From rosserjb@jmu.edu  Mon Apr 21 15:33:20 1997
From: rosserjb@jmu.edu (Rosser Jr, John Barkley)
Date: Mon, 21 Apr 1997 10:33:20 -0400 (Eastern Daylight Time)
Subject: M-TH: PANIC LEFT-13
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.3.95.970420134244.26131A-100000@conciliator.acsu.buffalo.edu>
Message-ID: <SIMEON.9704211020.C@oem-computer.jmu.edu>

     Hey, Ganter, since you haven't read my book, I am 
willing to send you a copy of my latest, a paper entitled 
"Dialectics and Nonlinear Dynamics."  Then you can 
"critique" its horribly reactionary attitudes to the list 
all you want.  It's a lot shorter than the book, as well as 
being more recent.  More up to date and all that.
     Of course you'll have to give me an address where to 
send it.  You can do that offlist, if you want.
     BTW, it's "catastrophe" not "catastrophy." Or is this 
latter one of these elegant neologisms, implying the 
hypertext unpacking of "strophy" as opposed to mere 
"strophe"?
Barkley Rosser
On Sun, 20 Apr 1997 13:43:53 -0400 (EDT) Brian M Ganter 
<bmganter@acsu.buffalo.edu> wrote:

> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Revolutionary Marxist Collective (Buffalo)
> ******************************************
> 
> 
> 
> PANIC LEFT-13
> 
> 
> 
> Sprouse's question becomes a question only under a post-al set of
> assumptions: the assumptions that (as Deleuze, Guattari and others argue) 
> the social is a series of un-related DIFFERENCES.  The "difference" of
> "theory" from "practice", the "difference" of the "academy" from "real
> life", etc.. Such a segregationist approach to social totality has
> tremendous appeal because it puts different practices in different spheres
> and never raises the question about their systemic connections. Everyone
> on the net-left thinks that the "academy" is a world of its own: that it
> is not marked by "labor," by "class, " by "exploitation"... where do you
> think the "academy" is located?  If you believe that capitalism, is a
> systemic operation, then how could you possibly imagine a sphere (called
> "academy"  or "theory" or...) that is free from its domination?  Sprouse,
> appealing to a populist notion of politics ("spontaneism" and
> "experientialism") then is able to say that it really does not matter all
> that if you place an academic "conference" at the center of your critique
> because the REAL thing is somewhere else -- in the actual EXPERIENCE... 
> 
> 
> As we have said, this conference is the CONCRETE moment of intersections
> of a set of social relations and by examining the conference we will
> examine those social relations. This is a conference in a PUBLIC
> university, supported by PUBLIC funds (tax=labor). It produces a set of
> "ideological" concepts which are then deployed to explain the existing
> social relations of production.  An explanation that is part of the larger
> practices aimed at blocking the development of "class consciousness" (the
> transforming of a class-in-itself to a class-for itself)....The conference
> is a site to examine: labor, taxation, public education; what passes as
> ideology/knowledge/ science; power relations, and the entire practices of
> bourgeois knowledge industry...
> 
>   	The conference and the way it is being conducted raises the question of
> censorship and the political economy of labor and its material relation
> with knowledge.  On Friday April 17, 1997, for example--the day before the
> conference the organizers of the conference first attempted (and finally
> failed) to block an effort to videotape the conference--so that it can be
> disseminated outside the university.  Why?  The conference is made
> possible by PUBLIC money and as such its products belongs to the PUBLIC. 
> By preventing its wider dissemination, the organizer PRIVATIZE knowledge
> practices and put them beyond the scrutiny of the public... The question
> then is not why should the conference be the center of a classical Marxist
> analysis but rather... 
> 
> 					WHY NOT?
> 
>  
> 	Sprouse's attempt to marginalize theory is of course only one of
> the several modes of marginalizing of theoretical critique. Russell
> Pearsons, for example, declares himself somewhat sympathetic to theory,
> but then marginalizes what we are attempting to do.  He says we should do
> "recent theory" and then in response to Robert Nowlan he offers Saussure,
> Foucault, Derrida as examples of "recent" theory -- Saussure as "recent"? 
> Or take Barkley Rosser: he thinks real theory of discontinuity is what he
> does.  What is it that he does? He deploys the most reactionary theory of
> "catastrophy" (Rene Thom) and turns historical and materialist series into
> a "formalist" analysis (systems theory).  What, of course, is making him
> more angry than any inquiry into "theory" is that he has published a book
> which is not acknowledged here: his quest is really about power ("I am an
> authority, how dare you Buffaloes....") rather than critique.  He says we
> have made a hash of Foucault.  What makes what we have said a "hash" and
> his comments a "gem"?  The only rational way to engage our critique of
> Foucault is to un-pack our text and critique it: to show its limits and
> situate it historically.  It is in such a context, the rush to erase us
> from the scene of contestation that we find it quite strange that when we
> critique postmodernism Yoshie regards our text to be an attempt to elevate
> pomo so that our critique of it looks important.  When she goes on and on
> and offers a descriptive and most elementary paraphrase of
> postmodernism--more appropriate for a high school senior class--she seems
> to think that she is doing a "radical" critique of pomo! (We leave aside
> that her focus on Zizek's "Sublime Object of Ideology" is a description of
> "early" Zizek and a rigorous critique of his work must deal with more
> recent texts).  She does not so much seem to be concerned about a rigorous
> critique of postmodernism as about monopolizing the right to "talk" about
> it: others first need to get her permission otherwise she has
> "objections"! 
> 
> 
> 	Description, we repeat, is not a CRITIQUE nor are slogans. 
> Critique is above all an analytical engagement which brings out the
> historical limits of a practice and in doing so locates it in the social
> relations of production... There is thus little difference between Hugh
> Rodwell who is frightened of the "other" (and conceals that fear by
> mocking the object of fear) and Yoshie who simply "describes" the other
> and marks it as so utterly banal that she does not have to deal with it. 
> She erases ("deletes") it from the discursive horizons of the post-al. 
> What is needed is critique -- complex enough to engage pomo and to go
> beyond it.  The critique of "post" is not the inscription of a "pre" (Hugh
> Rodwell's nostalgia) but a supersession of "post". 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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-- 
Rosser Jr, John Barkley
rosserjb@jmu.edu




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