4. The Institutional Limits of Post-ality

These are very specific, timely and exceedingly commonplace post-Marxist mystifications in a text that appears to call for “historicization” and "problematization” yet is avowedly content merely to “suggest areas of Marxist doctrine that are in need of 'problematization' and 'historicization' (our emphasis, 3). There are few political sensibilities more fundamental to a well-trained and complicit managerial class than those that underwrite Shaun Huston's response: first, programatically and analytically noting the aporias (in the A. 0.) and then subtlely “suggesting” that the actual marginal “others” (workers) begin the reparations!

While it is also insinuated by Huston that “scholar-activists” (4) are sufficient for the transformation of capitalist social relations, it should be recognized (not as a matter of “faith” or “principle” or as a matter of the consistent “application” of dialectics, but as the resultant and recurring conclusion of an analysis of the social and power relations of the capitalist mode of production) that “scholar-activists” are not “sufficient”.

This contradiction, between a presumed pure space of “debate," and a completely skewed relation between the sides in the debate (again, characteristic of “free inquiry” in the liberal academy) is particularly evident in Huston's inability to make sense of anything in the A. O. other than its Marxism. The recent issues of the A.O. have contained systematic critiques of (post)modern theory, of liberal feminist pedagogy, the politics of “experience," liberal pedagogy, etc.; it has publicized and theorized contestations between marxist students and “progressive” pedagogues (as instances of the reactionary effects of the post-modern identity politics Huston subscribes to); and it has invited progressive professors on campus to theorize their politics and pedagogy (and that of the A. 0.) in an open, public way. In other words, the A. 0. has not simply been Marxist in the abstract—in the sense, assumed by Huston, that we “believe” in Marxism—but has advanced a concrete Marxist political agenda, involving an attack on the central contradictions and obstacles to revolutionary theory and pedagogy at work in the institution within which the A. 0. is situated. Huston stays far away from a critique of this agenda because the liberal academic assumptions his text depends upon enable him to remain “neutral” in relation to it until he has been “convinced” of its theoretical basis.

For our position, thorough, this “neutrality” is in fact a way of taking sides. According to dialectical materialism, the truth is always practical (and so is the questioning of other “truths"): the “proof of a theory is in its usefulness in guiding practices which transform reality and its ability to account for the forms and ultimately global effects of those transformations, so as to produce collective practices on a higher historical level. The A. 0. is Marxist insofar as it theorizes the academy as a site of class struggle and takes a proletarian position in that struggle—it does so by exposing and explaining the hegemonic bourgeois discourses, the ruling class interests they serve, the reactionary institutional practices and modes of regulating labor they serve, and the oppositional practices their contradictions make possible. The proof of Marxism, then, is in its ability to contest the dominant social relations and link this contestation to a theorization of the global contradictions of capitalism—that is, its ability to take sides.

The kind of critique we would be interested in, then, would be one which demonstrates to us the historical and political inefficacy and irrelevance of our practices within the contestatory sites we have struggled to engage and clarify. We would be especially interested in the theoretical consequences of such a critique, since it would be compelled to advance an opposing theoretical ground for the practical problems faced by the A. 0. To Huston's critique, though, we find it useful to advance a counter-critique along the following lines: how does he account for the way in which his theoretical position reproduces the terms of the dominant ideological and institutional structures? His discourses thoroughly erase (by presupposing unconsciously) his own subject position as a student, teacher, and intellectual, a position which places him squarely within the class struggle as it is organized (and disorganized) within the academy. What Huston must account for, theoretically, is how his “anarchist” position disenables him from contesting the dominant knowledges circulating through his students, teachers, department, the journals he reads and writes for, etc. We believe that the attempt on the part of Huston and others who share his position to address these questions within the contestatory theoretical frameworks advanced by our respective texts will be a more useful “test” of the “truth” of these theoretical frameworks than any “refutation” on our part would be.