Against Opportunism and Centrist Politics and Pedagogies
| Revision History | ||
|---|---|---|
| • Summer/Fall 1997 | Newspaper: Funded by Syracuse University students. | |
| The Alternative Orange: Vol. 5, No. 2 (pp. 3-4). | ||
| • September 25, 2003 | Webpage:  . | |
| DocBook XML (DocBk XML V3.1.7) from original. | ||
1: At the Present
the [sic.] “left” in the U.S. and Europe is busy manufacturing a new “center” which, as Tony Blair never tires of saying, lies beyond “left” and “right." In this post-ideological zone of imperialist exploitation of workers of the world, "left” journals in the U.S. (from Social Text to Socialist Review) are, more than ever before, competing with each other to out center the center. They publish, in ever new-er technosavvy languages (which are the discursive code of post-ideological “progressiveness"), politically innocuous writings that distract attention from the on-going global class struggle and legitimate the way things are between the North and the South, the owners and the workers.
On this scene where political opportunism is masquerading as effectivity, The Alternative Orange continues its struggles to break the imperialist silence of the “left” by publishing “ruthless critiques of everything existing”. In an age in which the “reasonable” has become a code word for opportunistic “pragmatism” (cynical manipulations of people and institutions), such radical critiques that are afraid neither of their own conclusions nor of conflicts with the powers that be, must necessarily read to the “left” readers as “unreasonable” and “unrealistic” demands for the organization of the available resources and social relations.
The longest text in this issue ("Quango-ing the University: The End(s) of Critique-al Humanities") is a rigorous, non-compromising critique of the new alliance between transnational big business and the “new” managers of the academy that is de-forming the university from a place of critique-al knowledges for a democratic society to a corporate annex devoted to teaching skills to a compliant labor force. “Quango-ing the University” takes the specific case of the “crisis” in the English Department at the State University of New York at Albany as the “symptom” of this de-formation and shows how “writing studies” has become the pedagogy of the new pragmatic technoelite that serves the interests of the transnational ruling class.
In manufacturing the pragmatic center, the opportunistic left has, among other things, reduced “class” to an “identity” acquired not in the process of production but in acts of consumption. The “center” in short, has become the allegory of a post-class-ness and “The Limits to Generationalisms” shows how the post-class “left” academics themselves have become allies of the corporate managers by substituting terms such as “generation," for “class”. A history of contemporary theory, written by way of the erasure of “class”, de-forms history to a history of ideas: as successions of “modes of thought” outside the social relations of production.
One of the main characteristics of this post-al opportunism is that it (following the logic of entrepreneurial capitalism) valorizes the “personal” and places the “individual” at the center of all social practices. Pedagogy, therefore, becomes a personal “affair” in which the pedagogue, as Jane Gallop says, aroused by her/his desire, relates to another. Marking the space of the pedagogy of desire as basically the naturalization of class politics, “Against the End of Critique-al Knowledges” argues that pedagogy is never a “private” act.
In both “Quango-ing The University” and in “Against the End of Critique-al Knowledges” the concept of “private” is used to signify both the private appropriation of social production—private ownership and the regime of profit—as well as private in the more immediate sense of the word: as the “individualistic"—the cult of “me”. Knowledge is, by its very constitution, a public act and the processes by which it is disseminated (pedagogies) are also public: they are shaped, not by desire of the pedagogues and students, but by the social relations of productions in which they are located historically.
The ultimate goal of any effective pedagogy (and this is one reason we have devoted this issue of The Alternative Orange to knowledge and pedagogies) is the production of class consciousness. This is the argument that underlies all the texts in this issue but some of its implications become more clear in “Lying and the Politics of Representation." This text shows how when public pedagogy abandons its goal and becomes a “private affair” its practices become assaults on democratic citizenship. The organizers of a “conference” (supported by public funds) manipulate its representations for their own “private” interests. It is, of course, highly significant that the text deploys the word “lying”. Post-al theory has, almost completely, erased terms such as “truth” and “lying” from the scene of the social. The ostensible reason is, of course, that in the absence of founding evidence, to call a statement “lie” or “truth” is more a “moral” statement than an epistemologically secure position. In actuality, however, the post-al critique of “lie"/"truth” is that by disenabling such terms, the post-al manages to provide a space beyond “truth"/"lying” (a space similar to the post-ideological) in which all claims (of the owners and workers alike) are equally undecidable. This, of course, "forgets” that the decidable is decidable not by its discursive traits but by its power, which is derived not from epistemology, but by its relations to productive practices. “Lying and the Politics of Representation” takes “lie” and “truth” away from both the post-al and the moral and returns them to historical dimensions.
"The Dead Center” is, in this theater of representation, a close look at the way the “radical” is constructed in the pages of The Chronicle of Higher Education—the unofficial organ of the ruling academy. What The Chronicle calls “radical” is the “pragmatic”, “opportunistic” leftist academic who, by providing the appropriate concepts (e.g. “generation” to replace “class"), justifies the dominant practices that are necessary for a high rate of profit for the owners. When Cary Nelson, for example, proposes the elimination of the “marginal” humanities program, he does it as a “radical”. However, what is represented as a “radical” act is exactly what is needed by the corporate university to bring its practices more in line with transnational capital: to downsize its (what “Quango-ing the University” calls) “critique-al humanities”. This critique of the practices of academic “radicals”, raises the larger question: who is a “radical” in the moment of the post-al? A person who can “negotiate” with the established ruling class and get the better terms for subjugation and exploitation of citizens or the one who refuses to “negotiate” on the grounds that “negotiation” itself constitutes a legitimization of the exploitation of the many by the few and thus an abandoning of the very premises of democratic society.
In the revolutionary tradition of The Alternative Orange in publishing “struggle-texts” of intervention into the wider space of knowledge practices, we also reproduce for our readers, “Panic Left," a series of theoretico-political exchanges originating on the Net. “Panic Left," in a densely layered and widely encompassing mode of engagement, exposes the deep complicity of the post-theory academic left with the postintellectual “activist” left on the Net—what it marks as the “net-left”—in their united assault on red critique. In doing so, it focuses in particular on how the activist net-left, in relinquishing scientific analysis for allusional thinking, and political principles for a pragmatic agenda ("take it where it is-ism"), is constructing the Net more as a rearguard space for thinking mired in nostalgia and anecdotes, than as a space for boundary analysis of capitalism today. To make the Net into a site for such boundary-practices, it argues, it is necessary above all to combat the net-left's “supportive” pedagogy which justifies its reactionary sentimentality by marginalizing Marxist critique as “Stalinist” and the "other” of “democracy”. The deployment of “Stalinism” to silence revolutionary Marxism, as “Panic Left” makes clear, far from marking the limits of Marxism, is a strategy of systems maintenance and a device of cyberfascist propaganda to defend a triumphalist capitalism.
