Date: Mon, 14 Dec 1998 14:12:59 -0500 (EST)
From: Joseph Flanagan III <flanagan-AT-odin.english.udel.edu>
Subject: Re: Radical Schmadical


Llyod, I found your response rather interesting, but also felt the need to
respond. If I understand your argument correctly, it is that certain
theorists (and for now I want to keep it vague as to who they are),
misrecognize their academic work as activism. That is, they mistake the
kind of interventions they perform at the university at the level of doxa
(i.e. the production and reproduction of knowledge in terms of syllabus,
pedagogy, etc) for political interventions in the so-called real world. 
Because they feel there is some kind of prohibition against speaking of
certain subjects within the academy, they feel their work represents a
transgression of orthodoxy that is not only analagous to political
activism but feeds directly into it (i.e they feel since there is no
difference between Menchu's activism and their teaching of Menchu's text
their work is just as political as Menchu's).  The truth, however, is
something quite different. First, their self-marginalization is already a
kind of privilege that masks the reproduction of the university discourse. 
Students who know how to follow the unspoken rules of that discourse will
succeed in their classes just as well as they would with more conventional
course material.  Second, their concern with methological procedures
represents a kind of theoretical solipcism that effaces "true" activism
because the reading of texts can never be a substitute for political
action. 

I agree that there may be a romantic impulse that glamorizes academic work
with the radical chic of political intervention. My response is as
follows: First, I think your characterization of Spivak's work is
inaccurate. While it is true that Spivak is concerned with the
ethico-political implications of pedagogy, I do not see how it can be
described as a kind of reader-response criticism that is concerned with
readers of Menchu rather than Menchu's work. Rather than simply reproduce
a binary opposition between texts and readers, between sites of production
and consumption, I would characterize deconstruction (I am using shorthand
here so that this isn't just a defense of Spivak) as working through those
oppositions--sites of consumption are not simply opposed to the sites of
narrative production, they are instead the very condition and means by
which narrative production takes place. Or, to put it somewhat
differently, the sites of production must themselves be constructed even
as they remain excessive to the sites of consumption--that is, consumption
is never complete because of what Derrida terms differance. This explains
the concern with ethical responsibility--Readers must accept a certain
level of responsibility for the text they (re)produce. Deconstructionists
would certainly not claim that they are magically exempt from university
discourse--in fact, they continually highlight the complicity of their
work with such larger institional forces.  My second point follows
directly from the first. Spivak's work on the "subaltern" means that we
cannot simply produce a text willy-nilly or that our own production (or
consumption) of a text is all there is. In fact, we should understand the
"subaltern" not as an empirical subject who either can or cannot speak but
as the failure of our own theoretical and political assumptions, or, even
better, as their limits--that is, our desire to locate the subaltern's
resistance always runs aground on her difference from our theoretical
presuppositions (i.e. the sublatern can't speak because she is never
resistant in quite the way we either want or expect her to). Following
this pedagogy, students could not take the "safe" route and merely
reproduce what the teacher says because she would always highlight the
aporia of theoretical/political judgement. I have already gone on too long
here, so I won't explain this last point further. I would just conclude by
remarking that I don't see how materialist approaches are immune from the
same criticism they direct towards theorists. Not matter how we present
the material, there is no way for teachers and writers to be activists in
our academic work (I certainly do not want to suggest that we cannot do
activism outside the academy--rallies, community outreach programs, etc.)
without the kind of intervention Spivak and other theorists call for. The
point isn't to interpret the university, but to change it--a modest
proposal in comparison to Marx's original injunction, but one that we can
do as academics. In other words, let's differentiate what we mean by
political activism so that we don't perform the kind of romantic
glorification you warn against and then specify what we can accomplish
within the "relatively autonomous" institution of academia.  Joe F




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