From owner-marxism-thaxis
Date: Sun, 20 Apr 1997 13:43:53 -0400 (EDT)
From: Brian M Ganter <bmganter@acsu.buffalo.edu>
Subject: M-TH: PANIC LEFT-13
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 much 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 the 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 organizers
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 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 “catastrophe” (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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