File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/97-04-13.095, message 43


Date: Thu, 10 Apr 1997 16:40:26 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Amrohini J. Sahay" <ajsahay-AT-mailbox.syr.edu>
Subject: M-I: PANIC LEFT-7


PANIC LEFT  8
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" which drives him "crazy" is that politics is not simply
a "spontaneous" demonstration against the Korean Police.  Those very
people who 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
publication, (the British) NEW FORMATIONS....) We are the RED "other" of
the reformist left...





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