Why Now?

We have seen the inability of the English Department to take decisive and principled action following the recent incident of violence against a female student by Professor Stephen Dobyns (in effect suggesting that what amounts to a paid vacation is sufficient in this regard). We have also witnessed its inability or unwillingness to provide a coherent explanation of the conditions of possibility of this incident. In this regard, a recent text by Professor Robert Gates in which he announces his candidacy for the chair of the English Department (following the sudden announcement of the imminent departure of the current Chair, Professor Richard Fallis), is particularly instructive in terms of enabling us to frame the larger issues at stake in the intellectual emptiness and theoretical bankruptcy evidenced in the department's (lack of) response. As we will explain, although this text proclaims a profound concern for the theoretical level of English Department discourses and pedagogy, its actual attack on rigorous theoretical understandings constitutes a reaction, on the local level, to a much deeper crisis in global capital-labor relations which requires an increasingly violent suppression of the politicality of all social practices which theoretical knowledges foreground.

In his text, Professor Gates offers a highly contradictory account of the causes of the present “crisis” and the necessary response to it. First of all, Professor Gates suggests, that in the “reshap[ing]” (1) of the department there should be a renewed emphasis on the teaching of “theory” despite the “colleagues in other departments who bash us for our use of theory” (2). In other words, Professor Gates positions himself as a dedicated defender of theory who is willing to advance its interests even in the face of what is likely to be regarded, within the wider space of institutional politics, as quite an “unpopular” and “risky” move on the part of the chair of the department. However, while mourning the decline in the theoretical level of the department as evidenced by the “loss” of “exciting young teachers” (3), Professor Gates offers no account of why so many “exciting” theorists were “lost” by a department that several years ago committed itself explicitly (and with the aid of a national publicity campaign) to an “avant garde," theoretically oriented curriculum—or, why, if having these theoretical positions represented in the department was considered so urgent, no real effort was made to replace them with people with similar interests and abilities. Professor Gates, that is, in a move calculated to confuse many newer faculty members and students, thoroughly erases not only the historicity of the “decline” of theoretically aware knowledges in the department, but, as well, the struggles of several faculty members and students—which preceded the adoption of the new curriculum, and was conducted against the strenuous resistance put forth by traditional literary humanists (like Professor Gates himself)—for the extension and politicization of existing understandings of “theory."

What this means is that while, at this historical moment, no “credible” humanist academic can simply claim to be “against” “theory” (just as, as Professor Donald Morton points out in further developing and explaining his critique of the “white(wash) logic” proposed by Professor John Crowley, no one can now afford to be “for” sexual harassment), Professor Gates's “defense” of “theory” is really a defense aimed at consolidating a completely de-politicized and experientially, even “psychologically” based “theory.” We can see this more clearly if we examine the means Gates proposes for reinvigorating the “theory” curriculum. In addressing this issue, Professor Gates in fact proposes a rewriting of “theory” as “creativity” in his call for a “theory” that will be “exciting” and “crucial” for “first and second year students... to understand their personal, cultural and political experience” (3, italics ours). This view of theory, which merely reproduces and accelerates the “white-washing” of the actual anti-theory position of the department in its rewriting of “theory” as an “enhancement” of EXPERIENCE, is, indeed, already codified in the new ETS 141 Student Manual (1994), which reassures students that although “theory” “texts are different in character from the kind of texts [they] are accustomed to, [and] will at first seem difficult," nevertheless,

you [i.e., entry level students] will quickly begin to understand how to read them, and... will find, too, that much of what [these writings] say is obvious once it has been stated. [This will be] an indication that theory fits into the system that you have internalized in structuring your understanding of the world (ibid., emphasis in original [2]).

What this articulation of current “divisions” underlines is that while gesturing toward transcendental verities like “respect” and “discussion," Professor Gates bases his ability to secure a “mandate” on his commitment to a workplace which is "communitarian," and “creative," efficient and above all “profitable” (it can “draw students by the hundreds” [3]). This commitment to rehabilitating the department by proving its usefulness to the ("right-sizing") liberal institution explains why Professor Gates necessarily constructs his notion of “community” through its violent opposition to the “anemic” and “parasitic” “other," the Other without the “natural” “energy” of “creativity” which is to be channeled by the chair. Professor Gates is, in fact, through the most virulent form of scapegoating, calling for a bloc of those who have strenuously resisted “theory” (who else, at this point, could be “complicit...with injustice” through their “ignorance” [3]?) for the sake of “mov[ing] quickly," (1) and cleaning up the department in conformity with the standardization, commodification, and professionalization of knowledge which is the “norm” in less contestatory departments. (Some of those he mentions as examples to be followed are Fine Arts 105-106, BIO 121-123, PSY 205!). This move is to be enforced by “a teaching committee whose task will be to help every faculty member create courses that carry out the lofty ambitions of our not-so-new 'new curriculum'." (3). The point here is not that it is inherently wrong to make the pedagogical practices of the department the subject of collective discussion, but rather that the establishment of “supervisory” mechanisms in the absence of any sustained theoretical accounting for the contesting positions regarding the content and necessary aims of “literary," “textual," and “cultural” studies cannot be anything other than a form of policing directed at the suppression of oppositional positions (already necessarily marginal for this very reason), in the interests of “returning” to “business as usual."[1]

In fact, the motive logic which governs Professor Gates's text is its utter hostility to promoting an understanding of the present local “crisis” (the almost total absence of “theory” courses, the fall-off in registration, the bare-bones graduate program, the harassment of a Marxist-Feminist student... ) as opening up the space for such a sustained re-theorization of the long-term (hiring and teaching) practices of this department within the framework of a historical re-assessment of the workplace in bourgeois society: that is, as a space which is rigidly informed by the contradictions of class, race and gender struggles (and not the idiosyncratic “psychology” of its members). We and others (see, for example, the text by Kevin Mahoney, distributed in the English Department, which we have reprinted here) have provided the beginnings of this re-theorization by foregrounding the connections between the systematic harassment and degradation of women students within the Creative Writing Program and its defense of a retrograde, patriarchal notion of “creativity” as the privileged insights into the emotional and moral “complexities” of “human nature” granted to especially “gifted” individuals. Indeed, in place of such a re-theorization, Professor Gates's text argues that now is the time to consolidate a “new” (dialogical) “vision” of the department, which will be set in place, in the first instance, through the personal commitment of the chair and the further proliferation of “committees." In other words, through the continued substitution of spaces of “personal resolve," “talking," “good intentions," and intra-departmental “negotiations” for what at this juncture remains the only viable option: to, first, hire rigorously intellectual pedagogues and, second, require that all faculty be enabled to take courses on contemporary theoretical developments (on other campuses if necessary) such that they will be able to raise the level of scholarship and political awareness at this institution.

The “creative," “ethical” workplace proposed by Professor Gates further coincides with the broader contemporary backlash-discourses regarding “political correctness” in general, and struggles for socioeconomic racial and gender equality in particular, which the sexual harassment case initiated by Ms. Cotter has brought to the surface. In these discourses, systemic gender oppression is “really” a result of individual “excesses” and a “lack of communication," which require not practices aimed at social transformation but at a re-assertion of the “inclusive” values of “community”: in fact, within these discourses, the insistent publicizing and politicization of gender oppression is seen as an ultimately more dangerous “excess," since it interferes with “creative” and “free” interaction in the workplace, and even interferes with the “natural” working of “human nature” and “human sexuality." Since the “community” itself is a prime site for the re-production of systemic sexism, such re-assertions of “community” ultimately aim at merely cosmetic reforms which conceal even more effectively the structural roots of the oppression of women. (So, for example, Professor Gates indicates that he will take a position on the charges of sexual harassment directed by Ms. Cotter against Professor Dobyns in the “proper forum," making it clear that he considers it "improper” to address issues of workplace equality in a text claiming to advance a “vision” of the department. [p.3])

This goal of constructing a workplace grounded in “cooperation” rather than “struggle” is why the “vision” of community offered by Professor Gates, while presumably inclusive of all, including those who may be “complicit in their ignorance...with injustice," (3) significantly marginalizes those theoretical practices of “bloodless abstraction” which relentlessly foreground the politics of dominant commonsense notions of “community," “dialogue," and “creativity” as in fact in conformity with the agenda of the ruling class. These knowledges are excluded because they advance critique as a mode of praxis for the revolutionary overthrow of class relations, and foreground class struggle over knowledges as taking part, at another level, in the class struggle at the level of production. They are not creatively “constructive” but rather “destructive”: that is, they are not aimed at relieving the brutalities of a society of exploitation in the space of classrooms, committees, writing, etc. so that they look “kinder," “gentler," more manageable, and merely the result of individual (psychological) deviations from the moral norms of the moment—but at getting rid of them, in the first instance by recognizing them for what they are: mediations of class based antagonisms stemming from the appropriation of surplus-labor at the site of production. In other words, these knowledges are not interested in, and in fact they vehemently oppose, depoliticizing the workplace by reiterating the petit bourgeois banalities of the “creative”..." “constructive”... “psychological” which are being deployed, in any case, to conceal the discourses of the “efficient” and the “flexible” (2): i.e., precisely the banners under which the broader “restructuration” of the late-capitalist workplace is being conducted. In fact, these oppositional knowledges have an understanding of the workplace not as a space of accommodation and muting of all social conflicts—a space of resolution of historical tensions which produce all social spaces in capitalist society as spaces of contestation over the material inequalities of race, class and gender inscribed in the rules of ownership of private property—but as a “critique-al” workplace where the “bloodless [i.e., transpersonal] abstraction” of THEORY is understood as a mode of revolutionary praxis for social justice. Like other discourses currently circulating locally (such as those coming from Creative Writing faculty and others) aimed at containment and “reconciliation," then, Professor Gates's text is addressing the present crisis as an opportunity to advance the struggle against those intelligibilities which further the critique-al clarification and exposure of the means by which bourgeois institutions and discourses consolidate the existing exploitative social arrangements.

Yet, what this situation finally points to is in fact the larger crisis of the recession-ridden advanced industrial “democracies," the resultant high level of “tolerance” of growing discrimination in the workplace and the sustained attack on the “politicized” workplace which is taking place at this historical moment. The intellectual collapse of the department—its systematic evacuation, over the past several years, of theoretical knowledges and discourses and its refusal to hire pedagogues with radical (and not merely token) political commitments—prevents it from recognizing that the narratives which have been put forward in the wake of the charge of sexual harassment against one of its professors—narratives which either excuse his reactionary behavior, claim exemption from any collective responsibility for it, or see it as requiring a renewal of some “lost” space of “community"—are actually in response to this broader historical crisis, a crisis the causes of which are in the current ruling class offensive aimed at restoring the rate of profit to previous “boom” levels at the expense of the wages, living conditions, and past gains of working class struggle.

Finally, although the “divisiveness” located by Professor Gates's text and other similar accounts are reactionary attempts to explain away social contradictions through recourse to the dramatic narratives of individual “psychodynamics," the very fact that they help bring to light the existence of an irreconcilable division within the space of the English Department at S.U. is itself from our point of view a progressive development. It is progressive because contrary to what Professor Gates and others seem to think, the heightened demarcation of antagonisms existing at the local level is itself an effect of the heightened contradiction between the forces and relations of production which produces such moments and allows for political and [theoretical/intellectual] clarification of opposing positions in relation to the class struggle. It is in this light that we have understood the space of our struggle-texts—in the form of the Radically Trivial supplements to the Alternative Orange which we publish in full for our readers—which have engaged (and moved beyond) the knowledges/discourses put forth in the texts of The Radical Tangerine (circulated anonymously in February, March and April of this year). The “jesters"/"scribes” of The Radical Tangerine, like the faculty in the English Department, have, through various discursive strategies, consistently tried to maintain that the emergence of contesting intelligibilities is really an effect of the idiosyncratic viewpoints of “unique” individuals and not of the materiality of signifying practices informed by the social division of labor. They have thus been unable to connect the conditions of possibility of their own proto-fascist cultural pedagogy—among other things its racist, homophobic, anti-communist, and profoundly anti-intellectual content disseminated more insidiously by virtue of its transcoding by the “parodic"—with the appearance on [an/a] [international/national] scale of a fascistic “crack-down” on racial, sexual, welfare, immigrant and other social margins in the face of the current economic crisis. As our own texts of response indicate, the necessity of conducting (following Marx) a “hand-to-hand fight" with the forces of reaction wherever they surface—and particularly when they do so on the “funny” fringes of [everyday/daily] petit bourgeois life and thereby more effectively conceal the obscenity of capitalist exploitation—has never been so urgent.

The Syracuse University cell of The Revolutionary Marxist Collective of the United States

April 18, 1995