Date: Sun, 20 Apr 1997 13:40:39 -0400 (EDT)
From: Stephen C Tumino <sctumino-AT-acsu.buffalo.edu>
Subject: M-I: 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 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
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 organizer 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 of 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
"catastrophy" (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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