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 --- from list marxism-thaxis-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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