From owner-marxism-international
Date: Thu, 10 Apr 1997 16:40:26 -0400 (EDT)
From: “Amrohini J. Sahay” <ajsahay@mailbox.syr.edu>
Subject: M-I: PANIC LEFT-7
PANIC LEFT 7
WHY PROF. HOLSTUN, UNCLE LOU AND ASSOCIATES DO NOT GET IT
One of the running themes of the violent attacks against us has
been that we are “out of touch”... that we do not
reach “people” (Holstun's “interacting with
others”; Proyect's “bike-riding in Central
Park"), etc. This, “reaching out and touching
someone”, we have repeatedly pointed out, is the project
(ploy?) of the reformist left (Monthly Review crowd). We believe
in the Leninist principle of intervention in the
“consciousness” of the “people” from its
“outside” and oppose any form of bourgeois political
theory based on “spontaneism”. The
“spontaneous” is “spontaneous” only in the
sense that it is the site of emergence of the dominant ideology:
what is “out there” is put out there by capitalist
institutions and as such it has to be engaged not “in its
own terms” (from “below” as, Monthly Review
advocates) but from its “outside” (as Lenin says). The
fact that Wood opposes Laclau-Mouffe does not therefore in any way
obviate the other fact that she shares more with them than she
opposes in them. Laclau and Mouffe and Wood all — in spite
of their surface differences, share the same regime of the
“spontaneous”. Laclau and Mouffe take their idea of
the spontaneous from Deleuze and Guattari (the
“intensities") and from Lyotard ("libidinal
economy"). For them ultimately it is the Lacanian notion of
“desire” (now being re-articulated by Zizek through a
new relay system of the fantasmatic) that anchors POLITICS. Desire
is the zone of the spontaneous: outside any and all
“examinations”; it is the “excess” of
representation. For Wood, who opposes them (as post-marxists) on
the basis of their INTERPRETATIONS, politics is still anchored in
the “excess” but her “excess” is not
Lacanian desire but the Thompsonian idea of
“experience” (THE MAKING OF THE ENGLISH WORKING CLASS;
POVERTY OF THEORY... ). THE MAIN REASON WOOD HAS ACQUIRED THE
STATUS OF “FOLK HERO” AMONG THE COMPRADOR LEFT IS THAT
SHE HAS RESCUED THEM FROM “THEORY” AND LEGITIMATED
ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM THAT THEN NATURALIZES WALLOWING IN
“EXPERIENCE” TO BE MARKED AS SIGNS OF POLITICAL
ACTIVISM. Like Laclau and Mouffe, Wood advocates a brand of
politics which has its anchor in the “spontaneous”.
Both the “performative left” which acquires its
theoretical legitimacy from Laclau-Mouffe and ultimately from the
Lacanian notion of the “real” (the unexplainable
“trauma” of desire whose loss can only be covered up
by the “object a") and the “automatic left” of
Wood
(which comes into being by the mere “experience” of
oppression by the oppressed) act to negate the Leninist notion of
revolutionary politics which is founded upon the intervention into
“desire” and “experience” from its
“outside”. Both reject the “outside” as
the site of totalitarianism. Thus the united (theoretical) front
of Laclau-Mouffe-Wood against, for example, the analytics of
“base and superstructure”.
The point that Holstun is unable to get because he cannot see
beyond the “local” and which drives him
“crazy” is that politics is not simply a
“spontaneous” demonstration against the Korean
Police. Those very people who [he mentions that] demonstrated
against Korean police are now only putting up with the emergence
of the police of wage-labor and capital with a human face in this
country because they do not see the global connections. Holstun's
local politics systematically dis-enables them from drawing
connections between the practices of Korean police, the police of
US capitalism (which does not only wear a uniform but acts in all
spaces of the everyday from the supportive teacher whose main
method is violence to the workplace to... ) and the police of what
they Holstun and associates call “feminism”.... This,
by the way, is why Henwood is jubilant about Holstun's text which
he reads as “wrecking” the RED CRITIQUE. What bothers
Henwood is the shocking (to him) realization that his desire for a
society made by those who write “good sentences” is
identical with the aesthetizised pomo... that his opposition to
pomo is a self-pleasing narrative... he (like all cyberfascists
who seek the STRONGMAN) finds in Holstun's violence a proxy for
his violence.... The violence against us is the violence against a
theoretical knowledge that cuts through the surface and
shows—as we have outlined here — the underlying
complicity of the reformist left (Monthly Review) and the ludic
Left (Verso press publications, [the British] NEW
FORMATIONS... ). We are the RED “other” of the
reformist left....
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