Dear Mr. Thompson:

As part of what you have termed the “Majority” of the A.O. staff, which, by the overall (il)logic of your letter takes on the characteristics of a perpetually evil anomaly (like the “KKK and churches” which practice, what you “experience” as, “a pedagogy of indoctrination”) that has disengaged from the normative development of a properly maintained (imaginative) teleology of “world liberation” (which you equate with the “discursive liberation” of “private emotions” vis-à-vis “discursive pluralism” and the “pedagogy of support”) as upheld by the “dissenters” which you claim to represent as immanent to the—local—staff, I will address this simplistic binary logic again—and again(?)—despite the fact that for you at least my explanation may be theoretically impenetrable and may not carry the proper resonance which your “private” “experience” of theory (as necessarily mimetic of “emotions”) fails to grasp as effectual at the more encompassing political and conceptual level.

I have positioned the theory operative at the site of your text above as a “binary logic” because I understand it to consist of a Cold War manichean world view of essentially opposed Values—although contradictorily premised upon a transcendental (because unexplained, genealogically or politically) “base” of inherent (unchangeable) “commonality” ([“I feel”] p.2 [#3])—that by this very logic attempts to posit as natural an insurmountable barrier between binaries such as theory/experience, public/private, politics/emotions that, when taken together, are, ultimately, subsumed in individual discursive democracy (the ideology of capital’s “free”-market economy) as opposed to full socialization of the means of production. At the level of theoretical method the barrier you posit as essentially one to be maintained between “individual” knowledges proper, as stemming from untapped wells of creative potential (entrepreneurism)—which, of course, subsist in the naturalized Other as a self-same plenitude of depth—is opposed to the collective and co-operative knowledge of the theoretical which traces the interconnectedness of the socialized global logic of organized labor. It is only in the world view of the petty-bourgeois imagination, where you reside “privately,” that the vacillating position of the petty- bourgeois intellectual emerges as of the autonomous agent of “world liberation”: he becomes the only term capable of “floating” as a “free-agent” (an apolitically “objective” roving reporter as it were) whose “semi-committed, semi-participating” undecidable decidability is the mark of an implicitly “principled” politics which locates all explicitly partisan discourses as an “excessive” and “difficult” Other to be publicly “exposed.”

If, as you claim, “our ends” are the same, namely “world liberation”—despite the fact that the term is ultimately meaningless except as a projection of subjective desire and would, therefore, be jettisoned from a rigorous Marxist position as necessarily mis-leading—what is the difficulty then preventing social transformation according to your theory? The term “Majority” then is opportune in opening a space for there to be made the qualitative distinctions that your theory elides in its privileging of the local and subjective experience of what are, again, ultimately the symptomatic effects of wider social and historical causes. In articulating these distinctions I will displace the transcendental legitimation—the inherent contradiction between theory/experience in your text by which this binarism actually re-inscribes the first term in dependency to the latter and, further, posits this relation as inherently (naturally) a reciprocal and mutually beneficial one—and re-theorize them upon a more inclusive, as necessarily more explanatory, and verifiable base: that is as around the materialist standard of organized labor, not discourse, as the totality of productive possibilities presently traversed by its division according to exploitation as waged-labor.

It is because “Majority” is the literal English translation of Bolshevik that I find it to be opportune in teasing out what you theorize as a totalitarian practice of “pure theory,” which, contrarily, I theorize to be a method of (socio)logical propaganda—i.e. as a practice to propagate publicly a dialectical methodology through the supercession of the (ideo)logical markers that negotiate the (post)modern “real,” available (although in uneven ways) as the present market(able) logic of common-sense. For instance, it is only when the actual social and historical conditions of capitalist exploitation, as read through its apologists (the academicians aligned with the interests of the ruling class), and finally as opposed in the pages of the A.O., that the term “Majority” assumes its actual significance as the minority of theorists aligned with the majority of working people according to their objective interests. According to the intelligibility of “discursive liberation” that you espouse, the local “Majority” assumes the characteristics of the repressive aspects of the contradiction between capital’s forces (the academic system) and relations (the working class of this system including its class conscious strata) of production. In your narrative this contradiction becomes resolved at the site of the subjective experience and local partiality of petty- bourgeois coalitionalisms rallied, either for or against, “theory” which would, therefore, justify that the A.O. is the position to be opposed, as such, on the local organizational level as it does not compromise theoretically with liberalism’s program of endless vacillation and “undecidability.” Why is the “compromising” of the A.O.’s marxian position the object of your proposal when this position’s erasure is so widespread and your own liberalism so popular? This cannot be divorced from the A.O.’s history of intervention, nor its politics. Your class alliances are revealed by the non-ability on your part to work collectively within an organization of theoretically skilled workers (cf. Robert Oretz’s “Who said It Can’t Be Done? A History of Graduate Student Organizing and Unionization in the U.S.,” the Alternative Orange, Vol. 2, No. 5., April ’93, p.18) struggling to further the knowledges that would participate toward the global abolition of waged-labor and therefore accomplish the full social extension of democracy.

The (ideo)logical inversion of the dialectic that you deploy (the individual against society) corresponds politically with the liberal democratic position of the Mensheviks; the “minority” according to a wider account of objective interests, who, during the Russian Revolution, were the petty- bourgeois functionaries of parliamentary legality, this latter upon which the hegemony of the “freedom to speak” was, as per your re-articulation, also fetishized as the epitome of democratic “progressiveness” beyond the acknowledgment of its role in politically repressing the working class and peasantry. It is in so far as the actual world historical social transformation which the Russian Revolution irrefutably effected in political practice, as de facto an economic accomplishment of the working class for socialism, that the radical Left of the 1930s adopted a principled adherence to Bolshevik methods. As James P. Cannon outlines in The History of American Trotskyism it is the scientific (rigorously methodological) application of dialectical materialism which captures the logic of the given social “real” and which, further, produces a principled necessity on the part of politically active individuals that informs their effective oppositional organizational practice at the local level of theoretical production. It is the Bolshevik method of scientific socialism, as the necessary abstraction away from the immanency of the liberal position of the broad Left, whose agents privilege “experience” and the teleological extension of “discursive pluralism” as a viable reform so to manage the pre-locutionary structures of economic inequality, that determine the propagandistic function theory should take in actual social relations. That is, as a “hardline” of demarcation that shall position those vacillating elements of all reading/writing/thinking practices such that the historical material stakes involved in these social practices may be explicitly surfaced and made available for oppositional appropriation by a resistant political praxis.

It is in the same (socio)logical sense that your historical re-articulation of “discursive liberation” functions as you necessarily bear the material interests of your class position as interpellated by the academic hegemony of the present liberal Left—which reposes upon the criterion of immanency (“close reading”) of (post)structuralist epistemologies, now degenerated into a populist adherence to context dependency—which opposes the methods of scientific (dialectical) socialism that must work out the social and historically objective chains of mediations that occlude the determined status of social inequality. It is with these conditions in mind that Lenin’s theory of “democratic centralism” was introduced into the organizational space of the A.O. editorial meetings. We, the majority of the A.O. staff, voted for a practice of democratic centralist methods because, as we have concluded through extensive reading/writing/thinking around this problematic, in order to produce a qualitatively distinct public political position—as a theoretically classed subject interpellated by the (socio)logical difference of the paper, away from the class hegemony of petty-bourgeois “identity politics”—we had to “rationalize” our production to meet the “re-privatization” of knowledges in the academic system as a whole. This has meant that we must take as a given the degeneration of theory in the academy as the political capitulation of the Left insofar as they have renounced their own theoretical adherence to a principled (structuralist and epistemologically secure) politics for an experientially based model. This turn to the Right in academic practices must be countered now as it determines the very (im)possibility to theorize cultural practices from a non-personal and critique-al relation as this hegemony of “experience” has a monopoly on the means and resources of knowledge production. The Alternative Orange’s Bolshevik tendency is designed so to accentuate the systematicity of knowledge, and therefore, the politicity of its relations, to the detriment of opportunistic articulations made on the behalf of individually pragmatic “undecidability” which is currently wielding its authority in our class-rooms according to the “personal” criterion of privilege that marks its agents’ class hegemony.

At one point you reference a “casual discussion” (as you call it) between us in which I am made to support a “pure theory” that many liberals, including yourself, find unduly focused as it effects merely just “a few radicals ‘lingering at the edge of theory’” (as you quote me). This, according to the logic of the populist oriented liberal imaginary, is “elitist” and unconnected from the population at large and thus unavailable for the kind of semiotic symbioticism you espouse—which I understand to be the conceptual status of a theory that privileges the [im]possible mesh between the signifier and the signified as upheld under the Authority of the transcendental signified, the great “end” (p.2 [#2]) of language as a pragmatic medium by which to strictly [mis]communicate the informatics of “experience” as the valorized trope of “understanding” “our” “emotional” “commonalities” that you yet believe to be the prerequisite for “world liberation.” Accentuating for a moment the functionality of the terms of your discourse, your letter begs the question: What exactly are the conditions of possibility that allow you to conflate your “personal” “private” “experience” of “discursive liberation” as equivalent with “world liberation”? Now, this “question” is properly a theoretical one as it is not premised upon the “consciousness” of its Author-as-the-origin-of an intentional statement, but, rather, upon the wider socio- historical conditions of knowledge production. At a basic level, your formalism, the locally limited binarism of the individual’s emotional “discursive liberation”—as conjointly a global methodology of “world liberation”—is a “false” concept as, in your text, these terms are merely a juxtaposition of words since you give no theorization of their possible practical application. In other words, your “theory” has no theory to account for the distribution (the social effect) of its local articulation beyond the individually pragmatic “reasons” of your proposal.

In accordance with the logic of your text, words may be divorceable from any and all conceptual modalities (merely lexical) but it is only when we begin to open up the theoretical/political presuppositions and conditions working to support your text’s dominant social-logic that it actually begins to make sense: that is, produce a theoretical logic as an articulate and coherent conceptual apparatus capable of interrogating knowledges according to when and to what extent it is expanded into the global socio-historical conditions in which it objectively functions as a reflection. This move is something your text never does, of course, this is what it cannot logically and coherently “embody” and remain identifiably the same—i.e. as a liberal imaginary of “discursive liberation” while not, simultaneously, seeming to legitimate the populist logic of the United States government’s imperialist practices against the global working class to ensure that multinational capital accomplishes its historical dream of “world liberation.” As in your text, this dream also figures the possibility of disengaging the social subsistency of a given use-value (language as a politico-conceptual apparatus) for an exchange-value divested of all content and thus available for individual desire as “experience” (language as possibly just a “lexicon” of signifiers that strictly repeat endlessly in ahistorical “time”).

To reflect the wider epistemological conditions of your text’s articulation is thus a significant political move against its “interested” limitations. The whole A.O. staff is continually pressured to occupy a critique-al relation to all texts by its “Majority” members, so that, at the very least, we as a collective of theorists will yield a return that we should find to be most productive for the pedagogy of oppositional political practice, but, further, that we will be enabled to work to produce beyond the merely rationalist project of necessarily reproducing the given theoretical logic of any and all common- sensical text(s) and institutions. To do so we must begin to produce a resistant knowledge that takes the capitulation of the institutionalized liberal Left seriously as a reaction against—a de-skilling of—theory and its rigorous political applications and conclusions that are needed to explain the concrete systematicity of gender, sexual and racial oppression, among other things, and how these discourses function to support the exploitation of women, gays and people of color. It is the non-rigorousness of your locally focused empirical methods, the solipsism of the given conventionality of your text whereby you understand language to be merely a vessel of individual desire (a vehicle of emotional “dissent”) that elides the fact that this type of move has been thoroughly problematized in (post)structuralist epistemologies, specifically in theories of “post-coloniality” (cf. Gayatri Spivak) and (post)structuralist feminism’s critique of the determined developmental norms of the “libido” as operative in Freudian teleology and its convenient “end” in the “physical” Foucauldean “savoir” of the “Author’s Death” (cf. Teresa DeLauretis, Judith Butler, etc.). This should not be where theory stands now. NOW, (post)structuralism, which has thoroughly displaced all “humanisms” in theory, is widely considered along with previous structuralisms of theory to be an “outdated” explanatory mode according to the “new” academic hegemony of “identity politics” as they do not allow for normative understandings of “experience,” “subjectivity” or “agency.” (For instance Lacan is currently critiqued by Laplanche for his adherence to a structuralist institutionality, his patriarchal Freudian social residue as it were, which must become (re)privatized as inherent to the individual (in self-analysis).) This reactionary move in theory, back to the individual as an essential thematic, is ideologically necessary so to meet the current demands of the labor market that, through the entrepreneurial speculative “drives” of the Reaganite ‘80s, had resulted in the surfacing of capital’s anti-social practices and which must now (re)turn as the dominant ideology of the more socially democratic “welfare state” (“national health care”) as the present de-skilling and “downsizing” of capital’s inexorable logic of exchange-value shifts to exploit (more than ever) the cheapest sectors of the world proletariat. And so on. The question becomes: Why now do you not know this when these conditions have been explained in previous issues of the A.O. (albeit not within the dominant academy)? Could it be that the pedagogical methods of the A.O. necessarily block any theorization on your part, or is it that these same methods elicit from you a reaction to protect your “personal” and “private” class “experience” of “private” privilege because they explain your ideological complicity?

Given these (socio)logical facts, which you conveniently defer, I will address your positioning of my adherence to the “difficulty” of theory—as serving merely the apolitical “interest” of “a few radicals,” as you put it, thereby implying that theory is not historically an integral and effective force functioning in the social economically and politically—as this logic contradicts the very claims you attempt to make regarding the necessity of arguing on behalf of “reformism” as a methodological principle. You are unable to even recognize what was touted as reform just yesterday and attempt, on this (non)basis, to work against those progressions in theoretical understanding today in the name of an abstract adherence to “reformism.” Your re-form back to a form of language as apolitical (the possibility that any discursive series is only a “lexicon” functioning within, involuted narcissistically upon, its own immanent terms whilst simultaneously—mysteriously—dominating other “experiences”) is, to put it explicitly, an historically outmoded epistemology which yet serves to naturalize the oppression and exploitation of marginalized social strata of the working class. The intelligibility of “experience” functions as an oppressive apparatus as it marks an Other of discourse to be the embodiment of the inscription process of their own oppression as “expressed emotionally”, that, in turn, is specularly experienced by their dominators in the “pedagogy of support” but that, somehow, becomes necessarily violated by those who would explain the “naturalization” of this relation as the “support” of the petty-bourgeois academician. What is at stake in your (anti)theory theory becomes clearer when there is an attempt made to understand how it is that “theory”-in-general, for instance, which from your (con)text is understood as Marxism in particular, interrupts so inevitably what you theorize to be “your” apoliticized “private experience.” You label as the “pedagogy of indoctrination” words that are reproduced in specific social contexts whereby, accordingly, through their repetition, you understand them not only to mark their refusal to be available for appropriation but to determine terroristically a dominating totalitarianism over the “semi-committed, semi- participating” “covert investigator”; and this despite your comment on what you claim to be the mutual “end” of “our” relations on the paper, “world liberation.” This “end” connotes impractical Utopian proportions, to say the least.

To sum up, you continually and explicitly project a shared unquestioned relation to “Marxism” on the part of the “Majority” (“repeating [our]selves uncritically”) which is, on your own terms, however, reproduced in your participation in its concrete relations (“sitting silent and uncomprehending”), as if “Marxism” was a (non)Identity through the mere intentionality of claiming to align oneself with it and not through its actual social practice; by which the “Majority” is fundamentally distinct from the “dissenters” by virtue of such practice. Further, when you are pressured to explicitly develop a theory on the basis of your critical relation to practice you claim to occupy an “objective” position of “semi-participation” and “semi-commitment” (as a “covert investigator”?) who is not actually concerned with the logic of what’s being contested anyway but desires to produce reformist oriented (local) “discursive liberation.” Thus, must one suppose the proliferation of discourse you seek to be the spectacular exposé of “Bolsheviks on Campus.” You prop up this reactionary and sensationalist theory of language (essentially “reader response”) upon the “physical” apparatuses of control, that, by their mean physicality (“such as ‘yelling’ and ‘interrupting’”) are positioned beyond textual interrogation into the space of the factual (i.e. as if now I must either contest that this did or did not happen…) as they necessarily stand self-evidently as violations of propriety and etiquette (…thereby offending further the sensibilities of those who take such claims at all seriously which you in your populist imaginary assume to be “the people” but that are, in actuality, the authoritarian policing mechanisms of the petty-bourgeois as dependent upon the given “discursive liberation” of discursive “outrage” against the A.O.’s previous interventions). However, these conditions cannot bolster your theory of language; as a simple Pavlovian reader response mechanism it remains a “degenerated” theory in so far as the semiotic and linguistic theory which has been instituted over the past 30 years (Saussure, Levi-Strauss, Benveniste, Barthes) has progressed beyond the Cold War theories of cultural relativism (where contact with the Other is “as experienced” “essentially” by radically divergent identities), through adopting a structuralist social theory which recognizes the necessary inscription process of acculturation as a social phenomenon (Nietzsche’s methodology in The Genealogy of Morals as re-inscribed by Foucault). Acculturation, as recognized by these theorists, necessarily is a function of all societies as a process of theoretical indoctrination, at the least, to economically function to regulate some form of collective value (discourse, kinship, power, etc.). Indeed, it is recently that anthropology and ethnography (cf. Writing Culture, 1991) have renovated their knowledge banks to meet the objective conditions of the erasure of cultural relativism: multinational capitalism. The question remains: Why now do you not know all this?

It is because revolutionary Marxism recognizes theoretically that a communist teleology does not inevitably result from the natural accumulation of outmoded forms of social (re)production that it enables those given to understand, that is, intellectuals (socio)logically bound, that although your espoused humanism functions according to the epistemological laws of its own signification as per its historical conventionality, its re-articulation in qualitatively different historical relations carries a qualitatively different social valence than your expected intentional affect. Deployed within the current relation of forces, within the current hegemony of (post)structuralist informed “appreciative” cultural studies (A. Katz)—against an organization whose “Majority” members would even be included as representative of marginalized social groups according to the social policy of “multiculturalism” taken on its own terms but, as they are aligned theoretically with a political commitment to critique-ally re-present the liberal discourses that privilege the non-representational/representational binary as the limit of the possible, are excluded from this space—your discourse’s imperialist legitimations must be positioned as a qualitatively different form of humanism: this we can term the neo-humanism of the New World Order. This distinction of your affected theoretical claims from your effective political practice is an important one if we on the A.O. are to be committed to fighting against capitalism’s degradation of content (the erasure of social- history) for the sake of exchangeable values which are optimal for the private accumulation of academic entrepreneurism (cf. M. Wood’s “On Self-Critique and the Enterprising Subject”). The socio-historical theorization of neo-humanism is, moreover, important in that it allows there to be drawn out explicitly the interconnectedness of seemingly autonomous social processes—the A.O., the university, the academy, etc.—as not merely the localized instances of immanent personal histories disconnected from a causal social relationality. The co-option of (post)structuralist academicians who entered the academy as Leftists claiming to fight the struggle on the part of their marginalized subject positions, in line with their radical agenda of social political reform, is evidenced by the compromise of their projected aim of being the embodiment of the essential experiential core of “liberation” (what Foucault has critiqued as nevertheless dependent upon a depth ontology as “the soul of revolt” whose “great Refusal from below” now is deployed by the liberal Left “from above,” as it were) and becomes explicitly revealed through their pedagogical monopoly over “theory.” This is the historical result of adopting (post)structuralism’s “undecidability” as a socio-political program. NOW their “discursive liberation” functions to politically repress a principled theoretics which explains their historical capitulation. It is according to the wider logic of the socio-historical conditions of knowledge production—where the economy of signs is actually extended democratically and not (ideo)logically as in accordance with the political (re)activity of individual “liberation”—that the first eight words of your letter to the “Majority” of the A.O. staff capture the functional political violence of academic neo-humanism: “Allow me to assault you with my experience…”

Stephen Tumino

October 11, 1993