THE SECOND FOLD On Michael Sprinker's Passion for “Evidence” and his Rhetorical Bluffs

I have read your “Letter to the Editor” in College Literature (February 1995), and I think it is really more of a cynical rhetorical bluff than an articulation of a serious interest in opening up a space for public discourse on your “rightward” moves as symptomatic of the practices of the post-al left. If you were serious (and not cynically manipulating the occasion of writing a “letter” for scoring rhetorical points), you would have sent me a copy of your letter before publishing it and let me respond to you in the same space that your letter was going to appear. I am very familiar with the post-al left's gestures of democratic openness and equality—interest in “facts," a commitment to “empirical” evidence, and so on—and know first-hand the actual practices of silencing, excluding and repressing all whose views do not conform with those of the ruling ludic left.

Whatever “facts” and “evidence” I have, even before reading and examining them, you publicly announce, you are “quite certain” that they will be nonfactual. How do you know? What really is your position on “facts” and empirical “evidence"? Is there such a thing as a “fact” and how do you know it? How do you know, for example, that my facts are biased, that is, how do you factually know the nonfactuality of my facts since you have, in fact, not seen them? Are all “facts” (as you clearly say in your “letter") subject to biased interpretation? Do you believe that interpretations are all that we are left with, as poststructuralists (whom you regard to be “progressive" in their practices) declare, or do you take Lenin's position? What are your criteria for evaluating “facts” and “evidence"? You cannot say you want facts and not offer rigorous procedures for knowing them, or are you one of those who know a “fact” when they see one? In other words, are you one of those who do not need rigorous procedures because you are a person of perception, intuition and vision with lucid experiences? It is only by such divine gifts that you can be “quite certain” of anything before having any “empirical” knowledge of those things. If you are indeed a person of lucid knowing how does such transempirical lucidity fit into a materialist theory of knowledge and subjectivity?

You say you are “quite certain” that my facts are biased; that they are not legitimate. Since you have not read them, seen them, evaluated them, the only conclusion I can draw is that you are “quite certain” of their fraudulent nature simply because they will be offered by me. That is the only thing that you can—beforehand—be "quite certain” about. Here, once again, I am, as far as a Western academic is concerned, the criminal subject, the fabricator, the liar, the un-law-full thinker of color whose facts are biased and whose knowledge merely an instance of (dis)simulation.

Not only are my “facts” and “evidence” fraudulent, my knowledge, according to you, is also non-knowledge—I have only a “supposed knowledge” of what I talk about ("[Zavarzadeh's] supposed knowledge of Lenin"). You dismiss my knowledges as instances of a “foolish blunder” and do not allow me to show you and other bosses of the left, who stopped reading Lenin a long time ago, that for Lenin the autonomy of members of a cartel does not contradict their participation in establishing spheres of influence in production and price practices, as in fact Routledge and Verso do. (More on cartels later.) I am always already tried beforehand and found guilty. You, to adopt your own phrase, have not “laid eyes” on my “facts” and “evidence” (you did not know them at the time you wrote your letter) and yet you are “quite certain” they are non-facts. It is quite clear that you declared my “facts” and “evidence” fraudulent half-truths not because they are not factual (you have not seen/heard/read them yet) but because they come from me—a theorist of color—and as such I am “by nature” the embodiment of lies, distortions, half-truths. You go further: it is not enough for you that I am the embodiment of half-truths, and my knowledge is merely a simulation of knowledge, you say that I am not even able to think since whatever I say will be the “views of some of those who resigned." I am, in your text, the dark gullible subject unable to analyze and evaluate evidence critically.... I am always told what to say and what to do, and I do as I am told. You, the Western judge, are “quite certain” because even though you say publicly (cynically following the codes of a formal liberal democracy) that you want public proof so that the truth will come out, you have already (and in the interests of those who benefit from the masquerade of “democracy") decided that certain facts are not factual and certain evidence is not evidential and certain people are not reliable to think for themselves.

You are here simply performing what others have said: “For our purposes, it matters very little what strange thoughts occur to people in Albania or Burkina Faso..." (Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?" The National Interest, Summer 1989, p.9). These people are irrelevant to the course of history and thus should be erased from the scene of the social since their facts are “biased” as you say and they lack analytical abilities.

SIDE DISCOURSE

I can hear Sprinker saying “but...all my best friends are..."

This act of intellectual ethnic cleansing is what your letter in College Literature undertakes: to remove from the scene of theory the “strange” and “biased” revolutionary knowledges that contest your “rightward” and reactionary practices. These strategies of containment, silencing, discrediting and excluding are all too familiar to me. I am the “other” of truth as far as you and other Western academics are concerned. For the Westerner, I always write as a criminal thinker. I write, that is, as an already convicted person—a distorter of facts, a fabricator of evidence, whose argument is fed to him by his betters and whose knowledge is merely a “supposed” knowledge.... all because my sense of history is not identical with the views of the left bosses who now have a hold over the academy and have commandeered the main publishing houses, journals, and hiring committees of the universities that enable them to suppress revolutionary knowledges...

Your strategy is, of course, a calculated diversionist one: in your “letter” you try to divert attention from the “truth” of your practices to the “sources” through which these practices are made public and critiqued. However, I take your rhetorical bluff literally and assume that you are, in fact, interested in learning about the “truth” of your practices and wish to be given “evidence” that they are indeed moving “rightward." Since, as part of your diversionist tactics, you declare beforehand that you are “quite certain” that whatever “facts” and “evidence” I offer are the (dis)simulative utterances of people of ressentiment, I will give you “facts” and “evidence," not from “those” biased people, but from a source that you cannot so easily accuse of bias and distortion: yourself.

I will give you facts and evidence from three levels of your own practices: 1) from your own “Letter to the Editor” (College Literature February 1995); 2) from your own editorial practices at Verso and Cambridge University Press, and 3) from your own writings. I am serious about public discourse and the need for critique; I am not a cynical left boss interested in diversionist tactics. Therefore, I will show the trajectory of your “rightward” move in your own words and practices: no “facts" or "evidence” from a (biased) “outside." I will follow your own favorite pragmatico-poststructural protocols of ludic immanence. It is, of course, always possible for you to adopt a “progressive” poststructuralist position on this too and evoke the Derridean problematics of “signature” to declare your own writing as “biased” and “unreliable” and thus defer your own complicity in your own practices.

Is the “signature” a post-al principle of deniability? Is Signeponge/Signsponge a defense of Heidegger's Nazism or a reading of Ponge? How does “Like the Sound of the Sea Deep Within a Shell: Paul de Man's War” figure in “signature"?

Since the texts/practices I will draw upon are all in the public space, readers of these exchanges will have open access to them: they can read the texts, your view of them and my critique of your views... and reach whatever conclusions they wish for their own social practices.

First, then, evidence for your “rightward” practices from your own “Letter to the Editor” (College Literature, February 1995). I am really not surprised by your maneuver to exclude me from contestation and to install your rhetorical bluff of a “letter” as a free-standing text without my countertext. Only in the absence of such a contestation can your “letter” seem to be about “something." My contesting it would have shown that in “fact” there is nothing to the letter but the mourning of a left boss whose hegemonic practices are questioned; your “Letter” is an empty text. It is an empty text because it does not address any of the substantive issues I have raised in my essay—the thick theoretical and historical context by which I have demystified your reactionary practices. Like all bluffs, your text isolates, abstracts and removes from their history, the “facts” of the matter. You should know that “facts” yield their meanings only dialectically—not in abstraction.

This leads me to another philosophical issue that your text does not want to discuss. You have to make up your mind: you cannot be opportunistically both a poststructuralist discoursist (Democratic Culture vol. 2, No. 2, Fall 1993, p.22) who laughs at “empiricism” and at the same time gesture towards empiricism—at least the way you represent it in the work of Roy Bhaskar (New Left Review No. 191, January-February 1992, pp. 122-144). Unless of course, you are cynical about both and “don't really mean it”—which is another way of saying they both are simply rhetorical bluffs. (Significantly, you approach your editorial position in New Left Review in the same register, saying in effect that you are an editor who is really not an editor; you really do not mean it.) You cannot say that you want to support poststructuralist colleagues (Democratic Culture) without also supporting their practices; unless, again, you do this cynically or out of simple bourgeois personal friendship. If you support a poststructuralist colleague and if that support is going to have any significance, you are, at least in part, also committed to supporting her/his practices (otherwise it is not support; it is a cynical rhetorical bluff—an “I don't really mean it” speech act). The first principle (of the anti-principle principles) of poststructuralist work is to cross out “facts," “empirical” evidence..... Following your own logic, then, you have to accept that this erasure of “facts” and “evidence” is, as part of the general project of poststructuralism, “progressive” (Democratic Culture). But in your gesture towards Bhaskar, you have also, at least in part, accepted a version of the very theory of knowledge that you denounce in your support of poststructuralism. Only a deeply cynical eclecticism can cover up the epistemological faultlines in this double move. You suture over the utter confusion that marks your writings now—representing it as a coherent position—by relying on the institutional power you have accumulated through your thick networking. have accumulated through your thick networking.

This cynical pragmatic hybridity is the frame of intelligibility for all your “rightward” practices, which I will analyze as I go on. The epistemological hybridity that conceals your political confusion is not, of course, limited to you. I might as well add here that, contrary to what you seem to think, you (as a person, or even a “signature") are not the subject of my inquiries, but your “rightward” practices—as historical strategies for the containment of revolutionary knowledges and praxis—are. Your practices, as historical responses to a crisis, are part of an ensemble of strategies now becoming common among the ludic left and, as such, need to be analyzed. See, for instance, how another contributor to New Left Review, Fredric Jameson, performs an operation on “materialism” that is identical with what you do to “empiricism." Through similar moves, he turns “materialism” into its “ghost”—into an instance of ludic hybridity in which the “ghost” is as material as, for example, surplus labor because the “ghost” also has an existence, albeit in the theoretical imaginary of the bourgeois scholar. In Jameson's text we are back to medieval nominalist/realist nursery tales and not accidentally or by the working of the “alea” either (F. Jameson, “Marx's Purloined Letter," New Left Review No. 209, January-February 1995; 75-109). It is your on-again, off-again empiricism, this spectral analytics of is/not, that is one of the main strategies legitimating the “rightward” moves in your practices and those of other post-al left critics. All these hybridities have not only become common but are also privileged in the left academy as marks of “subtlety” and of “depth of analysis” because they denounce the Orthodox left and provide a necessary blurring of the rigid clarity of the binaries underlying all economic and social practices of contemporary capitalism. These binaries--which you, in your cynical pragmatism, turn into a simple difference/heterogeneity, and which Jameson transforms into a reversible double session—are epistemological only in the first instance. They are, like all binaries, the founding binaries of class antagonism which present themselves in different localities of the social and in different idioms. This is what I mean when I say that your (Jameson's...) epistemological hybridity is the underlying frame of intelligibility of your rightward moves: this hybridity is a cognitive alibi for reactionary acts of class dealignment. It is a practice for blurring and blending the binaries of class antagonism.

In your “letter” you seem to think that my argument about the “rightward” move of New Left Review and your own practices is completely demolished by your listing the names of left writers whose texts appeared in the New Left Review “during 1994 alone." You obviously think that although some people with “supposed knowledge” might find Derrida's politics questionable, even these people will be compelled to agree that the publication in the New Left Review of the writings of the Stars of the Left, whom you list in your “Letter," is "evidence” in itself (self-evidently and beyond “empirical” proof) that both you and New Left Review have not moved “rightward." The writings of these Stars are, in your view, the “proof" that disproves me. So the question becomes: Who are these Stars of the radical left whose names you offer—in the absence of any rigorous argument by yourself—as a devastating counter-argument to my position? I will select a few names, all from your own list, and annotate them.

Eric Hobsbawm is a good starting point for my annotations since his version of post-al leftism has been one of those most responsible for the (theoretical) collapse of the British left. In the pages of such retrograde journals as Marxism Today (he was, next to Stuart Hall and Ernesto Laclau, their privileged theoretician-historian), he produced a marxism that gave up “class”; abandoned the goal of deprivatization of the means of production; displaced “revolution," and substituted the description of “consumption," as an index to “identity” and “citizenship," for analysis of “production” as the logic of the social division of labor and exploitation. If this is Marxism, it is barely recognizable. Instead, it is a souped-up liberalism masquerading as “marxism today." All this rewriting of Marxism as marxism was done by Hobsbawm at the height of the Thatcherite dictatorship of the owners, against which he invoked some of the most obvious political banalities of bourgeois democracy. To overthrow Thatcherite dictatorship, Hobsbawm advised activists-citizens that the most radical solution was to “in every constituency vote for the candidate who offers the best chance of beating Tories” (Marxism Today Vol. 31, No. 3, May 1987, p.15). You offer him as a “factual” proof that New Left Review is not veering “rightward” because it publishes his reactionary and reformist writings?

Take the case of the another Radical Star of the Left on your list: G.A. Cohen. G.A. Cohen—with the collaboration of John Roemer, Jon Elster (among others)—has fabricated a post-al theory whose main purpose is to deconstitute Revolutionary Marxism into a bourgeois social science called “analytical marxism." You refer to him as “evidence” contradicting my critique of the “rightward” move of New Left Review? [sic.] And you call the veracity of my statement into question?

I am not sure whether you are serious when you imply that Wallerstein and Habermas are radical leftist thinkers the publication of whose writings in 1994 in New Left Review somehow supplements the reactionary views of Derrida. Of course, I realize that you regard Derrida to be “progressive," and, like all poststructuralists, he is, as you have put it, “even radical” (Democratic Culture). You will undoubtedly reject my view as a “biased” one planted in my mind by others, but the context of your listing of names seems to suggest that nonetheless you see a “difference” between say, Derrida and Habermas: a myth that the post-al left has by now established in ludic circles as a “fact." The differences between Habermas and Derrida are simply matters of strategies: different routes that take them to the same place. Again, of course, I am aware that for a post-al leftist like you all that matters is HOW one gets there, and this difference in manner between Derrida and Habermas is all that matters to you. For me, however, the primary question is WHY are they there? They are there because they are historically needed “there” to smooth out the glaring contradictions of life under capital and wage-labor. Their theories provide effective modes of naturalizing the social division of labor and the order of private property under capitalism. To be more precise: for both, the “class” matter of “property” is simply a matter of language. For Habermas it is a matter of “communicative competence," that is a "speech” (discourse) matter that he sees as articulated by the “grammar of forms of life” while for Derrida class is a question of property only in the sense that property is itself a slippage of the “proper"/"improper” adequation of the sign. Both, in other words, violently remove “class” and “need” from the scene of the social and put in its place a “community” without commonalty (that favorite subject of bourgeois academics now) and “desire." Theirs is, to use the term from bourgeois sociology, the politics of the “upper-middle class”: both justify the interests of what bourgeois writers regard to be a new “service class” (Dienstklasse).

What is the political and economic difference between Habermas's privileging of “family” (as the foundation of the public sphere) and Gingrich's notion of “family values"? The fact that the former is a sophisticated adoption of Adorno's notion of the Father by a return to Hegel and the latter simply a commonsensical reassertion of white middle class values does not change the outcome of their views. Habermas wraps up his mystifications with the writings of early Hegel while Gingrich embraces Alvin Toffler. Both advocate the same rule of labor and the same social division of labor, and both reify bourgeois democracy. Toffler is, in fact, the PopHegel of the New Age with his scheme for the movements of the Spirit of Entrepreneurship and the arrival of the Third Wave in which the public sphere is finally, in a New Age version of Hegel's theosophy of the dawning of self-consciousness, transformed into a luminous site of cybercapitalism. Cybercapitalism ends the alienation of the Spirit of Entrepreneurship in the First and the Second waves, and, under its laws of labor, capital is finally freed from labor and “knowledge (i.e. Spirit) drives the economy” (Alvin Toffler, Powershift 413). Habermas's speech community and Derrida's idea of the proper/improper are simply more abstract forms of Toffler's notion of the “symbolic (language-made) economy." Both Habermas's and Derrida's notions of the social are founded upon their understanding of language which can only be called—as I do later in a critique of one of the books you have edited—linguistic fascism. Because of limited space I leave aside here Habermas's views in which he, like you, regards the West to be the only place where a post-conventional “rationality” can be articulated. The ethnocentric vision of an emerging world, articulated by both Habermas and Derrida (e.g. Derrida's Other Heading in which what matters is the matter of Europe), is one of the reasons why their books are bestsellers in the West. This is a “rightward” move with a vengeance; if it does not look like a “rightward” move to you and other bosses of the left, it is only because all of you are going in the very same direction. The current Habermas-ing and Derrida-ing of rhetoric studies in the U.S. is quite instructive for looking into the way racism runs very close to the surface of a movement that passes itself as devoted to the “empowerment” of “other” students.

And, finally (there is really no point in annotating all the names you list), Wallerstein's version of the “dependency theory” of “capitalism” is, above all, aimed at producing a theory of capital that diminishes the explanatory power of the labor theory of value in favor of what has now become the hallmark of ludic radicalism: the valorization of the political (his privileging of the role of the State) and the deployment of “center” and “periphery” to mystify the laws of motion of capital. A formal technological determinism, in his work, takes the place of historical transformations of the mode of production and class struggle. In fact, for Wallerstein classes not only do not have permanent reality but share their importance in social transformation with ethnorelations. For him it is eventually the market (market links = world system), that is, “distribution” and not “production," that is the force of history. This privileging of the “market” is what has made Wallerstein's theories the guiding spirit not only of the works of such U.S. conservative academics as Neil Lazarus but, as you know, also of such Verso-Routledge bestsellers as The Empire Writes Back and De-Scribing Empire. Are you saying that Wallerstein's writings (one of which is also a Verso-Routledge bestseller) are contradicting my view that New Left Review is moving “rightward"? Do you actually read the writings of these people?

Using the “evidence” in your own “Letter to the Editor” (not a biased “outside” document), I have shown that New Left Review and your own practices (as “editor") are clearly moving “rightward." People whose writings you edit and mention as signs of the “progressiveness” of New Left Review are counter-revolutionary by any understanding of revolutionary praxis (the struggle to build a classless society of equal economic access): they advocate a political pragmatism that is aimed at keeping the existing social division of labor, which is necessary for extracting surplus value (the “profit” of owners) rather than meeting the “needs” of producers. They do so in subtle, nuanced epistemological “arguments." But the subtlety, nuance and discursive glamour with which they deground revolutionary praxis should not be allowed to divert attention away from the fact that epistemology is simply a cognitive alibi. What is at stake is not the subtlety of philosophy but the crudeness of the exploitation of humans by humans and the need for revolution to overthrow the regime of profit and build a society that attends to people's needs: a classless society free from the capitalist division of labor.

All the Left Stars you mention legitimate the rule of capital through political pragmatism; they offer “epistemological arguments” which turn the most fundamental concepts necessary for transformative praxis into fictions of language. In other words, theirs is a politics without “class”; a politics that marginalizes the “proletariat”; a politics that substitutes “consumption” and “knowledge” for “production” and “labor." This is a “rightward” moving politics because it protects the regime of profit by discrediting revolution as violence while at the same time institutionalizing the daily violence of capitalism under the guise of incremental reform. It is a politics directed at a local ("superstructural") change of representations rather than a global (material base) change of economic access; it is founded upon the priority of the “desires” of those who, at the expense of others, have fulfilled their own “needs."

Side Discourse

—they have even made using the concept “superstructure” like committing a felony so one cannot establish the binary of base/superstructure, and thus the entire social totality is seen as an ensemble of differential signs each autonomous in its own sphere with no necessary relations to others....

This is a politics that denies collectivity and legitimates individuality.

I am offering my view of the “rightward” moving politics and my “reasons” for stating that your practices are complicit with this “rightward” move. In doing so, I am placing my arguments in the public space for all to contest. You, on the other hand, take refuge in a list of names whose purpose is not analytical but rhetorical: these names weave you into a thick series of associations, connotations and connections in order to establish your leftist credentials with the reader. But the “un-said” of the list marks, in its silence, other sides of your “rightward” move.

The thick series of associations show that you are well-connected, that you are part of a dynastic left, that you are who you are and what you are not because you have anything of significance to say (the “Letter” is an empty text with no argument) but because you are part of a very elaborate and extensive network. You know everyone and everyone knows you. Your work is published by the most prestigious presses: VERSO, CAMBRIDGE, JOHNS HOPKINS, BLACKWELL.... DIACRITICS, PUBLIC CULTURE, MLN,... the list goes on and on. These are the very places that return my manuscripts unopened or come up with the most amusing excuses (as you have done) in order to tell me (what you have just said) that I am a discredited, criminal thinker. Why do you think there is such a difference in the treatment we get from journals and presses? Do you think—as you imply—that it is because you have a superior scholarship and I am simply a “sloppy reporter"? Or is “sloppy” used to discredit what I report on because what I report on is what people in power—the left bosses like you—do not want to know? Left bosses who think of themselves as enlightened radicals, do not want to learn that their practices are in fact immensely useful to the ruling class, that they are who they are and what they are because the ruling class has found their (real and not “supposed") knowledge to be a reliable ally in its fight against the oppressed of the world.

When my “sloppy reporting” demystifies the practices of the post-al left bosses and their followers and shows the public that these left critics are complicit in the most exploitative practices of capitalism, they get violently upset and angry with me. All they can think about is to discredit me and my “supposed knowledge," to silence me by calling in the police. Is this why you threaten to sue me? To shut me up?

I will now move from the “immanent” evidence provided by your “Letter to the Editor” (College Literature February 1995) and your work as a journal editor at New Left Review to the “immanent” evidence of your work as a book editor. In my essay in College Literature (October 1994), I critiqued your editorial work at the Verso-Routledge cartel, so therefore I will focus here on your work at another international monopoly: Cambridge University Press. Your series “Literature, Culture, Theory” at Cambridge University Press has now become one of the main sources of retrograde post-al literary criticism—criticism which advertises itself as full of “astonishingly new readings” and moves along the grain of the ludic knowledge industry. The series produces concepts and interpretations that legitimate the rule of desire and, in the name of openness and freedom of interpretation, institutes the most exploitative form of entrepreneurial, anti-collective individualism and, in consequence, naturalizes the reign of property.

Let me be specific. One of the most recent books in the series is Anti-Mimesis from Plato to Hitchcock by Tom Cohen: a kind of Jesse Helms of right-wing de Manian poststructuralism who seems to regard “reference” to be the Castro of literary interpretation and wants a quick military action to get rid of it—once and for all—and bring the free market of sliding signifiers back so that the rule of free interpretations without regulations is once more established! He therefore sets himself the task in this book of putting in question not only the empirical and the factual (what you seem to opportunistically embrace in your rhetorical bluff disguised as a “Letter to the Editor") but also any point of reference in the real—any point at all that can be deployed as a basis for revolutionary praxis. He does so all in the name of up-to-date knowledge—that alibi of the petit bourgeois academic who markets his skills by advertising them as “new and improved," as always the “latest," as always astonishingly new"! Anti-Mimesis has set itself the task of showing why reference is the enemy of freedom and that if reference is destabilized, people will be set free from the tyranny of representation—the enemy of the people! Emancipation is the other name of post-mimesis.... You, as a self-styled “left” editor, have decided that the squashing of reference—that is, demolishing all stable sites of the social that might serve as a basis for revolutionary praxis—is the most urgent knowledge project now. In other words, for you “anti-essentialism”—the very conceptual apparatus that capitalism uses to discredit any struggle for needs—is what is required for an open democracy constituted by ungroundable conversations...

You, like all petit bourgeois editors, may say that your job as an editor is simply to publish “good books”... and Anti-Mimesis is a “good book." In that case, you would have to admit that for you (as a left editor) “good” is a self-constituting category—an “immanent” entity free from any such “outside” as politics—that there is such a thing as “good” in and of itself; that it is autonomous, and that its consequences might even be politically harmful. Celine, by this “logic” is a “good” writer—as in fact Kristeva argues more or less following Celine's own justification of his writings: “I am not a man of ideas. I am a man of style...".

Is it just a “coincidence” that Jameson's SAQ is publishing a “special issue on Celine"?

Is not this mode of editing finally based on “knowing” that a “good book” is the attribute of those books that editors publish to reinforce the regime of profit? “As Germano knows, the only thing better than critiques of commodified culture may be commodifying critiques of commodified culture” (28). Is a left editor merely a functionary (like Germano) whose job is to simply publish a plurality of “good books” to meet the quota that the rate of profit determines (26)? It is, of course possible that you will invoke a version of your defense of your editorial practices at New Left Review—I am an editor who is really not an editor.

Cohen's up-to-date re-announcing of the disappearance of reference (like Jesse Helms's political theory) is a re-conditioned theory, a “used” theory that has been in service at least since Schiller's notion of a self-reflexive, autogenetic art and has now become ludic dogma through the post-al Dionysianism of the Nietzsche-Harold Bloom axis of conservative theory. Like most post-al annotators, Cohen's main criterion of judgment is the publishing season: he regards last season's theory as already “outmoded." Yet, he embraces some very outmoded re-conditioned notions as post-contemporary. Like Jesse Helm's plan for the “liberation” of Cuba that brings back “free market” dictatorship as an enlightened “new” democracy, Cohen's “new" regime of interpretation-without-regulation brings back a form of linguistic fascism that erases the historical materiality of labor in order to put forth the “matter of language”—puns and tropes—as the truly liberating element of a transmimetic art of waving-wavering “reference."

The book itself is not much to dwell on—it is part of last publishing season's crop and according to its own “logic” is “old” by now. It is an eclectic collage of poststructuralist banalities. But it becomes important in this discussion because it highlights what I have already discussed: your epistemological opportunism which legitimates your blurring and blending kind of politics—the blurring and blending that renders class antagonism a matter of interpretation rather than the objective (referential) reality of the fight for communism. In editing books like Anti-Mimesis, you blur and blend the Bhaskarian notion of “representation” with the Derridean idea of “differance” and produce a pragmatic eclecticism in which ideas are “enjoyed” for the “astonishing” pleasure they give rather than for their truth: what they offer by way of explaining the objective historical relations of production. This epistemological eclecticism is an alibi for a political cynicism that now rules the bourgeois knowledge industry through the power of networking.

Why is the dynastic left suddenly interested in journalism? Why do Sprinker, Davidson... all use journalism as the norm of truth telling? It is this anti-conceptuality—legitimated by a right-wing poststructuralism—that, among other things, “authorizes” their editorial practices. Cathy Davidson, for instance, as a co-editor of the Oxford Companion to Women's Writings in the United States, has concluded that Dorothy Allison—the working class lesbian who relates class to sexuality (not “pleasure” as such) and critiques bourgeois feminism ("traditional feminist theory has had a limited understanding of class differences")—should be “left out” from the Companion. Who "is in" in the Oxford Companion? Tama Janowitz, the journalist-as-writer who makes a joke of “class” and turns the social (in the manner of Tom Wolfe) into a choreography of the eccentricities of the upper-middle class...

What is needed here are “concepts” that can provide a world-historical explanation, that can connect the plant closing to the law of the rate of profit and not a picture that localizes the plant closing as an autonomous Foucauldian “event." Photography—which is now the most popular form of “political” activity among bourgeois academics, erases concepts by replacing them with translucent images that turn the devastating effects of capitalism into occasions for aesthetic meditation and pleasure rather than rigorous conceptual analysis—analysis that can provide the basis for transformative practice.

But then again, in editing books such as Anti-Mimesis from Plato to Hitchcock you have already indicated that any ground for transformative praxis should be demolished. In editing the book, you have laughed in the face of the very idea of revolution and rejected it (along the grain of the ludic academy) as an “essentializing” project. Like Cathy Davidson, you have no argument but keep reminding people that I'm a political person; politics are a passionate part of me. This is, as I have argued at length in my essay in Transformation 1, obscene.

Is it my “sloppy reporting” or my reporting on these political obscenities of the dynastic “left” that makes you so angry, so determined to discredit me and my “supposed knowledge"?

Like a decadent aristocrat who recognizes his own historical irrelevance, your own tirade reciting of your associations/genealogy of descent does not convince even yourself of the legitimacy of your massive power. Then, in order to silence me, you resort to that steady ally of all barons of the post-al left: you call in the police of the state and threaten me with legal action ("slander"). You say I “slander” people on the left. This must be a new definition of “slander” because (as I have done throughout this text), I merely read back to the people of the left, their own practices. I merely quote the evidence provided by their own actions (as I have done throughout this text). It is the people on the post-al “left” who do things with such cynicism that they have difficulty recognizing what they have done as their own acts. They have cultivated such a reflexive false consciousness and consequently turned commitment into such a parodic performance that when their performances are replayed, they do not “recall” them; they feign outrage and call in the police. Like all cynics, they “really did not mean” what they historically have done and deny that they have ever done it. This is what happens when, in my critiques of the dynastic left, I read back their own texts to the barons of the left. They, thus, appeal to all sorts of theories of interpretations/performance/parody to cover up the cruel historical literalness of their reflexive performances. The erasure of the “literal” and the domination of the “tropic” (to which such books as Anti-Mimesis are devoted) in ludic theory is not simply an epistemological or a scholarly project. The “undecidability” (postliteralness) of what has been said and done is what provides the ruling class and its petit bourgeois theorists with an alibi and enables them to sing their song of evasion and collaboration: “That is not it at all, That is not what I meant at all." Thus the immense usefulness of books like Tom Cohen's Anti-Mimesis from Plato to Hitchcock for the post-al knowledge industry and the owners of the means of production. Turning the historical literalness of practices and discourses into an “undecidable” Heideggerian in-betweenness—the crowning achievement of Paul de Man's linguistic fascism—is what justifies the alibi, what makes calling the police such a “natural” act. In this regime of cynicism buttressed by a linguistic indeterminacy that degrounds the reference, “slander” becomes the name of that practice of reading back in which the literalness of the tropic in class struggle is revealed.

I merely read back to the post-al left the very practices that they are so “proud” of: practices that “are a passionate part” of their lives. They find the “evidence” from their own texts and works so contrary to their own self-understanding of themselves as “radical” that they call it “slander." Within the network, there is no room for critique (in fact critique is deemed to be an instance of hostility, of Stalinism), and so everyone is affirmed all the time about their identity as “radical” and “leftist." When they hear otherwise from “outside” the network, they have no other way to understand the critique than as “slander"....

Every time I have critiqued (by reading back) the political practices of left bosses, I have been threatened with legal action. You are in good company in calling the police of the state to silence the dissent. You have indeed absorbed Derrida's lessons of containment and suppression of dissent under the guise of anti-totality(tarian)ism very thoroughly. He too, as you know, called in the police of the state against an editor whose main “slandering” crime was that he had reprinted (that is “read back” to Derrida) one of Derrida's own essays in defense of Heidegger's Nazi practices. Derrida's postmimetic reading of Heidegger suddenly lost its “ingenuity," “imaginativeness" and “inventiveness” in the post de Manian situation and was revealed for what it always had been: a “literal” act of collaboration in the class struggle against the workers. He thus attempted to suppress the “evidence” which was highly damaging to his political “credentials” as a person on the “left” ("A Normal Nazi," The New York Review of Books, January 14, 1993 and the following issues). Derrida is also “a political person; politics are a passionate part” of his life, and he, too, finds it "slanderous” that an editor should publish his defense of Heidegger's Fascist practices..."That is not it at all, That is not what I meant at all."

Derrida calls in the police to “burn” the book—take it out of the circle of dissemination—at the very time that he formally denies the “literalness” of his defense of Nazi practices: his self-reflexive false consciousness does not recognize the “literalness" of the “parody” and the “tropic” since he has no historical memory; his counter-memory is an ensemble of “negotiations”—blurrings and blendings. Derrida does not realize that while formally denying his own support of Nazi practices, he is performing Nazi acts by “book burning” through the agency of the state, by bringing in the police to silence the disseminator of his own self-slandering text. And what are his “reasons"?

Derrida's reasons are that his “property” ("copyright") is violated by the editor: the theorist who has written (and acquired massive property) by denying “property”; who has written and proved (White Mythology; Signeponge/Signsponge) to the cheers of the ludic academy (e.g. Spivak, “Speculations on Reading Marx: After Reading Derrida” in Post-Structuralism and the Question of History, ed. D. Attridge and others) that property, contrary to what Marx and Engels had “essentialized” is in fact a transmimetic fiction of waving-wavering signs ("signeponge/signsponge")—“proper"/"improper”—suddenly becomes a “literal” reader and is outraged that his “property” is the subject of transgression by an editor.

At such moments of the crisis of “property," you opportunistically forget that “slander," too, (if you are not cynical about what you write in support of poststructuralism as a “progressive” practice) is merely a legal fiction according to that regime of meaning. To be precise, to accuse a person of “slandering” is to accuse them of having violated the laws of the “proper”—which is, according to poststructuralist radical theory a “good” thing! He/she who transgresses the “proper” and deconstructs the totalizing “proper" as the ever expanding system of relays of the (dis)simulatory “improper” is called “slanderous." Which is it then: is “slander” a transgression of the “proper” (and thus in the poststructuralist regime that you support a PROGRESSIVE act) or is it a “literal” act, in which case the question becomes why are you blurring and blending the literal by lending editorial support to such violent erasures of the literal as Anti-Mimesis? Is it too much to ask from a “person of he left” to be coherent, or is coherence itself a fiction of the proper? In your adopted poststructuralist regime of reading, the “slander"ous reader should be treated as a progressive, subversive liberator of signs from their imposed determinate meanings and not sued and sent to jail.... But you, too, like Derrida, at the appropriate moment, suddenly become “literal” and insist that the “proper” should be respected and the laws of “property” be observed. Do you ever believe in what you say? Have you become so cynical, so pragmatic, that you never mean what you say? Is the transgression of the “proper” progressive or a violation of the bourgeois right of property? Take a stand before reciting the anthem of I'm a political person; politics are a passionate part of me.

And, I am sure, you know how Derrida defends those Nazi practices which were a passionate part of Heidegger's life: Derrida, like the writer of Anti-Mimesis from Plato to Hitchcock demolishes all referential grounds, and in the post-al transmimetic, moment it becomes impossible to “decide”—in the unceasing slippage of the reference—what is the “proper” Nazism, let alone who is a “proper” Nazi. In the post-mimetic space, the logic of the “improper” rescues the Nazi; the pornographer; the sponsors of the Republican Bill to Reform Welfare; ethnic cleansing in Bosnia; apartheid in the U.S... they are all, according to the postmimesis of the sign, undecidable meanings with no stable reference. Nazism, poverty, genocide all become moving sites of displacement and not self-identical practices. This is the political effect of linguistic indeterminacy, which makes any attempt to “normatively” explain the social a “slandering” of the people on the left. You see how your editorial practices provide a justification for the “rightward” move.

This calling in the POLICE ("slander") simply shows how much the post-al left is an extension of the bourgeois state, and how much its practices support the state, which in turn supports it with legal codes, police, jails... all geared to silence critique. Is it a mere coincidence that one of the major theoretical preoccupations of the post-al left is to “argue” that critique is “epistemologically” a “sloppy” practice—that it is no longer possible since there is no ground (reference) for it and those who insist on its practice are totalitarian Stalinists? Is it not clear that the post-al philosopher (in providing an epistemological discrediting of critique) and the state's police (by leveling the charge of “slander") are acting together to squash the critique-al citizen? Why is F. Jameson so obsessed with declaring the death of critique (Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism 46, 399)? No doubt you are proud of him too and his book on Derrida (which, like Derrida's own book on Marx) will be published by the Verso-Routledge cartel later this year. And you say Verso-Routledge do not have a monopoly on “progressive” books? (But more on that later.)