The Resistance to Materialist Critique

Your one-page text of 2 April, 1995 is a continuation of your all-out resistance against materialist “critique” in your essay in College Literature (October 1994). In both texts you perform maneuvers which are represented as “reasons” for excluding “critique” from the scene of theory and social struggle. In both texts, critique is regarded to be an abstract, theoretical work which is in-"effective” because it is an obstacle to “conversation," “negotiations," “coalition," and what you call the “strategic” uses (that is “concrete” “local” and “practical” translations) of the “concepts of poststructuralism” according to the intensities of specific “desires” which you posit as “activism." These localities of experience are the sites/practices of what your texts regard to be left politics. Both texts therefore formulate a rationale to justify not publishing critique which is (according to you) the totalizing “other" of concrete “desires” and “strategies." Doing so, of course, attempts to prevent the appearance of any theoretical analysis of social totality—an analysis which will reveal the political economy of these localities and will indicate that far from being autonomous sites they are, in fact, determined by the laws of motion of capital. Your resistance against critique is, in short, a resistance to a coherent knowledge of capitalism and your very denial of the possibility of “coherence” is itself an element of this strategy of delay and deferral and, finally, exclusion. I have engaged some of your points in the College Literature essay in my response to you in that issue and I have dealt with some others in my book, The Post-al Left.

Here I will focus on the suppression of “critique” in your 2 April text in some detail because, and this is one of my points, although the 2 April 1995 text is signed by you it is not “your" text in the singular sense of the pronoun ("you"): it is a text which is now circulating widely over many signatures and is part of the class politics that I have called “Strategic Reason” (The Post-al Left). The post-al left, as part of its theoretical legitimization of the ruling class, has abandoned “totality” and with it all sustained theoretico-political understanding of the world-historical situation. The left is, in short, reduced to “pure strategy," and my text here (and my new book The Post-al Left) is part of a “critique of Strategic Reason."

"Strategic reason” is the “reason” assembled by the post-al left from such post-al practices as (post)structuralism, post-Fordism, consumption theory, ludic linguistics and identity politics, to support the post-al left's political opportunism, its epistemological eclecticism, its localist politics and, in short, its complicity in capitalist practices. The final goal of strategic reason is to substitute “reform” for “revolution” and in doing so provide the ruling class with concepts and tactics that maintain the existing structures of exploitation and suppression with minor changes. Strategic reason puts a human face on capitalism. The critique of strategic reason is part of the struggle for international communism.

Resistance to critique, as I said, is now a widespread practice and your texts are merely local manifestations of a global structure for conserving and relegitimizing capitalism. I will come back to some examples of this resistance to critique, but let me say here, by way of broadening the scope of my intervention, that your texts reproduce what, for example, Michael Sprinker's texts, Jameson's texts, and other post-al leftists do. Following Paul de Man's injunction (in his “Preface” to Allegories of Reading), Sprinker, for example, declares that critique (especially ideology critique, which is what I am doing here), is not an acceptable mode of understanding ["Criticism as Reaction," diacritics 10.3 (1980), 4]. Critique, Sprinker elaborates, is not acceptable because it goes against the grain of poststructuralism: it moves beyond an ironic, reversible writing/reading and offers rational arguments which, he thinks, posit meaning as “determined” by an “outside” rather than as forever undecidable by the differential moves of its own immanent signification (3). Critique, in short, is rejected by the post-al left because it is assumed to be totalizing and polemical and thus as having room neither for the reversibilities of idealist philosophy (often read as subtleties—see my discussion of “shallowness” as a term of containment in The Minnesota Review Nos. 41-42, 191-92) nor for the ludic congenialities of people-in-conversation. (Of course, those supreme modes of strategic reason—ludic feminism and queer theory—rejected “critique” and the “global” a long time ago as “masculinist” and, under the cover of gender and freedom of sexuality, strengthened the exploitative regime of captialism.) [sic.]

The reversibility of meaning is a necessary instrument in what Deleuze calls the theory “box of tools." It is used by the theory clerks of the ruling class to obscure the “oppositions” (i.e. binaries) in social life since all binaries (no matter what their specific cultural or political articulations might be) are ultimately binaries of the two antagonistic classes separated from each other by the capitalist mode of production. The notion of the reversibility and thus undecidability of meaning—which is critiqued in the concept of determinacy—makes it possible to deconstruct the archebinary of class (by an epistemological move) and thus cloud class antagonism. If meanings are reversible and indeterminate, all social phenomena (including class) become a differential sign without any stable meaning. In the absence of a stable ground it will not be possible to put in opposition the two determinate classes: the exploited and the exploiter.

Your resistance to critique is part of this general resistance to a coherent understanding of social totality which is now (self-evidently) dismissed by the post-al left as a coercive act of totalization. The post-al left privileges a mode of understanding that is, in de Man's words, not so much concerned with “ideological motives” as with the “technicalities” of the “procedure” (Allegories of Reading ix-x). This is exactly what your own texts perform: marginalizing the economic, the political, the ideological and the theoretical in favor of the “technicalities” of “procedures."

This is perhaps the place also to repeat and make explicit that although I will use “you” throughout this text—I do not know how to avoid it without making my text become what bourgeois readers will regard to be rhetorically awkward—this “you” is not a pronoun for you or any other specific identity: it is the you of the post-al left, the you of strategic reason. In engaging your text, I will also develop some aspects of the theory and practice of “critique," particularly the need for critique and its indispensable place in social struggle. I will point out, in passing, the historical necessity of what is considered to be “rhetorical awkwardness"—which is, of course, not an “awkwardness” but the effect of an intervention in the ruling codes of writing theory and theoretical analysis. It is an intervention that breaks the codes of “good writing” in order to bring back words and phrases that have for sometime now been suppressed in acceptable theoretical discourses. It is necessary now to write “awkwardly” so that one can deploy the lost vocabulary of red theory and through the analytical yield from these concepts provide a revolutionary explanation of the world-historical situation. There is the need, in short, to write and repeat with regularity—regardless of the “rhetorical awkwardness” for bourgeois readers—the prohibited terms of the red lexicon: “ruling class," “forces of production," “laws of motion of capital”... as I will do throughout this text.

The work of materialist “critique” is never done: critique is an on-going intervention in all existing practices. This never-ceasing intervention (which you so angrily reject as “interjection") is part of the larger struggle to implicate the seemingly autonomous cultural and political practices in their historical coordinates and in the exploitative economic interests they legitimate. What I write—and your text attempts to justify its silencing--is a contribution to this struggle. In my critiques, I attempt to lay bare all practices—whether seemingly trivial or significant—that perpetuate the self-evidence of the ruling class: these self-evidences are needed to represent “profit” itself as self-evident and thus legitimate the regime of wage-labor and capital. The self-evidence of profit is the antagonist of socialism, and it has to be fought on all fronts and in all its theoretical, economic, political and cultural disguises (thus the “awkward” red term, “lay bare," which is now the subject of intense epistemological scrutiny, jokes and displacement in bourgeois philosophy). Your resistance to critique is part of the ruling class defense of profit and obstruction of the struggle for a socialist society. My texts (whether in the form of responses to other texts or the more familiar format of essays, books...) undertake the critique of profit through on-going, detailed, theoretical analyses which aim at “implicating” (rather than “explicating") practices in their political economy and thus foregrounding the class relations they take as self-evident. This is the kind of writing that such clerks of the ruling class as de Man and Sprinker reject with such ludic complacency by “attacking” the “ideological motives” of practices.

The resistance to publishing my texts is, to put it another way, a resistance in the knowledge industry to re-directing the current discussions away from a ludic preoccupation with HOW (de Man's “technicalities of procedure") to the WHY of class struggle; away from explicating “meanings” to “laying bare” the ratio of surplus labor—that is, the index of profit. The ruling class always attempts to keep the focus of social contestations on cultural “values”: as in “family values," “sex education” and “creationism," which are the populist everyday versions of the way “value” preoccupies the post-al academy by means of concepts of “pleasure," “consumption” and “meanings” under the cover of “cultural politics." The two, of course, converge in the synthetic debates over “political correctness," which is in actuality a ruse to displace “class” by cultural “values” as the matrix of subjectivity for the workforce. This strategy serves the ruling class by representing people as divided not by “class” (economic access) but by their “values” (cultural inclination); not as “determined” subjects of labor but as “autonomous” agents acting on their free consciousness. By focusing on “cultural politics” ("values"), the ruling class is able, in other words, to represent the social as an ensemble of “different” ideas, beliefs, attitudes, and convictions. In one word, it is able to provide the false consciousness that misrecognizes the world as the effect of one's feelings and ideas and not the historical laws of motion of capital. Critique, which de Man, Sprinker, Jameson, Rorty, Jean-Luc Nancy, and other theory clerks dismiss, on the other hand, demystifies this false consciousness (another red term that makes good jokes these days) and shows that people are divided not by whether they believe in “school prayer” or “creationism” (in the everyday version of “values") or in “undecidability” and “hybridity” (in the high theory version of “value") but by their property relations. Locating issues in the cultural arena is not limited to right-wing militias, Pat Robertson or Newt Gingrich. The post-al left also privileges culture as the primary arena (and this is one of the many ways in which it serves the ruling class). In focusing on culture, the post-al left does all that the institutionalized conservative ideology does and more--what the conservatives themselves cannot afford to do without losing their petty bourgeois supporters.

The post-al left does this “extra” service not only by focusing, like the conservatives, on culture and thus legitimating the notion that what divides people is in fact their beliefs and ideas but also by deploying, at the same time, such post-al notions as the indeterminacy of meanings, irony, reversibility and undecidability (all the “values” that Sprinker in his diacritics essay advocates). The post-al left is able to represent as the most complex and subtle form of belief, not belief in any particular belief (de Man's “ideological motives"), but belief in self-reflexivity: the freedom to be unencumbered so as to exercise one's true freedom and turn beliefs upon themselves and examine how they in fact become beliefs (de Man's “technical procedures"). The most advanced form of this unencumberedness is the freedom not to have any particular beliefs but to turn one's own beliefs upon themselves: to be self-reflexive about beliefs rather than (simply) to have any. True freedom of consciousness, then, is represented in post-al left political theory and epistemology as the freedom to be free from beliefs—the belief in believing without believing in anything in particular. This cultural notion of freedom as the freedom of the ironic consciousness is not something the institutionalized conservatism can advocate without alienating a great number of the petty bourgeoisie. Instead it is constructed by the allies of conservatives—the post-al left—for what bourgeois sociologists call the “managerial” class or “upper middle class”.

By dwelling on culture and deploying post-al concepts of irony and undecidability, the post-al left constructs a subtle subject of labor who believes in believing (that people are different because of their beliefs which they freely cultivate). It thus helps the ruling class have access to managerial workers who have no stable beliefs ("ideological motives") and thus can be most trusted to carry out the decisions of the owners of the means of production without any serious questioning—as long as those decisions have the formal elegance of observing “technical procedures”.

The post-al left, like the conservative ideologists, posits that social difference is not a matter of class but a matter of value/belief. Deploying ludic notions, it goes beyond conservative theories and declares that people are divided not simply by what they believe but by HOW they believe: do they believe in the freedom to believe in “something” or in the more sophisticated freedom of reflecting on belief in “something." In this stage of culturally dividing people, the post-al left produces the appropriate consciousness of managers and other “free” agents of the owners. Not all people “can be” managers. Therefore, the post-al notion of self-reflexivity is used as a “strategy” to separate managers from the rest of the workers. At this stage of cultural division, the sophisticated and skilled are said to be “different” from the others because all the others (whether they are “leftists” or “rightists") believe in “something” while the advanced consciousness of the managers is self-reflexive: it turns believing in something in on itself and displaces it with the play of signs in the construction of beliefs. The post-al left argues that, finally, one cannot separate people according to what they believe but on the basis of their self-reflexivity. As far as the post-al left (and advanced—cynical—owners) are concerned, both the “far left” and the “far right” are, as some of the essays in The Minnesota Review No. 41-42 assert, the same: they both, for example, believe in “school prayer." The only difference between them, the post-al left assures everyone, is that while the far-right wants children to start their day by saying “Our Lord who art in Heaven..." the far-left wants them to begin the day by singing “The Internationale”. Both are prayers and as such “decided” utterances with closure. It is only the enlightened, self-reflexive, consciousness that goes beyond a closural belief. People are, thus, finally divided between those who believe in something ("ideological motives") and serve at the lower level of the labor force and those who are subtle and self-reflexive and have no closural beliefs but are interested in “technical procedures” and form the upper level labor force that makes local decisions. The self-reflexive subject is then put forth by the post-left as the sublime subject, and all who wish to succeed in the existing power relations, it is implied, should adopt this subjectivity. The “far right” and the “far left” ("ideological motives") are both eliminated from the scene and the affairs of the social are left to bureaucrats of texts: decoders/readers of “technical procedures”; managers of skills.

The opposition of de Man, Sprinker, (and your text) to “critique” is rooted in its resistance (on behalf of the ruling class) to such demystifications that, for instance, implicates such seemingly epistemological notions as reversibility and self-reflexivity and their roles in the construction of the subject of labor in the matrix of the economic interests it serves and does not, consequently, allow these concepts to remain purely cognitive and as such acquire the status of self-evidence in bourgeois propaganda (such as your own texts) and be approached as if they are autonomous and not determined by class struggle. Materialist “critique”, among other things, shows how the post-al left, not only displaces class by focusing on culture, but also how it discredits the revolutionary struggle for socialism by marking it as a dangerous extremist and irrational practice similar to the far-right fringe: both examples of an unsubtle mind that believes in something. Your text of 2 April, 1995 and your text in College Literature (October, 1994) are contributions to the production of such self-evidences by performing the practices of a consciousness which is too cynical to have ideas and instead focuses on “technical procedures”.