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| To the Members of the A.O. Staff: |  2003-10-29 | Dear Majority of the A.O. Staff: |
| The Alternative Orange (Vol. 3): An Alternative Student Newspaper | ||
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“Self”-Critique
Ms. Zoli presents “Comments and Critiques” (co-authored by Jennifer Maroon), a paper ostensibly aimed at interrogating bureaucratic and politically inconsistent “decision-making” policies and practices of the Alternative Orange working staff. Though presented as a politically oppositional and progressive intervention, this paper is instead a progressive “commentary” informed quite thoroughly by the dominant understanding of politicity and epistemology, both of which currently operate to suppress oppositional theoretical discourses in the late (post)modern academy. Its register is experientialist, an (ideo)logical response to rigorous theorization such as that practiced by the A.O.
This text, in its very first moments, opposes itself to a thorough understanding of a political problematic in its very loca(liza)tion of problems—effects—as ones that “arise out of the minutes from 9/16/93.” This very first sentence—the grid of intelligibility it foregrounds—secures the incompatibility of the paper’s mode of engagement with the space of address acknowledged as necessary and acceptable by the A.O. This oppositionality consists of, at the most primary level of abstraction, a subtle, yet pernicious, opposition to an understanding of “problems” as the outcome of perlocutionary, extra-textual, objective historical causalities, specifically as ones emerging from contradictions in the global developments and movements of the international class struggle; the A.O. has publicly maintained the necessity and urgency of this very problematic in both its mode and object of theoretical address. However, this implicit foregrounding of anti-foundationalist principles in this text (counter to an effective socialization of either the act of reading—the text’s methodology of knowing—or of the A.O. meeting—the text’s object—since the text is explicitly founded on a “close reading” of the minutes), despite Ms. Zoli’s acknowledgment, after being pressured by Mr. Tumino, that the critique was knowingly “waged” without founding principles—leaves no alternative but to understand this oppositional criticism as the result of Ms. Zoli’s and Ms. Maroon’s outstanding attentiveness to discursivity—the mode of close reading that they (the discourses of poststructuralism that implicitly inform this undertaking) establish as the epistemological venue by which “problems [seemingly] arise out of the minutes.” This is not very different, then, from the modes of intelligibility that buttress the pedagogues of the bourgeois academy who account for their own vast institutional successes and ascendence to privileged sites of cultural agency as a mere function of “advanced” subjective perceptivity and “tight” reading skills and then accordingly contain their class privilege by remaining forcefully immanent to the text(book) and its dehistoricized intricacies.
Though the grid of intelligibility that enables Ms. Maroon/Ms. Zoli’s “unique” attentiveness would (and does) fare well in these current conditions and structures of knowledge production which rely on an unabashed submission to the authoritative text (hence the need for “close reading”), its introduction in the space of the A.O. should be resituated and vehemently opposed, as a significant move to elide accountability to the historical conditions of possibility of their very intervention in the space of the A.O. and as a means of subtlely (re)introducing a discursive voluntarism as the “starting point” of a radical political praxis. There is, in a radical materialist reunderstanding of signification, nothing necessarily objective to the logic of “minutes”—nor to the immanent logic of localities, meetings, etc. in any case. On this point Ms. Zoli and Ms. Maroon are arguing with their theory. However, the problematic is, again, certainly in excess of a “Ms. Zoli,” a “Ms. Maroon” or an “argument” such that it is the very mode of engagement and the intelligibilities it promotes that are crucial to address. This is, effectively, the dominant mode of engagement, the “back and forth” filibustering so prevalently rehearsed in the private annals of the academy, one that very effectively maintains the public silences which these institutions rely on for the occlusion and naturalization of a classed society. However, the A.O.—in its public theoretical stances—must recognize that what is often referred to as a self-intelligible logic—an immanent accounting—is rather an instance of struggle, an instance enabled by globally dictated contestations over incompatible historical material “truths”: Mr. Tumino’s “distortion” in the minutes of the 9/16/93 meeting is one such “truth” that is incompatible with Ms. Maroon’s assertion of “truth”; the question is, however: What are the interests and practical theoretical and political ends served by Mr. Tumino’s “truth”? As the Maroon/Zoli argument runs, Mr. Tumino’s is inherently a “bad” truth, because it is not compatible with their “truth” and it in fact imposes itself on their “truth,” i.e., without respecting the terms of their “truth.” Ms. Zoli and Ms. Maroon have only concluded, through “argument,” that this exchange was, in fact, “political”! However, as pointed to by Mr. Katz, Ms. Cotter, Mr. Tumino and Ms. Sahay, the conclusions of these “conclusions”—the material consequences—are never drawn out nor are the enabling conditions of the opposing discourses ever revealed. One of the argument’s semi-conclusions (“Therefore, on the other hand…”), then, is the necessity for “fair” and “honest” contestation—ones in which the contesting factions all respect one another’s terms of argumentation and never finally decide “for” or “against” oppositional discourses (noting here, also, that “deciding not to decide” is in-and-of- itself a decision against certain enabling practices). Furthermore, it should be recognized that the positing of politicity as the outcome of formal “argumentation”—in this case, an argument for the political rather than the pragmatic—should, in lieu of the A.O.’s extensive theorization of the necessity for politicity at the most primary level of abstraction… in the first instance… be recognized as a move both self-referential at the level of articulation and redundant at the level of the A.O. meeting space; in short, regressive. This engagement then can be taken as “residual” of the regressive shift to the right which has followed, among other causes, America’s late-eighties productive downslide in regard to the other two of the “big three” nationals: Germany and Japan. American capitalists (and their academic counterparts) are finding that any space for contestation is too costly to the prospects of an acquiescing labor force and, as many A.O. staff members will attest to, have opportunistically shut down the class space to “un-interested” students. This is a tendency the A.O. has vehemently contested in public, in the recognition that privatization is the historical occlusion of the socialization of labor.
It is important, however, to take the time to point out these modes by which the dominant discourses, even in the space of the A.O., exercise their authority of immanence—for instance, positing an argument over the politicity of contestation, a tact which also is heading up the conservativist P.C debate currently being “popularized” in the academy—in order to interrogate and display the theoretical distinctions that operate both through the A.O. and through cultural productions generally. It is through the unchecked invocation of immanence—in this case the immanence of politics to the A.O. meeting space—that the dominant resecures the continued conditions of possibility of cultural and institutional authority by securing the “real” as the “only,” a reifying move which limits the production of historical possibilities and alternatives through political default to nationalism, P.C., etc.—a stance directly counter to the publicized theories and practices of the Alternative Orange.
It is hardly necessary to recall that the most advanced bourgeois knowledges have been arguing for non-foundational knowledges for the past twenty years, and that the “solidarity” politics that Ms. Maroon and Ms. Zoli privilege in their text, that is, a grouping together on the grounds of common undecidabilities and crises in experience is a powerful and prevalent means of flushing the academy of “unwanted” theorists that are too “certain” of their knowledges in an academy now reliant on the mass institutionalization and populist reprivatization of poststructuralism (responded to by Prof. Zavarzadeh in “The Me-In-Crisis” section of his submission, Break the Silence). In a recent text by Madhava Prasad “solidarity” is revealed as the new “truth” of American capitalists, a philosophy of coalition in which “consensus around a set of issues is enough to give them the status of truth” (M. Prasad, “The New (International) Party of Order? Coalition Politics in the (Literary) Academy” in diacritics 22.1: 34-46). It should be noted how easily the “groundless”—a solidarity based on common crises and undecidabilities—in the late postmodern moment acquires the local status of “truth,” while at the same time invoking its full breadth of prestige and power to contest the imposition of other “truths” upon its own dominance or even, as in this case, to contest counter-imposition in general (what the Zoli/Maroon argument refers to as “misrepresentation”). In other words, the argument that informs this text is very careful not to breach through critique the privacy of a series of discourses it has located as oppositionally “other”; the rhetorical questioning that formats its conclusions—the “hinting” that something is politically “awry”—is, however, enough to generate discussion and thereby acquire the status of a substantial dialogical intervention, both legitimate and tactful, in short, acquiring the dominant status of relativist “truth.”
In regards to the postponement of “the Feminist Issue,” the Zoli/Maroon argument reads its enabling conditions as distinctly unpolitical ones: “the A.O. staff needed to theorize politically (and not pragmatically)… [since] pragmatic terms… are themselves mandated and determined by political interests.” For Zoli/Maroon, those discourses that readily enunciate their politicity, as such, are necessarily to be valorized for such a gesture. However, when situated within the current proliferation of P.C. in the academy, the advocation of the necessity to “theorize politically” when coupled with the lack of enunciation of a political content, foregrounds itself as the very epitome of pragmatism! This is the implicit understanding in a text that by rendering engagement on the local level of discursive speech- acts/parole (the mode of “who said what” or “who wrote what” that reveals the political and epistemological limits of this text) fails to provide a political content by way of a materialist accounting, a materialist accounting that necessarily need be rigorously decidable and stringently political (in excess of what the oppositional discourses “say”) within the framework of a conservative resurgence of a populism within which the very valorization of “spoken” experience is the ruling “hard-line” in the post-poststructuralist academy.
The most reactionary shift in this argument consists of Ms. Zoli’s defensive maneuvering into the theoretical comforts of “certainty,” “originality” and impositional Truth, deployed against Mr. Tumino and Ms. Cotter in a Deleuzean charge of mimicry. Ms. Zoli contends that Ms. Cotter’s and Mr. Tumino’s critique-al engagements mask a simple mimicry of, respectively, Ms. Sahay’s and Mr. Katz’s critiques. It is in this instance, that the argument crumbles further under the weight of its own contradictions, first eliciting charges of “misrepresentation” and, then of “mimicry,” a disparity symptomatic of its vaguely informed understanding both of its theoretical opponents and of the conditions and limits of its own informing problematic. Mimicry is a figure of a bankrupt Cold War rhetoric, one that is able to dismiss collectivity—the co-operative completion of theoretical tasks—as “conformist” and “mindless” simply with a knowing nod in the direction of the Soviet Union. On these terms, as deployed by Ms. Zoli, mimicry remains the bourgeois codeword for an over-imposing anti-individualism, the reduction of “difference” in experience to “sameness” in conceptuality. Mimicry has also already been addressed, in any case, by Prof. Zavarzadeh’s paper, Break the Silence, of which there are still copies available.
What this exchange initiated by Ms. Zoli reconfirms is the fact that the Zoli/Maroon critique is bound up in precisely this mode of subtlely resituating the political in the cognitive which inevitably individualizes its opposition into “conspiratorial” status in order to occlude the necessity of political alliances that preserve theoreticity in an increasingly constrained academic space. In this sense, the submission aligns itself with another criticism received in the exact same meeting space. I am referring to the e-mail letter from Chris Koliba presented by Mr. Cymbala at the aforementioned meeting. Mr. Koliba’s mode of engagement, a mode which takes as its political end what he accurately describes as “radical communicative action,” is identical to that of the Zoli/Maroon argument: they are, effectively, privatized moments of crisis which bracket their informing discourses (what Mr. Koliba refers to as “issues… beyond my wishes”). Mr. Koliba, as well, supplants contestation and avoids the labor of critique by positing “questions” about A.O. practices—while refuting the theorization of the real concrete political effects or consequences of his comments—e.g., he rationalizes the crisis in his subjectivity by way of a reliance on Habermasian “communicative action,” the notion that “censorship” and “clouded” dialogue are the only mediations in the way of the eradication of class exploitation and social injustice. Although Mr. Koliba is “concerned” that the A.O. “could be headed for difficulties if any of the buorgiousie [sic] governing bodies find out about [the A.O.’s] discriminating practices,” his commitment of “concern” without labor of social change—i.e., productive theorization towards the explanation of the social totality and the A.O. in relation to that totality—can be taken to be yet another “non-foundational” “attack” on the necessity for the global situation of these contestations that itself relies on a voluntary reaction to a personal impugnment as its founding instance and commitment as its end result. It is precisely this commitment—whether it be commitment of concern or commitment of labor—that is absolutely incidental towards advancing collective political ends, which demands not a critique-al line, as such, but rather theorized political interventions. However, it is because the groundless and the committed—those frames of intelligibility that exceed a “Ms. Zoli,” a “Ms. Maroon” or a “Mr. Koliba”—so easily and subtlely acquire the status of legitimacy—even in lieu of theoretical “vigilance”—and that, furthermore, these discourses demand to be “taken up” in and through staff meetings, that what is necessary here at this late moment is
| a proposal |
for a Leninist theory of democratic centralism,
since these current incidents underline the need for political
practicality in and through theory, that is,
the need for those introducing proposals to theorize and
make explicit the concrete and expressed political effects of their
proposals as a means of countering the slippage of
A.O. meeting time into unnecessary discussions or
ruminations or addressing submissions that introduce or valorize this
general tact. Mr. Tumino has introduced the applicability of
democratic centralism: Lenin’s understanding of proposals and
criticism in the space of (Party) meetings:
“…the principle of democratic centralism and autonomy
for local Party organizations implies full freedom to criticize so
long as this does not disturb the unity of a definite action; it
rules out all criticism which disrupts or makes difficult the
unity of an action decided on by the Party… criticism
within the limits of the principles of the Party Program must be
quite free…, not only at Party meetings, but also at public
meetings.” (quoted in Paul Le Blanc’s “Notes on
Building a Revolutionary Party in the United States: Part
Two,” in Bulletin In Defense of Marxism
(BIDOM), no. 108, July-August 1993, p. 19).
In effect, this proposal stresses the necessity of a collective agenda with definite and unified political ends and activities, and in a historical moment traversed by “solidarity”—and “identity”—politics, demands a theorized political definitiveness that extends beyond the space of the A.O. Proposals that formulate a problematic immanent either to this space or otherwise should be recognized as ones that both through the appropriation of the meeting time or through the more explicitly liberal pluralist dialogical methodologies (e.g., rhetorical questioning, roundtable discussion, etc.) infringe counterproductively upon these collective political ends. I am moving that we reserve a space to vote to either address or dismiss future proposals precisely on these terms—in order to practically facilitate collective political ends—and I urge the staff of the A.O. to institute such a policy in the space of its meetings and editorial procedures pending majority approval. I further move that all counter-proposals be delivered in writing for address in one week.
[Brian Ganter, facilitator of October 7, 1993 meeting]
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