The Self-Serving, Long Text with a Bad Argument

The “two problems” with which you begin your 2 April, 1995 text are part of this general strategy of shifting the discussion away from the contents of ideas and their consequences ("ideological motives") to “technical procedures” and in doing so bypassing any substantive inquiries into the historical practices of the post-al left and the class interests that they serve. The “two problems” are, as I will show throughout this critique, really formal components of one nonproblem. They perform a repetition in your text of a very familiar rhetorical gesture in post-al left texts by means of which philosophico-political questions are marginalized so that technical, managerial and practical (non)"problems” can be represented as the “real problems." One of the consequences of this strategy is that it enables you, in a populist mode (similar to the one Michael Berube and others have adopted), to deal almost exclusively with “local” topics that you disconnect from the global series (the “global” now being safely bracketed as “masculinist” and “totalitarian"). “Technical” problems therefore are dehistoricized and represented as issues that have to be dealt with in and of themselves and not in relation to the political economy of social struggles and contestation of concepts and praxis. Nowhere in your text, therefore, do you ask the question: WHY should we engage these critiques? Instead you are more interested in HOW to contain them. Consequently there is no discussion of ideas, no conceptualization of issues, no explanation of problems but a bureaucratic listing of more and more procedural, parliamentarian, technicist “points." Your text is more interested in observing the codes put forth by books like Robert's Rules of Order than in critique-al inquiry into social practices and their political economy.

Therefore, in your letter of 2 April, 1995, you are concerned, first and foremost, with the (seeming) practical difficulties you think my letter of March 30, 1995 to College Literature, asking the editor to publish my response to Michael Sprinker, causes in “terms of exigencies of journal publishing." To make your managerial concern sound like a theoretical problem you say that if my demand were to be met and any person whose text is attacked in a journal were given a chance to respond (in the same issue in which the text of attack is published) there would be immense management problems: “How far does this extend? to anyone who is mentioned critically in an article? must the journal send any reference out and then hold each issue open for responses, however long or badly argued?"

Who (to use your favorite word) is being “disingenuous" here? You, conveniently conflate the case in which a work/person is “mentioned critically” in an essay and a “letter to the editor" which is exclusively and relentlessly an attack on one and only one person and is focused on an issue raised by that person. For instance, I certainly do not expect that you, as the editor of The Minnesota Review, send me the proofs of Tom Cohen's “Diary of a Deconstructor Manque" (published in The Minnesota Review Nos. 41-42) for a response because he attacks me in his text. I regard this essay to be part of the general contestations of ideas and practices in the public space, and I will engage it in the same public space in one of my texts. But there is, even in your own managerial and technicist terms, a huge difference between Cohen's attack on me—as part of a general argument he is making in defense of the ludic academy and the fascist discourses of Paul de Man—and Sprinker's text, which is exclusively about me and addresses me personally and asks me by name to provide him with “evidence" and “facts" in support of my critique of his “rightward" practices! How can I provide the “evidence" and “facts" if the editors of College Literature who have decided that his letter is important enough to be published, do not give me the space to do so? Would it not be non-disingenuous and a mark of commitment to public debate to ask that I be given room to offer “evidence"? How can I support my critique, which is “accused" of being a “foolish blunder" and an “ignorant tirade" (by the way, are these, by your own criteria, “good" arguments made in a “short" and precise discourse?), and show that it is indeed an enlightened historical understanding of the right-wing practices of U.S. left academics?

Your text regards my demand for public debate to be unreasonable in terms of other pressing managerial and practical issues that an editor would have to face: should an issue of the journal be held open until the response is received? For how long? Again, I will first answer in terms of your technicist logic as I just did (so you have less of an excuse to dismiss my text as not answering your specific questions), and then later in my text shift the register and engage the issues theoretically. You know that College Literature, like all academic publications, comes out two or three times a year: there is a considerable amount of time, therefore, for the editors to disseminate a text, such as a “Letter to the Editor," in which one particular person is targeted and ask that person for a response. We are (to use your own managerial logic) not talking about daily or weekly publications that are under tight deadline pressures nor are we talking about publications for profit which have other priorities than the critique of social practices and ideas. Notice that you do not ask the question: WHY should we publish such materialist critiques? Instead you seem to be exclusively concerned with mechanics and practicalities in the hope that by inventing and listing practical difficulties you will not have to deal with ideas themselves. In your text, it is instrumental planning that sets the agenda of a journal—not the urgency and significance of issues, which should challenge the editor to find ways to make the public availability of those ideas a practicality.

I would like to ask: what is so important about meeting deadlines for an editor of, for instance, an intellectual journal? Why shouldn't he/she keep the issue open? Is his/her responsibility as an editor of a journal of ideas primarily to meet deadlines or to make sure that ideas and their social consequences are publicly debated? (This, as you very well know, is the underlying question in my letter of 10 November, 1994 to you and the other editors of The Minnesota Review.) What is more important for a journal of thought than to provide space for interrogating such political practices as thinking, writing, teaching and the ways in which these construct subjectivities for the labor force, which is another way of saying: how they (de)legitimate “profit."

The technicist and managerial points that your text raises are in reality strategies for the containment of oppositional practices. This becomes quite clear from the two adjectives that you use to describe these (unwelcomed) responses: you ask whether responses to various essays/texts should be published even if they are too “long" and “badly argued." As I will demonstrate in the next part of my text, “long" and “badly argued" (as well as your other favorite term of denunciation, “parody") are always deployed by the ruling class and their petty bourgeois allies in the academy to dismiss adversarial arguments in seemingly “reasonable" and “commonsensical" terms. What makes your particular use of these adjectives more “disingenuous" is the epistemological forgetfulness that marks your writings: you forget that as a person who advocates poststructuralism, you really have no grounds upon which to distinguish the “long" and the “badly argued" from its “others." A poststructuralist has to accept all arguments as simply chains of concepts that are themselves sites of the differential playfulness of signs—without “beginning" (arche) or end (telos). Your evaluations, in other words, can have no concepts capable of determining length, or “priority" and “hierarchy": they are without the system of norms that allow making evaluations of “good" or “bad." The use of concepts such as “long" and “badly argued" to dismiss an adversarial “case" and to legitimate the hegemonic order becomes more clear in a recent case of sexual harassment at Syracuse University. Jennifer Cotter's case against Stephen Dobyns (a professor of “creative writing") was not taken seriously by a self-described leftist on the grounds that it was an instance of “poor writing skills" (Syracuse Post-Standard, 12 April, 1995, A-12. A detailed discussion of the case is printed in The Alternative Orange, 4.2, Spring 1995; available from The Alternative Orange, 126 Schine Student Center, Syracuse University, Syracuse NY, 13244). For this leftist, global thinking is seen as totalitarian and masculinist and thus as indifferent to “human emotion," “compassion, forgiveness and support"; it imposes “political ideology" on the expression of human experience and “writing."

"Long," “badly argued," “poor writing" are all part of the same politics of “phrases" that justify the dominant power under the disguise of aesthetics, logic, grammar. “Long" in relation to what? And more importantly doesn't it matter to you WHY it is long? Any “long" text by this ahistorical “essence" that you are proposing is unacceptable? Isn't it more important to ask the question WHY is the text long and what kinds of connections are made in the text that cause its (to you unacceptable) length? As I will show later, “long" is a term of rejection only in reading oppositional texts.

Oppositional texts (such as the one I am writing) are long because they cannot afford to take anything for granted, they work without the security of self-evidence. Cultural self-evidence is not available to me as an oppositional theorist, and in its absence, I become a discredited writer (as your text and eleven other texts attacking me so clearly indicated in College Literature of October, 1994). Moreover, in constructing a counter-logic, I need to examine, publicly and at great length, the self-evidence upon which your texts and other ruling class texts are founded—thus my “long" opening discussion in this text. Your 2 April, 1995 text is a trivial text whose bankrupt logic in defense of ruling class interests and reactionary ideology can be demonstrated in a few sentences. But any such short response from me will be unreadable since--in spite of its triviality—your text has tremendous cultural credibility (why do you think The New York Times interviews you again and again?): you deploy all the appropriate self-evidences of the hegemonic logic. Your text, in spite of its triviality, is (always) already accepted as a “powerful" and “compelling" argument because it supports the ruling intelligibilities and the interests they protect. An oppositional text acts without such support and thus has to spell out every one of its assumptions and argue for them. But, as I said at the beginning, these issues are not important to you: it is more important to your text to use the bourgeois notion of efficiency to convince your readers that it is almost a moral imperative for an editor to meet his/her deadline rather than make sure oppositional ideas are given a space in public discourses.

I repeat, the “badly argued” is the name given by the ruling class and its clerks to those arguments that demystify their economic interests, which is disguised as an epistemological consideration. If you want to reject a text because it is “badly argued” then you need to show what is a “good argument” and, furthermore, show that its “good-ness” is not simply a matter of its formal elegance—a matter of pleasure—but derives from its ability to intervene in the order of things. An argument that is judged in an aesthetic vacuum—without reference to what it does to social practices—is simply a ludic exercise. It is symptomatic of post-al anti-intellectualism—as in the high populism of Derrida, Baudrillard, Jean-Luc Nancy and others—to posit knowledge of the senses ("elegance") as the ultimate “local knowledge” worth having; I will come back to this later.

Your text is simply a list of excuses to justify excluding me. It needs to find reasons for the containment of oppositional ideas and practices. To give another example, it represents my demand that College Literature publish my response to Sprinker as “disingenuous” because, you say, in the College Literature debate, those who wrote against me did not have a chance to respond to my response. And then you ask: is not my demand therefore serving my own interest and not a principled one. The technicist and managerial response to your question (which you should accept because it is simply an extension of your own logic) is that: I am NOT the editor of College Literature. It was their editorial decision to organize the issue in question the way they did as, in fact, it is their editorial decision to publish Sprinker's text without giving me space to respond to him. I am critiquing them for what they have done. You, however, do not wish to make such a critique of their practices in public, because in doing so you run the risk of alienating them. Your implied claim that you had something to say in response to my text but were denied the opportunity to do so is simply an empty claim, because, as I will show, there have been numerous occasions for you to do so, and yet all you have offered is excuse after excuse.

Having given you the technicist and managerial answer and thus having logically satisfied the demand of your own system of technicist argument, I want now to move beyond the limits of your managerial logic and begin to introduce the philosophical and political issues related to the questions that, at least, are implied in your text. You seem to think that if you say that my demand for publication of my response in College Literature is purely for “your own interest," you have really settled the issue and completely discredited me and therefore you do not have to engage the theoretico-political problems involved. This is one of the many instances in your text in which your “opinions” are so mired in the prevailing anti-intellectual populism that it does not understand the conditions of its own production while at the same time it formally asks for self-reflexive discourses. By saying that I have acted upon my “self interest” without unpacking what my self-interest might be and philosophically and politically analyzing it and demonstrating its constituents, you have said nothing. It is like when you say that a text is “badly argued” and thus not worthy of publication without demonstrating what you regard to be a “good argument” and whether the argument used to dismiss the “bad argument” is itself part of that order that you call “good argument." Without analyzing my “self-interest” and showing that it is harmful of collective interests (which is the only reason self-interest can be critiqued), you have simply “accused” me without “reasons," and this is not acceptable in terms of your own premises that only a “good argument” makes a case worthy of serious attention. I do act in self-interest, but unless we know what this “self-interest” is—what the “self” in “self-interest” is—we learn nothing from such a marking. So, let's un-pack it; let's see what are some of the constituents of my “self-interest” and what are the parameters of the “self” in my “self-interest."

My self-interest has been to get all the arguments and contestations about contemporary theoretical and political practices out into the open: to have public debates and critiques. When I wrote to the editors of College Literature in 1993, I urged them to have a forum of a number of people (of their own choosing), so that there could be an informed debate about the issues. When I sent them my letter of 30 March, 1995 in response to Michael Sprinker, I again urged them, as you will see from reading it, to have an open and public debate and specifically suggested that they ask Michael Sprinker (or whomever they/he/others want) to respond to my response to Michael Sprinker. In my letter of 10 November, 1994, to you as the editor of The Minnesota Review, I urged you in a 12-page text to open a discussion on editorial policies and let ALL speak... this is how my self interest is served. An on-going open public debate, which is not brought to a closure for the kind of managerial points you enumerate, serves my self-interest because the “self” in my “self-interest"—a concept you have refused to theorize since you have taken that term uncritically (as self-evident) from bourgeois ethics—is not a “private” self.

If we take this “self" to be a “private” self (as you clearly do, otherwise your statement condemning my attempts to get my text published in College Literature as simply for my “self-interest” does not make sense), then you have to explain another set of issues that you have bypassed in your anxiety to avoid dealing with substantive issues. You have to demonstrate how my practices in question serve the interest of this “private” self. Such an explanation is necessary because everything that I am doing, even in terms of your own text, is contradictory, incongruous and opposed to the interests of a self conceived as “private." On the level of the “private” self, nothing that I am doing (for example writing this long critique of your text) is serving my ("private") “self-interest." This critique of your letter, to take one example, will simply make you more angry with me; it places you in a position to be even more ready in the future to dismiss my texts and exclude my arguments. I “gain” nothing by writing this critique of your text in terms of my private “self-interest." There is nothing in my essay in College Literature or in my 10 November, 1994 letter to you, or in my response to Sprinker or in my... that “serves” the interests of my “private” self. Tell me, what “interests” of my “private” self will be served by publishing in such marginal publications as College Literature or The Minnesota Review? You know that those who can help my private “self-interests” do not take either of these publications seriously. What interests of this “private” self will be served by publishing the kinds of critiques I have published of the ruling practices in the knowledge industry? Does what I write help the career of this “private” self? I am a widely-published full professor with a distinguished record of research and teaching whose salary, as a direct result of his practices, is less than the “median” and “mean” of his rank in his own department. It is a mark of the “self-interest"-edness of my practices that in a year that I had published three (3) books I received a “salary increase” from the Dean of the College in the amount of $250.00 (two hundred and fifty dollars)! The “publishing” people in my department routinely receive raises in the thousands.

You have to explain to me exactly how my “private” self-interest is served by my insistence that my response to Michael Sprinker (or my similar texts) be published? Will the publication of my essay in College Literature serve me in getting a better job? The more I publish these kinds of texts the more places I am blacklisted. Not only will I not get a job anywhere else, but do you know—do you want to know or are you simply interested in accusing me of unprincipled “self-interest” as do all who oppose my practices?—how many times people have attempted to get me fired? What kind of self-interest am I serving by doing what I do? When you say my demands are an instance of unbridled and unprincipled self-interest and, at the same time, squash any discussion of what constitutes self-interest and what is the identity of this self, your discourse becomes one with the discourses of such reactionary hacks in the culture industry as Oliver Conant, who, in his attack on me in Dissent (Spring 1995), calls my practices “rhetorical posturing" because for him it is inconceivable that any “real" practices can do anything other than serve self-interest. Collective practice has been so violently suppressed in U.S. capitalism that any attempts to activate them are mocked as empty gestures. Entertaining editing has helped to wipe out the memory of collective work and has opened up room for other academic hacks (hacks because they reinforce the regime of the individual and repeat the dominant ideology in new forms) such as Tom Cohen, who, like you, laughs at collectivity as parody, as “lefter than thou" posturing. “Honest" people, according to these reactionary texts, are always selfish and aggressively individualistic: “real" acts are self-serving—that is what you are saying. This logic discredits as a “fraud" anyone who denies the legitimacy of the regime of wage-labor/captial [sic.] and the knowledges that naturalize profit.

How do I serve my private self-interest by writing the critiques I do and therefore alienating people? Tell me! How do I serve my private self-interest by writing texts and undertaking practices that put me under FBI surveillance—who now routinely listens to my phone, opens my (e)mail? Do I gain “prestige" and “status" by publishing in College Literature, The Minnesota Review...? Look at my “status" in your own texts: I am, according to you, a strident dogmatist, a self-aggrandizing unprincipled demagogue who writes tediously long texts that are badly argued to serve his own individual self-interests. This sort of “identity" (and the ones you establish for me are kinder by far than those given to me by others) is hardly in my “own self-interest." Would it not be more in my “self-interest" to “persuade" people rather than to “critique" them, to “compromise," to be more “reasonable"—in other words, to “go along" and “get along"? As in fact the post-al cult of “community" now proposes (Nancy, The Inoperative Community, Corlett, Community Without Unity: A Politics of Derridean Extravagance). Unless you are able to “explain" the contradictions that arise from taking your observations seriously, you really have no case: you are simply trying to bluff your way out of your own unresolvable contradictions through double and reversible moves. But, as I said, your text is silent on substantive issues. It is a journalist's text: it does not have an explanation/philosophy/theory of “self" nor does it understand “self-interest" in any way other than a commonsensical bourgeois ethics. But there is another plane on which to understand “self" and “interest" and their combination as “self-interest."

This is the plane of “collectivity": the “self" in history; the self-in-connections (as opposed to a “monadic"/"nomadic" self in its own immanent difference); the self, that is, as part of a social collectivity (not a community of differences without unity). On this plane (which you quietly suppress with the help of bourgeois community theory, which is a legitimization of the isolated self), “self-interest" becomes a very different matter because it is all those practices that serve the interests of the social collective. This is the plane not of “privateness," “difference" and “individuality" but of connectivity and of commonality (the very sense that bourgeois ethics and community theory occlude and you reject, in your poststructuralist reading, as a metaphysics of subjectivity inherited from the Enlightenment). It is in this sense of the “self" that I agree with your statement that I act in “self-interest." My insistence on publishing my text in College Literature is because it serves my “self-interest" in this sociohistorical sense of self: a self in the public space whose interest is served, first and foremost, by dismantling the existing social and economic organizations that deny collectivity and fetishize privateness. Such a self, in short, struggles against the ideology and material practices of individualism which assumes, without question, that working for profit is the only mode of working and that any act of social connectivity (community with unity) is a mere “rhetorical posturing"—a gesture of “lefter-than-thou." Denying the collective subject of history is, of course, necessary in order to privilege “profit" in the “guise"—that is, in the ideological fantasy—of individuality so as to acquire legitimacy for a regime of labor that excludes fulfillment of the needs of all to satisfy the desires of a few.

A part of the struggle for such a social transformation—a small part I might emphasize--is an on-going “ruthless critique of all that exists" [die rucksichtlose Kritik alles Bestehenden] (Marx, “Letter to Arnold Ruge," Collected Works, vol.3, 143). “Ruthless," Marx goes on to say, “both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflicts with the powers that be" (143). This is the very thing that your text attempts to squash by marginalizing critique as “interjections" and then finding innumerable managerial reasons for the practical inconvenience of publishing it. Your hostility to critique derives, in part, from the fact that critique offers an unremitting explanation of practices and processes and does not leave anything as self-evident. The Marxist “ruthless critique" is unlike the post-al mode of critique that Barbara Johnson, for example, regards to be the main strategy of deconstructive reading (Johnson, “Translator's Introduction," in Derrida's Dissemination viii-x). Materialist critique is not simply an exercise in self-reflexivity. Nor is it merely a mode of explication, which, in its various forms, is the underlying method of all modes of post-al critique. Marxist critique is an apparatus for producing class consciousness by the implication of practices in the social relations of production. What you marginalize as “interjections" are attempts towards a continual, never-ceasing “implicating," and it is this very implicating of the practices of the post-al left in class politics (as I have done in my College Literature essay) that leads you to block critique as too “inconvenient" to publish and as an act of self-aggrandizing. Critique, among other things, unveils the complicity of bourgeois left practices in maintaining the ruling social relations of production (the right to profit and its accumulation into capital) by appealing to the self-evident. In the (re)production of the self-evidence of profit, critique and critique-al knowledges are violently excluded from the social and cultural scene.