Why Now ‘Auto-Critique’ ?
Alternative Orange Staff
| Revision History | ||
|---|---|---|
| • Winter 1993-1994 | Newspaper: Funded by Syracuse University students. | |
| The Alternative Orange: Vol. 3, No. 2 (pp. 20) | ||
| • September 24, 2000 | Webpage:  . | |
| DocBook XML (DocBk XML V3.1.3) from original. | ||
The institution of a ‘permanent’ section of the A.O. as an ‘auto-critique-al’ space is based upon a proposal to A.O. Staff foregrounding the necessity to implement a section of the paper which will reflect the contradictions emergent within the internal space of this paper as represented by various contesting positions as they are articulated herein. However, this necessity, although locally designated by our political project to extend the limits of democracy by way of a public theoretical forum for resistant knowledges (as they are consistently encroached upon by bourgeois knowledges), further requires a theorization that must provide an historical understanding of the conditions of materialist praxis in the late capitalist academy today. Thus this section of the paper, although it is to be understood as secondary to the extensive theorizations of particular problematics recognized to be significant interchanges in regards to the production of oppositional knowledges, as signified by our primary articles, maintains a dialectical relation, as a boundary text, with both the primary material of this publication, and the Western academy as it is globally situated. As a boundary text this space critically informs the conditions of possibility determining (post)modern intellectual production as well as provides an historical record which reflects the terms under which ideological, political and economic struggle between various contesting discourses manifest themselves.
Such an understanding necessitates a very different reading of the stakes involved in making public the internal dynamics of a particular site of discursive production. Far from being limited to a petty-bourgeois (mis)recognition of local contradiction as the necessary disjunction of individual discord, which correspondingly depends upon an invocation of a volitional (self-same) subject of agency, this reading argues that the individual is a discursive construct, situated within the coordinates of material production, and, as such, is the socially available site of the effects of this location. In the academic domain of the production of ideology this translates into subjects primarily interpellated by the dominant discourses as these are themselves framed by the status of intellectual production within the division of labor between the owners and the sellers of labor power. (Post)modern intellectuals are sites of contradiction between the ideological interests of their investment in (a particular) discourse and the material interests that these discourses represent as modes of producing political(ly active) subject(ivitie)s. Necessarily, then, it is discourse as collapsed into ideology which mediates between the “knowing” subject, acting according to either voluntary or identitarian political alliances, and the objective social real so positioned as to renarrate the intentional according to a global (socio)logic. The emergence of contradiction, in the form of antagonistic political and theoretical positions thus stands revealed as extending beyond the individuals in question into the social sphere of objectively irreconcilable interests within the global division of labor and the totalizing structures of race, gender, and sexual oppression that it engenders. These antagonisms are, therefore, (theoretical) forms of (material) practice at the level of discursivity, relating to and fundamentally in-form-ed by a logic of the (re)production of the conditions of production of capital (as they are subject to historical redefinition) and the struggle against this continued (re)production. We argue that this reading does not preclude the possibility of intervention, in dominant discourses as in the normative structuration of subjectivity, for the purpose of the transformation of the capitalist mode of production, but rather recognizes the social valence of such intervention as located according to the historical conditions governing its effectivity.
The conditions of possibility framing the implementation of a “permanent” ‘auto- critique-al’ section in the A.O., are now recognized to be the symptomatic conditions of struggle within the (post)modern academy—against oppositional knowledges which attempt to effect a historical material trace (distinct from the materiality of the sign which we real-ize to be an ahistorical materialism) through a rigorous understanding of the social totality as it informs all contexts. It is, we argue, in the (post)class imaginary of the (petty)bourgeoisie that discourses which locate the present socio-politico-economic configuration of transnational capital as definitively informing/(re)locating all discourse become a ‘violation’ of the normative standards of bourgeois democracy=the inviolable right to self-expression/assertion for dominant discourses and thus translate the (socio)logic to its interested “pluralism.” Oppositional discourses are subjected to the most trivial and historically repetitive interrogations by discourses that assume the essential validity of their own knowledges and hence are constantly asked to explain their terms against the common-sensical logic of the trivial-as-the-transparent- realm-of-the-(ideo)logical. In order to resist the hegemony of the trivial which is positioned as the epistemological filter of “everyday” social relations and which, if allowed to remain within this privatized realm of the personal (as inter-personal dialogue with its inevitable residue of rumor, innuendo… for the purposes of containment), must necessarily appear as the boundary text informing the content of this paper, the imperative becomes the appropriation of this site through the theoretical/political engagement of its very possibility. That is, a publicly available distribution of contestation within this institution which, at its most basic level, contests the limits of bourgeois democracy currently legitimated by a liberal-pluralist ethic which attempts to eradicate critique-al contestation in the space of its classrooms through its subsumption by the logic of a mandated “conversation”. The ‘auto-critique-al’ site of this student publication is then a margin to the policed boundaries of this liberal “conversation”, which, as the dominant mode of current social intelligibility insists on its privilege (through the dictatorial privilege of common-sense) to inform all sites of culture. To this dominant logic we say—if we are silenced in your classrooms, we will speak elsewhere. When you attempt to silence us elsewhere, WE WILL MAKE OUR STRUGGLE PUBLIC. This is not a voluntary and self-proclaimed margin but a margin of necessity; a dialectically produced margin to the centrality of the dominant and the practices it engenders in all the various sites of this institution and all its fellow institutions in the Western academy at this moment in history. This theorized space is then a margin of resistance on these very terms: as a sign of this resistance it is a “permanent” space of (re)situating the trivial within a non-fragmentary continuum of the politicity to knowledge; as a margin of resistance it is historically contingent as according to the (ideo)logic of the center as it engages with, and is transformed by, the (socio)logic of resistant struggle. In the larger struggle for proletarian democracy it is the urgencies of the moment that are hereby addressed.
| ★ |
