File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1997/marxism-thaxis.9706, message 148


From: LKED54B-AT-prodigy.com ( DEB   KELSH)
Date: Wed, 25 Jun 1997 19:36:37, -0500
Subject: M-TH: Re: Karl's request for explanation




Karl (But first Russell: I'm working on a response to your request): 



Perhaps my last post, which probably wasn't up when you posted
your request for explanation, makes my argument clear to you.  If
you're still not clear, let me know and I'll try again.

Now, though, I want to ask these questions, since your request
raises some rather critical issues about reading and writing from an
oppositional knowledge:

1.)  Precisely what sections of my text are "difficult"?  In order 
to
make my explanation clearer, I need to know what concepts seem
to you rather ineffectively theorized, or where the connections
between concepts are weak.  Otherwise, simply asking me "what I
am saying" is going to prompt more text that will likely be just as
unreadable to you as the first.  You seem to presume here that my
text used a specialized language and that what I am saying could
just as easily be put in some non-specialized--neutral--language.  
Is
there such a language to which we all somehow naturally have
access, some language unrelated to class interest and
unformed/uninflected by class interest? 

2.) This is not unrelated to the question of WHY you find these
sections "difficult."  Is it for some reason akin to Doug's opinion
that Ebert "writes a bit too much like a professor of English"?  And
Doug, BTW, I'm curious what you mean by that--especially since, 
as a Marxist writing in English studies, I am often accused of 
"masculinist" prose.
I wonder about the gendering of discourses here.

Karl, do you find Marx's or Lenin's texts difficult?  Resnick and
Wolff's?  Toni Morrison's?  Richard Rorty's? . . . . Did you ever? 
What did you do to change that?

Another way to frame this concern of WHY you find the texts
difficult is this: Are they difficult because the words, connections,

sentence structures don't make "sense" ("I" am somehow a "weak"
writer/theorist) or because they make a "sense" that works to be
outside of dominant sense, and therefore the text *appears*
"abnormal," "incoherent?"  This was the issue at the core of the
canon wars.  Texts that conveyed knowledges from cultures
other than that of the dominant culture (that of the middle-class
white male) were excluded, marginalized, precisely on the basis of
their "unreadability."  But what was "unreadable" was not the
"words" but the knowledges informing the relationships between
words in any section of text (and in my text, Karl, I'm using
"Marxist" "words" quite frequently, and articulating all I say
 to classic Marxist arguments and concepts, so your request to my 
mind
might be indicating some other issue or stake beyond that of "what
I am saying" --although I want to stress here I am not attributing 
to
your request or to "you" some nefarious motive, rather I am
working to indicate how all knowledges are intersected by their
"other", as Engels argued: historical materialist "knowledge. . ., by 
its very nature, must always
contain gaps and be incomplete because of the inadequacy [translated 
in the Tucker anthology as
 faultiness,' p. 156] of the historical material [*Anti-Duhring* p. 
107].  That is, even historical
materialist knowledge is "incomplete" because it is caught up in 
class contradiction, it involves a
"faultiness".)   And not only were these knowledges
"unreadable," but many people had a vested interest in keeping
them that way: their careers and the recurrent perquisites of their
jobs--raises, awards for teaching excellence, tenure--had been built
on knowledge of canonical texts (this is true to varying degrees in
any discipline, not just English); some of those perks might not be
quite so forthcoming if those accustomed to them allowed for the
influx  of new knowledges ("more" and "different" individuals--
suddenly in demand because
"new" and most likely able to recuperate failing relations of 
production-- competing for limited
resources).
 

The issue underlying both these points involves the relationship
between language and knowledge.  Won't a knowledge that
proceeds from a fundamentally different ontology than that of the
dominant knowledge use language differently, because it invests it
with different meaning?  That is, won't different ontological bases
register in the use of language, at the level of meaning?  James 
Arnt
Aune, in *Rhetoric and Marxism,* writes: "From Marx's public
humiliation of the rather admirable Wilhelm Weitling down to
Engels's attack on Eugen Duhring, Marx and Engels carried on the
nastiest traditions of German academic vituperation" (2).  Aune--a
self-described Marxist--reads Marx and Engels as "nasty" rather
than "oppositional" or critique-al: WHY? Why characterize critique as 
"nasty"?  Is his reading not
class interested?  (See Ebert's first few pages in *Ludic Feminism* 
for a critique of
this same  tendency in feminism.)

The issue of "making sense" of oppositional knowledge goes right to 
the core of the issue of developing class consciousness. . . .

Finally, I was not "interpreting" other's work.  I was critiquing it,

showing the condition of its possibility as rooted in class
contradiction.  But critique is a mode of reading, so I'll address
your request for "what I am saying" from the more general angle of
"reading":  I don't think anyone says anything that isn't a
reading of something, whether that be a book-text, a context, a
social text, the market or the commodity form.  I cannot simply say
"what I am saying" because "what I am saying" does not exist in a
vacuum.

Having risked writing yet another text that people will ask me to 
explain,


Deb Kelsh
Red Theory Collective
The University at Albany, New York

l 




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