TWO: Holstun, Capitalism, and the Privatization of Public Discourses in the Public University

The politics of truth we have just discussed must be connected to the historical situation universities find themselves in today. It is in the context of an all out attack on a public university system by corporate interests that Holstun's electronic memo must be read. Reading his memo one gains absolutely no conception of this class struggle taking place over the political status of higher education in late capitalism today. We think that this is the most important un-said of his text that, when analyzed through critique, will situate his text historically and expose its reactionary political conclusions.

It is through the public funding of universities that corporations meet the high cost of capital outlay on research and development to continue on with their own competition over profit. The university, therefore, far from being an “ivory tower” isolated from the “real world” is a primary site of contention between “public” and “private” interests. Corporations today are attempting to commodify university education by dismantling the institutional structures through which their profit imperative may be contested. This takes the form of a refusal to fund progressive student associations, etc. However, it is a grave political mistake to limit one's support of a public university only to the fight over the recognized institutional mechanisms and thereby implicitly concede that other spaces (like the classroom, inter-departmental memos, conferences...) are unproblematically “private”. It is in fact at the level of theory that the contestation between public/private interests will be decided because it is only through a critique of the existing structures and their normative standing in the minds of the “public” that the requisite political force can be generated that will finally turn what is now strictly a defensive maneuver on the part of the “public” against the forces of privatization. It is the struggle at the level of theory over the very terms of contestation that proves to be the most productive of change.

We are therefore engaged in a theoretical contestation over the understanding of the “public” and the “private” with Holstun and the GGMS among others. We have very different ideas about what “public” means and what constitutes an “explanation” than those of Prof. Holstun. Holstun, in what can only be characterized as a “tabloid” imaginary, seems to think that public knowledge is produced when “something secret” and “hidden” comes “to light” for all to “see” and that the act of apprehension is itself a spontaneous “experience” of the senses of a self-evident universe of phenomenal “facts” and not a theoretical frame of intelligibility. This is why in his text he assumes that our critique of Frankel's practices surrounding the conference was a form of moral condemnation as is evident from the terms with which he has tried to oppose our critique: he accuses us of trying to “hide something” and then looks for evidence of our "guilty” knowledge or lack thereof ("denial” etc.). We, on the other hand, understand “public” as a political (not moral or phenomenal) category marked by history. We think that knowledge is produced through the careful investigation of the historical and political conditions of possibility that structure the public space and is not the moral possession of individuals which then makes them essentially “right”. We think the privileged method of investigation is critique and that critique is a political and not a moral endeavor because its object is not the local and discreet “behavior” of “individuals” (a concept which imparts an essential and monadic autonomy to subjects which essentially “privatizes" them) but the world historical social structures that produce subjects as individuals and that make knowledges public. Such structures include juridical apparatuses (like courts, prisons, etc.), educational apparatuses (political parties, trade-unions, schools, churches, etc.) and even everyday institutions (practices of consumption as well as inter-personal institutions that are marked as “intimate” and “private” etc.) which all in particular ways can be said to demarcate fields of “pertinency” from an “irrelevant” extraneous remainder. We, therefore, have then a fundamental philosophical and political disagreement with Prof. Holstun: while he presupposes an intuitive zone of interiority whose complement is a phenomenally self-evident “universe” we understand that this binary is itself a bourgeois understanding that is a necessary support of capitalist relations of production. This binary (moral interior/phenomenal exterior), which is not actually a binary but an ideal identity, is socially necessary for capitalism because capitalism is premised on the extraction of profit from surplus-labor and the historical form of this exploitation is founded on the sovereignty of the individual's right to buy and/or sell labor-power. If the subject is a sovereign subject due to the fact that he possesses an essential moral interiority that spontaneously resists the external world and vice versa this then means that the subject as well as the world can only be realistically (truthfully) understood as outside of history (understood as the history of changes of mode of production and modifications within the prevailing mode of production).

This theory of knowledge (empiricism) is extremely useful to the dominant race, class, gender and sexuality because it presents the existing social structure as a transhistorically valid one that is not subject to change. Part of its usefulness stems from the fact that the established “meanings"/"values” which misrecognize the world for the benefit of those who rule can be marshaled and deployed against those who pressure the priorities of their rule through critique by marking them as unintelligible (i.e., “you can't make yourself understood"). In other words, unintelligibility is not a spontaneous self-evidency “out there” but is manufactured for the political benefit of interested parties. As we have been indicating Prof. Holstun's is such a text. In his text, Holstun deploys this binary understanding: he presents what are essentially aesthetic ("unlovely”, “brazen”, “engraved") and moral ("craven”, “liar”, “ashamed") categories as the objective truth of our practices (not to mention “the universe") and does everything in his power to deny us the space to contest this "truth”. In fact, so intent is Holstun to deny us a space from which to speak that he even tries to lay claim to “the future” as well telling us that he is so sure he even knows what we are to say before we say it that he's willing to “bet” on it. In this letter we are asking an-“other” question than Holstun's ("Is this or is this not the truth?") and the question we are asking is “why?": why is his question about our moral integrity the question? Under what conditions does the truth become reduced to a “just the facts” approach that, in an authoritarian manner, demands either affirmation or denial as if the facts where not situated historically and politically? And finally, how are we to understand the role of the teacher in the public university: as a disseminator of public knowledges or a final moral authority? We have everywhere answered in the affirmative for the former and ruthlessly critiqued the latter at every opportunity....

And you Prof. Holstun?

The Revolutionary Marxist Collective (SUNY-Buffalo)

April 23, 1997