Four

The distance between the empirical and the structural is an historical and materialist distance produced through the process of exploitation in which the extraction of surplus labor gives rise to the alienation of workers from the products of their own labor. The distance between representation and reality is not a product of language itself. It is the effect of production practices of the ruling class and its legitimating ideology which is produced to conceal the process of exploitation and the historical basis of alienation, rendering it fixed and unchangeable. It is precisely the seeming “staticness” of reality that capital promotes in order to prevent workers from understanding that it is through the exploitation of their collective labor that “what is” structurally exists and it is through their collective opposition to this exploitation that this “what is” can be transformed. The post-al deconstruction of the empirical, insofar as it replaces the “real” with the “text," and understands the distance between the two to be an inherent function of language, a transhistorical disparity (without accounting for the fact that language is itself produced under definite historical circumstances), contributes to the ideological legitimation of capitalist class relations by presenting the “play” of signification (and the corresponding difficulty in explaining reality) itself as a natural given not a product of the capitalist relations of production that rely on “misrepresentation” to justify exploitation.

Discursive “invention," then, is an ideological “invention” of the ruling class deployed to conceal material production and the class contradictions and antagonisms on which it is based. Such a notion of discursive “invention” is the basis upon which post-Marxist apologists for wage-labor such as Laclau and Mouffe can claim that “the question about the conditions of possibility of the being of discourse is meaningless. It is equivalent to asking a materialist for the conditions of possibility of matter” ("Post-Marxism” 105). Not only do Laclau and Mouffe indicate that indeed they are discursivists not materialists (insofar as they are concerned with “discourse” not “matter"), they also demonstrate that they have a complete lack of understanding of the historical (and dialectical) materialism that they reject (a “lack of understanding” based on their own complicity in and legitimation of ruling class interests). Indeed, historical materialism does investigate and account for the conditions of possibility of “matter” (Lacau and Mouffe's code word for “things") in the historical structures of the forces and relations of production. “Matter” as “thing," as historical materialist feminist Teresa Ebert has argued, is the product of the social relations of production—of labor practices and the class conflicts of which they are a part (126). The “matter” in historical materialism is not a static, reified mass—a “thing"—it is an historical structure of social contradictions and antagonisms. The bracketing of an investigation of the conditions of possibility of such fundamental concepts as “discourse” (for textualists) or “matter” (for materialists) as “absurd” is really an alibi for ludic materialists not to account for their discursive practices on historical and material terms. Just as “intuition” in creative writing pedagogy is used to exempt the artist from accounting for her political practices, “invention” in ludic postmodern theory exempts the theorist from having to account for her discursive practices on social, material, and historical terms. If discourse “invents” itself and its own repetition, if knowledge is not a product of material social forces but is rather the product of the inherent structure of language, then the theorist cannot act on principles as they are always disrupted by the play of signification.

What then are the consequences of this theory of discursive “invention” for the struggle to emancipate women? Gallop and other ludic feminists endorse a “contemporary radicalization in feminist and queer theory that views all gender as performance” (12). Yet, if gender is performance or impersonation (or citationality, or parody...), and there is nothing behind impersonation except the “impersonation” itself, Gallop ultimately argues that there is nothing behind gender except gender itself. “Gender” is itself the cause of “gender"! Gender becomes an immaterial, self-inventing practice—a ludic essentialism—which is cut off from the historical forces of the mode of production. Gender “rewrites” itself—it invents itself—and is discursively reversible. Such a notion of gender rips it out of historical and material relations and makes it flexible (like the “free play” of language) but unchangeable (like the presumed “inherentness” of this “free play"). It is this discursivist and self-inventing notion of gender that enables Gallop, in “The Teacher's Breasts," to read the sexual harassment of a female teacher by her male student as a “subversive” repetition of gendered norms.

Reading Helene Keyssar's “Staging the Feminist Classroom," Gallop purports to reject the identitarian terms upon which Keyssar has based her feminist pedagogy and a reading of an instance of sexual harassment in her classroom. However, Gallop does so by severing sexual harassment from a much broader system of the exploitation and oppression of women. During a scene in a play that Keyssar's class is producing, the heroine, a teacher, is sexually harassing a male student in her office by kissing him rather than taking him seriously on an intellectual level. In Keyssar's class itself the situation is reversed with the student in the class who is playing the student in the scene and Keyssar who is playing the teacher. While in the play the student leaves “but not without first touching her breasts” (Miller as quoted in Keyssar as quoted. in Gallop 83), the student in the class, growing hostile to the pressure exerted on his own gendered practices, “strode toward [Keyssar] and fiercely, with overt erotic impulse, grabbed and held each of her breasts” (Keyssar quoted in Gallop 86). In the series of class discussions following this incident Keyssar finds herself having to contradict her own pedagogical principles of “undermining” her authority in the classroom by instead making use of her authority through providing her own interpretation of this scene. Meanwhile the student “insisted on the correctness of his initial interpretation, essentially on the grounds that 'no man would do otherwise'" (Keyssar as quoted in Gallop 84).

In the re-reading that she provides of Keyssar's interpretation of this scene Gallop argues that,

Gallop can only say this because she presupposes an ahistorical undecidability between material relations and reading practices. If there is an undecidable relation between the “text” and the “real," one cannot draw a conclusion about what is and what is not sexual harassment. Yet to press charges for sexual harassment (to appeal to collective standards) one has to uphold principles of what gender is and how it is organized and reproduced. If gender is the beginning and the end of itself, if gender is a trope that constantly re-writes itself, that is constantly re-written and recited through impersonation, then holding particular subjects accountable for their social and material practices (as when one is charged with sexual harassment), is seen as itself a participation in the reification and perpetuation of the regime of gender. In the name of “subverting," “loosening” and “freeing up” gender, this preserves gender oppression by leaving those who are the targets of sexist violence with no recourse to do anything about it.

In the name of “undecidability” and discursive inventiveness Gallop advances a (reactionary) determinate position while occluding the fact that she is doing so. Criticizing Keyssar's use of her authority as a pedagogue to intervene in sexist practices, Gallop argues that, “while feminist teaching based in appropriate feminine behavior has been implicitly defined by gender, feminist pedagogy can teach us to analyze effects of gender in our pedagogical practice rather than just acting them out” (Gallop 88). What Gallop is actually arguing is that it is not the male student who assumes the self-evidency of his desires ("no man would do otherwise"), that is “acting out;" rather, it is the feminist pedagogy which has attempted to intervene in this “self-evidency” by producing a counter-interpretation, that is “acting out." Here Gallop, like Dobyns, represents herself as the “rebel” against the “totalitarianism” of “political correctness” and manifests the same nostalgia for a time without challenges to the “self-evidency” of ("heterosexual male") desire. In doing so, like Dobyns, she repeats one of the most sophomoric banalities of liberal journalism which, in the guise of “neutrality” (or “undecidability"), promotes a “He Said/She Said” narrative in which one can never know the “truth” and the “He Said” always wins on the basis of his inherent inability to control himself.

It is this reification of gender and desire that allows Gallop to argue that while the “woman-to-woman paradigm shows the teacher giving up her authority and its association with distantiation in favor of blurring the boundaries between teachers and students ... [m]aleness in either teacher or student affects this paradigmatic blurring of authority” (80). Particularly the presence of male students in the feminist classroom, according to Gallop, “poses a sexual question, if not a paradigmatic threat” (81). What the male student (and particularly for Gallop, the “insubordinate” male student) disrupts and reveals in the traditional feminist classroom is its implicit gendering of teacher and students. On Gallop's terms, while the “all female” feminist classroom operates along the lines of a “hyper-feminine gendering of sexuality," and the male teacher/female student relation is within this paradigm “sexualized as harassment," the “male students... can neither be subsumed in the maternal desexualized erotic nor made to fit the sexual harassment case” (81).

Engaging in a post-al diversion which appeals to the ludic notion of supplementarity—proposing that all identities are so fluidly invented and reinvented as to make it impossible to assign anyone a particular identity—Gallop contributes to the mystification of the difference between aggressor and victim, between oppressor and oppressed, and between exploiter and exploited. She does this by inventing a “split” between the “man” and the “student”: is he the “man playing the student” or the “student playing the man"? Just as the split between “art” and “politics” perpetuated in creative writing makes it impossible to hold Dobyns accountable for his sexist violence (as we never know whether he is “performing” as a “man” or an “artist"), the split between “reading practices” and “politics” as a material struggle makes it impossible to find a male student guilty of sexual harassment as we can never determine who he is: is he a “man” or a “student"? Social principles disappear in the “gap” that post-al politics “invents” within “identity-as-difference” and the aggressors of oppressive practices are acquitted on the grounds of “incoherency." However, such an instance of sexual harassment is indeed an acting out on the part of a male student, although not as a result of the student's “innate” desires. Rather, in a time when putting a “human face” on capitalism is historically unconvincing; when capital literally cannot afford the “niceties” of social reform and as a result there is a backlash against all marginalized groups and a reprivatization of historical and material gains made by these groups; such a response on the part of a student to his teacher is an instance of the backlash against feminism which is itself a manifestation of a global backlash against women under capitalism.

Keyssar's experientialist response to this incident which ultimately argued that the student could not have known how to behave otherwise because he did not share experiences of oppression with women is also problematic. It is an inadequate response to sexual harassment because it assumes that understanding the “effects” of the oppression of women through descriptions of “experience” is enough to produce knowledges which can explain the material causes of this oppression. In doing so it promotes a reformist politics aimed at “making up” for the damages done to women and other marginalized subjects without a transformation of the conditions which give rise to these damages. However, Gallop's point of contention is ultimately not with this reformism (no matter what she “intends"), it is with the fact that Keyssar took a decisive position on sexual harassment. Gallop privileges the “violence” of the closure of meaning over the violence of sexual harassment and the global exploitation of which it is a part. However, she does so while claiming that her notion of “impersonation” is not a “depersonalizing strain that denies the connection between discourses and the bodies that produce them” (15). Gallop “acknowledges” the existence of the material production of discourse, but she does so by redefining “materiality” itself as what Teresa Ebert has called “matterism"—specifically the “matterism” of the “body” (Ebert 119-125). Having excluded the possibility of explaining any set of relations other than discursive relations (which themselves cannot really be explained without a violent closure of meaning and therefore can really only be “recited” and “invoiced"), in order to refer to “the body” as a material entity which produces discourse rather than an entity theologically brought into being by discourse, Gallop and other post-al feminists must presuppose the existence of a “body” that lies in no relations whatsoever until it is inculcated into discursive relations. “The body” is a static reified mass that is the “excess” to signification—it is a mass which “resists” signification and hence any form of theorization.

Yet this is a violent suppression of the material relations in which “bodies” are inculcated: the relations of production in which the materiality of “the body” is a product of the praxis of labor—of practical activity and the class structures that determine this activity. In mystifying the relations of production—which in all class based societies are founded on exploitation—and reducing material relations to a reified “body," these relations themselves are rendered fixed, ahistorical, and unchangeable. What is at stake in accepting such a theory is the abandonment of a project for emancipation as such and the emancipation of women in particular—a project that can actually explain these relations in order to enable the collective intervention into and revolutionary transformation of them. This is a particularly damaging retreat for feminism in the era of transnational capitalism in which all over the globe women's unpaid and subsistence labor is increasingly subordinated to the capitalist relations of production.

The class character of “discursive reversibility” of gender and its subsequent reification of material relations is thrown into sharp relief when we examine how this operates in the “local” situation of Syracuse University. It is precisely the occlusion of material relations and its subsequent rejection of principled collective praxis that enabled the Women's Studies Program at Syracuse University from its Director Diane Murphy to its most casual associates to remain absolutely silent about Dobyns' sexual harassment in the public forum. Sometimes opportunistically claiming to be working “behind the scenes” along the “proper” institutional channels, these “feminists” refused to come out publicly against the sexual harassment of a student who has an understanding of feminism (namely Marxist) different from their own. Yet sexual harassment, if it is to be opposed systematically cannot be addressed on a “case by case” basis but must be vehemently opposed in every instance, on principle, regardless of the ideas of the target of this harassment. Despite its activist rhetoric of “Your Silence Will Not Protect You” and “SILENCE=COMPLICITY” the Syracuse University Women's Studies Program has demonstrated in its practices that, on principle, it believes that it is perfectly alright for some (i.e., Marxist) women to be sexually harassed.

At the same time when these so called “feminists” were protecting their relative privilege in the academy, the female and male staff workers at Syracuse University were risking what little resources that they have in a fledgling union campaign, to make the issue of sexual harassment in general and this case in particular a public issue. Proceeding from the systematic and principled understanding of sexual harassment as a way to devalue their labor, these workers refused to remain silent and treat sexual harassment as an “institutional negotiation” rather than a conflict and struggle over the control and use of their own labor power. Instead of remaining silent they published my formal grievance in their newspaper “Staff Infection." As a response to this, union officials demonstrated their own complicity by attempting to silence these workers through cutting the funding for their newspaper. Their argument? Sexual harassment is not a “bread and butter issue” meaning: sexual harassment and gender cannot be understood on the terms of class and labor.

On the contrary, under capitalism “gender” and all other socially produced differences are ultimately deployed to serve one purpose: the extraction of higher rates of surplus-value from specific sectors of the proletariat (e.g. women) in order to increase the rate of profit. As Marx and Engels have written, as the structures of exploitation become more complex and capitalism becomes more sophisticated, what matters is the maintenance of a high rate of profit and questions of “gender," “sexuality," “age," “race” and so on are all subordinated to these same ends and interests: “All are instruments of labor, more or less expensive to use." All such “differences” help the capitalist extract higher amounts of surplus value from the workforce as a whole. The “subversive performance” of gender, its “flexibility," its inventive capacity to “re-write” itself is in actuality an ever changing strategy of the marketplace to increase the rate of profit and legitimate wage-labor. Capital has an investment in maintaining “gender difference," and the subordination of women (and other forms of social differences) so that it can extract higher amounts of surplus-value from the entire labor force. This works to increase the rate of exploitation not only of female workers but also of male workers. As the standard of living of male workers is pushed down in the process of bringing relatively cheap female labor to replace them, male workers are also pushed into the position of accepting less compensation and harsher working conditions for more of their labor time. In short, the working class as a whole has a material interest in ending the sexual division of labor and the ruling class has a material interest in maintaining it. “Gender” is important precisely because it is a site of class struggle over the ownership and control of the means of production.

Gallop and other ludic feminists would argue that my notion of gender is too rigid, too deterministic and cuts off the possibility of a “subversive” production of pleasure in the classroom. For Gallop the pedagogy of pleasure in which the teacher aims to please students by appealing to and producing “new” sites of pleasure is liberatory because it “breaks” pedagogical rules (85). She claims that unlike the situation where the student pleases the teacher for professional reasons, the reversal of this paradigm actually displaces professionalism because “a teacher trying to please students doesn't have that rational, pragmatic excuse” (3). It is based on this assumption that Gallop argues that the teacher pleasing the students “is a prime site where the personal tangles with impersonation” (3). In arguing this she “forgets," and hence suppresses, the reorganization of teaching practices in the “new” “student centered university” in which pleasing the student is, indeed, a careerist move. Further, this “pleasing” is predicated upon a reification of “student's interests” as the “student centered university” is aimed at pleasing and producing a particular kind of student: one whose interests correspond with and adapt to the interests of the market and the regime of profit.

Not only is this not radical, it is reactionary because in the name of “blurring” boundaries it renaturalizes “desire” and allows Gallop and others to mask their authority in order to abuse it and wield it more effectively. Such a notion of “student centeredness” is exactly what enabled Dobyns to engage in a reversal relocating himself not at the aggressor of sexual harassment but as the victim of a rigid and “authoritarian” pedagogy: “I have no economic reason for teaching... I teach because I love it, and if it becomes clear to me that teaching is impossible because one has to have a barrier between the students, then I'm not sure how I'll feel about that” (Buckley 10). Dobyns' “student centered” pedagogy and Gallop's “bad girl” pedagogy help legitimate reactionary practices such as sexual harassment in the name of “closeness” and breaking boundaries. Gallop, who herself has been under investigation for sexually harassing her female students, here constructs an alibi for this harassment by renaturalizing desire and presenting it as a “resistant” force autonomous from and opposed to institutional, social and economic relations.

In response to Keyssar's interpretation of the scene in the play Gallop uses the difference between “Breast” and “breasts” (drawing from the Lacanian difference between Phallus and penis, and implicitly from the postmodern feminist difference between “Woman” and “women"), to draw a distinction between the monolithizing “good girl” pedagogy she rejects, and the plural, “more historical," “bad girl” feminism she is advancing. Gallop argues that: “The breast—singular, symbolic, and maternal—is precisely the imaginary organ of nurturance, what the good feminist teacher proffers to her daughter-students. Refusing to nurture... the bad, sexual teacher, brings into the discourse of feminist pedagogy not the breast, which is already appropriately there, but the breasts” (87). Claiming to “subvert” the gendering of the classroom and break pedagogical authority, Gallop is not actually “displacing” gender, she is merely sexualizing it. This sexualizing is understood as a progressive move enabled by the “branch of queer theory [which] has devoted itself to the defiant perversion of any norm, working toward a notion of the queer as the generalized case” (12). However, Gallop can only argue that this displaces the norm because she already, as has become increasingly popular with the emergence of post-al queer theory, presupposes a separation between sexuality and gender and a severing of each of these from the capitalist mode of production.

Yet, the enforcement of heterosexuality is structurally linked to the enforcement and maintenance of gender as part of the regime of wage labor and capital. Heterosexism, after all, is legitimated by the notion that gender is an ahistorical, unchangeable fact; that “men are men and women are women." Such a notion of gender, as I have discussed, is not only enabled by the “realist” notions of gender contained within traditional creative writing pedagogy, but also within the ludic essentialism (the notion that gender is a “self-inventing” practice) of post-al feminism. As long as gender continues to exist as a material practice, the conditions for enforced heterosexuality which is undergirded by a naturalization and preservation of gender will be continuously (re)produced. When sexuality and gender are abstracted from each other systemically, sexuality and “desire” can then be used to regulate and maintain gender and consequently enforce heterosexuality, in the name of “the queer perversion of the norm."

The necessity for shifting political practice from gender to sexuality without structurally linking these forms of oppression, is for petit-bourgeois politics to “move beyond” the historical burdens of debates in feminism over the question of the material dimensions of gender. Feminism has been burdened with the project of representation (rather than “impersonation” or “performance"), which assumes the possibility of the extra-discursive material production of women that discourse then represents. This is because feminism must deal at some point with what Drucilla Cornell points out, and subsequently occludes through a series of discursive reversals: “the material suffering of women” (2). When the question of the material status of women or the material production of gender is raised, this question gets “weighted down” by issues of the material forces and relations of production (the material conditions which enable all forms of production), and the class antagonisms that result from the contradiction between these forces (which are based on increased communication and cooperation of various sectors of the proletariat around the globe) and these relations (which are based on the private ownership of the products of this collective labor). When sexuality is severed from gender (and gender is severed from class), sexuality serves as the escape valve from the pressure for closure in theorizing gender as a system. In post-al politics as a whole, sexuality is understood as the new discursive horizon—the supplement—that subverts the closural status (which is always assumed to be an “identitarian” claim) of investigations into the material dimensions of gender and its claims to “the real." “The real” is constantly “disrupted” by sexuality as Joseph Litvak claims when he argues that, “the sexual 'truth' about a person spreads out to suffuse everything he or she says and does, especially at the level of apparently nonsexual words and deeds and especially when he or she is unconscious of their 'true' significance” (20).

Sexuality is the “excess” to theory as a systemic explanation of material conditions that makes possible collective revolutionary praxis, which means that “desire” is in excess to economic determination. What then does “effective” political practice come to mean but the liberation of desire itself and the production of multiple pleasures. Solidarity is not based on collective interests [but/it is based] on pleasure; people work together as long as it is pleasurable—and what is pleasurable is what does not put pressure on the class interests of those who already have the relative privilege and leisure time to develop multiple pleasures. A “radical” subject on these terms is a subject who identifies with her own particular shifting differences, her multiple capacities for pleasure—she identifies, in other words, with what is available to her through sensory experience. Far from “disrupting” the logic of identity within mainstream feminist practices, this notion of sexuality merely reasserts it.

This re-emergence of experience as the basis of knowledge within post-al queer politics can be seen in George Haggerty's article "'Promoting Homosexuality' in the Classroom," in which, despite his ludic “anti-essentialism," he argues: “it seems to me that the 'truth' of this 'experience' is too valuable to sacrifice to the ideal of theoretical unassailability... lesbian and gay students... cannot defer to others—by which I mean any others—who only imagine, however theoretically profoundly, how (homo)sexuality figures in their lives” (15). By this he means that the “experience” of gays and lesbians contains a knowledge that displaces the systematicity of the knowledge of theory—it disrupts its closure of meaning. Yet, for Haggerty and many queer theorists homosexuality is the condition of possibility for all sexuality—which means that the "truth” of all sexuality is found in experience. Material reality becomes a matter of the desire of the body. Here one sees how two seemingly disparate sites (i.e., Dobyn's heterosexuality and Haggerty's homosexuality) collapse into one strategy: the strategy of “experience” which is necessary for maintaining the self-inventing subject of capitalism.

The move to abstract sexuality from gender practices and both from the mode of production is a move to dehistoricize desire and make it a self-inventing practice cut off from the forces of the market. If desire is a “self-inventing” practice beyond collective determination, there is no possibility for collective revolutionary praxis as desire always disrupts principled praxis with strategies devised to increase desire. “Desire” becomes a site in which the bourgeois subject finds an unregulated space; a space of excessive practices. As an excessive practice “desire” is then used to legitimate the deregulation of ruling class interests. In other words, the “excess” of sexuality and desire is really an alibi for the excesses of the market which rejects principles for strategies in the interest of maximizing profit. The “deregulation” of desire by reprivatizing (taking back) sexuality from gender helps reprivatize the relative gains made by the working class in their struggle for control over the conditions of the working day. Of course post-al theorists assume that ending capitalism is not necessary for the emancipation of women and of gays and lesbians, and in so doing will argue that an emphasis on class struggle leads to an erasure and rejection of feminism and gay and lesbian liberation. On the contrary, a Marxist critique of sexual harassment marks a refusal to give up feminism and the struggle for gay and lesbian liberation to the interests of the ruling class.