Three

Such a project is manifested in Dobyns' poem, “Allegorical Matters." At the core of this allegory is a rehearsal of the abstraction of “artistic expression” from its social, historical, political, and economic conditions. On one level “Allegorical Matters” is a piece on the recognition of the total collapse and historical bankruptcy of the heterosexual male subject as absolute. This Dobyns indicates by inviting the reader to participate in a “heterosexual male fantasy” in which the subject is a man sitting on a park bench approached by a “universally” beautiful woman who removes her shirt and presses herself against him. The man subsequently embraces her only to find that “while her front is young and vital,/ her back is rotting flesh that breaks away." In other words, the narrator invites the reader to partake in this fantasy only to discover the “emptiness” of it—its “rotten backside"—which creates “the illusion of an eternal present." Furthermore, all the while the narrator is rehearsing this fantasy he interjects parenthetical qualifiers in order to call into question the absolute certainty of his own reliance upon this narrative: “Let's say you are a man (some of you are)/ and susceptible to the charms of women/ (some of you must be)... (Clearly,/ we each have his or her own idea of beauty/ but let's say she is beautiful to all) ... (Let's say you are an admirer of bare breasts)...." Through the construction of the narrator who qualifies this fantasy at every turn, Dobyns presents himself as a “nuanced” reader/writer who is “sensitive” to multiculturalism—or at least multiple forms of fetish—and “aware” of its challenges to traditional notions of masculinity and heterosexuality (i.e., some people may be men, admirers of bare breasts, and some may not).

However, this criticism is really quite trite and superficial as, on another level this poem manifests a deep nostalgia for a time when “men were men and women were women"—a time without challenges to the naturalization of gender and sexuality. The parenthetical qualifiers serve not merely as a recognition of these challenges, they are also a mourning for the coherency of the heterosexual male subject: “Some of you must be [susceptible to the charms of women]" (emphasis added). This nostalgia is promoted and legitimated by what Dobyns later introduces in the poem as “the ruthless necessities of art"—a space “free” from political and social contestation in which the artist does not have to account for his “aesthetic” practices on social and historical terms. In short, this poem is a lamentation for a time of the unrestrained exercise of desire—where desire is understood as autonomous from and fundamentally opposed to social relations.

In creative writing pedagogy “unrestrained desire” is represented as “natural” insofar as it is understood to be “repressed” by social forces not produced through the social relations of production. This becomes apparent in the poem when the narrative is interrupted by a “metanarrative” in which the “author” (who initially invites the reader to partake in this fantasy) must confront the readings that “a trio of experts” (Dobyns' term for theoreticians) have produced of his story. As Dobyns presents them, these theorists—whose assumptions are grounded in psychoanalytic, deconstructionist, and feminist theories—represent the “suppression” of the artist's “everyday desire." In the face of these “expert” readings and the “weight of their disapproval” the author censors himself and refrains from the “spontaneity” of his desires: “He scratches under his arm and suppresses a belch," he thinks twice about stepping on an ant in front of the experts, “he would like to be elsewhere, perhaps home/ with a book or taking a walk." These rather banal examples of “desire” are really a promotion of desire as a transhistorical and “natural” human “instinct"—as the product of a transsocial subject. In order to understand social norms of collectivity and critique as an “outside” force that suppresses artistic freedom of expression, Dobyns necessarily presupposes the existence of a transcendent human consciousness and innate desire.

Dobyns promotes such a notion of the subject by positing that the artist is ruled by “intuition." In fact, the creative writing industry as a whole legitimates the naturalization of desire through this invention of "intuition." “Intuition” is that characteristic which exempts the artist from accounting for his social practices on historical terms. Dobyns states that “material comes to the creative artist through intuition; he or she rarely chooses it consciously. And when the material comes, the creative artist is not allowed to reject some part of it because it is horrible or disgusting; the writer cannot refuse it by imposing upon it an everyday subjectivity [norm of collectivity]" ("Voices” 22). It is upon these grounds that Dobyns (like some other creative writers) legitimates social oppression and exploitation. By representing themselves as the “rebels” for “truth” against the “authoritarianism” of “political correctness” (i.e. “everyday subjectivity") they redefine “creativity” as the freedom to “let it all hang out”: the freedom for the reckless exercise of one's hatreds, prejudices, and appetites. Yet, what is twisted as “political correctness” and subjected to endless jokes by right-wing polemicists as well as state jokesters is of course nothing more than a simple awareness of the “other”: the other's social being, her life and practices, her human feelings and freedom. The same freedom that Dobyns allows himself as a creative writer he denies the other by the ruse of “political correctness”: the respect for the other's being is “political correctness”; the satisfaction of one's own desires is “freedom." The intuitive subject has insight into such “freedom” because he only acts on “internal” impulses and desires, not collective social principles. Yet in understanding these “impulses” as natural, the desire to sexually harass, to gay bash, to rape, to accumulate and profit off of the labor of others—all become ahistorical, unchangeable, and uncontrollable desires.

By abstracting desire and “artistic expression” from the social relations in which this “autonomous” desire and its expressions are produced, Dobyns and the creative writing industry end up supporting a particular kind of desire under the guise of “neutrality." For Dobyns “free art” is opposed to “partisan art"—or partisanship in general—which “instead of posing questions, gives answers” ("Voices” 22). According to Dobyns, “partisan art” such as “anti-war poems... radical feminist, black, gay, and Marxist poems... speaks to those already convinced of its truth or bullies those who aren't” ("Voices” 22). As a result, “unrestrained” expression is expression that does not have to account for the advances of social theory: of feminism, of black liberation, of gay liberation, of anti-imperialism, or of Marxism. Far from remaining neutral, Dobyns not only laments but revives the supremacy of the “white," “middle class," “heterosexual," “male” subject as the measure of neutrality. What Dobyns pretends to “give” in the form of “sensitivity” to and “awareness” of challenges to traditional notions of gender and sexuality, he takes back with a vengeance by making dominant modes of intelligibility the standard of neutrality and in doing so he renaturalizes socially produced differences and renders the violence inflicted against people on the basis of these “differences” as a “fluke."

However, sexual harassment and other forms of social violence can by no means be understood as “flukes." Sexual harassment is a tool of class exploitation. Dobyns is a symptom of the dominant mode of creative writing, which contributes to the ideological legitimation of class based societies which rely upon and (re)produce differences in order to conceal and maintain the processes of exploitation: the process in which the working class is compelled to work part of the working-day to reproduce its own means of subsistence and the rest of the day to produce surplus value for the capitalist. This compulsion is itself produced by private ownership in which a small fraction of people, the ruling class, own the means of production and the products of that production, and the vast majority of people own only their own labor-power to sell in order to survive. In order to naturalize and justify this exploitation, divide the working class to prevent it from effectively fighting this exploitation, and produce new specialized markets for consumption, capital relies upon the production and reproduction of historically produced differences such as “gender," “race," and “sexuality." In short, these differences are the result of exploitation and serve in its ideological legitimation. In this context, sexual harassment can be understood as a concentration of practices meant to reinforce, exacerbate, and intensify gender differences, thus contributing to the justification of the economic exploitation of women and maintaining a politically divided labor force that is, as a result, prevented from collectively fighting the entire system of social oppression and exploitation.

In suppressing the material, historical and political dimensions of art through the invention of an apolitical “force” such as “intuition," the creative writing industry helps legitimate the backlash against those struggling against systematic exploitation and oppression. Under the guise of neutrality creative writing pedagogy “invents” a transsocial subject that actually serves to legitimate the production of antisocial subjects who, in the face of the pressure of principled political practices, retreat from world-historical events into the more “comfortable” and “familiar” domain of the body and personal pleasure (take a walk, read a book, etc.). This is ultimately a class narrative for the privileged liberation of the bourgeois subject of desire in which freedom of expression is the freedom to act on whim; the freedom to do whatever one wants, including the freedom to unleash this desire on women and others.

Under the pressure of contemporary social theory and the argument that all modes of understanding are political, more recently creative writing pedagogy has had to “acknowledge” the politics in creative writing but does so by presenting a vacuous notion of politics itself. Erasing politics as the conflict and struggle over the ownership and control of the means of production, Dobyns argues that “all literature is political whether the writer is responding to a sunset or expressing indignation over the world's many injustices. It is political because not only does it make us aware of the world, it helps us live within the world. But a distinction can be made between the political and the partisan” ("Voices” 22; emphasis added). This seemingly neutral and “reasonable” notion of politics is really an ideological alibi that helps conceal exploitation by presenting the “world” as a neutral zone without class antagonisms in which it is possible to take a political position without being partisan. It further conceals and maintains social alienation, what Marx explains as the process in which workers confront the products of their own labor as a force alien to them (Capital 990). Dobyns, and all modes of creative writing pedagogy which argue for politics as “freedom of expression” while occluding the material conditions necessary for equal access to such “expression” (that is, freedom from exploitation), present politics as the struggle to adjust to the existing “world." In doing so these ruling class strategies present the “world” as an ahistorical, natural given—an empirically fixed entity—not a product of social labor which can be collectively transformed. This is most strongly manifested in the poem when the “author” provides his explanation to the “experts” for his fantasy: "...don't we become blind to the world around us?/ Isn't what we see as progress just a delusion?/ Isn't our country death and what it touches death?" Presenting the artist as the “subtle” reader who gives us unseen insight into the operations of the world, Dobyns in actuality rejects the knowledges that can actually explain this social alienation.

This appeal to “contemporary theory” while still preserving capitalist relations of production is symptomatic of a much larger trend within creative writing and the literary and cultural industry as a whole to update its exchange value in the academic marketplace. A similar strategy is deployed in Colors of a Different Horse: Rethinking Creative Writing Theory and Pedagogy, an attempt to relegitimate realism by breaking down boundaries between “creative writing” and “theory” through the poststructuralist injunction against binaries. In its introduction one of the editors argues that in the debate between “theory” and “creative writing” “a potentially more productive approach to take is to redefine arguments across boundaries as dialogues with the self” (Ostrom xvii). Such an approach is meant to “help” the creative writing instructor “open up” to theory by “questioning” her own resistance to it through reunderstanding the “theorist” as a person with flaws like herself and “theory” as just one of a series of texts to play with in the workshop. By playing with and parodying theory in her classroom she can “defang theory... and help us remember the extent to which our enterprise is mutual” (xviii-xix). Theory in this context is not understood as the historical concepts and analytical practices that can demystify the social structures that give rise to exploitation, oppression, and alienation through a materialist critique of those discourses and practices which conceal these structures. Theory is emptied of its explanatory force and instead becomes a means to justify one's own legitimacy in the marketplace without interrogating the structure of exploitation upon which this legitimacy and class privilege is founded. Theory becomes simply another “text” for “self exploration” and “self expression."

Yet it is precisely this rejection of social theory as an explanatory practice that prevents people from understanding the conditions under which they live. If people are not taught the historical concepts and analytical practices necessary to understand the social arrangements of which they are a part, they will see these not as historical conditions that can be changed through collective actions, but as fixed, unchangeable, and natural givens in which they are “trapped." Instead of understanding their conditions of life as social and taking collective action to change their world, they treat this oppression (manifesting itself as personal unhappiness and unfulfilled desires) as a personal tragedy. Their goals become not changing the world and the conditions themselves, but the suspension of their own unhappiness: they seek violent “remedies” such as the abuse of children, gay bashing, violence against women, rape, sexual harassment, etc. “Freedom of expression” without freedom from exploitation is the ruse of the “Liberal” state: it is a means of crisis management to "help” people “survive” within relations of exploitation without collectively transforming them. Yet to encourage “survival” without social transformation is to teach people to adjust to their own exploitation. By “neutralizing” politics and theory, and concealing its own partisan position in protecting existing social arrangements, the dominant form of creative writing pedagogy exempts itself from having to explain exactly what the “problem” is with the specific political and theoretical positions it opposes. Consequently, it reveals that far from being concerned with preserving “freedom of expression” the dominant mode of creative writing that Dobyns represents actually contributes to policing social theoretical knowledges and radical political praxis in the name of “neutrality” (non-partisan poetry) and liberal politics ("free expression").

Consequently, in the name of protecting “freedom” and advancing a progressive position, “creativity” is redefined in order to legitimate the most reactionary, aggressive, retrograde and brutal sexist practices. Further, by elevating this to a disciplinary and artistic level as the “authentic” mark of creativity, Dobyns and others in the culture industry and the academy who support this theory are preventing those students and faculty who might otherwise invest their creative energies in fighting reactionary practices from doing so. In short in the name of “freedom” this produces an absolute pressure on students and faculty not to act (as evidenced by the fact that the twelve witnesses who knew of Dobyns' sexually harassing practices all along, felt completely unable to do anything about it until the issue was made public). While Dobyns (and others) reject my notion of socially progressive knowledge, which he called “Stalinist," the use of “creativity” and “free expression” as an alibi for sexual harassment marks a backlash against the struggle for social emancipation of all other concerned students and faculty. A telling example of this is the subsequent harassment and intimidation that Director of Creative Writing Michael Martone received when he refused to remain complicit and silently protect sexual harassment by speaking out against the past silence in the Syracuse University English Department and openly calling for Dobyns' resignation on the basis of his past practices. As a response, the “old guard” (led by Tobias Wolf and including Mary Karr, and Brooks Haxton), the most effective collaborators for institutionally shielding sexual harassment at the Program level, (unsuccessfully) took it upon themselves to have Michael Martone removed from his position as Director. In short, the “old guard” advancing “freedom of expression” has attempted to force out the one tenured faculty member in the Creative Writing Program who immediately stood up against Dobyns and dissented from the whitewashing of his sexually harassing practices.

The defense of “freedom of expression” is really a bankrupt notion of “freedom” which serves as an alibi for sexual harassment by promoting the creative subject as the entrepreneur of desire. The argument for the unregulated exercise of personal pleasure promotes what has emerged in contemporary culture as a culture of consumption in which it is understood to be “creative” to consume, and any mode of consumption—including sexual consumption—is understood to be an expression of artistic creativity and the mark of “true liberation." Yet what such a politics occludes is the regime of profit and wage labor that undergirds the production of such commodities. Dominant creative writing pedagogy is not alone in the occlusion of production by consumption. It is not a freestanding practice, rather, it is a more pronounced articulation of mainstream notions of pedagogy which aim to produce subjects who will invent newer and newer modes of consumption. In other words, the pedagogical practice that endorses “creativity” as “intuition” or “unrestrained expression” is part of a much larger strategy of the pedagogy of pleasure in the bourgeois knowledge and culture industry aimed at “liberating” desire while dehistoricizing desire and articulating it as a free-standing practice.