Desdemona’s Revenge; or, Notes of a Malcontent

“Postmodern cultural studies tends to reduce the practices of theory and critique (in the sense of inquiring into the material conditions of the production of subjectivity so as to transform practices, and to raise them to a higher theoretical and political level) to instances of totalitarian-inspired terrorism directed at those subjects who are, presumably, thereby prevented from ‘speaking for themselves’.”—“Where?”

The contemporary postmodern academy is riven by a series of contradictions and crises which are only beginning to take on a conscious form. The practices of students who have challenged both the traditional and neo-coalitionist teacher-student relationships and rigorously critiqued and interrogated their teachers regarding the assumptions and purposes advanced by their pedagogy have, at this university, provided an especially acute theoretical diagnosis of this accumulation of contradictions. The practices of these students, and the counter-practices of those professors engaged as public intellectuals—those situated closest to the fault-lines, and who therefore function as siesmographic indicators, having been deprived by their refusal to theorize their contradictory location of any theoretical knowledge of the situation—have been compressed within a series of events related to the last several issues of the Alternative Orange. This is significant because the Alternative Orange has represented a move beyond the immanent resistance within the classroom which, without other supports, can easily be repressed, diverted, or contained within the privatized adjacent spaces which flourish within the academy (the professor’s office, department gossip, the exchange of “trade secrets” on the problematics of “dealing with” disruptive students, etc.), toward an independent organization of the means by which contestations of the pro-capitalist, neo-liberal, reigning “radical” postmodern multiculturalism could be sustained.

It is important to recognize that these developments did not follow from the voluntaristic desire of students to “be heard”; rather, they are the product of an objective, urgent need (based on the closure of more conventional spaces) and, more importantly, of the internal logic of the now dominant methodology for maintaining institutional peace and ruling class domination. This methodology, which I will theorize and document in detail in this essay, involves the deployment of a postmodern identity politics as a strategy of containment and confusion; its contradiction lies in its relation to its “other” (a specter is haunting the postmodern academy—the specter of revolutionary Marxism) which it must simultaneously coopt and dismiss, mimic and repress. Thus, in direct confrontation with this other, which demands that a consistent position be taken on all questions, it finds that its wager has been lost, its cover blown, and the intellectual and political emptiness of its position exposed. What follows is a resort to the most dependable “liberal” and covert mechanisms of institutional repression—silence, the exclusion of students from the classroom, unaccounted for refusals to write and “modifications” of already written letters of recommendation, refusals to serve on and withdrawals from dossier and dissertation committees, the establishment of “rules of compassion/order” within the classroom, etc. Finally, in employing such methods, the professors involved cannot surrender their progressive rhetoric, since this rhetoric constitutes the currency which enables them to circulate within those sectors of the academy where they have carved out a (market) niche; hence, the contradictions and crises are internalized and multifariously reflected within that rhetoric (the dominant rhetoric: identity as difference-in-negotiation), making the unfolding of its incoherence, aporias, and vacuity extremely instructive. Especially since, as I would contend, this apparently specific, local set of contestations is a general one, with only its manifestation needing to be generalized.

“All this is much better than the nitpicking you do earlier—some of which is belabored…Your argument is much better when you stop these detailed critiques and expand upon your own argument—which in its totality is a critique of a dominant strain of thought.”

One cannot “make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he socially remains” (Marx), since these relations have been determined elsewhere and are indifferent to anyone’s “individuality.” And yet public accountability to the means and authority possessed by subjects is the political form taken by social contradictions; without recognizing this one can gesture to the “contradictions of capitalism” incessantly without ceasing to be an idealist. Furthermore, only the mechanisms of accountability—which require that those in authority “account for” other interests and therefore reproduce the contradictory interests of class society— enables positions to be de-privatized and publicized, and makes it possible to place on the theoretical and political agenda the collective uses of social capacities; thus, these mechanisms provide the critical means for the revolutionary pedagogy required for revolutionary practices. This essay will reference specific actions taken by specific persons in their capacities as pedagogues, university professors, and intellectuals, and this will inevitably be read as a series of personal attacks and, by those who consider the personal to be directly political, as sexist, racist, elitist, etc.—it is impossible to control these types of readings, especially since they are an intrinsic component of the taking of positions I will explain here. However, these very readings will quickly display their desperation and bankruptcy—their inability to rise above rumor and gossip and enter the public sphere of contending discourses—thereby accelerating the exhaustion of the theoretics and politics on which they are based, and in this way enable the opening up of the possibility for more sustained and effective critiques and theorizations of the discourses, practices and institutions that will necessarily be contaminated by the unfolding of these utterly typical (because apparently personal and individual) moments of crisis.

I will begin by reading a pair of letters.

First, I wish to situate this letter institutionally before moving on to its effects. The letter of recommendation is an essential element of the reproduction of existing institutions. It provides for the circulation of individuals throughout the institution by guaranteeing that they have received a “stamp of approval” from those who are already well ensconced within that institution, and can therefore be “trusted” to see to its well being, i.e., to exclude undesirables. It is also a mechanism of the continual reproduction and, when, necessary, adjustment of the positions and interests of middle class bureaucrat/intellectuals, that is, a form of institutional “bonding” which enables the well protected professional to constantly check on the latest codes and criteria which determine acceptability and up-to-dateness. It ensures that one will not enter the institution without having pledged fealty to one or another of the “camps” which have formed within the institution, i.e., without having “protection.”

Professor Nussbaum’s letter makes an important theoretical and ideological claim, regarding the relation between the personal, the political, and the intellectual. The letter “knows” the feminist slogan that “the “personal is political,” a slogan that originally served the purpose of directing political attention to social arenas which had been marked as “personal”: the home, sexuality, subjectivity, etc. That is, it was an attempt to extend the category of the political to these new areas in order to widen the scope of emancipatory struggles. The letter also “knows,” though, that the articulation of these categories now takes on a very different form, radically opposed to this prior articulation. According to Professor Nussbaum’s letter, the relation between the personal and the intellectual is undecidable: the personal can “reflect” or “disrupt” the intellectual. The same is true of the relations between the “personal” and the “political”: the personal, in this regard, may be “conservative” or “radical.” How do we distinguish when it is one and when it is the other? This can only be determined theoretically, by analyzing the social conditions under which the “personal” is produced. However, this would mean rigorously subordinating the “personal” to the “intellectual,” which Professor’s Nussbaum letter absolutely refuses to allow for. In this case, the indeterminacy of the relations between these categories means, in effect, that the personal means what I, personally, take it to mean: that is, it is a much needed mechanism, under conditions of heightened social antagonisms, when contending agencies demand public accountability for institutional practices, for removing one’s practices from social determination and political accountability and relegating them to a realm “beyond” politics and beyond theory.

Professor Nussbaum’s letter is a response to the following.

We can now see that Professor Nussbaum’s letter is concerned to correct a misreading of her act of writing a “supportive” letter for Dr. Katz. According to Professor Nussbaum’s letter, Dr. Katz’s letter posits her in a critical relation to professors Alcoff and Callaghan, whereas, she is anxious to make clear, she is in fact aligned with them. Of course, Dr. Katz’s letter has a basis for suggesting that a letter of “support,” under these conditions (where others have changed their letters of support into letters which undermine one’s candidacy), implies a difference and critique: that is, a critique of those who seek to prevent one from continuing in one’s intellectual work because of political disagreements. This is why Professor Nussbaum’s letter, in countering this claim, must enter into the “undecidable” zone where the personal can be conflated with the political. Dr. Katz’s letter offers Professor Nussbaum a subject position which presupposes that the responsibility of professors, especially those who see their intellectual work as supportive of progressive “political ends,” is to support students who effectively advance progressive politics in their intellectual work, even if they disagree with those students and even if those students put enormous pressure on their intellectual and political positions. Professor Nussbaum wrenches herself away from this subject position and explicitly rejects it, not on solid intellectual grounds, but on the grounds that it misreads her local alliances with other “progressive” professors. Her letter claims that Dr. Katz has done violence to her intentions, but in fact the violence has been done to her supposed ability, as an experienced, Full Professor, to “transcend” institutional disputes (like those between Assistant Professors and graduate students, lower orders on the academic food chain), by supporting (offering patronage to) both the student and those professors who seek to exclude him. Dr. Katz’s letter takes away that “transcendental” subject position, which is necessary not only for existing institutional hierarchies, but also for the dominant ideology since it is those who can thus “transcend” these “local” disputes (in which, in fact, social forces are concentrated) who are socially placed to produce the “universals” required for the dominant ideology to be effective. Dr. Katz’s letter takes that position away from her by insisting that she must take sides, that she has already taken sides, that she is not “above the fray” but very much implicated in it. Professor Nussbaum’s letter in turn openly acknowledges this, by taking sides: for Professors Alcoff and Callaghan, against Dr. Katz. This is an extremely productive moment to critique, because it is at those sites where the dominant ideology becomes “practical” (not transcendent) that its contradictions emerge and become available for critique, because it is in such cases that the contradictions and contestations it seeks to reconcile are dissolved into their warring elements, of which the ideological claim is simply one component: thus the interests served by that claim can be made visible and accounted for.

Professor Nussbaum’s letter focuses on the question of “tactics”: “I deplore the tactics which have been used against them.” (Which tactics?—the writing of public critiques which address the stated positions of pedagogues; the taking of oppositional stances within the classroom, etc.). Suddenly, the law of undecidability governing the relation between the intellectual and the personal is “lifted”: the theory can be good, but the tactics are bad, and it is the “tactics” (which supposedly injure persons) that are most important. This allows for a dislocation of the ethical (grounded in intersubjectivity) from the political (determined theoretically). This organization of an “alliance” around opposition to “deplorable” tactics produces a shared identity which compels the exclusion of the subject position proposed and the one represented by, Dr. Katz’s letter. In other words, Dr. Katz’s letter proposed a mode of authority based upon theoretical knowledges; Professor Nussbaum’s letter responds with a challenge to this theoretical claim with an apparent political claim (“the ends which I support”) which in fact enacts the subordination of politics to institutional alliances qua personal attachments (“support”). The incoherence of this position unravels into the causal claim made in the final paragraph of Professor Nussbaum’s letter: [b]ecause “my letter…has been misinterpreted” therefore, “I feel compelled…” Where, in fact, is the “necessary” link between this “misinterpretation” and “add[ing] a paragraph”? Its necessity, and hence the compulsion, is in the dictate that one abandon oneself to the institutional power brokering that the liberal position of generosity was unable to transcend. Thus, it is precisely when brute institutional interests must be overtly asserted, and the ideological legitimation is all the more necessary as a mode of concealment of existing relations, that the ideological legitimation breaks down, and becomes an incoherent arrangement of terms which mutually repel one another (the personal, political, and intellectual both are and are not related, one must “choose” one of them but also “all” of them, etc.).

Thus, the purpose of “breaking the silence” surrounding such events is not to “scandalize,” but to read the codes of confidentiality, the “behind the scenes” machinations of the institution, as sites of struggle which are successfully contained insofar as the reign of silence is maintained, and ideology maintains its apparently “surface” function (of summing up the variety of positions institutionally and socially available). This type of exposure is an attempt to bring the crisis of these discourses and institutions in public view, in the interest of producing contestatory subjectivities who cannot say, as the dominant ideology would allow, “either/or” and “both.” For this reason, as well, there is no such thing as “absolute” exposure which would reveal the entire “truth”: rather, the practice of exposure or counter-publicity is aimed at advancing critiques of the dominant ideology, at waging ideological struggle which makes the social contradictions constitutive of the institutional site (which are both concealed and revealed there) available for theorization and contestation. “Silence” reflects the privatization and monopolization of knowledges. However, there are two modes of silence: one is the commonsensical silence of a position which has not been effectively challenged, which does not need to “respond”; the other is the organized silence of positions that have been challenged and for this very reason cannot respond: it is in this second case that the “silence” and the means of maintaining it become a site of productive contradictions. This condition is theorized in another letter written by Dr. Katz to a professor who “modified” his letter of recommendation.

At the same time, “exposure” by itself is not the most enabling way to make use of access to a public space, such as that offered by the Alternative Orange. The letters of Dr. Katz included above are limited by the constraints of the institutional space within which they are situated. They are limited, that is, by the relatively low level at which global social contradictions are consciously recognized by that institutional space: this recognition takes the form of the problematic of “openness”/“closedness”; i.e., by the dominant ideology of liberal pluralism. Within that space, one can insistently point to the contradictions between institutional practices and ideological claims, and thereby to the ideological structure of the claims themselves: in this case, the claim to “openness” (made by the liberal institution) and “difference” (made by the reigning postmodern multiculturalism), as opposed to the orchestration of the exclusion of specific positions (Marxism); in turn, this points to the contradictions of postmodern liberal multiculturalism, which can include everything but that which calls into question the regime of pluralism itself. However, once these contradictions have been situated practically and institutionally, and transformed into sites of conscious struggle, they must be seized as instances of global contradictions which occasion and require explanation. In this way, other such instances can be instituted on a higher ideological and political level, the diffusion of such instances can be connected and organized into coherent collective practices, the institution can be transformed into an explicitly contestatory site, and the groundwork can be laid for recognizing, theoretically and practically, the unity between these and other struggles against the capitalist social order. What this means in practice is a cross class alliance between proletarianized and revolutionized sections of the petit-bourgeois intelligentsia and the proletariat (which is itself confronted with new modes of regulation and exploitation closely related to those at work in the academy—flexible management schemes, welfare systems organized around “ethical” categories, etc.—and will therefore urgently need the knowledges which are produced as a result of these struggles).

[sic.] “the useful element in their work is attention to the contradictory and heterogeneous elements found in the current discourses of the academy”

The past two decades have seen an in many ways drastic transformation in the dominant reading practices in the academy. This transformation has entailed a move away from reading understood as the extraction of a transhistorical philosophical or aesthetic meaning from a text (grounded in the categories of universal truth and the humanistic subject), toward a reading of texts as the articulation of a field of social, political, and cultural forces. One representative text of this movement, The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature, ed. by Laura Brown and Felicity Nussbaum (New York and London: Methuan, 1987), argues for, according to the editors’ “Introduction,” “a commitment to critical and political self-consciousness, to the unspoken of their texts, to the foregrounding of theoretical assumptions, not only for the sake of clarity but also for the purpose of acknowledging the writers’ own cultural and historical positions” (4). This commitment, which Brown and Nussbaum see as a result of the intervention of Marxist, poststructuralist, and feminist theories, is contrasted with the dominant “appreciative formalist readings that seek to describe a stable core of meaning in the text” (4).

The New Eighteenth Century, though, has already contained this transformation within an institutionally delimited field: the traditional literary “period.” As Brown and Nussbaum argue, “[i]t is, course, from our position within the academic profession and its institutions that we urge the revision of present practices…we seek to play a strongly revisionist role, but one that is attentive to its debts and its institutional limits, and responsible— even in opposition—to the work it undertakes to revise” (3). This formation of a loyal opposition, which revises responsibly, points to the establishment of a two party system within the academy.

A science of writing would organize the study of textuality around the concept of the trace: texts would be understood not as containing a unitary meaning which their organization of signs would merely serve to make apparent and available; rather, they would be understood as a product of their exclusions, elisions, aporias, and absences—the “text” would be a series of de- and re-hierarchizations reproducing or challenging the hierarchies at work in all texts of culture. For Derrida, writing would be the sign which enables the organization of the field of textuality, thereby rendering obsolete the disciplinary segregations and hierarchies which determine the production of knowledge in “Western” institutions: for example, the distinction between literature and philosophy, or between anthropology and history.

For Michel Foucault, this disciplinary field or grid is posited (as an object of critique) by the concept of power/knowledge. Here, as in Derrida, the notion of the intentional subject (the possessor of self-present meaning), who deploys power in accord with conscious purposes and ends is undermined by the conceptualization of a general field of power which works through and deploys subjects and institutions. The discipline, according to Foucault, does exactly what its name suggests: it disciplines subjects, it activates them, and establishes the epistemological norms and criteria which ensure that power continues to work through existing channels, and hence reproduces existing relations. Disciplinary distinctions, then (such as the gradations of aesthetic value which structure the traditional literature department), are grounded within the interlocking fields of power governing the social.

What is at stake in these theoretical innovations is a general theory of the production of subjectivity, involving a challenge to the humanist modes of subjectivity presupposed in existing disciplinary structures. Postmodernism, in this connection, represents the socialization of knowledge production: that is, knowledge is no longer a supplement to the development of technology and productivity, which serves (as in the phenomenology of Husserl [The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970] and Heidegger [The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt, New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc. 1977]) to preserve an intentional subject which is undermined by social and technological transformations. Rather, knowledge, and the subjectivities it produces are thoroughly integrated into the globalization of production. Derrida’s “différance” and “writing”; Foucault’s “discourse” and “power”; Baudrillard’s “simulacra”; Lyotard’s “differend” all indicate the historical necessity of fracturing the humanist model of cultural production and producing a general conceptualization of a field or economy of knowledges and subjectivities. In other words, all of these theorists are compelled to posit categories which homogenize the entire field of social discourses and practices. Furthermore, they are compelled to do so as a result of the necessity that they account for transformations in global economic relations.

All of these discourses are compelled to offer descriptions of the contradiction between the forces and relations of production in late capitalism: the form of this contradiction, in post-World War II capitalism, I would argue, is between the maintenance of private property in the means of production and the privatization of labor power, on the one side, and the socialization of the productive forces and public modes of reproducing labor power, on the other side. This contradiction is displaced and allegorized in each of the theories I examined above: in Derrida, it is the contradiction between an outmoded metaphysics and the knowledges required of a “cybernetic” age (i.e., a technological determinism displaced onto opposing models of thought); for Lyotard, it is the contradiction between a global logic of performativity and the generalization of the possibilities of “paralogy” as a mode of subversion; and for Foucault the contradiction is between “disciplinary” modes of regulation and micro-instances of “resistance” in which “power” is turned against its dominant usages. In each of these cases, the “outside,” “incommensurable,” or “alterity” which must be privileged in theory (as a kind of motor which keeps the theoretical discourse running) is the global contradiction between the forces and relations of production, and the class struggle between capital and labor—which the petit-bourgeoisie in late capitalist institutions is responsible for micro-managing and must therefore reduce to manageable proportions within “cultural” institutions.

Why doesn’t postmodern theory become a general critical science of subjectivity and knowledge, one which contests the production of subjectivity within the operative institutions? Why, to follow up on Derrida’s cautionary note, has the science of writing (grammatology) in fact never been established—and this despite the increasing prevalence and dominance of postmodern theories, to the extent that they have become virtually axiomatic in wide sectors of the institutions of knowledge production and actually set the standard of what counts for legitimate knowledge throughout the “human sciences”?

“This is connected to your extreme determinism and class reductionism. Though I too criticize cultural studies for the absence of economic analysis, you seem to put only that variable into play. How, then, is this work itself accounted for?”

A critical science of subjectivity would have to itself be a practice of struggle against the present mode of producing subjectivity. Here we can begin to locate the aporia in postmodern critical theory. Foucault, who calls for a critique of the “global functioning of…a society of normalisation” also calls for the knowledge-practice of “genealogy”: a “painstaking rediscovery of struggles together with the rude memories of their conflicts” (83). The genealogical analysis is not directly tied to those struggles themselves (i.e., the struggles of oppressed groups), but rather constitutes a struggle within the institutions of knowledge (and subject) production against the dominant knowledges which suppress the memories of such struggles with which they are themselves marked. In other words, what is proposed in Foucault’s work is a politics of the institution, or a cultural politics, which contests disciplinary modes of power rather than sovereignty (state power). This, furthermore, is not a cultural politics which is combined with a mass politics aimed at contesting state power; rather, it is a cultural politics which replaces the struggle against state power which Foucault’s discourse posits as outmoded. It is therefore aimed at replacing one type of knowledge production with another, rather than critiquing the way in which the entire system of knowledge production reproduces the interests of the ruling class. In other words, what is advanced in these discourses is intra-class competition (between new and outmoded sections of the petit-bourgeoisie), not class struggle in theory—competition, that is, over which section of the petit-bourgeoisie can best manage the new forces of production as they impinge in crucial ways upon the maintenance of existing production relations.

In this case one attempts to locate the lines of force which constitute and are immanent to the texts of the dominant culture and which are simultaneously suppressed and marginalized by those texts. This is similar to the “clotural” reading proposed by Derridean deconstruction, where the deconstructive reading dismantles the text of Western metaphysics from within, by locating the limits of the text’s assumptions, where the hierarchies and exclusions which make meaning possible can be displaced, with the dominant now exposed as dependent upon the subordinate term, and the included shown to actually incorporate and mimic what it claims to exclude. The problem here is where these knowledge practices, which meticulously interrogate the “inside,” necessarily border upon the “outside”: the struggles of the subjugated or the “global functioning of normalisation” for Foucault, the science of cybernetics, or a “future [which] can only be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger…which breaks absolutely with constituted normality and can only be proclaimed, presented, as a sort of monstrosity” (5), for Derrida. How does the (institutional) inside account for the (social) outside?

Despite their critique of Western “values” like humanism, theorists like Fanon and Cesaire, while advancing a penetrating analysis of the subjectivity of the colonized, never advanced an opposing theoretical model of subjectivity in opposition to the humanist one. Fanon, for example, argued that, in the wake of the successful collective struggle against colonialism, “[t]his new humanity cannot do otherwise than define a new humanism both for itself and for others” (246). Cesaire, meanwhile, claims “that at the very time when it most often mouths the word, the West has never been further from being able to live a true humanism—a humanism made to the measure of the world” (56). This “new” or “true” humanism, for revolutionary theorists like Fanon and Cesaire, indicates the historical (i.e., necessary) limitations of calling for a global revolution of the oppressed in conjunction with the cross class alliances required for national revolts against colonial domination. Thus, rather than push their critique towards a theorization of the globalization of capitalism which produced the conditions of possibility for the colonial revolts, Cesaire and Fanon tend to locate resistance in the transformation of colonial subjectivity itself. Thus their texts, read ahistorically, can be appropriated for a politics of identity (self-determination not in relation to the colonizer or capital, but in relation to marginalizing discourses). In other words, the categories of “nation,” “race,” and “gender,” if not grounded in a theorization of the class struggles they mobilize at a given historical conjuncture, necessitate a displacement of social struggles onto “culture” and “subjectivity.”

According to Robert Young, postmodern theory continues the work of decolonization from within the West: i.e., a dismantling of the institutions, discourses, and subjectivities of colonialism which are sedimented within the “liberal” everyday world of the “West.” However, this raises the problem, once again, of the relation between this within and the (post)colonial “outside.” What does it mean to decolonize the West from within more than two decades after the formal process of decolonization (national independence) has been completed and new modes of global exploitation (based more upon the freedom of transnational corporations than upon an a priori segmentation of the workforce) installed? Young’s argument, which is typical and symptomatic (see, for example, the arguments made by postmodern feminists such as Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson ["Social Criticism without Philosophy: An Encounter between Feminism and Postmodernism," Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda J. Nicholson, New York and London: Routledge, 1992, 19-38] regarding the relation between postmodern theory and the struggles of marginalized groups), both posits the dependence of the political effectivity and urgency of postmodern theory upon its contribution to the same global processes which Third World peoples have advanced by other means (revolution, armed struggle), and eliminates the theoretical means (totalizing social and cultural theory) which would actually make it possible to account for the related and differential effects of these unevenly situated struggles. The only way in which First World theorists and Third World peoples could be allied in the same struggle is through a cross class alliance (like that implied, within the colonized countries, by both Cesaire and Fanon) which is theoretically determined and directed against the global operations of late capitalism. Postmodern theory imagines such a cross class alliance as a struggle for “difference,” as the dismantling of metanarratives, the eruption of suppressed knowledges within capitalist cultural institutions, etc. Liberation is made discursive, and displaced onto the “cultural,” the site of the reproduction of labor power and subjectivities. However, the legitimacy of this claim depends upon its ability to “account for” its outside, which makes demands upon it at every moment.

Postmodern critical theory therefore desperately needs to include the “other” (the exploited) in order to resolve the contradictions internal to its project of institutional politics. That is, it must answer the question, critique in the name of what? It becomes necessary not only to allude to the other, or to issue declarations in the name of their interests, once it is recognized that knowledge-practices themselves are implicated in the reproduction of alterity; rather, the other must be em-bodied within the institution, alterity must be performed. (The acceleration of this process--the anti-theoretical return to "experience"--in recent years corresponds to the re-privatization of socialized and public institutions initiated by the ruling class in response to the political and economic crisis of the 1960s and 1970s.) However this need produces a profound theoretical and institutional crisis, because it renders incoherent the very presuppositions of postmodern theory, as a mode of resistance both to unmediated presence and representation-as-correspondence (its weapons in its successful struggle against liberal humanism). It aggravates the contradictions which postmodern theory urgently needs to resolve, in such a way as to enable us to posit that the “other” of the world described by postmodernism—that which unconsciously determines its theoretical movements—is the reality of late capitalism (the contradiction between the forces and relations of production), with postmodernism’s unassimilated other being revolutionary Marxism: postmodernism is a sustained and elaborate reversal of Marxism on every theoretical and political point, it is Marxism viewed through a camera obscura, where superstructure produces base, metaphysical oppositions produce class, and “flexible” knowledges (productive forces) undermine “naive,” representational knowledges (the relations of production). It is a sustained assault on Marxism and on proletariat organization and practices which has provided a much needed replacement to outmoded methods, such as those of Nietzcheanism, existentialism, academic sociology and political science, and modernist aestheticism. Its social (class) basis is the “new” petit-bourgeoisie, in particular those charged with the task of reproducing labor power in late capitalist public institutions. Sections of this class rebelled against capitalist rule during the 1960s, but due to the underdeveloped character of their struggles and the contradictions in their class position did not succeed in forging an alliance with the proletariat: the energies of ideological production, of both the reformist left and the right, have since been primarily focused upon ensuring the recruitment of these class sections (the necessary transmission belts of the dominant ideology directed at the proletariat) into management and reformist/activist positions so as to occlude the necessity of an alliance with the working class. The form taken by this ideological offensive is an imaginary cross class alliance within the realm of "culture," which opposes by presenting in an idealized form the necessity of cross class alliances grounded in combined struggles extended across the various contestatory arenas of capitalist society, and thereby securely delivers the working class over to ruling class domination.

“Notice the narrative you are constructing here. All previous political struggles and movements of critical theory have been chimeras or outright reactionaries until the brand of ideology critique that you champion came along. All the struggles of feminist academics and African American, Latino and other theorists, newly emergent in the academy, can be virtually dismissed by your account. There is no sense of continuity.”

One articulation of the crisis of these discourses— now, after a period devoted to displacing outmoded positions, charged with the rigors of institutional management— can be seen in Linda Alcoff’s “The Problem of Speaking for Others” (Cultural Studies, Winter 1991-1992, 5-32). The very title signals a return to the phonocentrism undermined by deconstruction: speech, the self-contained plenitude of meaning embodied by the subject is privileged over the dissemination of signs and discourses. However, we should not see this as a naive phonocentrism; rather, it is a post-grammatological phonocentrism which returns to the ground cleared away by anti-foundationalist theory. Alcoff insists on the mediated character of discourse, both on the epistemological level in the sense that “a speaker’s location (which I take here to refer to their social location, or social identity [I will return to the slippage between “location and “identity”]) has an epistemically significant impact upon that speaker’s claims” (7), and on the political level, in the sense that “the practice of privileged persons speaking for or on behalf of less privileged persons has actually resulted (in many cases [I will return to the function of parenthetical qualifications in this discourse]) in increasing or reinforcing the oppression of the group spoken for” (7).

[i]n this case, we might say that I should only speak for groups of which I am a member (7).

this does not tell us how groups themselves should be delimited. For example, can a white woman speak for all women simply by virtue of being a woman? If not, how narrowly should we draw the categories? (7-8)

The term privilege is not meant to include positions of discursive power achieved through merit, but in any case these are rarely pure. In other words, some persons are accorded discursive authority because they are respected leaders or because they are teachers in the classroom and know more about the material at hand. So often, of course, the authority of such persons based on their merit combines with the authority they may enjoy by virtue of their having the dominant gender, race, class, or sexuality. It is the latter sources of authority that I am referring to by the term “privilege” (30).

In other words, the return to phonocentrism in Alcoff’s text is necessary in order to disguise as an updated voluntarism (what should I do) what is really a social and collective problem of regulating the circulation of discourses within privileged sites which must, in some way, due to their “absorption” of social contradictions, address their “outside.” The “outside” (the material reality of class society) impinges upon, and therefore constrains the “conscience” of those on the “inside,” but is never allowed to displace the ethical imperative, which reduces social relations to relations between individuals and ad hoc articulations of “group” interests. Despite her claim that the analysis of “speaking for” should be grounded in “an overall analysis of effects” (28), these “effects” are reduced not to struggles over the social uses of institutional authority, but whether the “others” end up “worse off” or not (i.e., social amelioration). This is why Alcoff can argue that “the practice of speaking for others is often born”—not of institutional inequalities and the contradictions of bourgeois democratic representation, but—“of a desire for mastery, to privilege oneself as the one who more correctly understands the truth about another’s situation or who can champion a just cause and thus achieve glory and praise” (29). Speaking for others in “illegitimate” ways, then, is a result of “bad” individual characteristics (arrogance, vanity, etc.). Within the ethical terms of Alcoff’s discourse, the solution to this problem is individual self-examination and restraint: “[i]f one’s immediate impulse is to teach rather than listen to a less-privileged speaker, one should resist that impulse” (24). Just say no!

However, if we “translate” this ethical claim into an institutional mode of regulation, it follows that such individuals, insofar as they cannot be counted on to restrain themselves, must be restrained forcefully. And who will exercise judgement in such cases? On the one hand, people of “good will,” who “legitimately” speak for others (only when it is “necessary,” and not out of a desire for praise and glory); on the other hand those who occupy, at least at some micro-site, a “less privileged” position, and would therefore be “worse off” if “illegitimate” speaking were allowed to continue—i.e., the negotiated coalition of “group members” and the well meaning privileged (and, by a stroke of good fortune, these positions happen to coincide “so often”). The contradiction of the institution, which is based upon “privilege,” but must somehow find a way to see “privilege” as a “problem” in order to avoid critique, is thereby resolved in a space which has the advantage of being both imaginary (“ethical”) and institutional (the exclusion of disruptive modes of “speech”). Force and consent are both accounted for in such formulations. The critique of institutions (involving the questions “what can be said?” and “what needs to be said?” and for what purpose—not “what should ‘I’ say”) is replaced by an institutional ethic-uette which regulates the margins of academic “speech” in accord with untheorized (based on the “wherever possible,” the “so often”) “agreements” as to when the “outside” has been represented in an illegitimate way: the outside (“others”) thus functions as a floating signifier facilitating the suppression of critique from the “inside,” and hence the resolution of the institution’s crisis. Alcoff’s essay provides the “theory” for the institutional repression of dissent for which “Rosaria’s rules” provides the “practice.”

“I find your work often frustrating because of its lack of nuance: rarely do you allow for a two-sided account of any tendency or theorist.”

Another instance of the necessary articulation of institutional and theoretical crisis is Linda Alcoff’s and Laura Gray’s “Survivor Discourse: Transgression or Recuperation” (Signs, Vol. 18, No. 2, 260-290). First, it is useful to note the slippage between these two essays. While “On the Problem of Speaking for Others” addressed the problems of “theorists” in speaking for others, “Survivor Discourse” inhabits the space of the others “speaking for themselves.” In this case, is Alcoff the other (survivor, woman), or the same (theorist, philosopher)? According to “On the Problem of Speaking for Others,” she is the “same” in relation to some groups (of which she is not a member), and an “other” in relation to those groups of which she is a member. The model I made explicit in “The Problem of Speaking for Others” for a workable method of liberal institutional policing comes out clearly here: I will let you police your discourse domain (your “otherness”) and you will let me police mine. Postmodern theoretical discourse, made axiomatic, has become a subsection of contract law: you respect my difference and I’ll respect yours, and your right to theorize stops at the end of my identity.

The contradiction here is that Alcoff and Gray’s notion of discursive autonomy is based upon an “uncritical” use of Foucault’s notion of discursive mediation of power relations; rather than submit Foucault’s theory to judgement, they incorporate it by giving it an axiomatic status which places it beyond the realm of “judgement.” As we saw earlier, Foucault’s theorization of knowledge/power legitimates the localization of analysis, while at the same time it borders on the contradiction between the local and the global (i.e., the problematic of Marxism). The axiomatization of Foucault must therefore both internalize and resolve this contradiction on the terms of the “local,” and a local space which is already compromised by its dependence upon an “expert” discourse which is supposed to be “outside” of the authoritative mediation of women’s experience. The “outside” will presumably be accounted for here by “making our own theories” (an expression of populist demagoguery which guarantees that less knowledgeable survivors will not have access to public discourse and advanced theorizations except through the "mediations" of the "social theorists and philosophers" among them), but it is precisely here that the outside, the very outside which is internal to every “group” which is posited by “On the Problem of Speaking for Others,” imposes itself most forcefully. Because, if some of the members of the survivor community are also “social theorists and philosophers” this must, if the problem of speaking for others is a real one, structurally overdetermine who will be the “we” that “make[s] our own theory.” In other words, through the mechanism of “bilocalism” employed by “privileged others,” one is no longer the same and other “here” and “there” but rather gets to be both here and now. This space in which speaking for the other is no longer problematic is a precondition of its problematization elsewhere (just like inequality in the regime of property is a precondition of political equality); and, for this method to work, this question must never be raised—that is, those women/survivors who would wish to politicize in “unacceptable” ways the “community” (which constructs, in the absence of universalized welfare state institutions, a mode of support upon which individuals are highly dependent), would have to be subject to the exclusions upon which the politics of inclusion depends. Hence the task of policing this border line.

In other words, there is a concealed logic of “selection” at work here. The inclusion of more and more differential identities within supportive networks in fact requires the exclusion of more and more differences because the possibility of violating increasingly subtle and elaborate terms of alignment grows in accord with a creeping scarcity of resources. This logic is being generalized under post-welfare state capitalism: for example, recent proposals for welfare reform advanced by the Clinton administration call for a combination of “rights” and “responsibilities” in determining welfare eligibility. This appears to introduce a structure of reciprocity into the system which contributes to the “dignity” of recipients and stems the tide of “dependency.” However, this reciprocity simply reproduces the wage labor relation in the absence of any possibility of the organized countervailing power of the working class being brought to bear on its formulation. Thus, this “reciprocity,” while “including” more people in the lower end of the workforce— “rights”—also excludes a growing number whose ability to meet their “responsibilities” is determined by global economic structures outside of their control. This in turn facilitates the lowering of the value of labor power through the production of an enormous reserve army of labor, and thus the aggravation of the entire process. In other words, under contemporary social conditions, the “ethical”—the contingency of inclusion upon respect for the system of inclusion itself— represents an “extreme” mode of labor regulation with pronounced genocidal implications.

This generalization of “ethical” discourses also enables us to see why the category of the “survivor” is useful in this regard. The survivor appears to contain the defining determination that Marx conceptualized regarding the proletariat: dispossession. Whereas the proletariat has been separated from the means of production, and left with nothing but its labor power to sell, the survivor has been separated from her body, with nothing but her story to tell. The survivor can therefore represent the “ultimate” in oppression according to the discursive logic of ludic postmodern theory: bereft of “authoritative discursive mediation.” Once one is a “survivor,” then, one is a member of a group whose otherness carries the highest authority. While Marx’s theory of exploitation addresses the structural mediations of proletarian dispossession and its collective organization and thereby argues for a theoretically based alliance between the proletariat and revolutionary intellectuals, Alcoff and Gray’s theory of discursive dispossession places all mediations in the survivor community and therefore conceals class antagonisms between survivors (and women) by positing an imaginary cross class alliance grounded in an experience beyond mediation. (Marxism theorizes the proletariat as a collective social force, not a bundle of experiences of exploitation--otherwise, it would be impossible to posit the destruction of exploitative relations). Furthermore, since this imaginary space requires that it not be contaminated by determinations from the “outside” (it must be its own outside, and the embodiment of “outsideness” in relation to “experts”), it necessarily reproduces the class division internal to its space (between petit-bourgeois and proletariat women) since it requires the presupposition of discursive dispossession on the part of some its “members” in order to fulfill its internal logic. It posits a simulated autonomous space that represents itself through its privileged members, who expropriate from the disprivileged the means of contesting "expert" discourses and thus entering the arena of collective struggles. That is, “survivor discourse” requires that the “others” not be mobilized in a political and theoretical way so as to transform the site into one of collective theorization and practice and public accountability, and must therefore oppose attempts to do so. It requires that the “experiences” of survivors do no more than provide the privileged survivor with the means to enter into cultural negotiations with other privileged survivors and the well meaning privileged in general over the distribution of privileged places. Here we can see how the imaginary cross class alliance articulated by supposedly "supra-class" categories facilitate the exercise of petit-bourgeois hegemony over the proletariat within cultural institutions, in the interest of ruling class domination. “Survivor discourse” is the typical and necessary endpoint of the anti-Marxist sublimations of postmodern theory. The "survivor" is a transportable category which allows for the generalization of the replacement of the materialist categories of exploitation/organization/revolution with the (post)juridical ones of silenced/spoken for/speaking for oneself.

“I was glad to see you offer a bit of a constructive account for once, and not just critique.”

[t]he destruction brought to an end, the job completed, was not told by anyone, just as no one returned to describe his own death. Even if they had pen and paper, the drowned would not have testified because their death had begun before that of their body. Weeks and months before being snuffed out, they had already lost the ability to observe, to remember, to compare and express themselves. We speak in their stead, by proxy (84).

the only deposition of general significance is the one that cannot be given; the only depositions that can be given have limited significance and authority. The best one can do is point to the enormous gap between what is told and what cannot be told, that is, indicate the abyss between the drowned and the saved ("Forward," Jean Francois Lyotard, Heidegger and "the jews," trans. Andreas Michel and Mark S. Roberts, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990, viii).

Thus, this apparent critique of capitalism (echoed in the resentment against “experts” in “survivor discourse”), which gives postmodern discourses a great deal of popularity on the left—and which, on the surface, seems to “go further” than Marxism, which insists on distinguishing between fascist, liberal, Bonapartist, etc. regimes—in fact serves an apologetic purpose. The tendency toward “totalitarianism” in capitalist society is grounded in the necessary link between exploitation and extermination: capitalism requires both a skilled and capable workforce and a workforce reduced to the barest subsistence minimum; it requires both cheaper workers and more consumers. The “balance” between these contradictory requirements maintains the liberal regime, where labor continues to have a “voice” regarding the terms of its exploitation. However, this balance is also the site of political class struggle, in which labor tries to transform capitalism’s need for consumers into a living wage and (increasingly) a “social wage” and public control over the institutions of social reproduction; and struggles to organize its collective skills and capabilities in order to attain control over the means of production. Meanwhile, capital, when faced with this extension of the proletariat’s “needs” beyond its own “requirements,” struggles to undermine these collective practices, to atomize the working class, destroy its “capabilities” and subject it to the most rigorous regime of wage-labor which also entails semi or actual slave conditions. This constantly operative tendency, under crisis conditions (where political power—control over the means of production and not distribution—is at stake), combined with related tendencies toward large scale planning and collective organizations and the production of a surplus population which must, under liberal conditions, be supported by the social wage, but under crisis and depressive conditions becomes a political threat and economic burden and hence “surplus” in the most direct sense, produces the “totalitarian” regime (see Arno Mayer’s Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?, The "Final Solution" in History, New York: Pantheon Books, 1988 on what he calls the “Judeocide,” especially the discussions on the conflict between “productivist” and “exterminationist” tendencies within the Nazi SS; see also Richard L. Rubenstein, The Age of Triage: Fear and Hope in an Overcrowded World, Boston: Beacon Press, 1983).

The conflation of capitalism with totalitarianism not only mystifies this entire process by displacing it onto “technology,” and ultimately the knowledges and languages which according to this logic situate society as an appendage to technology (since this is the only way to posit capitalism as self-contained and impermeable on its own terms, but open and complex on the terms of petit-bourgeois "resistance"), but, even more importantly, it produces a political imaginary, and ideological narrative, which abolishes the space of class struggle by bracketing the economic (identifies its totalitarian logic precisely so as to exclude it from political consideration), and posits the “cultural” as the only remaining realm of freedom and resistance. The petit-bourgeois “same” (pressured on both sides by the demands of capital and labor, compelled to “manage” large scale institutions of production and reproduction which it does not own or control) is therefore able to exploit (“speak for”) capitalism’s ultimate other (the proletariat), precisely because—as in the allegorization of dispossession in “survivor discourses”—it has produced the theoretical construct which in principle exiles this other from the only realm of politics it recognizes: cultural politics, where the imposed “silences” of exploitation take on a high market value. This “speaking for the other,” with all its “humility,” is therefore a profoundly anti-working class discourse because it eliminates from consideration the conditions of possibility of working class political struggle. The petit-bourgeoisie “recognizes” the exploitation of the proletariat on terms which allow it to “speak for” the proletariat within the cultural arena (an arena which is itself predicated upon the exclusion of the proletariat).

This understanding of survivor discourse is, in fact, the dominant one in Levi’s analysis, who ultimately makes sense of the Holocaust in postmodern ethical-pragmaticist terms. However, the usefulness of Levi’s analysis lies in the existence of another tendency, which sets his writings apart from those of, say, Elie Wiesel (in which it is middle class American Jews and settler-colonialist Israeli Jews who garner the privileges of bilocalism, of speaking-for-while-being-the-other). This other tendency can be grasped if we recognize that the relation between “survivor” and “victim,” despite Levi’s positing of “proxy” status, cannot be a part-whole or metonymic relation; rather the modality of survivor discourse constitutes a radical break from the experience of victimization (which cannot be articulated, but can only be exploited), a break which involves the orientation of survivor discourse to the system of victimization in its totality. In this case, survivor discourse (the discourse of dispossession and resistance) no longer aims at a recovery of experience, but is understood as necessarily articulated within a political and ideological framework, i.e., the social structures which produce contestations over dispossession.

The demand for solidarity, for a human word, advice, even just a listening ear, was permanent and universal but rarely satisfied. There was no time, space, privacy, patience, strength; most often, the person to whom the request was addressed found himself in turn in a state of need, entitled to comfort (78).

Furthermore, Levi is critical of the notion, pressed upon him by religious friends, that his survival has a meaning insofar as it has enabled him to bear witness. This is problematical for Levi because “I cannot see any proportion between the privilege and its outcome” (83), i.e., the ultimate privilege of being alive is not commensurate with the good that follows from it. In other words, this shame is inseparable from both the camp and the condition of survival, it pervades the survivor discourse. And this is inevitable as long as subjectivity is constructed in accord with an ideological narrative which reproduces the exterminationist logic of capital, i.e., that “places” are limited and people are surplus. This, then, is an inherent political limitation of survivor discourses understood as “proxy,” in addition to the epistemological limitations I examined earlier.

But we can also see why, according to Levi, the “prisoners who, almost all of them political, had the strength and opportunity to act within the Lager in defense of and to the advantage of their companions” (73) did not suffer from this sense of shame. These prisoners understood their activities, both during the War and afterward, in their testimony, as commensurate with the struggle against fascism and not with an individual morality which becomes a series of incalculables precisely when it imposes the most stringent demands. This political understanding of survival posits the responsibility of the survivor as contributing to the means (knowledges, organizations, etc.) by which the system of victimization can be contested at theoretically and strategically (not morally) determined sites.

This means that the problem for the “privileged” (those who are capable of “speaking” or operating effectively in and therefore opposing dominant institutions) is not when or how to “speak for others,” but how to use the capacities which capitalism has provided us with to oppose the social relations which determine the uses of those capacities. This type of political practice would not ignore the experience of the oppressed, but would rather focus rigorously on the global contradictions in their ideologically mediated experience as a pedagogical point of departure. The “problem” of speaking for others is only such for those who use this—their bilocalism as privileged survivors—as a marketing strategy and wish to ensure that it remain credible. And this credibility is dependent upon the ideologic of “shame” which Levi describes, or a functional equivalent, in which the divided subject legitimates his/her privileges by claiming that after all one’s self-interest levies fewer death sentences than that of others.

“If the humanities today are mere functionaries for capital, and all the attempts by the new radical intelligentsia to perform social criticism are merely duped or opportunistic functionaries for their own class interests, how have you and/or this work been able to escape?”

This still leaves open the question of how to theorize the contradictory practices which make contestation possible, i.e., those sites where the processes of privileging (the collective possession of social capacities) collide with those of dis-privileging (dispossession) and so make opposition necessary. It will be useful to advance this inquiry through a critique of the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas (see "Philosophy and the Idea of the Infinite," Adriaan Peperzak, To the Other: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 1993, 88-119), which is becoming increasingly useful in moving postmodernism toward the “ethical” (i.e., the management of “others,” and the “negotiations” between same/others). Levinas addresses the question of alterity through the notion of substitution: the same or Ego must consider itself as a substitute or hostage for the (defenseless) Other, taking full responsibility for that Other. Although Levinas understands this relation in terms of an absolute or transcendental exteriority which characterizes the other (and excludes the other from thematization or systematization), his text in fact assumes the persistent possibility of generalized want (exterminationism), in which one could in fact be a substitute for the other according to the global logic governing social relations: that is, Levinas’ discourse presupposes that all differences are differences within capital and produced by capital, and are therefore subordinated to the interchangeability of subjects within the totality of the productive and reproductive institutions of capitalism. Thus, who gets “eliminated” has nothing to do with the subject, but with the need of capitalism to eliminate “surplus” populations and political agencies. In other words, Levinas transforms the substitutability (redundancy, dispensability) of individuals (and, indeed, entire sections of the population) from an actual process to an ethical imperative. It is necessary to read the philosophy of Levinas, like the other postmodern theories I addressed earlier, as a response to Marxism, i.e., as an anti-Marxist tract which is compelled by this very logic to try to account for in an ethical manner the central problems grasped and formulated theoretically and politically by Marxism.

More precisely, Levinas’ critique of Western philosophy’s conceptions of subjectivity (as the “conatus essendi” of the ego grounded in need which transforms otherness into the elements of its own satisfaction and power) and Being (as the strifeful world of such subjects, who can only build peace as a temporary balance of power between contesting forces) is, although ostensibly focused primarily on the phenomenological philosophies of Husserl and Heidegger and the tradition leading back to Descartes, first and foremost directed against the centrality of the category of labor in Marxism. The category of labor presupposes the entire social division of labor and the division of society into exploiting and exploited classes; thus labor is an immediately political category insofar as it is posited by the struggle over the organization of social production. This, then, is the strifeful world which Levinas wishes to find an “outside” to. The actual “other” of capitalism, or its outside is, rather, the abolition of social relations dependent upon the coercion and exploitation of labor, which the rapid increase in automation, scientific knowledge, and the demand that “leisure” (time for education) be increased at the expense of the working day, makes necessary and the collective power of the proletariat makes possible. In other words, labor as a category is itself a product of the class struggle, and it is as a theoretical weapon and practical guide in this struggle that it is “foundational.”

Levinas’ philosophy is nevertheless important because it presupposes the link between exploitation (surplus value) and extermination (surplus people), which is why his philosophy must go through ever more complex contortions in order to effect the replacement of politics by ethics in which it is interested. His philosophy re-establishes the duality of same and other as one between the “impersonal” institutions of advanced capitalist society and the transsubjective relation of exteriority. What this mystifies is that the substitutability of individuals along with the differentiation between them (only some actually become in effect “substituted”—and for Levinas, the “same” is “privileged” not philosophically but in the sense Levi uses the term, i.e., Levinas explains that without having a house you cannot welcome the stranger, without food you cannot feed the hungry; therefore, you need to get these things) is an effect of the warring tendencies of collective control over production and the “overproduction” of the workforce itself as an effect of increasing exploitation and privatization— what this means politically is that it is necessary to contest the tendency, grounded in private property, to produce surplus populations, who are urgently necessary from the standpoint of democratic, working class control over production (in which case free time means further cultural and economic advances) but, beyond a certain point, superfluous and dangerous from the standpoint of the social control of labor.

Two contradictory tendencies are operative in late capitalism: toward the public management of all sites of production and reproduction (the abolition of the law of value); and toward the (re)privatization of all sites of production and reproduction (the maximization of surplus value through the extension of the law of value to new areas of social life). Which tendency is prevalent, and the uneven and combined processes through which these tendencies are expressed in specific sites (and the “specificity” of a site is nothing more than this condensation of these opposing tendencies), is determined by the balance of power in the class struggle. The economy becomes directly political (work is imposed not by the social necessity of labor, which decreases continually, but by the exigencies of producing the workforce itself as a site of exploitation), while bourgeois politics (and “ethics”) becomes nothing more than competition between the various modes of accommodating the economic needs of the ruling class. Petit-bourgeois theorists and philosophers attempt to account for these processes ideally, through a complexity of thought which leaves nothing outside which the inside cannot account for, or account for its inability to account for. In Levinas’ philosophy, as in that of other postmodernists, the system-as-reflected-ideally is provided with a self-operating mechanism which allows the outside to come in just enough so as to displace the autonomous inside from its complacency and make it “leaner” and better adapted in dealing with the real outside: the contradiction between the forces and relations of production, which in this sense is not outside spatially but a set of possibilities and contradictions within the system itself. In Levinas, the other is fundamentally exterior and transcendental, but once the world of others is established ethically, the same liberal institutions are delegated the task of managing the relations between them: “[t]his is the great paradox of human existence: we must use the ontological for the sake of the other; to ensure the survival of the other we must resort to the technico-political systems of means and ends” ("Dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas," Emmanuel Levinas and Richard Kearney, Face to Face with Levinas, ed. Richard A. Cohen, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986, 13-33, 28). The “paradox” is where bourgeois thought abdicates its responsibility to follow the oppositional categories by which it works through to the fundamental opposition of class society. Significantly, Levinas’ philosophizing has undergone a discursive shift, moving from the relation between the same and other to that between the “Said” (the objectified, institutionalized, etc.) and the “Saying” (the ethical outside which can now only be made intelligible within institutions, in their aporias, interstices, etc.— i.e., the relations of managers). As Levinas has thus moved closer to Derrida, Derrida has also turned toward the “ethical,” with both “subversion” and “ethics” now necessary for advanced theory to legitimate itself as a competent crisis management device—see Simon Critchley’s The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas, Oxford: Blackwell, 1992). [sic.]

A materialist theorization of Levinas’ notion of “substitution” would argue that the “same” or “privileged” (i.e., the petit-bourgeois located within public institutions of reproduction) can most effectively fulfill its responsibility to the “other” not within the space of individual morality or the dialogic space of postmodern identity politics (bilocalism), but by transforming the tools capitalism provides to its skilled and knowledgeable workers into weapons against the system of exploitation. It means drawing a firm line in practice between the "privileged" (in this sense) and the practices of those whom Levi calls the "privileged par excellence," i.e., those who actively reproduce the system of exploitation, and entering into struggle against those practices. When the subject does this, it rapidly becomes “surplus” in relation to the system of exploitation, i.e., becomes “other” and “disprivileged” (denied access to the normal rights and capacities of that category of subjects). The "substitute" thus becomes dependent solely upon the weapons of critique and theory, and theoretically determined collective practices--and, these weapons are thereby sharpened and strengthened through struggle. In other words, those who think they can “decide” what to say, in this very assumption prove that what they are saying is of no value to the exploited, since it clearly doesn’t challenge the institutions which exploit them. “Substitution” involves contesting the substitutability of subjects by attacking the tendencies toward (re)privatization through the mobilization of tendencies of socialization and public control at whatever level or state of extension they happen to be where one is located; it means making the universal contradiction between same and other, privileged and disprivileged, exploiter and exploited, explicit and open, to expose it at every institutional site and historical moment. Such a practice requires a theoretical comprehension of the global logic of capitalism, which has no outside other than that produced by its own unresolvable contradictions (which pervade all social sites and are through “substitution” transformed into collective political oppositions), and thereby allows a reading of “rights,” “privileges,” “customs,” “conventions,” etc., as elements in which the class struggle is concentrated. (As I showed in my discussion on postmodern ethics, which when subjected to critique yields knowledge of the dual structure of bourgeois ideology—the legitimation of consent for the bourgeois subject [“reciprocity”] and of dispossession and unlimited exploitation for the proletarian subject [“selection”].) This in turn makes it possible to challenge the relations which produce these contradictions in practical and collective ways, by undermining the hegemonic cloak (ideology and institutional legitimations) which conceals the global power of exploitation. In other words, “substitution” demonstrates, theoretically and practically, how the logic of capitalism operates through a given institution (how it unites by differentiating), and systematically compels petit-bourgeois subjects to take sides in the class struggle, thereby transforming the institution into an overtly contestatory site in which the global implications of theories and practices can be clarified, and oppositional practices which are otherwise invisible can be organized. By thus making space for the “others” to struggle effectively, the “same” does not use the “outside” (the economic) to people the landscape of the “inside” (cultural negotiations); rather, the petit-bourgeois theorist, by taking a working class position in theory creates the possibility for cross class alliances based upon pedagogical and theoretical relations.

A historical materialist “substitution” means entering into class struggle within and against the institution where one works (for professors, in the classroom, essays, curricula, hiring, advising, etc.). It means contesting the logic of “shame” (a gesturing toward the unavailability of the experience of the other) which keeps traditional morality in place by institutionalizing it. The categories of race, gender, and sexual orientation which articulate many contemporary struggles need to be understood as locations where the privileging (the possibility of collective struggle)/disprivileging (the denial of basic rights) axis is formed with special intensity, where the ruling class struggle strives to reduce the working class to the barest minimum (absolute surplus value), while the working class struggles to politicize the economy and subject it to public control (the politicization of the economy, the introduction of the question of equality into the structurally unequal “natural” workings of the economy, is the “other” of a reformist “affirmative action”). The exclusion of the class content from these categories automatically transforms them into means of recruiting new sections of the petit-bourgeoisie from these social categories, and relegating their privileging/disprivileging to the question of their managerial, exemplificatory (“role models”), and representative (“spokespeople”) aptitude. Contemporary controversies over academic reform (like the “PC” debate) are results of the accumulation of contradictions within the institution of the university; they are, ultimately, distorted reflections of the class struggle on terms manageable to the institution: rather than a struggle between a humanist, cultural right and a multicultural, liberal left, these are really struggles over the most effective way to police and exclude dissent, and in particular Marxism (see Gerald Graff and Gregory Jay’s essay on critical pedagogy in the latest issue of Democratic Culture [2.2 Fall 1993, 1], the newsletter for the liberal Teachers for a Democratic Culture, which openly calls for an alliance between the multicultural center and the right against the left).

Likewise, the rules, regulations, conventions and knowledges of institutions are neither sites of totalizing social control (technocracy) nor sites of infinite subversive potential (and hence the closure of class struggle); rather, they represent the concealment and congealing of historically accumulated class compromises which need to have their antagonisms made explicit so as to reopen (de-sediment) the social forces they arrest. When oppositional pedagogy enters into combat with the exclusions of institutional normalcy, or force disguised as the contractual regulation of social peace (collegiality), it transfers the class struggle to the apparently distant realm of the regulation of subjectivities and knowledges—and it thereby replicates and generalizes the structure of privileging/disprivileging (substitution). The “substitute” does not “speak for others,” but rather allies herself with the exploited by creating the political conditions under which the “others” (the proletariat, those who are a priori excluded from, and hence a structural outside of, the production of advanced knowledges) can effectively organize their emancipatory struggle.

“Substitution” rigorously excludes the possibility of legitimating one’s practices within the institution on the basis of affiliations “outside” of the institution (which in identity politics becomes the cultural capital one brings to cultural negotiations); it insists that one’s practices within the institution be measured in accord with how effectively they make explicit, intelligible, and practical the concentrations of the contradiction between the forces and relations of production and the taking of positions in the class struggle at that site (and, to anticipate an “easy” attack on this position, “site” does not necessarily refer to a single classro