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| The Dark Bolshevik |  2003-10-29 | THE SECOND FOLD On Michael Sprinker's Passion for “Evidence” and his Rhetorical Bluffs |
| The Alternative Orange (Vol. 4): An Alternative Student Newspaper | ||
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As citizens, you have every right to disagree with my political position, argue against it and, like all political interest groups, organize and contest it. But as editors of a publication that is supported by taxpaying citizens and as such has an obligation to democratic exchanges and to opening up free forums to all citizens for the contestation of ideas in the public space, you cannot simply print one side of an argument and repress the other as you have done by publishing Michael Sprinker's “Letter to the Editor” in College Literature (February 1995) without my response. When publishing a “letter to the editors” focusing entirely on the writings of one particular person (as Michael Sprinker's does), you—as editors in charge of a public medium—are obliged by the very principles of democratic citizenship as well as by the pluralist liberalism that you so passionately advocate (and in reference to which, you find my political position “Stalinist," as one of your editors put it in your October 1994 issue) to send a copy of that letter to the person whose ideas are being discussed and invite her/him to respond. You have not done this in my case: you have simply published Michael Sprinker's letter and silenced me and excluded me from the debate by not giving me an opportunity to respond to him.
I am now sending you my response to Sprinker's letter, and I insist that you observe my rights to “speak for myself" (as your post-al slogans have it) and publish it in your next issue along with, of course, this letter I am writing to you. In the meantime, in order to reach at least some of your readers who have read Sprinker's text by itself, I will try to get this text published in oppositional journals. But I do not have the resources to reach all your readers: they can be reached only through College Literature, the very journal that has once again (by publishing Sprinker's letter) brought new accusations against me. If you or Michael Sprinker (or any of your/his friends) wish to respond to my text, you should send those responses to me in advance and provide me with the time and space to respond to each of those texts. You cannot arbitrarily stop the chain of contestations (is not keeping the chain of interpretation open what you formally stand for?) on the pretext that since I have already written in the pages of College Literature, I have had my “turn." This would be a very strange form of “justice” indeed—double, triple, quadruple jeopardy! The fact that I have defended myself once in your pages against charges of dogmatism, Stalinism and a whole host of other wrong doings does not mean that I should never again be given a chance to defend myself against new charges. You cannot simply exclude me from future debates concerning my writings because I responded once in the past to one set of accusations. As long as there are new turns to the argument, you need to provide me with space to engage those new turns of interpretation in the way that I find necessary and not in a manner convenient to you.
Of course, Michael Sprinker himself has been complicit in denying me the right to speak for myself. If he is serious about wanting an answer to the questions he asks and is committed to a public discussion (and not cynically using the pretext of an open and public discussion for yet another rhetorical bluff), he should have sent me a copy of his letter beforehand and invited me to respond so that his letter and my response could have appeared side by side in the same issue of College Literature. Now you and Michael Sprinker have imposed one side of the argument on your readers, and you should not use the length of my response as an excuse to suppress my text and thus keep your version of truth the only one. My text is long because, unlike Michael Sprinker, I am not substituting lists and names for a full discussion of the philosophico-political issues; instead I am engaging difficult issues in a comprehensive and public manner. I am, in other words, engaging all the issues he raises because I believe that if these issues are approached seriously and not cynically, the discussion can lead to new critique-al understanding of problems that are central to the work of all those who are committed to the revolutionary struggle for a classless society.
You cannot silence my dissenting voice in the United States and at the same time advocate freedom of speech the world over. For instance, as liberals you cannot say, on the one hand, that the People's Republic of China should give full opportunity to its citizens to exercise their “human rights” to freely speak for themselves—nor can you implicitly go along with the U.S. imposition of economic surveillance and punishment on the country for the alleged absence of such “human rights”—and then, on the other hand, turn around and deny me the very same “human rights” in the United States. American Liberalism (so relentlessly defended in your pages) cannot have one set of principles at home and another abroad. You cannot, on the one hand, be formally for the “other” and publish a special issue on “postcoloniality” and, on the other hand, publish Michael Sprinker's text that (as I will show) represents me as the “other” who lacks analytical abilities and speaks half-truths and distortions, without allowing me to respond to him fully. Why is it that Michael Sprinker and other U.S. academics, whose work I have critiqued, are quick to threaten me with legal action ("slander"), to call in the police to suppress my critique of the reactionary left? Why do they appeal to the established bourgeois state and its legal rules in order to silence me but conveniently forget about the other codes of the same laws which at least formally acknowledge that I have a “right” to speak? Why is it that only one part of your laws (the one that maintains your hegemony) applies to me?
Michael Sprinker is playing the police card to intimidate and silence me. I hope you do not re-play your familiar “mail card” the way you did last time when you did not send me one of my readers' reports and simply declared that your “records” showed otherwise (College Literature, October 1994, p.4). As you see, I am suspicious because I have a long history with U.S. editors who have, each in his/her way, silenced me and suppressed my writings with infantile excuses and bizarre justifications. My next paragraph will provide the most recent example.
What Michael Sprinker has done in the pages of College Literature in his silencing me is in line with what he is doing in other sites. Since November 10, 1994, I have been trying to have Michael Sprinker and other editors of The Minnesota Review open up a space in their journal for a discussion of left editorial practices, including their own eclectic and reactionary editing. He and other editors have so far refused to do so.
SIDE DISCOURSE
I can imagine a scenario in which Michael Sprinker will repeat the same self-defense he offers in relation to his role in the New Left Review. Defending his practices in connection with that journal, he basically says he is really not an editor but a mere “reader” which, of course, raises further questions about his cynical approach to intellectual responsibility—having his name on the masthead of the New Left Review as “editor” without being really an “editor."
On March 6, 1995, Jeffrey Williams the current (executive?) editor of
The Minnesota Review wrote me and informed me
that the editors of The Minnesota Review ("a
journal of committed writing") did not seem to be interested in direct
engagement with me ("committed” to public discourse). He,
however, said that he might be able to give me, by the early April, an
“aggregate sense of what various people in the MR editorial
group think” ("Letter from J. Williams," 6 March 1995). As
I wrote him such an “aggregate sense” is a very thin
ideological alibi for the barons of the post-al left. “You
realize” I wrote Jeffrey Williams on March 10, 1995,
"the
ideological maneuver you are performing in your letter
of March 6, 1995. You state that you will write a letter which
will give me 'an aggregate sense of what the various people in the
MR editorial group think.' You are, under the
cover of an 'aggregate sense' providing an ideological alibi for
yourself and the other members of the MR
editorial group. The alibi (with which, as you can imagine I am
very well familiar in my struggles to engage the entrenched power
structure in the culture industry), works this way: if in my
response to your response of April 1, 1995, I quote from your text
in which you articulate the views of your fellow editors, they
will simply deny responsibility and say you (i.e. J. Williams)
have said that and not them. If I quote you (i.e. J. Williams),
you will deny any responsibility for the idea and simply say that
what I have quoted is not your own view and that you are merely
giving me an 'aggregate sense' of what all the others have
said. In other words, you are providing a cover of
'deniability'—what every bureaucrat has been trained to do
(Oliver North
for Reagan...).
This “aggregate sense” will simply provide Michael Sprinker and others in The Minnesota Review with plausible excuses to discredit my arguments even before I have stated them. This, as I will explain, is exactly the maneuver Michael Sprinker performs in his “Letter to the Editor” in College Literature. I hope that you do not try to suppress my text by that flimsiest of excuses: lack of space. What do you want to do with your “space” if not publish serious contestations over the principles of a good society and the role of intellectuals and pedagogues in such a society? Invite Michael Sprinker (and whomever else you think will be thoughtful contributors to such a debate), let me respond to their writings and open the public discourses...