Notebooks Toward a Critique-al Practice
Alternative Orange Staff
| Revision History | ||
|---|---|---|
| • Winter 1993-1994 | Newspaper: Funded by Syracuse University students. | |
| The Alternative Orange: Vol. 3, No. 2 (pp. 33-34) | ||
| • September 24, 2000 | Webpage:  . | |
| DocBook XML (DocBk XML V3.1.3) from original. | ||
The decision to institute Notebooks Toward a Critique-al Practice, a “permanent” section of more readily accessible texts, to complement the longer in-depth critiques/texts within the Alternative Orange serves two functions. First, it provides an introductory-level pedagogical space dealing with basic questions of social oppression, that is, it is offered in the interest of “popularizing” unfamiliar “oppositional” (critique-al) discourses. Second, it acts as a challenge for radical intellectuals to account for their relation to the already existing, historical traditions of oppositional struggles.
The common sense of the (post)modern academy is that class struggle does not exist, or, at least, that it is no longer the primary locus of oppositional struggle. In other words, according to the dominant (ludic) theorists, what Marx wrote over a hundred years ago isn’t applicable anymore because there are now other equally valid discourses/identities that must be considered with (added to or in place of) “class”. Now “race” + “gender” + “class” + etc. = social emancipation. But the common sense of the academy does not reflect the “reality” of the world. In describing the Young Hegelian ideologists, the German philosophers of his day, Marx states: “It has not occurred to any one of these philosophers to inquire into the connection of German philosophy with German reality, the relation of their criticism to their own material surroundings” (The German Ideology, New York: International Publishers, 1970, 41). The same can be said of ludic (post)modern theorists. In “Socialism or Neoliberalism?,” Ernest Mandel describes a reality in which there is a growing inequality between two sectors of society, between two classes. Meanwhile, within the academy the theorists are debating whether “class” is still a viable term or not. This section is offered, then, as a space to engage the differences between these discourses in the spirit that the educators must themselves be educated.
In order for this space to be politically effective, however, it is necessary to theorize it as a critical oppositional practice instead of a space for un-critical (pluralist) re-presentations of different oppressed groups/identities. The political choice, as A.J. Sahay argues in “Toward a Critique-al Practice…” (Alternative Orange, vol. 3, no. 1), “is not between theoreticity or a-theoreticity but between theory and anti-theory theory.” In other words, whether one acknowledges it or not there is no theory-free zone of political practice. Experience is not auto-intelligible. In order not to collapse into the dominant mode of pluralist re-presentations it is then necessary to have an “other” theory—a theory of “critique-al” practice based on a particular kind of “ruthless criticism” that moves beyond immanent critique by situating its object historically and implicating it within the reproduction of a specific social formation. The articles within this new section, Notebooks Toward a Critique-al Practice, are intended to introduce the reader toward such a critique-al practice.
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