Rothrock —•— M-I: PANIC LEFTIST - FRAME FIFTEEN

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See also: M-TH: who's a fascist?   (post by Gerald Levy)

See also: M-I: who's a fascist?   (post by Gerald Levy)

From owner-marxism-international
From: Brad Rothrock <Braderr@aol.conp
Date: Sun, 20 Apr 1997 13:08:52 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: M-I: PANIC LEFTIST - FRAME FIFTEEN

Revolutionary Marxist Collective (New Brunswick)

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PANIC-LEFTIST - FRAME FIFTEEN

Hugh Rodwell, having exhausted his inventory of “ideas” has now resorted to a new strategy for silencing all voices other than his own. He now poses “questions” and “demands” answers. He asks: why do we not answer HIS questions. The “answer” is that because this is not a police prison where he can pose the questions and control the direction of discourse. QUESTIONS are not “asked”, they are historically developed in the course of a rigorous critique. Hugh Rodwell does not have a critique: he has (as all counter-revolutionaries do) a set of “opinions”. In order to protect those opinions from theoretical analysis (which will unveil their fascist first principles), he not only marginalizes “theory” but has now gone even further and attempts (like all fascists) to control the exchange by ASKING and DEMANDING answers. When Hugh Rodwell learns (through reading and thinking not by spouting formulaic opinions), and if he works to produce a historical and theoretical critique questions will be produced that not only we but all interested persons on this list will engage.

One of the discursive strategies that Hugh Rodwell is now adopting to control the debates on this list and to legitimate his fascist tactics is to transform Marx's rhetorical tropology (which are always conjunctural and not essential) into “principles” of persecution of the “other”. In this way he thinks his use of ad hominem attacks can replace theory.

It is in such a context (the deployment of the “personal") that Hugh Rodwell ends up his confused commentary on “knowledge” and “experience”. He does not seem to realize the meaning of the “historical” (in our short excursus on knowledge/experience). Nor does he seem to understand the “person” beyond the commonsensical frame. Knowledge is always historical. The “matter” that Aristotle worked on is not the same that “string theorists” are working on — the “matter” itself is subject to historical transformation. And the “subject” (of knowledge), i.e. the “personal”, is always already historical. There is no subjectivity outside history. To posit the subject beyond history ("human beings as bundles off feelings and experience...") is “idealistic trash” (to use his own highly nuanced philosophical rejoinder). It is not that one can or cannot escape the “processes of thinking about what's happening”. That is “commonsensical”.

Our point — which as all complex points escapes Hugh Rodwell's conceptual scope — is that not all “processes of thinking” are “knowledge”. (This, by the way, is how one begins to produce QUESTIONS... not in the manner of a Police Captain posing questions and demanding answers...).

Predictable in his formulaic responses, the moment Rodwell “reads” this post, he will write a long diatribe on : “How could you say “thinking” is not “knowledge”. If he does indeed make a spectacle of his ignorance then we will explain. QUESTIONS, we repeat, are PRODUCED (not A S K E D) through historical-theoretical critique.

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