Date: Fri, 29 May 1998 21:42:34 -0400
From: Brian Ganter <bmganter-AT-acsu.buffalo.edu>
Subject: Put an End to Clique Rule in the Society for Cinema Studies


Put An End to Clique Rule in the Society for Cinema Studies

                        HANDS OFF BOB NOWLAN


       Recently, when Rob Wilkie, a "duly elected" English
graduate student representative  at the State University of New York 
at Albany, protested the cronyism that passes as "policy" in the 
English Department's funding of graduate students, the "senior" 
graduate students who had benefited from the existing "policies" 
decided that he did not "represent" their interests and attempted to 
depose him as an official departmental representative of the graduate 
students.  Rob Wilkie is a member of The Red Theory Collective -- a 
Marxist collective that has in recent years struggled against the 
overwhelming power of a coalition of conservative faculty and students 
who currently run the Department in a closed and autocratic manner; 
the aim of Wilkie and of the Red Theory Collective is to contribute to 
the rebuilding of the Department and its practices so that these will, 
in the future, be conducted in an open and democratic way.  In its 
public writings and other interventions The Red Theory Collective has 
tried, among other things, to show how the bourgeois democracy to 
which these holders of institutional power declare formal allegiance 
is simply an ideological device for legitimating the interests
of this clique in maintaining its own power. The clique in power 
respects the rules of election and terms of office only if members of 
the clique are elected to the office.  Democracy, in short, is reduced 
to a set of purely formal procedures for protection of their private 
interests.  Rob Wilkie insisted on public accountability and as a 
result became the target of a massive attack and vicious red baiting.


         As the triumphalist narratives of big business about the
"collapse of socialism" fall apart (narratives which for a long time 
had reassured these businesses' "faculty lobbyists" in the academy of 
their uncontested control of universities and other knowledge 
institutions), and as a new generation of Marxist theorists and 
activists appears on the scene of contemporary knowledges, in turn 
newer and ever-more aggressive anti-red tactics are unleashed on 
campuses, in so-called "scholarly" organizations and conferences, on 
the editorial boards of academic journals, on supposedly "left" 
listserves on the Internet, and in college and university classrooms 
and programs of study.  The aim of all these crypto-fascist and 
anti-democratic practices is to keep the red knowledges away from the 
very people who might benefit from them -- the workers, the students, 
and the citizens who have not yet completely yielded to the
brand of cynicism bourgeois academics are today marketing as both the 
most advanced and the only legitimate form of "new" and "progressive"
knowledges.
      

          Bob Nowlan -- the current Chair of the Caucus on Class of 
the SCS -- is the latest target of these neo-fascist and post-al 
McCarthyist attacks by the cronies of capitalism in academic film 
theory.  Over the course of the last three years, Bob Nowlan -- a 
revolutionary Marxist theorist and editor, and a member of The Red 
Collective -- has attempted to open up the intellectually 
claustrophobic and politically self-validating practices of the SCS 
and to provide new spaces for transformative knowledges and practices 
to the Caucus on Class.  His radical practices have created a "panic" 
among the "senior" holders of power in the SCS who cannot (owing to 
the bourgeois interests they effectively represent) engage his 
theoretical practices which tear the mask of serious, principled, and 
committed knowledge away from their reactionary preaching to show the 
hollow pragmatism behind this deceptive facade.  Having failed to 
contain him intellectually, they have now, in a desperate move -- 
which is in fact a repetition of the maneuvers at SUNY-Albany -- 
initiated a deceitful and imperious attempt to remove him
from his position as the Chair of The Caucus on Class on the 
ostensible grounds of procedural technicalities that they have in fact 
fabricated for this very occasion.
     

        In addition to the (newly invented) "policy" considerations 
which the ruling clique is deploying to get rid of Nowlan 
(considerations which contradict the very terms under which Nowlan 
agreed to stand for election and was elected), the clique is also, in 
the tried and true manner of all post-al reactionaries to get rid of 
the RED and the REVOLUTIONARY, attempting to redirect attention away 
from issues of principle to ones of "pragmatics" and (ethics of) 
"personality. "  Thus one of the dominant narratives being circulated 
aims at attributing the source of the current contestation to the 
"individual" failures of Bob Nowlan and his predecessor as Caucus on 
Class chair, Terri Ginsberg, to speak, write and act in "properly" 
"responsible" ways -- ways which involve simply deferring to 
established institutional authorities and operating in blind
obedience to entrenched traditions and pragmatic protocols.  The 
members of this clique have gone so far as to invoke twisted readings 
of Nowlan's own "body language" to support its zealous quest to remove 
him, while also sarcastically deriding Nowlan and the few other "reds" 
on the listserv as simply a handful of infantile thinkers for 
proposing that the current contestation is ultimately rooted in 
serious intellectual and political differences and that it is 
important not to conflate "policy" with "politics," and, especially, 
not to reduce the latter to the former.

 
        Behind the clique's appeals to "policy" and "personality" is 
not the advancement of a "principled" and "democratic" agenda but  the
narrowly self-serving practices of a ruling minority who have 
recognized that Nowlan's practices are "dangerous" because his acts 
hold up for public inspection their own reactionary practices and, in 
doing so, remove the veneer of "the scholarly" and "the progressive" 
from their theoretical and pedagogical practices to show these for 
what they ultimately are -- lessons in allegiance to capital and its 
regime of escalating global exploitation. While these lackeys of 
global capitalism (who masquerade as "progessive intellectuals") are 
plotting their coup d'etat against Bob Nowlan, we call upon members of 
the Caucus on Class and others to join us in protesting these acts of 
red-baiting which are now becoming commonplace -- from classrooms and 
other sites of pedagogy to the "committees" whose primary 
institutional function is the bureaucratic policing of transformative 
ideas and practices in the interest of capitalist crisis management.
     

        We call upon all members of SCS and the Caucus on Class as 
well as all interested persons to join us in defending the university 
as a place of critique-al knowledges for social transformation and a 
site of open pedagogy: that is, a space for free exchange of ideas, 
rigorous critique, and open contestation -- practices that are 
constitutive of a democratic society.  We urge all members to resist 
the behind-the-scenes deal-making and careerist wrangling for selfish 
and solipsistically personal and professional advantages. Support Bob 
Nowlan and oppose the authoritarian move to remove him as the chair of 
the Caucus on Class.



For Red Critique,

Jennifer Cotter, Kimberly DeFazio, Minette Marcroft-Estevez, Brian 
Ganter, Christopher Hank, Adam Katz, Deb Kelsh, Donald Morton, Grant
Phelong, Erica Pittman, Brad Rothrock, Amrohini Sahay, Julie Torrant,
Stephen Tumino, Rob Wilkie, Mas'ud Zavarzadeh







* Note: For a further sustained critique-al engagement with the issues
which are outlined here, refer to Bob Nowlan's "For the Caucus on 
Class," available by contacting Professor Nowlan at 
<ranowlan-AT-uwec.edu>.

For detailed red critiques of issues regarding the English Department 
at SUNY-Albany see The Red Theory Collective Web Site:
http://cnsvax.albany.edu/~rw4653 or contact The Red Theory Collective 
at <redtheorycollective-AT-yahoo.com>.

For an extensive revolutionary Marxist engagement with the
postintellectual "activist" left on the Net see _The Alternative 
Orange_ Vol. 5, No. 2, or contact the Revolutionary Marxist Collective 
at <http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Lobby/2072/>.


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