tenure and publication) must ultimately dictate the conditions under which theory and practice are locally determined. The practice of the broad left has in fact been an almost unanimously enacted capitulation to the pressure of the logic of the market which necessitates (contrary to the “democratic” ideology of free enterprise) intellectual production to be entirely determined by exchange value (the historical value for a particular version of history, politics, subjectivity, etc.,) and thus results in an eclecticism in theory (generally legitimated by anti-foundationalism) and a radical departure from the ostensible “ideals” of their proclaimed politics into an emphatically careerist and brutal defending of their own market niche (correspondingly depending in intensity upon how they are situated in relation to tenure and publishing).

It is as an intervention in this space that the Alternative Orange (re)cognized its political function as an oppositional publication and issued an invitation to all faculty and students to offer theorizations of their politics to be published within the public space provided in these pages. The necessity for such a public space was foregrounded as an attempt to counter the privatization of social knowledges and this to ascertain that contestation and intellectual debate become privileged modes of knowing which can function to open up the space of new knowledges. As is noted in our invitation, the call for such engagement is specifically directed towards faculty comprising the broad left to take advantage of this space by contributing theoretically to its pages what they understand to be necessary as regards their political agenda. We further argue, in accordance with this theorization, that such a space is necessarily a contestatory one. That is, a space which attempts to further the project of social change through critique-al contribution which can further the collective apprehension and understanding of oppositional political practice. This public space is, moreover, understood to be a site not directly managed by the immanency of departmental/interdepartmental considerations which, in some cases, may serve as an enforced closure upon the possibility of sustained and rigorous theoretics, as well as providing a space for those who recognize such public intellectual debate to be crucial in the present moment of a general theoretical regression to engage theoretically and politically without the repercussions following from an enforced and practiced institutional power hierarchy. The results of this invitation have been several.

It is significant to note that the only serious response to it that has so far been offered has been done so by Professor Zavarzadeh who, it seems, does not find it necessary to make his theoretical/political position available in the abstract but is willing to materially, critique-ally, and publicly contribute to the project of intellectual production for social change. We have, in this light, received a series of “other” responses, responses that are not willing to theorize or account for “critical” positions they are enunciating and which are put forth in classrooms, in writing… and which affect us all as students and fellow theorists. That is, positions which offer us modes of intelligibility which have a direct bearing on our immediate understandings of the world and the understandings of our classmates and faculty and which, to a large extent, determine the conditions of possibility for our collective theoretical and political practices. It is for this reason that we find the necessity for taking up one of these responses which has a very serious (sub)text underwriting its charge. On the 5th of October, the A.O. staff were sent, by Professor Callaghan (ETS/ENG), a “message” through one of our staff members by way of an explanation (?) as to why she had not contributed to its pages. This message was to the extent that she did not wish to associate herself in any way with the paper (by means of being published therein) due to a caption, following under the “Rationalist” graphic (A.O. Vol. 3, No. 1, p.5), which was both “misogynist and racist.” We on the A.O. staff wish to thank Professor Callaghan for this information. By no means do we wish to engage in either “misogynist or racist” theoretical practices; we are however puzzled as to what exactly it is about the caption that Professor Callaghan found to be so self-evidently “misogynist” and “racist.” In fact, we wish that Professor Callaghan would teach us what we have obviously missed so that we don’t remain “misogynist” and “racist.” And of course in teaching “us” in these public pages Professor Callaghan would have the opportunity to teach the entire campus what she understands by the terms “misogyny” and “racism”, a task that we at least think needs to be pedagogically addressed so as to inform and explain rather than to allude and accuse. We thereby invite Professor Callaghan to have a TEACH IN FOR THE ENTIRE UNIVERSITY: to open up these terms and THEORIZE their significance so that we can learn, publicly, from our mistakes.

Unless we are taught, however, what the un-said of Professor Callaghan’s understanding of the terms “misogyny” and “racism” is we must continue to theorize them within the framework of the social theoretics we privilege. Thus, for instance, we do not subscribe to (practices of) LABELING as racism the noting of the degree of professionalization and commodification of experientially validated categories (refer to caption) that would allow for a description of a female Professor’s academic “success” as a Latina to be ascribed to the fact that she was a “feminist, activist, professor, mother, and wife” (quoted from La Voz de La Lucha, Vol. 4, #4, Mar. 1993. p.3), a reading that in fact confirms the argument of the caption: an individual/group is not capable of “fixing a socially effective use-value autonomous from the objective social conditions of possibility that overwhelmingly include and (over)determine all individual intention—the now global market/factory”. That is, all experience is capable of being appropriated and used according to its market value—here a demonstration of the “roles” available to a woman of color (some of which are very problematic “roles” one might add) by means of which she is deemed “successful.” Rather, WE UNDERSTAND RACISM TO BE ALWAYS ENACTED AS AN INTERVENTION IN LABOR RELATIONS, for example, as exemplified by the instance of a white, petty-bourgeois, relatively privileged feminist who is already well-established in the academic institution to refuse a recommendation for graduate school to a Third World feminist and not feel the necessity for offering any explanation for such an action. Not being under the necessity to account for such an action is what we understand to be a reliance on the SELF-EVIDENCY OF RACIST PRIVILEGE.

Similarly, we understand the use of the term “misogyny” by a feminist in the 1990’s to be symptomatic of the general theoretical regression which we are striving to counter by providing a space for the historicization of CONCEPTS and NOT THE INVOCATION OF LABELS. “Misogyny” was a term in currency 30 YEARS AGO.[1] To invoke it at the present historical juncture functions as a dehistoricization of concepts through deployment of a term which does not account for its own historicity, which does not explain anything and which functions as an interpellation on the local, and experiential level, an interpellation which feminists must work to resist if we are going to learn from the lessons capitalism has taught us. It functions, that is, unless her conceptualization of the term is made explicit by Professor Callaghan, and we are not deprived of her pedagogy, as a limit concept: a concept which is deployed at the point that the pedagogue runs out of arguments and resorts to the most blatant form of imposing closure on debate and democratic discussion—a concept which is a strategy for the maintenance of SILENCE. Feminism cannot be allowed, in the face of the urgencies of late capitalism, to return to bourgeois-feminist modes of theorizing relations of exploitation and oppression through the self-evidencies of ideological categories: we must struggle for conceptualizations which work to explain the causes of experience and, moreover, the mediations through which ideology serves the interests of power, that is, eventually, the interests of the DOMINANT CLASS-IN-POWER.

We would further like to clarify that we are, in the context of the (post)modern academy, understanding a “Teach In” to signify a public discourse which is available to the institution as a whole. Correspondingly, in asking Professor Callaghan to conduct a “Teach In” in regard to “misogyny and racism” we are stating that the status of this project would be one corresponding to such public discourse in the available pages of the Alternative Orange—with full cooperation of the A.O. staff. It is thus formulated not as a counter-institutional strategy directed at reforming the university from an “outside” coalitional site (“consciousness raising”) but rather a mode of engaging the university from within, and attempting to counter and transform the reactionary practices of rumorological and other experientialist endeavers in regard to theory—through critique. We also contest the attempt to formulate the invitation to contribute to such a critique-al space as an invitation governed by the logic of a “show trial.” Rather we recognize this conjunction of a critique-al space as collapsed into a (continuation of) Cold War rhetoric of retribution to be itself governed by the logic of “Individualism” disseminated by those who are already favorably ensconced within the power hierarchy of academic politics. Such a claim marks the attempt to avoid the implications of the very real power that faculty have in regard to the student population (and indeed to implicitly posit the reverse), and to (mis)construe any attempt by students to open up the shared space of knowledge production to debate and explanation as an assault upon the “privacy” of “individual” “ideas.” The A.O. claims no authority, political, juridical, state enforced, or otherwise in regard to the theoretical practices of any individuals on this or other campus’: we merely request that theorists fulfill their intellectual if not political responsibility as academicians and explain their positions so to further an intellectual democracy of free and responsible exchange of ideas.

It is, furthermore, in respect to this project, that we have—judging by the “other” responses, that is, responses that can be categorized as strategies of silencing (some of which were offered within the space of A.O. editorial staff meetings) proliferating in the form of gossip, unofficial notes, and other modes of trivial engagement] which have, by implication, determined the modality of their own (privately understood, we must assume) politics as being one of silent hostility/ ridicule/ petty considerations, etc., prone to incoherent eruptions—made the decision to remain in sustained public engagement with the politics of inter-academic “theoretical” “life” for the remainder of the fall semester. This decision necessarily brought into the foreground the postponement of a “feminist” issue which was initially to comprise the Nov. issue of the A.O. Some arguments against following this course of action were offered (within the editorial staff) along the formalist lines of a necessity for remaining consistent and of not “disappointing” our readers. Needless to say such arguments remain limited to a politics of self-aggrandizing image promotion, particularly in light of the limited responses we have thus far received, but moreover, indicate a subsistent notion of politics, feminist politics for example, which does not take into account the fact that “feminism” itself is extensively implicated in the current state of pragmatic leftist capitulation and those of us feminists who recognize the need for a retheorization of (post)modern variants of reformist “feminisms” in accordance with a transformative agenda must simultaneously recognize the prior imperative of attempting to keep open a space within which such a transformative feminism may be theorized/practiced and published.

It is here, furthermore, that the opportunity to critically engage Professor Zavarzadeh’s text emerges insofar as the necessity which marks the oppositional practice of the A.O. and indeed even the conditions of possibility determining the effectivity of such oppositional practice, would seem to be not merely the “reign of silence” (p.2) within the bourgeois academy at large and within this institution in particular, as according to the marginalization of socio-critique-al discourses which are de facto excluded from the realm of (liberal pluralist) “conversation” (p.4), but indeed the extension of this “conversation” (and its mode of procedure) to all sites of social relations. This exclusion is no longer solely one enacted “behind closed doors” so to speak (as with committee’s, voting, grading, recommendations… ) but is now rather blatantly enacting its “suppressive” measures through authoritarian maneuvers which it is willing to promote, to an increasing extent, openly. Thus, for instance—professors openly “asking” students to “shut up”; walking out of class rooms in the middle of class; informing students that they “are quite willing to accept” their withdrawals from classes, telling students that they “will not critique!”, that their feminist interventions do not conform to the “intent” of the course, that their class-based interventions into the discourses of the petty-bourgeois academy are sexist, in short, that their commitment to intellectual practices for social change has no place in this institution—would seem to indicate a new level of acceptable suppression in the present socio-political “conversational” climate.

It is in precisely these conditions that we at the A.O. staff re-extend our invitation to all faculty on this campus (and any faculty and students anywhere) to “theorize (aspects of) their politics” and, indeed, to BREAK THE SILENCE.