Date: Mon, 21 Apr 1997 01:12:26 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Amrohini J. Sahay" <ajsahay-AT-mailbox.syr.edu>
Subject: M-I: PANIC LEFTIST - FRAME SEVENTEEN




Revolutionary Marxist Collective (Syracuse)

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PANIC LEFTIST - FRAME SEVENTEEN




One of the issues that we have tried to introduce to the net-left is a
more complex understanding of the theoretical analysis of
"representation". The net-left (as is clear from the painfully simplistic
commentary by Hugh Rodwell on experience/knowledge) has bracketed all that
lies beyond the "common sense". It is, then, within such a context that
Jason Schulman understands "violence". "Violence" for him is that which
hurts the "body" and the "body" is that which is located in "space"
("kitchen"). It is only in such a philosophically naive and semiotically
innocent context that Schulman recognizes violence and it is by
supporting these discursive practices of Rodwell, Schulman ...that the
net-left has produced a political unconscious which is sexist, racist,
homophobic... Because no one bodily beats up women on this list, does not
mean that there has not been a tremendous amount of violence against them.

        The same localizing/trivializing of (in order to legitimate) 
violence informs Jerry Levy's "defense" of the fascist practices of
Rodwell. What Levy misses is the fact that posing a question -- outside
any historical context that is developed by sustained critique -- is an
attempt NOT at production of knowledge but is a strategy of surveillance
and punishment (GIVE ME THE R I G H T answer or else).  This is Hugh
Rodwell's strategy. This is the favored strategy of all fascists. 

 Many on this list have chosen NOT to engage Hugh Rodwell because they
think any engagement with his discourses is simply a means to give him
more space of control....

        Those Marxists, teachers,....who also choose to pose a question
outside historical contexts -- that is, without first deploying a
sustained critique of that which exists and thus establishing the
necessity of the question -- are all -- no matter what they call
themselves and what profession they practice: fascists. This, by the way,
is the scandal of right-wing pedagogy and the resistance to "critique" and
critique-al pedagogy in the bourgeois university. 











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