Date: Sun, 20 Apr 1997 13:25:41 -0400 (EDT)
From: Stephen C Tumino <sctumino-AT-acsu.buffalo.edu>
Subject: M-TH: 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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