“The Stupidity that Consumption is Just as Productive as Production” (Marx, Theories of Surplus-Value)

In the Shopping Mall of the Post-al Left

Mas'ud Zavarzadeh

Revision History
• Fall/Winter 1994	Newspaper: Funded by Syracuse University students.
The Alternative Orange: Vol. 4, No. 1 (pp. 8-12).
• August 10, 2003	Webpage: .
DocBook XML (DocBk XML V3.1.7) from original.

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The task of this text[1] is to lay bare the structure of assumptions and its relation to the workings of the regime of capital and wage-labor (what I have articulated as “post-al logic"),[2] that unites all these seemingly different texts as they recirculate some of the most reactionary practices that are now masquerading as “progressive” in the postmodern academy. Analyzing the post-al logic of the left is important because it not only reveals how the ludic left is complicit with capitalism but, for the more immediate purposes of this text-of-response, it allows us to relate the local discussions in these texts to global problems and to deal, in OR‐2's words, with the “encompassing philosophical issues”[3] that are so violently suppressed by the diversionist uses of “detailism”[4] in these nine texts. Whether they regard themselves to be “new new left," “feminist," “neo-Marxist," or “anarchist," these texts—in slightly different local idioms—do the ideological work of US capitalism by producing theories, pedagogies, arguments, ironies, anecdotes, turns of phrases and jokes that obscure the laws of motion of capital.

Post-al logic is marked above all by its erasure of “production” as the determining force in organizing human societies and their institutions, and its insistence on “consumption” and “distribution” as the driving force of the social. The argument of the post-al left (briefly) is that “labor," in advanced industrial “democracies," is superseded by “information," and consequently “knowledge” (not class struggle over the rate of surplus labor) has become the driving force of history. The task of the post-al left is to deconstruct the “metaphysics of labor” and consequently to announce the end of socialism and with it the “outdatedness” of the praxis of abolishing private property (that is, congealed alienated labor) in the post-al moment. Instead of abolishing private property, an enlightened radical democracy—which is to supplant socialism (as Laclau, Mouffe, Aronowitz, Butler and others have advised)—should make property holders of each citizen. The post-al left rejects the global objective conditions of production for the local subjective circumstances of consumption, and its master trope is what R-4 so clearly foregrounds: the (shopping) “mall"—the ultimate site of consumption “with all the latest high-tech textwares” deployed to pleasure the “body." In fact, the post-al left has “invented” a whole new interdiscipline called “cultural studies" that provides the new alibi for the regime of profit by shifting social analytics from “production” to “consumption." (On the political economy of "invention" in ludic theory, see Transformation 2 on "The Invention of the Queer.") To prove its “progressiveness," the post-al left devotes most of its energies (see the writings of John Fiske, Constance Penley, Michael Berube, [Henry /Robert] Louis Gates, Jr., Andrew Ross, Susan Willis, Stuart Hall, Fredric Jameson), to demonstrate how “consumption” is in fact an act of production and resistance to capitalism and a practice in which a utopian vision for a society of equality is performed! The shift from “production” to “consumption” manifests itself in post-al left theories through the focus on “superstructural” cultural analysis and the preoccupation not with the “political economy” ("base") but with “representation"—for instance, of race, sexuality, environment, ethnicity, nationality and identity. This is, for example, one reason for R-2's ridiculing the “base” and “superstructure” analytical model of classical Marxism (Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy) with an anecdote (the privileged mode of “argument” for the post-al left) that the base is really not all that “basic." To adhere to the base/superstructure model for him/her is to be thrown into an “epistemological gulag”.

For the post-al left a good society is, therefore, one in which, as R-4 puts it, class antagonism is bracketed and the “surplus value” is distributed more evenly among men and women, whites and persons of color, the lesbian and the straight. It is not a society in which “surplus value"—the exploitative appropriation of the other's labor—is itself eliminated by revolutionary praxis. The post-al left's good society is not one in which private ownership is obsolete and the social division of labor (class) is abolished, rather it is a society in which the fruit of exploitation of the proletariat (surplus labor) is more evenly distributed and a near-equality of consumption is established.

This distributionist/consumptionist theory that underwrites the economic interests of the (upper)middle classes is the foundation for all the texts in this exchange and their pedagogies. A good pedagogy, in these texts, therefore is one in which power is distributed evenly in the classroom: a pedagogy that constructs a classroom of consensus not antagonism (thus opposition to “politicizing the classroom” in OR‐1) and in which knowledge (concept) is turned into—through the process that OR‐3 calls “translation"—into “consumable” EXPERIENCES. The more “intense” the experience, as the anecdotes of OR‐3 show, the more successful the pedagogy. In short, it is a pedagogy that removes the student from his/her position in the social relations of production and places her/him in the personal relation of consumption: specifically, EXPERIENCE of/as the consumption of pleasure.

The post-al logic obscures the laws of motion of capital by very specific assumptions and moves—many of which are rehearsed in the texts here. I will discuss some of these, mention others in passing, and hint at several more. (I have provided a full account of all these moves in my “Post-ality” in Transformation 1.) I begin by outlining the post-al assumptions that “democracy” is a never-ending, open "dialogue” and “conversation” among multicultural citizens; that the source of social inequities is “power”; that a post-class hegemonic “coalition," as OR‐5 calls it—and not class struggle—is the dynamics of social change; that truth (as R-2 writes) is an “epistemological gulag"—a construct of power—and thus any form of “ideology critique” that raises questions of “falsehood” and “truth” ("false consciousness") does so through a violent exclusion of the “other” truths by, in OR‐5 words, “staking sole legitimate claim” to the truth in question.

Given the injunction of the post-al logic against binaries (truth/falsehood), the project of “epistemology” is displaced in the ludic academy by “rhetoric." The question, consequently, becomes not so much what is the “truth” of a practice but whether it “works." (Rhetoric has always served as an alibi for pragmatism.) Therefore, R-4 is not interested in whether my practices are truthful but in what effects they might have: if College Literature publishes my texts would such an act (regardless of the “truth” of my texts) end up “cutting our funding?" he/she asks. A post-al leftist like R-4, in short, “resists” the state only in so far as the state does not cut his/her “funding." Similarly, it is enough for a cynical pragmatist like OR‐5 to conclude that my argument “has little prospect of effectual force” in order to disregard its truthfulness. The post-al dismantling of “epistemology” and the erasure of the question of “truth," it must be pointed out, is undertaken to protect the economic interests of the ruling class. If the “truth question” is made to seem outdated and an example of an orthodox binarism (R-2), any conclusions about the truth of ruling class practices are excluded from the scene of social contestation as a violent logocentric (positivistic) totalization that disregards the “difference” of the ruling class. This is why a defender of the ruling class such as R-2 sees an ideology critique aimed at unveiling false consciousness and the production of class consciousness as a form of “epistemological spanking." It is this structure of assumptions that enables R-4 to answer my question, “What is wrong with being dogmatic?" not in terms of its truth but by reference to its pragmatics (rhetoric): what is “wrong” with dogmatism, she/he says is that it is violent rhetoric ("textual Chernobyl") and thus Stalinist. If I ask what is wrong with Stalinism, again (in terms of the logic of his/her text) I will not get a political or philosophical argument but a tropological description.[5]

The post-al left is a New Age Left: the “new new left” privileged by R-2 and OR‐5—the laid-back, “sensitive," listening, and dialogic left of coalitions, voluntary work, and neighborhood activism (more on these later). It is, as I will show, anti-intellectual and populist; its theory is “bite size” (mystifying, of course, who determines the “size” of the “bite"), and its model of social change is anti-conceptual “spontaneity”: May 68, the fall of the Berlin Wall and, in R-2's text, Chiapas. In the classroom, the New Age post-al pedagogy inhibits any critique of the truth of a student's statement and instead offers, as OR‐3 makes clear, “counseling” feelings by anecdotes. The rejection of “truth” (as “epistemological gulag"—R-2), is accompanied by the rejection of what the post-al left calls “economism." Furthermore, the post-al logic relativizes subjectivities, critiques functionalist explanation, opposes “determinism," and instead of closural readings, offers supplementary ones. It also celebrates eclecticism; puts great emphasis on the social as discourse and on discourse as always inexhaustible by any single interpretation—discourse (the social) always “outruns” and “exceeds” its explanation. Post-al logic is, in fact, opposed to any form of “explanation” and in favor of mimetic description: it regards “explanation” to be the intrusion of a violent outside and “description” to be a respectful, care-ing attention to the immanent laws of signification (inside). This notion of description—which has by now become a new dogma in ludic feminist theory under the concept of “mimesis” (D. Cornell, Beyond Accommodation)—regards politics to be always immanent to practices: thus the banalities about not politicizing the classroom in OR‐1's “anarchist” response to my text[6] and the repeated opposition to binaries in all these nines texts. The opposition to binaries is, in fact, an ideological alibi for erasing class struggle, as is quite clear in R-4's rejection of the model of a society "divided by two antagonistic classes".[7]

All these nine texts are part of a much [larger /longer] monolithic ideological lesson through which socially produced differences (class) are dispersed and naturalized (in terms of various modes of identity politics) and deployed to justify practices that are aimed at maintaining a high rate of profit for owners of the means of production. The reason R-4 can say that these writers are not part of a “monolithic ideology” and imply that their diversity indicates their individual freedom and the independence of their insights is because the ideology lesson in each of these texts focuses on a different element of this post-al logic. R-4, her/himself, for example, who was “initially” somewhat “sympathetic” to my “Pedagogy of Pleasure-2," now has second thoughts about that text and in fact joins the rest of the writers to make explicit in his/her text their latent assumptions that I am, after all a Stalinist. [8] The fact that it took her/him six months or so to reach the same conclusion as the others, who had rejected my essay earlier, does not mean that she/he is different from them. All it means is that the detour of mediations in her/his case were of a different temporality. This difference in temporalities of subjectivities is the main ground in bourgeois pedagogy for locating the subject as a sovereign subject of “imagination," that is, as an “independent” person who is capable of pursuing surprising “pleasures” through which she/he can fracture ideology ("the monolithic").

The “New New Left” (as practiced, for example, in what OR‐5 calls the “magisterial” texts of Aronowitz) post-alizes bourgeois democracy (the political ideology of capitalism) by intensifying its pluralism (e.g. multiculturalism) and renaming it “radical democracy”. Radical democracy is the space of dialogue and conversation: no particular view is valorized and no specific conclusions are drawn from these conversations. Conversation is conducted for its own political good: it keeps citizens alert and vigilant. Any intervention in this conversation, from its “outside” (for example Leninist democratic centralism) is seen as shutting out the “other” and thus as an instance of anti-democratic violence. Any conclusion is regarded as imposing one's own view on the “other." In a pedagogy founded upon such assumptions, all theories are of equal validity. The student who puts forth a reactionary religious interpretation is thus placed in the same analytical terrain as the one who offers a scientific explanation because it is “obvious” in this post-al classroom of “difference” that “religion” and “science” are simply two autonomous and incommensurable interpretations whose differences, in the absence of a norm (truth) cannot be adjudicated: they are cases of “differends." It is in this classroom of difference-as-dialogue that Gerald Graff and Gregory Jay say that “if a student ends up deciding” that for him/her “authentic liberation means joining a corporation and making a lot of money," he/she should be respected for his/her views since there is no norm against which one can critique them ("Some Questions about Critical Pedagogy” in Democratic Culture, Fall 1993). But there is a norm—collectivity—and in reference to such a norm, what Graff and Jay regard to be a “personal choice," should be explained and critiqued as the work of dominant ideology and its counter-revolutionary understandings and practices made clear to the students. In contrast to the post-al left classroom in which capitalism, religion, communism are all treated simply as “different” and incommensurable discourses, the pedagogy of critique argues for the priority of science (conceptual knowing) and demonstrates that religion is a mode of mystification through which the ruling class naturalizes its oppression of the proletariat and that what is often regarded to be a “personal choice” is, in fact, a choice made for the subject by the laws of motion of capital. Pedagogy of critique, in other words, argues for the “truth” that mystification (religion) has no place in education and that education is a project of enlightenment and critique of ideology. Such a critique of religion is seen by a post-al leftist as an instance of dogmatism (Stalinism) and such a term as “ruling class” will never be used in his/her classroom since it is rhetorically not effective (Chernobyl!).

In valorizing “dialogue” as the spirit of democracy, the post-al left effectively excludes the “critique” (of ideology) from the scene of democratic participation since post-al discourses regard the conclusions critique makes as forcing “closure" on open democratic conversations. Such a move is aimed at discrediting intervention from the “outside” (revolution) as an instance of violence; it legitimates social change as the incremental, consensual reform from inside the system. Accepting dialogics as the means for social change is the condition for being included in the (post-al) democratic community. Dialogue has become a “compulsory” practice, and she/he who refuses to comply and instead offers “critique," loses his/her right to be a member of the community. OR‐5 is clear on this point: “one must negotiate," and since I do not “negotiate," in her/his post-al terms, I am therefore a “demagogue." In my refusal of dialogics, in R-4's words, I “cross the line” from democratic discourse to “dogmatics” (Stalinism), and when R-3 says my pedagogy “pisses” students off because the “interlocutor really is absent” from my text, she/he is referring to my displacement of “dialogue” by “critique”. For a New Age Leftist such as R-2, “dialogue” is imperative because “critique” is as lacking in pleasure as “radical bible studies." OR‐5 marks this absence of jouissance in my critique by calling it “wooden." Even worse, critique, to go back to R-2, is the boring “display-the-truth” business. In post-al left theory, the space of dialogue is the “reality zone” of democracy, and a non-dialogic person in bourgeois democracy is such a grotesque mutation of normal citizenship that he/she becomes either comical (OR‐5 sees my “Pedagogy of Pleasure” as a suitable episode in David Lodge's novels, and OR‐2 sees it as a “hoax” since no normal person will compose such a nondialogical text) or an embodiment of violence (Stalinism). The violent and the comical, however, are often combined in excluding critique since the violence ascribed to the nondialogical is perceived as so intense as to be comical (incommensurate with the reality zone). Thus OR‐3's cartoon combines the violent and/as the comical. The cartoon is, of course, the supreme “art form” of the petty bourgeois in his/her ridicule of the “egghead” who constantly critiques dialogics as both a ruse for producing false consciousness and a means for occluding class consciousness. The cartoon is one of the most commodified texts through which the ruling class teaches the petty bourgeois how to think and feel; how to construct norms of happiness and be cynical.

Respect for dialogue, however, is a mere formality in the post-al left: all who advocate it do so cynically (with an enlightened false consciousness which is the mark of subtlety and nuanced understanding). OR‐3, who “translates” the anti-intellectual petulance of the petty bourgeois into a cartoon and advocates openness to difference, says that her/his class was planned as a democratic dialogue (the airing of conflicts), even before “I had met the students” (in other words: dialogue is good transhistorically, always, under all conditions, for all “different” people). R-1 and R-3 both advocate dialogue, even though they know ahead of time that they are not going to “agree” with or “buy” the ideas of their interlocutors; they just want to have the pleasure of, what I called in my “Pedagogy of Pleasure-2," the performance of “talking”. Dialogue is, in all these texts, a device in the pedagogy of pleasure to let students “talk” about their experiences and to protect “experience” as the foundation of subjectivity from the “outside” (critique). The effect of this resistance to “critique” and embracing of “dialogue” (talk) finally makes OR‐3's text collapse into an extended anecdote that effectively erases all conceptual knowledge from the classroom. He/she does not have an “explanation” but merely associated anecdotes. This is also what the cartoon does: it mocks out of existence all modes of conceptuality ("eggheadedness") and thus clears the grounds of social life for experiential indoctrination; the laughter of the cartoon (its “pleasure") is the result of blurring the lines of antagonism between classes; a relaxation of (escape from) the social contradictions that mar the everyday of the petty bourgeois.

The blocking of critique from an “outside” then becomes the primary goal of post-al left theory. For ludic philosophers, such as Derrida (e.g. Of Grammatology, 30-65) the “outside” (as opposition to inside) is depicted as an instance of logocentric will: a violent construct that is produced by imposing closure on the “inside." All outsiders, in short, are part of the same chain of signification and thus integral to the inside. Laclau elaborates on this notion and turns it into a “principle” in ludic political theory: all outsides, are, according to him a “constitutive outside” (e.g. New Reflections on Revolution of Our Time, 17-84). Echoing Fredric Jameson—who in his more recent post-al writings, argues that although the “outside” existed in modernity, it has vanished in the post-al moment (e.g. Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism 45-54)—OR‐5 announces that there is no “outside” from which a critique of the ludic academy can be made: everything according to him/her (echoing a neo-marxist cliché) is “ideology." R-2 rehearses the ludic dogma (the “constitutive outside") in order to block the possibility of regarding “inside” and the “outside” as two antagonistic zones, and by repeating this ludic dogma, she/he seems to think that by playing with the word, “outside," she/he has answered my critique of “outside” readers.

Given the fetish of dialogics in bourgeois democracy and its relentless opposition to critique (as Stalinism), it is therefore necessary to explain, however briefly, what is the ground of a revolutionary “critique." Revolutionary critique is grounded in what I described, in my “Reading my Readers," as an unsurpassable objectivity—an objectivity that (contrary to poststructuralist theory) is not open to interpretation and that constitutes an ineradicable opposition ("outside"). Objectivity is an “outside” that cannot be included without the system itself being transformed by such inclusion. Since the notion of an unsurpassable objectivity is made unintelligible by post-al rhetoricians, such as Derrida, deMan and Jean Luc Nancy, who have commodified “interpretationism," I need to explain what I mean by the “objective” outside as the foundation of revolutionary praxis and of critique as part of such a praxis.

The unsurpassable objectivity which is not open to rhetorical interpretation and constitutes the decided foundation of critique is the “outside” that Marx calls the “Working Day” (Capital 1, 340-416). (R-4 willfully misrecognizes my notion of objectivity by confusing my discussion of identity politics and objectivity.) The working day is not what it seems: its reality, like the reality of all capitalist practices, is an alienated reality—there is a contradiction between its appearance and its essence. It “appears” as if the worker, during the working day, receives wages which are equal compensation for his labor. This mystification originates in the fact that the capitalist pays not for “labor” but for “labor power”: when labor power is put to use it produces more than it is paid for. The “working day” is the site of the unfolding of this fundamental contradiction: it is a divided day; divided into "necessary labor"—the part in which the worker produces value equivalent to his wages—and the “other," the part of “surplus labor"—a part in which the worker works for free and produces “surplus value." The second part of the working day is the source of profit and accumulation of capital. “Surplus labor” is the OBJECTIVE F A C T of capitalist relations of production: without “surplus labor” there will be no profit, and without profit there will be no accumulation of capital, and without accumulation of capital there will be no capitalism. The goal of bourgeois economics is to conceal this part of the working day, and it should therefore be no surprise that, as a protector of ruling class interests in the academy, R-2, with a studied casualness, places “surplus value” in the adjacency of “radical bible-studies” and quietly turns it into a rather boring matter of interest perhaps only to the dogmatic. To be more concise: “surplus labor” is that objective, unsurpassable “outside” that cannot be made part of the economies of the “inside” without capitalism itself being transformed into socialism.

Revolutionary critique is grounded in this truth—objectivity—since all social institutions and practices of capitalism are founded upon the objectivity of surplus labor. The role of a revolutionary pedagogy of critique is to produce class consciousness so as to assist in organizing people into a new vanguard party that aims at abolishing this FACT of the capitalist system and transforming capitalism into a communist society. As I have argued in my “Post-ality” [Transformation 1], (post)structuralist theory, through the concept of “representation," makes all such facts an effect of interpretation and turns them into “undecidable” processes. The boom in ludic theory and Rhetoric Studies in the bourgeois academy is caused by the service it renders the ruling class: it makes the OBJECTIVE reality of the extraction of surplus labor a subjective one—not a decided fact but a matter of “interpretation”. In doing so, it “deconstructs” (see the writings of such bourgeois readers as Gayatri Spivak, Cornell West, and Donna Haraway) the labor theory of value, displaces production with consumption, and resituates the citizen from the revolutionary cell to the ludic shopping mall of R-4.

Now that I have indicated the objective grounds of “critique," I want to go back to the erasure of critique by dialogue in the post-al left and examine the reasons why these nine texts locate my critique-al writings and pedagogy in the space of violence, Stalinism and demagoguery. Violence, in the post-al left, is a refusal to “talk”. “To whom is Zavarzadeh speaking?" asks OR‐5, who regards my practices to be demagogical, and R-3, finds as a mark of violence in my texts that “The interlocutor really is absent” from them.

What is obscured in this representation of the non-dialogical is, of course, the violence of the dialogical. I leave aside here the violence with which these advocates of non-violent conversations attack me in their texts and cartoon. My concern is with the practices by which the post-al left, through dialogue, naturalizes (and eroticizes) the violence that keeps capitalist democracy in power. What is violent? Subjecting people to the daily terrorism of layoffs in order to maintain high rates of profit for the owners of the means of production or redirecting this violence (which gives annual bonuses, in addition to multi-million dollar salaries, benefits and stock options, to the CEO's of the very corporations that are laying off thousands of workers) against the ruling class in order to end class societies? What is violent? Keeping millions of people in poverty, hunger, starvation, homelessness, and deprived of basic health care, at a time when the forces of production have reached a level that can, in fact, provide for the needs of all people, or trying to over throw this system? What is violent? Placing in office, under the alibi of “free elections," post-fascists (Italy) and allies of the ruling class (Major, Clinton, Kohl, Yeltsin) or struggling to end this farce? What is violent? Reinforcing these practices by “talking” about them in a “reasonable” fashion (i.e. within the rules of the game established by the ruling class for limited reform from “within") or marking the violence of conversation and its complicity with the status quo, thereby breaking the frame that represents “dialogue” as participation—when in fact it is merely a formal strategy for legitimating the established order? Any society in which the labor of many is the source of wealth for the few—all class societies are societies of violence, and no amount of “talking” is going to change that objective fact. “Dialogue” and “conversation” are aimed at arriving at a consensus by which this violence is made more tolerable, justifiable and naturalized.

The representation of revolutionary practices as “violent” is part of the larger project of the post-al left in which all practices are “read” as power practices and society itself is understood to be an ensemble of political struggle over contingent hegemony. In positing the social as “political," the post-al left engages in an idealist move that erases the material base of the political—the forces of production that in fact shape social organizations. In such a ludic social theory, “domination” and not “exploitation” is the primary term. Post-al pedagogy has, thus, become a long lesson in mapping strategies of power; detecting trajectories of power in daily life with the final goal of self-empowerment, and enabling the subject to speak for her/him self and to become an active “agent." “Language," according to R-2, “constitutes radical agency..." because access to language is access to power. The underlying theory of “power” in this ludic pedagogy is, as Foucauldian clichés have it, a diffuse (not localized and not the possession of one class but of “collective ownership"), post-juridical, multidirectional practice. This power is always a “power from below” and an effect of discourse, and not (as in classical Marxism) the hierarchical organization of the social that is the outcome not of discourse but of the social relations of production. The idea of power as a diffuse discourse to which everyone has access means there are is no clear line of demarcation between the powerful and the powerless (Foucault, History of Sexuality 1, 92-102). This is the central notion of the ludic view of power and the basis for the ludic erasure of the labor theory of value along with the materialist explanation of the social according to the dynamics of production.

The complicity of the Foucauldian view of power (rehearsed by R-2) with the ruling class is made clear in Foucault's insistence that everyone has access to power and more importantly that power is not repressive but in fact enabling ("Where there is power there is resistance," Foucault, 95). The ludic dogma that all people (regardless of their position in the social relations of production) have access to power is subtly deployed to argue that contrary to Marxist theories that power is in the hands of the powerful (owners of the means of production), power is in fact most effectively used by the powerless. It is, according to this complicit theory of power, the “weak”, as R-2 puts it, rather than the “tenured” that have power since the “weak” can always resist the “tenured” by not “reading." Such a view of the “weak” as powerful is, of course, the post-alization of a reactionary religious quietism that the meek will inherit the earth and a ludic recirculation of the old, free-market, capitalist, moral maxim of pulling oneself up by one's bootstraps. Furthermore, the power of the “weak” (resistance to reading) is a mere illusion of power, since what R-2 regards to be the sign of a successful resistance ("the victory of the student's reluctance to read") is eventually a victory for the ruling class since encouraging non-reading—as a mark of the free choice of a sovereign subject—is part of the very anti-conceptuality that the ruling class needs in order to produce false consciousness. Non-reading is represented in the commonsense of R-2's text as a liberation of the imagination from the oppressive schoolmaster who wants to bury you under books and prevent you from the real “experience” of the world through the body.

The perniciousness of the theory of power as resistance (not production) and its complicity with capitalism in pacifying the masses becomes more clear in such reactionary tracts as Lyotard's “On the Strength of the Weak” (Semiotexte, 3, 2, 1978, 204-212) which serves as one of the main theoretical texts upon which the retrograde writings of Ross Chambers are founded—texts which in turn serve as the master theory of reading in R-2. Chambers, in such books as Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and the Power of Fiction and, more recently, Room to Maneuver: Reading (the) Opposition (in)Narrative, applies the lessons of Lyotard and Foucault to “reading” texts as sites of power and empowerment. (I put aside here the pacifying lessons that Chambers delivers in which, for example, prisoners are seen as empowering themselves through their graffiti when in fact such a reading of prison graffiti is designed to produce a false consciousness in which the prisoners misrecognize their situation and mistake “freedom” in writing on the walls within prison for emancipation through economic access in the world.) The lessons that Chambers gives are based on prefabricated formulas through which relations of exploitation are obscured by lines of “domination”.

R-2's “Being Red and Misread” is a reactionary text founded upon the ludic cliches of Foucault-Lyotard-Chambers about reading as power-as-resistance. It is useful to focus on it, however briefly, since its mode and movements—like any ludic text of bourgeois propaganda which mocks socialism ("emancipation from capitalist ways of knowing will not mean disappearance of power")—are exemplary of the comprador practices of the post-al left. For R-2, “power play” is the key to “reading," and consequently he/she reads my two texts as examples of the exercise of power: “Pedagogy of Pleasure-2" is, according to her/him, an attempt to control a student, and “Reading my Readers” is a “hell bent” venture to “reestablish control” over my meanings. It is important to keep in mind that for the post-al left, power is a restriction and limiting of “meanings " (it is a matter of interpretive freedom) and has nothing to do with the materialist production. R-2 (copying Chambers who copies Foucault) advertises power analysis as a “political” reading, but such analyses are, in actuality, psychoanalytical: in spite of their formal recognition of “discourse” as a-subjective, they are aimed at getting at the mechanisms of “withholding and release” that they believe are the core of subjectivity. For example, Chambers's analysis of power in his “Graffiti on the Prison Wall"—a model for R-2—is essentially a Freudian-Lacanian analysis of “narcissism," which is another way of saying that these “power” analyses, through some predictable narrative detours, ultimately situate the “cause” of all practices in the dynamics of the psyche of the subject. They are a repetition of the idealist notion that it is consciousness that forms the social. Ludic Power analysis, in other words, is a strategy for reobtaining an aleatory subjectivity by meditating upon its “mysteries"—or, in R-2's term, the “something” of the subject that moves the subject but is inexplicable except through intermittent hints of language. This “something," which R-2 believes “we cannot say for ourselves," is, of course, the desire for control.

In R-2's power reading, one of the consequences of my writing/reading to control is that I end up reproducing in my texts what I want to erase in the student's text. Like all other ideas floating around in “Being Red and Misread," this too is a copy of a copy: this time from a copy that J. Hillis Miller makes of some Derridean apologetics for the dominant system to the effect that reading cannot have any claim to truth. Any such claim is, in R-2's terms, equivalent to an epistemological spanking—an instance of the tremendous violence suppressing “difference." Reading, for the ludic critic, is not the pursuit of “truth” but the experience of “joy” (Miller, Theory Now and Then, 295-297). All reading can do is to observe the workings of difference in the text, and any attempt to go beyond the description of difference is condemned, in Miller's words, to repeating “the work's contradictions in a different form." My texts, R-2 asserts, attempt to explain—control the difference—but the difference (following Foucault's formula) resists my power, and my texts end up being controlled by what they set out to control—the “weak” is victorious.

This narrative of reading/writing as the story of power-and-resistance is a prefabricated formula that is automatically applied to all practices—from Gilgamesh to I, Pierre Riviere... to Ghostbusters II—and in all cases the formula gives you the same pattern of meaning: power-and-resistance is the underlying motive of all modes of signification. The irony, of course, is that this universalizing formula is deployed by R-2 and others who formally declare themselves to be anti-universalist and on the side of “difference." Like all ludic formulas that suppress the “material” base and focus on superstructural cultural politics, this one too is reversible since it is non-explanatory and thus subject to the very laws (of power) that it maps in its tutor texts. To put it another way: the “other” that it “explains," “explains” it and in doing so cancels its "explanation." These prefabricated ludic formulas, in other words, are formal games devised not to obtain truth (that would be an “epistemological spanking” of the text) but to generate pleasure by meditating on the “something” of reading. This abandoning of truth as “epistemological gulag” leads R-2 to some truly hilarious “readings” of my text that I will mark later.

Now I would like to “apply” (the only appropriate word for a formulaic reading) this prefabricated formula of reading-as-power-and-resistance to “Being Red and Misread” in order to show how R-2's ludic dogma—that truth is merely a disguised power ("epistemological spanking")—renders the truth of his/her own reading a non-truth. If all truth is power and all texts are examples of this disguising of power as truth, then so is his/her own text. Thus what he/she says in “Being Red and Misread” is itself an unleashing of violence upon other texts.

"Being Red and Misread” (according to the formula) is a panic performance to contain the acute anxiety over the loss of “power” as an “expert”: R-2 had been asked by a scholarly journal to “read” a text ("Pedagogy of Pleasure-2") and “decide” whether it meets what R-4 calls a “higher evidential threshold” of truth and whether it should be published. R-2's “decided” opinion was that “Because attentiveness to contemporary work on subjectivity and resistance is sorely missing here, I cannot recommend publication." Using his/her "power" as an “expert” he/she represses Marxism.

The return of the repressed in the form of my “Reading my Readers," in which R-2 is asked to account for his/her “decision," introduces elements of uncertainty into his/her secure power as an expert, and the specter of powerlessness produces an intense case of withholding and release of anger at “Reading my Readers"—a “bunk” text—which does not give up and insists that it be published. “Reading my Readers” is, for R-2, an instance of shamelessness, an embarrassing attempt at “getting an article accepted with three rejections." The return of the repressed not only reminds R-2 that his/her “expertise” is not secure but also in a show of “academic chutzpah," “Reading My Readers," audaciously asks R-2 to explain his/her reading—"Reading My Readers” does not accept “pleasure” as the limit text.

The main task of “Being Red and Misread," therefore, is to reassert, with tremendous violence, the “power” of the expert and to prove the correctness (gain control) of his/her first reading ("the way I did the first time") as well as to establish a continuity between the “first” and the “second” reading ("the way I have tried to describe here"). However, the second reading ("Being Red and Misread") is not simply a “description” of the first reading (the recommendation for rejection) but a de-reading of it: a self-revision that allows R-2 to resecure his/her power as an expert. There is a gap ("something we cannot say for ourselves") between the first “decided” text and the second “indeterminate” discourse. This is the gap that another “power” reader, OR‐2, notices by saying that R-2's essay, like the others, does not “square”... with the original report"—"something” separates the two.

The anxiety about loss of power (being asked to account for one's expert decision) is, in fact, so intense that R-2 deems it necessary to make sure that everybody knows that he/she is in full control and is writing the “explanation” of his/her first reading voluntarily: “I have agreed” (no one can deprive me from my power as a sovereign subject to refuse to explain myself) to explain. This public demand and subsequent explanation of a behind-the-scenes decision to repress a Marxist text is so painful and the loss of power is so embarrassingly unexpected that R-2 calls it an “ambush."

In trying to resecure its power, R-2's text uses some vaguely left-political populist—"new new left"—rhetoric (Chiapas) and, like all anti-theoretical activists, evokes the “experience” of domination by drawing on an archive of names of similar experientialists: E.P. Thompson, Trinh T. Minh-ha. This archive distances R-2 from Orthodoxy, Stalinism and all other forms of power ("Gulag"). He/she represents her/-himself in the second text not as a police person who controls knowledges (repressing Marxism, for instance) but as an open, democratic, sensitive and caring person (La Cantuta University) who not only does not believe in “causality" (the “Because” of the rejection report) but in fact regards all texts and practices to be indeterminate, undecidable and quite fluid. He/she now denounces “causal certainty," matters which were black and white in the first text (for example, in his/her rejection report, “Pedagogy of Pleasure-2" was called a text that had “missed an entire generation of new thinking on power") are now suddenly more “complicated," and he/she now wants to do justice to the “complexity of reading." The decisive, aggressive tone of the first text (in which my text was called “misguided") becomes, in the second essay, laid-back, mellow, semi-humorous and altogether playful and distrustful of truth. Having been questioned about the foundation of the truth of his/her text, R-2, in the grip of anxiety, denounces the project of truth altogether.

"Being Red and Misread” is a text of melancholy: an attempt to come to terms with a loss (of power). Like all texts of mourning and loss, it is an (authentically) incoherent text without any logic: it is a series of associative observations and aleatory remarks kept together not by an argument but by a “feeling." In fact throughout, whenever R-2 realizes that the text is falling apart because he/she is not offering any argument, she/he either rejects argument as a valid mode of knowing ("epistemological gulag") or promises that she/he will offer the argument “sometime elsewhere." This evasive denial is a mark of texts of melancholy and mourning.

In his/her anxiety over the loss of power, R-2, on the one hand, keeps repeating that things are “complicated” but, on the other hand, she/he never offers any “complicated” understanding/explanation of these “complicated” issues. If things are as complicated as R-2 says, then one wonders why she/he is saying such silly and New Age-y things? Why, instead of addressing my questions, is he/she writing simplistic, journalistic, gossipy, anecdotal and non-theoretical memoirs? R-2 explains: “There's not enough space here” to bring out the complications of things. However, she/he spends the available space in producing such sentences of wisdom as “In any case, the relationship between the intellectual and making of a better world has never been an easy one, to say the least”. The analytical vacuity of R-2's text is exemplary of the theoretical blankness of an anxious post-al left which has no explanation for “exploitation” (since any such explanation questions its own class position) but a “feel” and a “sympathetic voice," a New Age-y “mood” about “domination."

In a ludic gesture, “Being Red and Misread” attempts to go beyond binaries (which according to R-2 dominate my text). Science, for example, in R-2's text is not the “other” of “ideology” but in fact mixed with it. However, R-2's text, itself, reproduces the very structure of binarism that it attempts to correct in my text: reading, for example, in R-2 is either bad (power play) or good (seductive). The goal of the second text is to seduce the reader to accept that the first reading is in fact correct and the second one simply a description of the correctness of the first. In seducing the reader R-2 regains power.

R-2's ludic approach to truth as fun produces some funny effects in “Being Red and Misread." R-2 spends a good deal of his/her scarce space in a meditation upon the absence of any reference in “Reading My Readers” to a reader's report that R-4 had evidently written on my “Pedagogy of Pleasure-2." To this date I have not seen such a text since, as R-4 says in his/her text in this issue, it was never sent to me. Rather than inquiring into the “truth” of the matter and finding out whether I had received R-4's report, R-2 starts a long story about the signs of my exerting power to silence R-4's report in my “Reading My Readers." It does not matter to R-2 what the “truth” is (he/she already knows, according to the formula, that it is a form of epistemological gulag), therefore all he/she cares about is a pleasureful (not truthful) story about my text. Like OR‐3, who knows ahead of time that “dialogue” is good for her/his lesson plans, R-2 knows (without any specific knowledge of the historical situation—a kind of knowledge that as a localist he/she advocates and thinks is lacking in Marxist analysis) that “repression” is good for his/her narrative of my texts, and consequently she/he takes the lack of reference to R-4's report in “Reading My Readers” to be another sign of my violent ("hell bent") power plays, part of “expressive and repressive tales."

Reading as power-and-resistance and the “something” of desire and seduction are not only the terms of R-2's text but constitute the dominant protocol of reading in the ludic academy. What this reversible formulaic reading does is to focus on the social as “domination” and, in doing so, suppresses class consciousness and distracts from “exploitation." In fact, an explanation of the social founded upon the notion of “exploitation” (capitalism as an accumulation of surplus labor) is mocked throughout “Being Red and Misread." For R-2 an analysis grounded on “base” and “superstructure," which reveals the dynamics of “exploitation," is a rather amusing narrative. I leave aside here his/her “reading” of Maoism as a form of classical Marxism which points up his/her “depth” of understanding of political theory, but point to the fact that what happened in Angola does not show that “base” is not “basic” it simply shows that R-2's trivialization of truth as epistemological gulag does not allow him/her to learn the truth of postcolonialism and to become less simplistic and journalistic in his/her understanding of theoretical issues such as base and superstructure. Why is it that things are not “complicated” when it comes to materialist analysis? But R-2 does not need “truth” or “argument”: an ironic hint from him/her is quickly accepted as a compelling argument by an academy that has already institutionalized his/her views on Marxism. It is to this academy that R-2 and all the other writers on this forum are addressing their texts—not to engaging issues I have raised. In their “prolonged assault” on me they are competing with each other to prove to the bourgeois university that they are skillful in putting down a Marxist and getting rid of a Marxist analysis: a skill that is always has high market value in the bourgeois knowledge industry.

Reading and writing as stories of power-and-resistance are now part of the curriculum of reading and interpretation in the ludic academy. Students are taught how to detect trajectories of power in TV texts, advertisements, novels, films, face-to-face conversations.... To occupy students with power analysis is one of the devices that the pedagogy of pleasure uses to produce false consciousness in them: they think that through power analysis they have got hold of the logic of the society in which they live, and if they can put an end to power relations, a good society will emerge. All the have to do to make such a society possible is to notice the code of power in conversations between a man and a woman; an ad for an automobile; a body gesture of a white male to an African American... when in reality the logic of the social is formed in the site of production. The ludic protocol of reading produces false consciousness in students by teaching them that power is the key to agency: that people can in fact empower themselves by becoming aware of the workings of power and by learning, through such awareness, to “speak for themselves." One can speak for oneself all one wants, but without economic access such speaking for oneself is simply one of many devices for reform and the suppression of revolutionary praxis in the radical democracy advocated by the post-al left. Empowerment is a material practice: it is achieved only by seizing ownership of the means of production from private owners. But the pedagogy of pleasure substitutes descriptive code-reading for rigorous conceptual analysis, thereby producing half-literate subjects of labor whose main skill is to “read” cultural practices—"reading” the news, playing with the rhetorical moves of a political speech, detecting “power” signs all over the place.... These a-conceptual, dialogic, anecdotal readers of codes of power form the reserve army of labor for capitalism. To teach students conceptual understanding of the world (scientific analysis of the everyday to develop class consciousness) is, in the pedagogy of pleasure, a violent act (banking pedagogy, or as R-2 puts it to “bury you with books").

The complicity of the post-al left with capitalism through its pedagogy of pleasure is, of course, caused by the fact that any revolutionary change aimed at ending exploitation (not simply domination) will also end the class privileges of the post-al left. R-4's text is quite telling on this point: in a moment of reflection, which in bourgeois rhetoric carries the signs of “honesty," R-4 announces, “I write these words as a an academic (neo)marxist whose health insurance, state retirement, and tax-deferred annuity are impeccably Republican." R-4's “honest” moment is a “complicated” warning to revolutionaries by reminding them that they are beneficiaries of the “system," and if any really radical action (which goes beyond the reformism that she/he calls “neo-marxism") is taken, their very privileges will be in danger. The un-said of this “honest” confession is, of course, that someone like me, who is working towards a revolutionary transformation (and OR‐3's cartoon affirms R-4 on this point) is dis-honest and hypocritical: how could I be in the system and criticize it? How could I speak for the “other"? I addressed some of these issues in my “Reading My Readers," which has made R-4 to call it a site of violence ("a kind of textual Chernobyl"). The other un-said of R-4's confession is, of course, that a decent job that feeds a human being, a health care plan that attends to his/her human needs, a retirement plan that makes sure that in his/her old age she/he is not thrown into the streets should be provided only to those who accept the premises of the system. Jobs for reformists only! Health care for the supporters of the system only! Jobs, health care, retirement plans... are in R-4's confession, a bribe for cooperation, for going along, for being collegial, for being dialogical... to this neo-marxist, jobs (economic access) are not part of basic human rights—they are graft for the reformist. This is the post-al left in its most lucid moment.

The ideological work of the “honest” moment validates “experience” as the limit text of the real. The “honest” moment is also a "reflective” moment: a moment in which the subject examines his/her practices, casts doubts on his/her own “certainties” and, in doing so, proposes an “undecidable” and “subtle” subjectivity. Self-reflexivity is a highly valorized commodity in the ludic academy because it constructs the subtle, skeptical subject of undecidablity thereby producing a hesitation: a hesitation that deprives the subject from any commitment to the decidable—the revolution. This is one reason why OR‐5 finds my decided critique to be “blindly unreflective." The “reflective” is the guarantee of a skepticism that is the most effective protector of ruling class intelligibilities and practices. The “honest” moment is now required in the new post-al vogue of self-writing (confessions, memoirs, autobiographies, interviews, testimonies...). Construction of the “honest” moment is constitutive of the mode of post-al logic underling the ludic populism that is sweeping the US knowledge industry. The main features of this post-al populism, in addition to its “honest"y, is its violent attacks on theory (now institutionalized as “Post Theory"); its opposition to any rigorous conceptual knowledge and scientific understanding, and its relentless anti-intellectualism (which in R-2's text is articulated by the New Age-y anxiety that “I will bury you with books"). R-2's liberationist, anti-book, freeing of the self is affirmed by, among many others, Jane Tompkins, who recently took a “two-year leave of absence” from Duke University to perform anti-book life—but “she has yet to say 'To hell with Duke' (Lingua Franca, March/April 1994, 55). She now works in the Wellspring grocery store in Durham, which is an “organic” place that “recycles everything” and will “only sell eggs from happy hens” (55). Pedagogy, according to Tompkins has lost its way because “it puts students in touch, neither with the world out there nor with themselves in here” (56, emphasis added). Her own pedagogy counters this sterile, “bury you with books” pedagogy with one in which the aim is no longer “explaining” texts but using texts as an “excuse” to calm the me-in-crisis: “get people to come out of themselves and find out what they want, who they are." At the center of this anti-explanatory, anti-critique-al pedagogy is “dialogue," thus she herself is “looking for someone to talk to." The goal of this ludic populism is, in Tompkins' words, individual “emotional and spiritual fulfillment” (56, emphasis added).

The various tendencies of ludic populism can perhaps best be outlined by examining the emerging figure of the post-al “public intellectual." The “public intellectual” is an invention of the bourgeois academy to solve the material contradictions of capitalism in the cultural imaginary. The “public intellectual” is represented in ludic discourses as a person who democratizes knowledge: he/she ostensibly removes the philosophical opacity, technical obscurity and conceptual density (all assumed to be marks of elitism) from the writings of intellectuals and offers the “results” of knowledge to the “public” in order to “empower” them and turn them into active “agents." In actuality, however, the bourgeois “public intellectual"—in the name of democratizing knowledge—perpetuates the ignorance of the people and deepens their dependence on the knowledge industry. In the name of making knowledge available to all citizens, the “public intellectual” “popularizes” knowledge under the cover of “accessibility” (bite sizing), but in so doing he/she conceals the conditions and practices of production of knowledge and instead offers knowledge as an ahistorical commodity to be consumed with “pleasure"—the success of bite-sizing is in direct relation to the amount of “pleasure” it gives to the reader. In this process the “public intellectual” renders an ideologically necessary service to the ruling class: under the alibi of democratization and anti-elitism, he/she reifies the language of “common sense," which is the congealed false consciousness of the regime of capital and wage-labor. Capitalism needs “common sense” in order to protect its class interests from ideology critique, which aims at producing class consciousness. Thus the “public intellectual” of the ludic knowledge industry is always a dialogical person who is opposed to “critique” (which, as OR‐5 puts it, is the practice of prophets and demagogues; and is considered anti-democratic, or, as R-4 puts it, “elitist"). In bite-sizing knowledge, the “public intellectual” denounces the critique-al relation of the intellectual and culture and instead becomes an “affirmationist”: she/he naturalizes the contradictions of daily life by accepting the laws of “commonsense” and its anti-critique-al, consenting ideology. In fact “affirmation” is the main task of the bourgeois “public intellectual." Moreover, the credibility of the bourgeois “public intellectual” is established through her/his “activism," which is, itself, an “affirmation” of the system by accepting (affirming) its rules and playing inside the system according to the rules of reform. The affirmative activism proposed by R-4, in terms of the work that he/she does “locally” in his/her “community," and the confirmatory “coalition” of OR‐5 are instances of this post-al practice. The complicity of this ludic, localist activism with the counter-revolutionary, experientialist reformism that is protective of capitalism is made clear in R-2's affirmative, New Age-y celebration of “experience” (a celebration shared by OR‐3) for its dismissal of “high theoretical schemes"—which are supposed to “seize and radicalize” the disenfranchised—as a fraud, as calls “from above." R-2's assumption is identical with the dominant ideology: the “disenfranchised” know by the authenticity of their “experience," and they do not need the elitist conceptuality of a vanguard party. The popularity of this ludic activism is owing to its no nonsense, pragmatic (no reciting here of the “right passage," as R-2 puts it) and “honest” stance against a revolutionary praxis guided by a vanguard party—produces a theoretical and historical understanding of social totality and rejects “experience” (the subject) as the “natural” (authentic) ground of social change. The “public intellectual” is a figure invented to combine this deep anti-intellectualism and counter-revolutionary affirmation of the commonsense with reformist localism.

The critique of “experience," introduction of the conceptual into the everyday, and development of class consciousness through praxical theory is, of course, the very heart of the revolutionary Marxist project. In What Is To Be Done, Lenin argues that knowledges should not be popularized ("translated"—to use OR‐3's privileged pedagogical technique—into “experience") for the workers: such a practice turns the worker into a passive consumer of knowledge. Workers should, themselves, become producers of knowledge. They intervene in the social “not as workers, but as socialist theoreticians” who are “able to develop” knowledges.

The funny thing about the post-al left is that, while it constantly “talks” about democratic openness, dialogue and coalition, it does everything possible to exclude, silence and marginalize revolutionary knowledges. For example, in the “Routledgized” space she/he describes, OR‐5 draws a map of the left," complete with a “normal bell curve of probable positions." This is a bite-sized map of the “legitimate” left in which the revolutionary left is depicted as falling off the edge (of the world?) since the revolutionary left—what he/she in his/her journalistic, tabloid discourse calls the “Syracuse Left"—is situated in the farthest “outlying position” of revolutionary praxis. As part of these strategies of ludic exclusion, OR‐5 reproduces some of the post-al mis-representations of Marxism in his/her tabloid account of Marxist collective practices at Syracuse, which he/she depicts as an almost exclusively (and thus exclusionary) “male” praxis. The historical truth is quite different from OR‐5's gossipy story: at Syracuse, at different times, on different levels and with their own contesting differences, persons of color, women, lesbians, gays, people of diverse nationalities and different ethnicities have all been involved in Marxist collective practices. To prevent further distortions of the history of Marxist collective practices at Syracuse, I will write here the names of those excluded from OR‐5's text: Sam Barry, Bryan Bates, Jennifer Cotter, Robert Cymbala, Brian Ganter, Terri Ginsberg, Brownen Heap, Rosemary Hennessy, Amitava Kumar, Alex Lindgren, Minette Marcroft, Rajeswari Mohan, Madhava Prasad, Mark Redding, J. Amrohini Sahay, Max Stevens, Stephen Tumino, Chris Webster, Mark Wood, Robert Young. Marxist collective practices at Syracuse has had no “center"—the women and men involved have struggled in complex, contestatory and critique-al ways in a university occupied by counter-revolutionary forces to produce transformative knowledges and critique-al pedagogies. Their struggles however have, by no means been limited to university work but has been global. The newly organized Red Orange: A Marxist Triquarterly of Theory, Politics and the Everyday[9] is an instance of some of these global practices. But, like R-2, OR‐5 does not care about “truth," “evidence," or “history"—she/he is more interested in a “good” map—a map that affirms the dominant ideology's narrative about Marxism.

In a show of cynical pragmatism, Michael Sprinker (an editor at the Routledge-Verso cartel) has written (and R-2 has copied it, with some modification) that since “socialism... is unlikely to arrive punctually at the call of left intellectuals” (Democratic Culture 2:2, Fall 1993, 22), “what's left” should ally itself with poststructuralism. This alliance is, of course, not simply one to support the tenure of the deconstructionists (as he represents it in his populist mode) but an ideological alibi. What is at stake is nothing less than an encompassing textualization of Marxism through poststructuralist interpretation and a rendering of Marxist “concepts” as floating tropes—allegories of reading, void of any truth value. In fact, Sprinker's move towards such a textualization is acknowledged by Derrida ("Some Statements and Truisms about Neologisms, Newisms, Postisms, Parasitisms, and other Small Seisisms” in The States of “Theory," ed. David Carroll). Sprinker, has done much more than support the tenure of colleagues; his alliance with ludic theory has privileged Derrida as the master reader of Marxist theory. For example, in The Althusserian Legacy (which Sprinker co-edited), Derrida has the last word on Althusser, and in the current issue of New Left Review (for which he is also an editor), a great deal of space is given to Derrida's lecture, “Spectres of Marx” (New Left Review 205, May/June 1994: 31-58). Derrida offers a reading of Marx which produces a post-al Marx for the ludic left. Sprinker's practices as an editor of New Left Review, has, of course, been part of the reasons for the rightward move of that journal—a move that has caused the resignations of some of the committed Marxists from its editorial board. At a time when the space for publishing revolutionary texts is diminishing, Derrida, who has “public access” and can readily be published in any journal, is given priority in the New Left Review, and in doing so, the spaces available to him have been extended. This, no doubt, is what Sprinker has in mind by “popular frontism"—give more room to reactionaries, in the name of coalition, in order to more effectively suppress revolutionary praxis.

Rehearsing Sprinker's cynical pragmatism, OR‐5 announces that “Like it not, the discourses of poststructuralism set the terms of current conversation” and advocates a “coalition” of the left (on his/her map) with poststructuralism. He/she does not seem to realize that to have a dialogue with poststructuralism requires that one have at least a modicum of knowledge of poststructuralism: poststructuralism does not “totalize” the domain of investigation into a map with an inside (post-al left) and an “outside” (Syracuse Left); poststructuralism does not construct simplistic binaries between a “seminal” essay and its “other." Essays, for a poststructuralist, are all part of a chain of significations; they are “texts." OR‐5's “master” plan (map) of the left is quite telling about the assumptions informing what she/he calls the “new new left” and providing the key to the salvation of what she/he (like R-2 playfully) names “What's Left”. In the interview with The Chronicle of Higher Education, OR‐5 (the new editor of The Minnesota Review) said that the goal of the journal under his/her editorship will be to move towards a “Generation X articulation of Marxism." (It is a mark of the level of comfort OR‐5 provides for the bourgeois knowledge industry that the media repeatedly seeks him/her out and solicits his/her views on issues of the day.) In other words, the function of the current populism of the post-al left is to make a “generation X Marxism” available to “radicals," and in doing so, reduce the anxiety of the post-al leftist “me-in-crisis” by providing “bite-size” radicalism that will make it possible for the post-al activist left to affirm that now it is a “cool thing” to be anti-theoretical and acquire one's authenticity through an experiential “me-in-crisis."

Conceptuality, however, is the condition of possibility for critique, for the development of class consciousness and for understanding the contradictions of the everyday in terms of the logic of accumulation of capital. Marx in the “Preface” to the first German edition of Capital argues for the necessity of “abstraction” in order to go beyond the “appearance” and reach the “essence” of social practices. The function of revolutionary pedagogy is to produce conceptual knowledges and to train people as “socialist theoreticians” who can go beyond their immediate “experiences” and organize themselves in a new revolutionary vanguard party to transform the world! To produce a world organized according to the principle: from each according to her or his ability, to each according to his or her needs....

PEDAGOGY FOR INTERNATIONAL COMMUNISM