Critique and Class Consciousness

I want to shift my focus here and discuss in more detail some aspects of critique and especially its contribution to social struggle: in other words, I would like to ask the question what does critique do when it implicates practices in the workings of the regime of wage-labor and capital? For you, “ruthless critique” is a species of self-aggrandizing—after all, according to the epistemological cliche of the post-al left, what grounds does the writer have for her global ruthless critique of everything existing? Is such an explanatory critique not the height of epistemological arrogance, of political totalitarianism? Telling people what and how to think? Therefore, those writers, who have gone beyond your local managerial and technicist logic, have attempted to dismiss the “ruthless critique of everything existing” through what is seen, in the ludic knowledge industry, as more “sophisticated” strategies: by troping the claims of “critique” and (on the epistemological plane) by degrounding it in an effort to “prove” (as Lenin says, for the “thousand and first time") that there is no reliable foundation for the “truths” of such a critique. This degrounding of “critique," which is vital to protecting the rule of profit, is, of course, not limited to bourgeois idealists—whether rationalist (Kant) or skepticist (Hume). Kant limits critique to a critique of its own reasons and its own processes and thus eventually (in the familiar move that I have in part described in terms of the practices of bourgeois editing) reduces critique to an instance of sublime self-reflexivity: critique examining its own premises and thus never getting out of its own rationality. This is, of course, a predictable rationalist move to close off the “outside” of history—see how Popper (The Open Society and its Enemies, vol 2, 100-10; 199-211; 259-80), continuing the same rationalist moves, finally rejects history as a mode of historicism (his code word for Marxism). Hume, moving in the opposite direction, degrounds critique's conceptual explanations by reducing all explanations to a chain of unrelated sensual and sensory experiences (again, as I elaborated in my discussion of the editorial practices of bourgeois academics, this move from concept to experience is simply the other side of rationalist self-reflexivity and encounter with the “sublime” “depth” of the undecidable). For Hume, as he puts in his A Treatise of Human Nature, "...'tis still certain we cannot go beyond experience," and thus any attempt—such as critique—to do so “ought at first to be rejected as presumptuous and chimerical." (How close is your own notion of critique-al writing as “self-aggrandizing” to this view of explanatory critique as “presumptuous"?) But the discrediting of “critique” is not limited to such bourgeois philosophers. In the post-al moment, it is practiced with a vengeance by an increasing number of “left” academics (some of whom call themselves neo/post/para/marxist-marxian). I have already discussed Michael Sprinker's resistance to critique, but he is not alone. Academics such as Fredric Jameson, as I have argued in my theorizing of the grounds of revolutionary critique in College Literature, (October 1994, pp. 98-99), basically rejects critique as part of the metaphysics of Enlightenment/modernity. Gerald Graff, as I will demonstrate later, has systematically suppressed critique as a form of propaganda in all his writings and practices. The list of the post-al opponents of critique is a very long one...

In this text, I want to expand my theorizing of critique and explore some of its aspects that I did not have space to engage in College Literature. I will therefore start here by relating critique, at least in the first instance, to an old principle in the struggle against the ruling class and its clerks of ideology—a principle that is articulated in the lore of peoples' politics in many ways, and one of them goes something like:

REMEMBER!

TO BE LITERATE IS TO BE LIBERATED

SO THAT NOBODY CAN FOOL YOU AGAIN

A ruthless “critique” of everything existing develops this revolutionary “literacy"—which is, at root, a materialist literacy of concepts as opposed to the instrumental literacy of skills put forth by bourgeois pedagoges, [sic.] especially in “writing” classes.

To go back to your accusation (that I insist on publishing my texts because they serve my self-interest), it is in the interest of my “self"—as part of a revolutionary and historical collective—to participate in publishing an unbroken chain of critiques of all that exists and to have on-going citizens' contestations over social practices and policies, from welfare to the knowledges disseminated in the classroom, so that new “literacies” are produced for all citizens. It is only through such a ceaseless critique that revolutionary literacies can be provided, for instance, for students in such classes as those of Gerald Graff. In these classes, “critique” and critique-al knowledges are rejected as viable knowledges because such knowledges, Graff believes, are in fact a form of indoctrination (The Left Margin, ed. Karen Fitts and Alan W. France, SUNY Press, 1995). But, at the same time, Graff, in a quite violent manner, indoctrinates his own students into the capitalist belief in profit. The rejection of critique-al knowledges, especially in the pedagogical setting, is more fully developed by Graff in collaboration with Gregory Jay in their “A Critique of Critical Pedagogy"—a text of propaganda by those who, formally, reject propaganda. Here they defend capitalism and profit as the self-evident of human societies. Graff and Jay turn “profit” into a self-evidence by representing it as a free choice (another self-evidence in bourgeois democracy—as I said, daily life is made up of these invisible self-evidences). What if, Graff and Jay write, a “student... decides that, for him or her authentic liberation means joining a corporation and making a lot of money” ("A Critique of Critical Pedagogy” in Higher Education Under Fire, ed. C. Nelson and M. Berube, New York: Routledge, 1995, 203).

The “hypothetical” question is not “hypothetical” at all but is, in fact, identical with the actual, working model of subjectivity supposed by the ruling class and its theorists. However, it is posed as “hypothetical” in order to simulate openness, self-reflexivity and fairness and to promote a rhetorically more effective legitimation of pluralism by quietly appealing to the bourgeois commonsense in which the “other” of this hypothetical situation, the revolutionary project of collective praxis is automatically read as “totalitarian." Thus the appeal to such a “hypothetical” question (and its underlying commonsense) is a reactionary double move: it not only implies the representation of revolutionary praxis as “totalitarian” but also argues for the “difference” of personal “liberation” and personal “freedom” (to join a corporation) as the ultimate goal of a successful life. Doing so is exactly what negates collective emancipation and mystifies the economic interests of the ruling class by claiming those interests to be the interests of all classes: the ultimate horizons of life itself. Graff and Jay's counter-critique-al pedagogy is reactionary because the un-said of their text (the seemingly hypothetical: “What if... the student...") which is offered to demolish claims of critique-al knowledges, is that the limit tes(x)t of a happy life is the unhindered path to the accumulation of “profit” and this is the denial of historically determined human “needs."

Emancipation is not achieved through individual quests for success. These are not equivalent to personal freedom—as queer theorists and feminists such as Gayle Rubin and Judith Butler think; for them, any attempt at collective freedom from necessity is masculinist ("Sexual Traffic," Differences 6, 2-3, 1994: 62-99). In equating individual success and personal freedom, Graff and Jay's anti-critique-al pedagogy legitimates the notion of the entrepreneurial subject that is necessary for the uncontested continuation of the regime of capital and wage-labor. Anyone who renders the regime of “profit” as a possible goal of life also legitimates the extraction of surplus labor (the only source of profit) as a natural part of social life and, in so doing, sanctions the exploitative social relations of production. Such a theorist is a reactionary because his/her “arguments” support the dominant social relations of production and do not bring to crisis the rifts and contradictions between the forces of production and the social relations of production. They write, as you do, to manage that crisis—to conceal it under the alibi of a “democratic culture” in which everyone is “free” to pursue “profit” knowing full well that under capitalism your “profit” is someone else's “loss." Such an anti-critique-al pedagogy is reactionary because it legitimates personal gains as the goal of social life and systematically undercuts any attempt to establish causal relations between “loss” and “profit” which is another way of saying that anti-critique-al pedagogy attempts to diffuse class struggle by displacing “conflicts” with “difference." Anti-critique-al knowledges are reactionary in their criticism of the goal of revolutionary praxis—to overthrow the regime of “profit” and to put in its place historically determined human needs—as totalitarian and reductive.

Emancipation is not about “desire” ("making a lot of money"), it is about meeting human “needs." No single person can possibly be emancipated or liberated when his liberation ("making a lot of money") would inevitably mean that a lot of people make no money. In this case, his happiness would be the misery of others. Explanatory critique involves practices that advocate collective emancipation and deploy materialist pedagogy to provide class consciousness about the relations between the personal and the collective, reform and revolution. This is why the exclusion of critique is indeed reactionary. Anti-critique-al pedagogy is the project of theory clerks in defense of the free market. The free market is a tool for enslaving humankind and not the means for its emancipation.

A student with materialist literacies will be able to show the complicity of such a classroom (one that represents itself as part of a “left” pedagogy and on the side of a free society) with the exploitative practices of the owners of the means of production and thus will not let the pedagogue “fool him again." He will be able to demonstrate that the notion of “freedom” underlying this pedagogy is the freedom of exploitation of one human being by another and the free society that such a pedagogy promises is the free society of property holders. Deploying her materialist literacies, she will be able to show that under capitalism there is no such thing as “free choice” and that all choices are made by the laws of the motion of capital and under “the silent compulsion of economic relations” (Marx, Capital, 1, 899). For each one who “freely chooses” to make “a lot of money” ("profit") there are several who will be subjugated to the extraction of surplus labor: profit ("a lot of money") for one is made out of the surplus labor of the others. The critique-al student will then be able to relate Graff's and Jay's defense of the right of the student to freely choose to “make a lot of money” to Graff's and Jay's writings in general, as well as to their other practices as clerks of the ruling class, in which they work to manage the crisis of capitalism through such organizations as “Teachers for a Democratic Culture." Through such a critique, the student shows the relations between reactionary pedagogy and capitalism; exposes what universities in advanced industrial “democracies” are now doing to protect the regime of profit, and argues for a different kind of university and pedagogy which are not possible within the present system of profit. Such a materialist critique raises founding questions about the organization of economic resources and leads to an argument for socialism. It is only under socialism that people have freedom and knowledge is set free from the yoke of profit. This, in outline, is how the seemingly trivial, in the guise of a hypothesis—the hypothetical question of a bourgeois pedagogue—is, in actuality, a defense of “profit” as the self-evident act in human societies. The critique of the trivial, on the other hand, leads to a radical understanding that provides the grounds for revolutionary praxis. One of the aims of critique in such a classroom is to provide an intervention that will change the purpose of pedagogy from cultivating self-reflexivity and contemplation to the production of class consciousness. This is why Graff and Jay, like you and many many other bourgeois pedagogues, regard materialist critique to be indoctrination, an act of self-aggrandizing and a totalitarian practice. The regime of profit that Graff and Jay, as well as you and numerous others, defend needs to discredit explanatory critique and the class consciousness it brings about. And you are all doing a great job: you have almost unlimited access to mainstream media (from Routledge to the New York Times) and determine what appears and what does not appear in the “major” journals and books of prestigious publishing houses. You have all been extremely effective in organizing attacks on materialist critique and representing it as an “extremist” indoctrination. The slightest attempt by someone like me to have his texts published (even in marginal publications and by marginal presses) runs into concerted resistance by all of you who try to prevent my efforts to at least outline a critique of your practices. And this is done by the very people who declare themselves anti-totalitarian and support freedom for all—or rather only those “all” who do not implicate their practices in the regime of profit.

You say that I want my texts to be published because publishing my texts serves my self-interest. If that is my goal, then, I am serving my self-interest in a rather odd way—alienating people in power, antagonizing those who control the publishing industry, and critiquing the logic of profit. In doing so, I have worked to open space for the texts of all citizens. Does this mean that I am a (relativist) liberal who believes truth will be established simply by putting (what are said to be) diverse versions of the truth together? No, not at all. I am a revolutionary and as such committed to open debate and democratic inquiry, but, above all, I am a partisan of the truth of the proletariat.

REMEMBER!

TO BE LITERATE IS TO BE LIBERATED

SO THAT NOBODY CAN FOOL YOU AGAIN

For me as a partisan, the truth of the proletariat—forged in the very process of struggle—is what ensures that “nobody can fool you again." False consciousness (fool you again) is combated only by class consciousness, and class consciousness is developed out of the ruthless materialist “critique” of everything existing (everything existing = class society). I am committed to the principle of the free exchange of ideas and debates about practices. (Later I will argue that your text's claim that I had the last word, in the College Literature symposium, is simply a rhetorical maneuver.) But I am also a partisan—not a liberal whose truth is the amalgamation of all partial truths. I also have a historical and material understanding of the issues and know that, for example, at the present time, in the U.S. there is no comparison at all between the spaces available for those texts that support ruling class interests and those that struggle against them. The liberal slogan of the “free exchange of ideas"—it should not be forgotten—is put forth by the dominant knowledge industry simply to conceal this inequality of access to media—which is, of course, an effect of the inequality of access to economic resources. The slogan ("free exchange of ideas"), therefore, should be understood historically and in the material context of this inequality: it should not be used as an alibi (as your text does) to increase even more the already near-monopoly of the media by those who already have unrestrained access. An abstract argument for the “free exchange of ideas," under the present unequal circumstances, amounts to an argument for the monopoly of the media by the clerks of the ruling class since they already have access to the majority of the publishing media.

It is the goal of materialist critique to produce class consciousness in people. However, such a critique has to go through innumerable detours to get there, because in order to get there, as the length of this critique itself shows, the writer of a critique has to demystify layers and layers of the ruling class commonsense that constitutes the self-evident truths of capitalism. The “length” of an explanatory critique, what your text's managerial logic uses as a reason for not publishing the critique, is caused by the critique's need to go through a whole series of demystifications. Its length, in other words, is a function of this political and historical actuality: the ruling intelligibilities of capitalism envelop all aspects of knowing and working, and in order to arrive at a praxis based on class consciousness, all sides of these intelligibilities will have to be—patiently and meticulously—critiqued. Such a critique requires a long text. In a short text only the self-evidence of the ruling class can be re-affirmed. The class consciousness that materialist critique produces will help people to overcome their individualities and see their shared historical and class interests. Such a class consciousness will, thus, lead to the organization, in the first instance, of local revolutionary cells. These “cells," however, no matter how effective, are still only a part of the global struggle, and thus need to become places for a further class awareness that will connect them together and form (given the present social formations) national revolutionary collectives that supersede the interests of localities. As the proletarian class consciousness provides a new understanding of the world-historical collectivities of people, these national boundaries will be seen for what they are: the lines dividing the proletariat the world over along ethnic, geographical, religious... axes that displace labor. National boundaries, in light of class consciousness, will be recognized for the diversionary strategies they actually are: strategies that obscure the real division of workers and owners across national boundaries. The final stage, therefore, of proletarian class consciousness is to organize all proletaria [sic.] of the world into a new vanguard international party. This is where the materialist “ruthless critique of everything existing” leads.

I am committed to the truth of revolutionary critique as it unfolds in various stages from the demystification of the most local to the construction of the most global. As a revolutionary, I work to get this side of the truth out. My efforts to get out this critique-al truth (as opposed to the self-evidence of the common sense) are persistent because the ruling class's side always gets out—it is the cognitive milieu of the everyday, it is always “covered." To go along with the formal liberal (ACLU slogan) of the freedom of exchange without taking this historical and material actuality into account is basically, as I have already argued, an attempt to double and triple the space for the ruling class's side.

Your texts are the texts of the ruling class; look at the coverage they get: from Routledge to The New York Times and places in-between (such as Cambridge University Press). Why do you think your texts have such access to the most powerful and prestigious media outlets? Why do you think The New York Times comes to you, again and again? They come to you because, in covering your narrative of knowledge, they cover the side of the ruling class. I am therefore not all that concerned with whether your particular text gets out: your texts are already out there, whether they are signed by you or Fish, Haraway, Butler, Cornell West, Jameson, Greenblatt, Graff, de Man, Sprinker, Aronowitz.... Who has the last word? You always have had, do have and will have the last word over your many signatures. You say that I had the last word in the College Literature symposium, and thus you did not have a “chance to answer" my “accusations." I did not accuse you of anything. I have explained at length in my “The Dark Bolshevik," the politics of the charges of “slandering” and “accusing” made by members of the post-al left. Here, I briefly adapt my comments in that essay in terms of your specific observation. I have not “accused” you of anything. What I have done is to merely read back to you, your own texts and statements. I have merely quoted the evidence provided by your own essay in College Literature and the interviews you have given to The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Times and elsewhere. It is a mark of your own cynicism in these texts and statements that you do not recognize them when they are quoted back to you, and then to cover the gap between what you have said and what you want to represent your texts as having said, you accuse me of having “accused” you. This is what in “The Dark Bolshevik” I called, reflexive false consciousness—the cynical consciousness. In the glow of glamour, you sit down and give an interview to The New York Times—the voice of the owners—and affirm the ruling ideology. But once those very words are read back to you, you object in shock and horror at having been misrepresented and quoted out of context and “accused." I did not accuse you of anything: I simply showed you how your own texts accuse themselves in history of having betrayed the cause of the proletariat because they act in pragmatic cynicism. They speak to the occasion “strategically” because the post-al left has no principles: its “philosophy” is an ensemble of strategies. This is also the condition of your own texts, as I am trying to show here. Your texts are empty texts: they are the embodiment of strategies, void of theoretical and principled arguments.

Like all cynical texts, yours claim that they “really did not mean” what they historically have said and deny that they have ever said it. They, thus, appeal to all sorts of theories of interpretation/performance/parody to cover up the cruel historical literalness of their reflexive performances. The erasure of the “literal” and the domination of the “tropic” (to which Tom Cohen's essay in The Minnesota Review 41-42 is devoted) in ludic theory is not simply an epistemological or theoretical project. The “undecidability” (postliteralness) of what has been said and done is what provides the ruling class and its petit bourgeois theorists with an alibi and enables them to sing their song of evasion and collaboration:

"That is not it at all, That is not what I meant at all.”

The immense usefulness of poststructuralism for the post-al left is that it provides the theoretical apparatus for turning the historical literalness of practices and discourses into an “undecidable” in-betweenness—the crowning achievement of Paul de Man's linguistic fascism. In this regime of cynicism, buttressed by a linguistic indeterminacy that degrounds the reference, “accusation” becomes the name of that practice of reading back in which the literalness of the tropic in class struggle is revealed.

But what is it that prevents you from opening up the College Literature discussion and not letting me get away with the “last word"? Why do you not continue that discussion in the pages of The Minnesota Review or any other journal? The public should know what is it (beyond simply the song of deniability: “that is not what I meant at all"), that you were prevented from saying and that is not said day and night in newspapers, journals, situation comedies and soap operas, night and day on TV, in films and other media? More literally, who prevents you from continuing the debate to show (once and for all?) the absolute falsehood and deceptive nature of my last word? In my letter of 10 November, 1994, I sent you a text and urged you to open the pages of The Minnesota Review to a wide-ranging debate about intellectual practices. Why not open up the pages of the journal, publish my letter and then say what you were prevented from saying? Why so many excuses for not publishing my letter? Why not support unconstrained debate in the pages of The Minnesota Review? You can say whatever you need on any questions that you think need to be further elaborated: all you have to do is to give others space to engage your questions. What last word? You are using this tired cliche to simply give the illusion that you were prevented from putting forth your insights into the workings of whatever it is that you have insights into. Here is your chance—open up the pages of The Minnesota Review to a debate without last words. Let the debate go on as long as you and others have anything to say. What is more important than such an on-going discussion in a “journal of committed writing," as you keep describing The Minnesota Review? What do you want to do with the space of The Minnesota Review? Print more entertaining (balancing) views? You have given me every excuse under the sun not to have such an open forum: stop the excuses and act on what you say—do not let anyone (including yourself) get away with the “last word."

But why do I say that your text is the text of the ruling class? Because, it not only legitimates the regime of profit (as I have already indicated in my discussion of editing and the related issues that you raise in your text) but it also normalizes the logic by which the ruling class naturalizes its economic interests as the universal interests of all classes. I will give you specific examples here, and if you give me room in The Minnesota Review, I will develop a more extended analysis. The overriding “logic” of the texts of the ruling class is to distract the focus away from social practices and discourses toward individual identities and the moral and ethical features of particular persons. In doing so, this ruling logic marginalizes materialist critique and its systemic explanations; suppresses revolutionary literacies, and produces false consciousness. The ruling class is never able to deal with explanatory critique—which implicates its practices in the larger workings of the relations of exploitation—so it does what you do: it refocuses the issues from practices to people. Remember when the ruling class was faced with the explanatory critiques of Ralph Nadar [sic.] on automobile safety? General Motor hired detectives to see if they could find some “personal” scandal about him: his race, his features, his morals, his behavior. He was the uppity ("self-aggrandizing") “other" who wanted to serve his “self-interest"—all because he had dared to question the “master's” profit practices. When, what Marx calls, the “political hull” of the ruling class (the state) decided to put another “uppity” other in his place and exclude his explanatory critique, J. Edgar Hoover tapped Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s phones to find something on “him." The texts of the ruling class always deploy the same strategy: discredit the person, and you have discredited her/his ideas/practices and thus have safely removed that person's truth from the scene of the social.

Your text of 2 April, 1995 is an embodiment of this logic of discrediting the person so as to discredit the truth he is putting forth. But this strategy is not limited to that text; your College Literature text begins and ends with me, as a person, and how untrustable and strange I am. You begin by describing me in terms that in the hegemonic commonsense of the West are terms associated with terrorists and religious fundamentalists. In your narrative I am either a “dogmaticist” or a “charismatic” person ("a prophet or a demagogue"). I leave aside, until a future time, the significance of the double in this text: the very text that reduces me to a stereotype of binaries advocates a mode of thought (poststructuralism) whose programmatic standing is above all for the deconstruction of binaries. It is a sign of radicalism to deconstruct binaries in essays, but when it comes to the historical, actual "other," the poststructuralist radical goes back to an either/or. Your text attempts to discredit me by representing me as a cultist, a brain-washer, an irrational person, who is self-serving, self-adulating, self-aggrandizing ("uppity"), mindless, thoughtless and who, instead of having ideas, has dogma. Your text does not offer a single argument: it does not even enter into a discussion of the ideas involved. Rather it tries to discredit me in the easy-to-understand terms deployed by gossip tabloids (sold in the checkout lines of supermarkets) to distract people from class relations and focus their attention on sensationalism. Your text takes for granted that if I am discredited, my ideas and practices will be discredited. Given the power and range of your network in the culture industry, I have no doubt that you (by whatever signature “you” is circulated) will have no difficulty discrediting me—it is not all that difficult to discredit a person whose very identity is already culturally under suspicion. But then what? Do you think you will be able to put an end to the practices that I am disseminating? I am only a small part of a collective effort. The only way for you to be effective is to stop occluding the issues by raising managerial and technicist questions and instead to begin to engage the issues, “concepts," practices and their histories. Anecdotes are effective only as populist distractions. The ruling class has always marked its opponents as mindless followers of a cult, as liars, deceivers, demagogues.

Your text is a text of the ruling class because, like all texts of the ruling class it blames the victim. In the College Literature debate I am the subject of relentless attacks by 12 different texts, and when I respond, my response is represented in your 2 April, 1995 text as the violent “last word” that oppresses the participants in the symposium (i.e. the attackers). For example, are you, whose text turns me into a mindless monster, the “victim” of my “last word," which is basically a reading back to you of your very own texts and interviews? Remember: people other than your friends and sympathizers are reading... not all people have suspended their critique-al thinking.

Your text is the text of the ruling class because, like all such texts, when it fails to discredit ideas and practices by discrediting the persons associated with them, it resorts to another tested and favorite strategy made popular in such ruling class texts as the “Firing Line” hosted by William Buckley. This strategy is to bypass the ideas and practices entirely and instead to focus on their formal “procedures"—from aesthetic issues (style, length, language...) to what is commonsensically regarded to be “logic” but in actuality is basically a matter of observing the protocols of the ruling class commonsense. “Logical” here means according to the rule of commonsense and thus “bad argument” (ill logic) simply signals that the commonsense is being damaged in this “argument." The appeal of this focus on “procedures” is that it guarantees the safety of the commonsense since it never allows the discussion to even approach the content of practices and the truth of the proposition. It keeps the debate limited to the formal organization of the proposition. Your text is too long—end of discussion. Your argument is bad—you are finished. There is never an examination of the conditions of production of a “long” essay or a “bad” argument: length and “bad-ness” are never historicized; they are “essentially” bad. They are, as in your text, part of a transhistorical self-evidence: a set of forms applicable under all circumstances everywhere. In this way the explanatory critiques of the opposition are excluded from the scene of social struggle because (according to this entrenched procedural approach that is dominant from freshman composition classes to “Firing Line," from The New York Times to the pages of Social Text and beyond) there is always a “technical” problem with oppositional texts!

This procedural approach to intellectual work and revolutionary praxis enables the ruling class text to acquire cultural power from knowledge—in the absence of ideas—that is, not in terms of the ideas themselves but rather from codes for the presentation of ideas. This is the source of power, for instance, of William Buckley: not a person of ideas but a master of intellectual ceremonies. But why are some of these formal features (for instance, length and bad argument, to take your concerns) self-evidently carriers of value? Let's take the question of “length," which I have already raised several times. Shortness is valued, in and of itself, because in a short text only the most familiar and most entrenched kind of argument can be even nodded at. There is no place in a short essay to question the hegemony of the established logic: if one opposes that logic one has room only to give one's conclusions, and, in the light of entrenched ideas, a conclusion without an argument reads more like the slogans of a demagogue (cultist), as simply crude assertions. The short essay is the ideal site for recirculating those views that one does not have to argue for: all one has to do is to point to them, nod at them, wink at them, and everybody knows and agrees. The “genius” of Montaigne is not in any new understanding of the world but in recirculating the cliches of the bourgeois commonsense. But this recirculation is legitimated under the guise of the “formal” properties of the Essais. They are said to be exemplary of “irony, humor, and a spontaneously flowing style incorporating wise judgments on human affairs."

It is necessary to exclude the long essay—even before it enters the contestation—on formal grounds. By your formalist criterion, The German Ideology in all its 700 pages is “too long," Capital in its all four volumes (before you find another technicist “fault” with my point, let me say that the three volumes of Theories of Surplus Value are in fact volume four of Capital) and 4650 pages is “too long." Your text excludes any historical discussion of length--it simply asserts that long essays are inconvenient to publish and therefore.... The funny thing is, as is often the case in the incoherent logic of the ruling class, which is really not a logic but an ideology, there are “exceptions." For instance, the “long” text of Proust (A la recherche du temps perdu) is somehow not too long: it is uninterrupted textual ecstasy. In fact, anyone who complains about its length is automatically branded as a philistine and his reading dismissed as impatient and marked by an absence of rigor and shortness of attention span—an expression of “vulgarity." But he who announces that The German Ideology is too long is by the same logic regarded to be an informed person, an “authority”: one who knows what he is talking about. Length, of course, is not the real issue—it never has been. The coherence and logic of the argument is not the real issue nor has it ever been. The real issue is what is legitmated [sic.] by the length and the argument? If what they represent as the truth is supportive of the dominant social relations of production, they are automatically regarded to be the right length and possess the required coherence; otherwise they are too long and incoherent—"badly argued."

You end your text of 2 April 1995 in the same way that you started it: with another managerial point. You ask “how do you determine when and where such an exchange ends?" Since you think ahistorically, you think that the critique and counter-critique can go on forever and thus implicitly conclude that what I have asked for is impractical. This is yet another repetition of your main point: publishing critiques is not compatible with the “exigencies of journal publishing." I have already given you the answer to your final question in terms of your own technicist logic so let me end by taking your question more philosophically. The exchange of critiques and counter-critiques “ends” (to use your own word), when the exchanges have critiqued the questions, and, in the history of class contestations, the question has been superseded. The [supersession/suppression] is a historical and material one. How many people today (1995) write or discuss Blake in the terms that Frye put forth? How many people still “do” analysis in the “narratological” model of early structuralism put forth by Todorov? It is not that Frye's “reading” is now “out of date” or that Todorov's “narratology” is “dead." Rather, what is generally called “myth” criticism or “narratology” is no longer urgent for class antagonisms: the kind of questions that Frye or Todorov ask from Blake or from narrative texts are superseded by questions that are themselves effects of the emerging forms of contradictions between the forces of production and the social relations of production. (Todorov is now writing for the New Republic.) The post-al contradictions are no longer interested in the “coherence” of Blake and his affiliations or in examining the “actants” of narrative texts and the syntax of narratemes. The “Blake” of de Man is not that of Frye, not because they are two different critics, but because they represent different trajectories of class antagonism. Blake is not even discussed in the main body of Harold Bloom's The Western Canon. How many people today (1995) take “dual systems” theory in feminism seriously and pose questions in its terms ? Those questions are superseded by questions raised by queer theorists; the very concept of “gender” itself has been superseded by “sexuality." An exchange ends when the questions raised by it are superseded. This is a historical and not a managerial issue. But your text is opposed to such a materialist critique: your text is a text free from issues and ideas; it is a text of “strategic reason."