On Other Campuses: SUNY Buffalo

Dear Editors of the Alternative Orange,

We read in your last issue of your “hand to hand fight" (following Marx) with the forces of reaction at Syracuse University—represented by the “clown pedagogy” of Radical Tangerine—and the necessity of waging such a struggle even in the “trivial” spaces of everyday life. Indeed, during the current ruling class offensive on working people when all opposition to the status quo faces an ever more hostile and fascist response it becomes more than ever imperative not to relinquish the space of the “trivial” to the interests of those in power. As the following trivial “response” to our recent efforts at critiquing the reproduction of these interests in the space of one text of bourgeois commonsense clearly shows, the “trivial"—a space constituted by the logic of class antagonism—is a highly significant site for the upholding of the dominant intelligibilities, and, consequently, the interests of the dominant class.

Recently, members of the Marxist Collective at SUNY Buffalo distributed a critique (Nov. 21, 1995) which interrogated the imperialist imaginary that underwrites a revisionist survey of recent Anglo sociopolitical history in a course called “New Criticism and the American Ego” (offered in the Humanities program here). By equating “American power” with an “American ego” considered to be a “free floating” ensemble of signifying practices the course description abstracted from the material and historical conditions of “American power” (imperialism and racist exploitation) and constructed an alibi for a “coincidental” and “contingent” theory of history driven by “aesthetic revolution”. Moreover, by marking “culture” as transcending political economy it proposed a de-materialized formalism of the “aesthetic” as a positive feature in helping to re-invent the commonplace identitarian assumptions of bourgeois ideology ("American") . In other words, in order to represent an American identity ahistorically cut off from the conditions that would explain “identities” materially it posited a “new” (old) identity for the dominant untrammeled by the logic of history. The subtext of the course description was of course to marginalize as “other” the kind of revolutionary explanations which could historicize these conditions and which could explain this commonsense logic of “identity” and offer modes of understanding which participate in producing revolutionary change. This is why we called it a PROPOSITION 187 pedagogy and why we concluded by asking our readers to consider whether the department should pursue a critique-al curriculum or one that suppresses critique for a more pragmatic understanding of culture in line with hegemonic interests.

Some days later, as a graphic [sic] demonstration of the extreme hostility elicited by both our specific critique of the course as well as our suggestion of a broader critique-al (re)formation of the Humanities curriculum (whose task, especially in a public university, should be above all the teaching of transformative understandings of the social) we found the following response posted on the English department mailboxes, scrawled in pen over a copy of our text

  Dear Asshole(s) Take your overblown 
  and self satisfied rhetoric and crawl
  back under your “new” post-al rook [sic].
  If this course isn't good enough for you, 
  then don't take it. In fact, if the
  presence of such a course offends 
  you so, get your ass out of UB!
  (please). Get yourself out of
  English courses at least, give the rest of us some room!
  We know who you are, and we, 
  in such a short time, have grown tired
  of your post-al self-agrandizing [sic] trumpet. 
  Pack it up and move on. Your 
  critique is valid and cogent—your attitude is hateful.
  
  You (all) give Marxist a bad name.
  
  Who the hell are you anyway? Too chicken to show your self(s).
  
  P.S. What the fuck is this? [Indicating the “al” of “critique-al"].

The extent of this hostility to revolutionary knowledges was nowhere more clearly demonstrated then when, while one of our members was attempting to make copies of the “response”, Dan Moose—the writer of this trivial text—moved from rhetorical to physical assault. This person, one of the reactionary graduate students here at SUNY Buffalo, grabbed our comrade in an attempt to stop him (from making the copies) and proceeded to make derogatory personal remarks about him in an attempt to intimidate him.

It would be easy enough to dismiss all this as merely the activity of one local fascist here. However, the truth of the matter is that Mr. Moose's trivial text (and his actions) actually (and unfortunately) symptomatizes the approach to pedagogy and to conceptual critique which is upheld in both the Humanities Program here, and as well in the bourgeois academy more generally where an "ethical " (non-polemical and non-critique-al) approach to pedagogy is considered to constitute the boundary of the possible. The contradiction, of course, is that while the dominant academy has in fact thoroughly institutionalized the ethical post-al lessons of, for example, Derrida's Postcard—in which any “decided” (i.e. critique-al) reading is a “bad” reading which does not respect the undecidable (ethical) economies of the “inside” (and thereby is merely an effect, in the commonsensical terms of Mr. Moose, of a “self-aggrandizing” and “self-satisfied rhetoric")—whenever the ethical actually comes into confrontation with its radical other it very quickly becomes “decided” about what is “good” and what is “bad”, and rapidly proceeds to persecute the “bad” (of the ethical imaginary) with a very “decided” violence. In the end of course the ethical is merely the alibi for policing concept-ual radicality (determinate understandings of the social) and preserving what is “good” for maintaining the present relations of global exploitation and oppression.

The exemplar of the institutionalization of this logic of the ethics of the good/bad—which informs Mr. Moose's [sic.] desire for the “good"name post-al marxism which he invokes to police our “bad" name (revolutionary) Marxism—is the Graduate Group in Marxist Studies at SUNY Buffalo ([of/with] which, Mr. Moose, it seems, [is a member/has some affiliation]). This group has to such an extent confused its “institutionality” (the fact that it is funded by the bourgeois state) with “institutionalization” that it now bows to the imperatives of the state by circulating the most reactionary knowledges and practices (as an “updated” and “revised” accomodationist “marxism"). Taking their reformism and revisionism to new heights, this group, whose theme for their next annual conference is the “State”, is currently characterizing the present transfer of social wealth to the rich—the greatest reprivatizing shift of wealth from the working class to the owning class in the past sixty years—as a “budget crisis"!

We are writing to you in revolutionary solidarity against this “budget crisis” marxism and in order to express our support of your struggle against the neo-fascist ideas and practices at Syracuse University.

In the struggle,

Marxist Collective at SUNY Buffalo