Editing as Entertainment Constructing The Self-Evidence of Profit

One of the main cultural apparatuses for the exclusion of critique in commodity culture is the institution of editing. Because your 2 April, 1995 text is essentially a statement about “editing," it is necessary to unpack your theory of editing and demonstrate how it is, in actuality, an alibi for the exclusion of “critique." Under capitalism, editing is a practice through which the body of self-evident beliefs and practices naturalizing private property is protected from any serious questioning. This is done, in part, by institutionalizing the role of the editor as entertainer, a master of ceremonies. The kind of entertaining provided by the editor and its particular idiom will vary according to the different modes of publication and the classes for which they are prepared. Here I focus only on the editing of magazines and journals (I have discussed book editing elsewhere). In the editing of popular magazines, the entertainment is basically a distraction from critique-al thinking. It focuses on the pleasures of the senses and the self-evidence of the “experience" they (seemingly) bring to the world—thus the narratives of seduction; the stories of adventure and the exotica of the far-away and the different, and the lore of celebrities and tales of taste and culinary pleasures, all of which set examples of consumption. The editor organizes a feast for the senses: by managing the articles, photographs, graphics, lay-out, and so on, he suspends critique-al thinking and substitutes for it the “natural" pleasures of the senses.

In editing thought journals, the role of the editor-entertainer is performed by a more oblique appeal to the senses and experiences. Here the editor makes an assemblage (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus) of each issue of the journal in which the lines of flight are organized as rhizomatics of difference. In each issue, different people “write” differing and differential arguments, contestations and parodies and the assemblage is represented as a “body without organs"—a field of intellectual energies. However, this field of energies, far from being a theatre of difference has a very clear pedagogy. The pedagogy of thinking as entertainment; thinking (pleasure) as a diversion from (conceptual) thinking. The entertainment-effect in thought journals is not so much in the individual performances as in the lesson that the editor delivers through the ensemble she produces out of diverse pieces. The production of self-evidence in these journals takes place (as my references to Deleuze and Guattari imply) by means of a more sophisticated deployment of senses/experience than in popular magazines. Senses/experience are not represented (as is the case in popular magazines) directly in a “raw” fashion but through ludic meditations on them (self-reflexivity effect), the purpose of which is (as both Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus demonstrate) to naturalize wage-labor and capital. In staging this scene of differential meditation, the petit bourgeois post-al theorists of the ruling class play a major role.

The main claim of these theorists, who are, for the most part, represented as “radicals” of the “left"—a strategic identity which gives them credibility and legitimacy—is that they relentlessly turn over all self-evidences by “writing” detailed genealogies that show they are not so much self-evident truths as tissues of (dis)simulations. However, in the end, these genealogies reify the representation of the economic interests of the ruling class (the extraction of profit through surplus labor) as self-evident with a vengeance through a circuitous route. The genealogies not only demonstrate semantic diffusion (the patched up nature of “meanings"), but they also place language itself in the rhetorical domain of ahistorical conventions and the codes of equally diffused institutions that are autonomous from the working of the mode of production and operate with the logic of the alea. The theory clerks of the ruling class, in other words, represent their own practices as a species of an on-going deconstruction of all self-evidences of culture, but the self-evident that the clerks deconstruct is only the self-evidence of cultural “meanings” (the codes of institutions) and not the self-evidence of economic practices: the regime of profit. In endless, predictable “readings," the theory clerks display the “meanings” of texts of culture to be orphaned; deprived of any unproblematic identity since they can not rely on any founding truth (a transcendental signified that is self-evidently identical with itself). Such deconstruction of the self-evidence of “meaning”, however, is simply a decoy for securing the legitimacy of the self-evidence of “profit." This clerical deconstruction, in other words, is merely a diversionist strategy—to turn the focus away from the economic to the textual/cultural (which is then represented as the truly “political"). Let me be more “concrete” and give you an example from your own practices as an anti-critique-al editor, an entertaining editor.

"In a postmarxist milieu," writes Tom Cohen whose essay in defense of the fascist texts of Paul de Man you have published in The Minnesota Review (Nos. 41-42), the voice in support of revolution “sounds shrill” and “totalizing” because in the post-al moment, according to him, “the best political energies are metamorphosed by absorbing” poststructuralist and deconstructionist “technologies” of “thought in a changing and accelerating historical signscape” (161-62). These “technologies” are privileged in the ludic academy which, among other things, understands history not as class struggle but simply as “signscape." (I leave aside the ironic return of the repressed mimesis: in an essay that rejects mimesis the entire text is an instance of the mimesis of “signsponge” which, of course, performs the truth of my point here about the sacrifice of the “decoy.") The self-evident that is deconstructed by the “best political energies” of the clerks today is the self-evidence of scientific knowledge that “refers” (the “decoy” object of deconstruction in Cohen's essay) to the objective grounds for revolutionary practices, which is another way of saying that the deconstruction of the very grounds that question the self-evidence of relations of property—in other words, “profit." As a result of such a deconstruction of the decoy, Cohen is able to provide a new map of the self-evident post-al social formation that is necessary for the rule of profit. In this post-al version of the social, people are no longer divided by “class"! For Cohen “class” is an effect of the myth of stable reference. What, according to him, actually divides people (as I said earlier in my discussion of “value” in right-wing theories) is not their place in the social relations of production, but their “ideas," and “values"—for example, in Cohen's text, whether they believe in mimesis/reference or not. There is, consequently no such thing in Cohen's post-al map of the social as “workers” and “owners” but only mimeticists and anti-mimeticists; referentialists and differentialists (161).

This new map of social division according to belief in mimesis, among other things, satisfies the ideological need of the ruling class to declare that what it regards to be the extreme right and the extreme left are the same because, as Cohen states in his post-al theosophy both “share” a faith in mimesis/referentiality and the stability of a signified. It is self-evident then that only (the reasonable, thoughtful, deep thinking) “middle” (the non-extremist) knows that mimesis is simply a myth (161). It is not economic access but an aesthetic/epistemological “value” that separates people in society. It is difficult to find a more telling example of the way in which the clerks of theory serve the ruling class by fabricating concepts and attitudes that legitimate the rule of profit. Not class but mimesis! People of the world are divided no longer according to their place in the social relations of production but by virtue of their “belief" or lack of it in mimesis/reference! These narratives are always marketed as “new” and revolutionary theories are always dismissed as “outmoded rhetoric." Cohen, who seems to think that last year's texts are already old, markets as the “new” what turns out to be, within the “speed” frame he privileges, very old indeed. His “new” narratives are simply recycled stories of Derrida written in “Racism's Last Word” (1985) and Barbara Johnson's A World of Difference (1987), itself a reprint of older essays. Both Derrida and Johnson, of course, here recirculate the stories of undecidability of The Structuralist Controversy (1966) which are themselves elaborations of earlier stories (see my “The Dark Bolshevik” in The Alternative Orange, Spring, 1995). The marketing of the old as the “new” (and “improved"?) is, of course, itself the old story of the commodity culture of capitalism. What strikes Cohen as a flush of unprecedented insights is the warmed over Nietzschean doxology that Johnson rewrites as the credo of self-reflexive radicals: "Nothing could be more comforting to the established order than the requirement that everything be assigned a clear meaning and stand” (A World of Difference 30-31). Nothing! The stability of the signifier and its clear adequation with a signified, in this ludic politics, is more “comforting” to the “established order” than the rate of profit. What Cohen now in 1995 popularizes is what Johnson concluded in 1986 from her occulting of profit by signification: “the undecidable [non-mimetic] is the political” (194).

Both the “decoy” ("reference"), which is deconstructed in Derrida and Johnson, and its very deconstruction are popularized and made into the self-evident of ludic politics, among other places, in Cohen's text. Cohen's text, in short, makes it possible for the the real economic practice ("profit") to emerge uncontested, because, having deconstructed “reference," it now becomes impossible even to point in the direction of any practice, let alone “refer" to “profit," as the truth of the ruling class. Profit, in Cohen's transreferential linguistic fascism, is simply a trace in the “historical signscape” and not the exploitation of direct producers by the owners of the means of production. After such a de Manian reading, profit is an undecidable identity and not an objective, historical and material practice.

The editor-as-entertainer, publishes Cohen's essay and then “balances” it by publishing, in the same issue, a text that opposes de Manian premises and the political practices of his annotators such as Cohen. This pattern ("on the one hand/on the other hand") is then repeated throughout on the “political” grounds of freedom of expression, openness of debate and the unhindered exchange of different ideas and positions. The bourgeois editor is “proud” that he does not tell her readers what to think or how to think but merely provides them with a diversity of views and lets them make up their own mind.

But such editing is, of course, decidedly political since the reader of The Minnesota Review Nos. 41-42 is clearly taught a lesson in the assemblage of texts “on the one hand, on the other hand." If she takes this representation seriously, she comes away with a narrative of double-sided reversibilities: “on the one hand” there are, in the post-al moment, no grounds to establish claims of revolution since there are no “referential” realities; “on the other hand” the “differential” itself is a species of “reference” in the dialectics of history. So which is it? Difference or reference? The Minnesota Review Nos. 41-42 merely “problematizes” the binary and, in doing so, once again brings about a political stalemate in a move that is structured into bourgeois editing practices. The reader, if she has taken the editorial lesson of this issue seriously, can no longer “act” for revolution nor can she decide not to act for it since both are, in the narrative of editing of The Minnesota Review Nos. 41-42 “highly problematic." Both options are now placed in quotation marks and thus require further contemplation: The lesson that the editors of The Minnesota Review Nos. 41-42 give her is: go home and “think about it"! This is the underlying pedagogy of ludic editing. The editor has provided the reader with an occasion for reflection—a reflection which will, if rigorously followed, lead to an instance of sublime self-reflexivity which is the supreme form of intellectual entertainment.

The editor as entertainer performs his/her "job” by diverting the attention of the reader, in the first instance, away from “critique” to “contemplation"—from “explanation” to sheer “description”; from “outside” to “inside"—and then by displacing “contemplation” (as an instance of the incommensurable play of concepts) with the delight of the senses—from “description” to “experience." To be precise: the reader is placed in a zone of ambiguity, dilemma, quandary, and undecidability, a zone that will become more ambiguous and enigmatic the more the reader reads. Having placed the reader in this undecidable zone, the editor offers, as a way out of the unresolvable reversibilities of concepts, none of which can be privileged (and in the name of a wisdom that comes only after one has encountered these dilemmas), the pleasures of the senses (by, for example, symbolically publishing “poems," “stories," portfolio of photographs...). The tangible, the sensuous and the post-al “taste” (as a synecdoche for all sensualities) evoked by the “aesthetic” object (poems, photos, paintings) displace “concepts," and what Deleuze and Guattari call “intensities” take the place of the revolutionary explanation of social totalities and the praxis to change it. The question is no longer the “truth” of revolution and the transformation of social practices but, to quote Deleuze and Guattari, “the production of speeds and slownesses between particles." The sensory delights of the popular magazine is reintroduced into the thought journal but with a detour: both the popular magazine and the thought journal exclude critique by the transcendental joys of the sensory. In the popular magazine this takes the form of a New Age cult of sensitivity; in the thought journal it is represented as the wisdom of the seasoned intellect which now knows the limits of the intellect and the dead end of incomensurate [sic.] concepts. In both cases, the bourgeois editor successfully “entertains” the reader and diverts him/her from critique-al praxis.

This is the aim of bourgeois editing: to bring about (beyond all its immediate concerns with various texts, issues, problems... ) a political stalemate, by the ruse of self-reflexivity, thoughtfulness, contemplation, self-knowledge, and sensitivity; to postpone partisanship (we need to think about it more!), and, finally, to displace all forms of conceptuality by a savvy sensuality—a retreat into the pleasures of the experiences of the senses as a mark of having reached a depth of thinking that is aware of the limits of thinking. This is another way of saying that the aim of the bourgeois editor is to turn praxis into a meditation upon praxis and thus transform it into a series of ad hoc sensuous practical measures of the kind advocated by the “new social movements." Practical measures of this kind simply reform the system in local terms—remember, for the new social movements the “global” is masculinist. The whole purpose of such editing is to discourage a global conceptual understanding of such systems as “capitalism” and to reject the struggle for such knowledges as simply totalitarian, masculinist urges. These ad hoc, piecemeal measures never question (the structures of) profit: they simply take the hard edges off profit and give it a human face. The work of the editor as entertainer is to protect profit by rendering it self-evident through the exclusion of critique by representing it as a self-aggrandizing interjection!

What passes for self-reflexivity is, in actuality, an exclusion of partisan explanatory critique so that the status quo can continue its hegemony without contestation. Self-reflexivity is, in short, an apparatus of class politics: it suspends partisan critique in the name of learning about “both sides of the story” and thus represents the conditions for the production of profit as the self-evident of human societies. But “both sides of the story” is a fiction of the ruling class for letting the side of power continue its powerful rule without intervention from the opposition. The double-sided story is an entertaining fiction: a differing device that defers any coming to a conclusion about private property and suppresses the fact that there is only one side to this story and that is the side of the exploitation of direct producers by owners. The bourgeois editor of the thought journal represents “one-sided"ness as unthoughtful, totalitarian and divisive. In doing so, he diverts the reader away from critique by taking the position that it is not his job to tell the reader how and what to think. At the very same time, he is, of course, telling the reader exactly what to do: take your time and think about it; you don't what to make up your mind now; you want to be thoughtful; wait until later, and the “later” will, of course, never come! The editor-as-entertainer thus acts as the master of ceremonies in a class fest of “common knowledge” (as opposed to “partisan knowledge"), the concept of which is now the title of one of Oxford University Press's journals. Common Knowledge is explicitly founded upon the editorial policy of rejecting the revolutionary and partisan and instead focusing on what all of the “included"—the Rorty-Fish notion of “community"—have in common without the discord of “critique” (the antagonism of the excluded that the editors mock as polemical and an effect of resentiment).

Critique “interjects” (to use your derogatory word) discord into this class feast of taste (full-ness)—the nonconceptual. It gets in the way of “pleasure” and leaves a bad taste. According to you, critique is a form of violent meddling into other people's affairs. Therefore, in your College Literature narrative, for example, you read my critique as simply the “insertion” of my “position” into other discourses. What I say is a rude “interjection” in the subtle space of self-reflexivity. Critique, in the words of Tom Cohen, who acts as the sheriff of undecidability in his essays, is the “shrill” voice of the outside of class antagonism and the contradictions of capital. Critique shatters the quiet reveries and meditations that the bourgeois editor is appointed to commodify. This is why you oppose critique and argue that it is inconvenient to publish it. It is not “inconvenient” for a bourgeois editor to hold the press, postpone the deadline, and even reorganize an entire issue in order to accommodate an essay from a “name” contributor, but it is inconvenient for him to ask a no-name citizen to respond to an attack on him!

Your 2 April, 1995 text accepts this notion of editing. Thus it is self-evident in your text that giving space to critique is bothersome for an editor because the self-evident "job” of an editor is to weed out the disturbing texts, meet deadlines and be “efficient." The editor in your text is, as I said, the “manager” of “common knowledge." She, self-evidently in your text, is not a person whose main task is to use the journal as an apparatus of social change by soliciting and publishing (no matter how inconvenient or difficult such a process might be and no matter how behind schedule she might be) those texts that put pressure on the existing relations of property and thus unveil the hidden crisis—the contradictions of the social relations of production and the forces of production. After all an editor should not tell the reader what to think! The bourgeois editor hangs on to the myth of editing as not telling the reader what to think but, curiously enough he thinks of himself as a political person! He rejects any suggestion that he is apolitical and, like Cathy Davidson upon being asked to show what are her political beliefs and practices, merely declares: “I'm a political person; politics is a passionate part of my life” (The Minnesota Review Nos. 41-42, 71). His politics, like Davidson's, are all those practices that enhance the existing power by new interpretations, new twists of phrases and innovative ways; as a result, the writer who opposes this power becomes for such an editor the writer of self-aggrandizing interjections.

Interventionist texts that aim at dis-managing the crisis are texts that provide idioms, spaces and practices that open up cultural and political forums for more elaborate articulations of the contradictions of the social relations of production and forces of production. They take the side of the emerging social relations of production. Such dis-managing of the crisis undertaken through “critique” is exactly what shows the fundamental instability of capitalism and foregrounds the crisis of legitimacy of the regime of wage labor and the managerial strategies of the theory clerks in the knowledge industry who attempt to mystify that crisis. I insist on getting my texts published because they are part of this collective, on-going, ceaseless effort to dis-manage the crisis by meticulous, detailed ("long"?) and never-stopping analyses of all that exists—from labor relations to the editing of books at the Verso-Routledge cartel. Any occasion serves as a site for displaying the workings of the dominant social relations of production and the ways in which they exploit the direct producers.

In this letter to you, for example, I am critique-ally implicating your own practices as an editor in the class politics whose main purpose is to defend capitalism by rendering profit the self-evident of human societies. I am trying to show how the seemingly trivial (editing of The Minnesota Review) is closely tied to what is usually regarded as non-trivial: my point is there is nothing trivial in political struggle. There is nothing trivial in the ceaseless struggle for socialism. In terms of the “big picture," the editing of The Minnesota Review is a rather trivial matter. But, the way that the ruling class makes profit self-evident—and this is my basic point—is by establishing innumerable pockets of such seemingly trivial instances, because the texture of daily life under capitalism is constituted out of suturing all these trivial practices together and making a huge text of the “natural” out of them. In unpacking the editorial practices of The Minnesota Review, one is unweaving this text of the everyday.

To focus on these issues is a non-ending task. Of course, the more one puts pressure on these trivial practices, the more one runs into anger and resistance because these trivial practices are the haven of the self-evident—as your own letter clearly shows. You know that as long as College Literature has “reasons” (such as the ones you list), and, by authority of those reasons, can refuse to publish my critique of Michael Sprinker's “Letter to the Editor," the premises of that letter (which support the very self-evident practices that underpin College Literature and lend support to the logic of the self-evident that finally makes the self-evidence of profit an uncontested or unnoticed question) go unquestioned. You know that you are an ally of the editors of College Literature not necessarily because you agree with them (I am sure you are “proud” that your editing is very different from theirs), but because you, they and and all bourgeois editors share the same overriding principle: editing as an assemblage of texts aimed at developing “self-reflexivity” and “thoughtfulness” in the readers who will then “take their time” to decide about the rule of profit (the subtext of all that you publish) which is the very condition of possibility for the continuation of the status quo, which is itself the naturalization of profit. As long as you yourself are able to find “reasons” not to publish my letter of 10 November 1994 to you and the other editors of The Minnesota Review, your own practices as editor-assembler will go unquestioned. So, the practical “reasons” that you give in your text are all really alibis of political interest. Your practical reasons, in other words, are the shields under which some of the most necessary ideas, practices, and concepts that legitimate the ruling class political theory are concealed.