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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Hand-to hand Combat with the Ludic Academy,
By
This review is from: Theory as Resistance: Politics and Culture after (Post)structuralism (Hardcover)
This author attempts to confront what he sees as liberal pluralism's resistance to theory (i.e., to a coherent explanation of social knowledge). He argues persuasively that since the Vietnam War, these "anti-theorists" have finally returned to the business of running the knowledge industries on behave of their clients, the elite ruling classes of Western societies. By parsing, and then successfully deflecting, legitimate critiques of the existing relationships between knowledge, power, culture, society and capitalism, they effectively serve as little more than the institutional sentries for the ruling elite. In short, the author argues that the academy ultimately is little more than a trusted arm of the regime of wage labor capitalism that has divided us into "exploited" and "exploiting" classes. As paid "knowledge workers" it is the academics job to provide the abstract concepts needed to justify existing social relations. In return they receive an appropriate share of the surplus capitalist value.
The challenge that these defenders of the status quo represent is that their own brand of reform, a stopgap of parsing, deflecting, refining and rearranging existing concepts. (called "progressivism"), is actually only a form of crisis management. Its primary effect is to superficially rearranges the deck chairs on the Titanic by substituting ideas such as "multiculturalism," political correctness, and an even emptier notion of "individualism" or "cult of experience" for what is really needed: new holistic and coherent theoretical knowledge of the total social situation. The author argues that this strategy of incrementalism is in effect only another ideological alibi that substitutes "ethics" (knowledge of the contingent) for "politics" (knowledge of the necessary). Ethics thus is uncritically and stealthily introduced as a "free-standing" independent mode of knowing (and judging) that does not appear to appeal to any grounded norms. But like so much else put forth by these "knowledge managers," it turns out that this too is just another ruse. In point of fact "ethics" is a notion that can both "localize" and appear to "arbitrate" societal contradictions on a case-by-case basis. Thus, "going ethically local," can make a major contribution to rendering invisible the structure of exploitation and oppression that underlies capitalist societies. It is this anti-theory set forth at the site nearest to capitalist labor, and that serves as a thinly veiled ideological alibi, that the author engages in hand-to-hand combat with here. He attempts to trace the various forms of resistance to theory using multiple text, formal essays, letters collages, transcripts of tapes, his own manifesto, and devastating social logic. As he sees the battle: "By instituting the "ethical" (the care of the self) against the political, on the one hand, and exchange value, on the other, these apologists for liberalism posit democracy as an unending chain of contingent, incommensurate, signifiers without any "totality," without any point of anchoring (that is, no place to situate "the origin" or "cause" of exploitation). Just reading the signifiers itself, in the ludic regime of knowledge, becomes, in the words of J. Hillis Miller, an ethical act. Ethical readers like Miller read to discover only the local effects and not the logic of totality that structures the regularity of those localities. Process, not production, exchange not use, signifier not signified, irony not epistemology, reading justly not justice, multiculturalism not class: these concepts form the grid of intelligibles through which today's dominant (post) modern ludic knowledge is disseminated under the sign of (liberal) anti-theory theory." In short, he attempts to unshackle theory so as to demonstrate how all regions of the bourgeois academy are constructed not out of unquestionable truths emanating from "nature," but out of theoretical assumptions whose ultimate role is to justify the free market; the exploitation of labor; complicit subjectivities; descriptive ludic knowledge; evasive pedagogies; and coalition politics. And while as noted in the earlier review attached below, this is heady stuff. Still in my mind it begs at least two important questions. The second having to do with capitalism, I dealt with (first) in an earlier review (attached). The second is this: We are symbolic animals. So far as is known there is no way to organize societies other than through grid-bound symbolic hierarchies, all of which ultimately will divide members along some logical, political, economic and ethical fault lines, whether they be capitalist, democratic, religious or otherwise. Thus, is the author suggesting that there are "better" (i.e., more ethical) ways to do this? And if so, is he not then skating on thin ice; close to being guilty of the same crime as that of the Ludites? In short, does his analysis not beg the question: that staking out a logical, ethical, economic and even a political platform, is inherent to the social condition. That is to say, such hierarchies necessarily must be constructed; and that furthermore, the dimensions (logic, ethics, economics, and politics) upon which they are constructed, are all on the same level of ethical, political, economic and logical generality. So where is the platform upon which the theorists themselves are supposed to stand, to be built? And how indeed will it differ from that of the Ludites? Ten more Stars. Earlier Review: An Important Unasked Question: What are the Alternatives to Capitalism? This is a carefully argued book. Its deep insights clarify a lot. However, that all depends on whether or not the reader buys into the culture of the academics point of view: that is, into their own epistemological narrative. Without buying into it, one can see rather clearly that there two rotten eggs lying at the subtext of these discussions. And if we cut directly to the chase, one discovers the first. It is that twice removed from ordinary discourse, the discussions here and the ones referenced by it (at least in most of their respective subtexts too), all seem to be begging, the same rather obvious question: Are there any realistic alternatives to the capitalism mode of economic organization? The second is this: This treatise rests on the hidden assumption that ideal political types (such as democracy or communism) when they undergo a transformation from theory to reality are then other than just abstract illusions. I would use the following argument to say that they are not: All of the political systems that we know of so far are easily collapsible into each other. That is to say they assume a canonical form with respect to the one thing that matters most: whether or not they are resistant to "localizing corruptible effects." So far as we know none are resistant, including all of the candidates fought over in this book. The reasons of course are given to us in this book. But the academic conversations come at these two problems from the angle of literary criticism which has both merits and draw backs. One of the drawbacks is that it is always twice removed from ordinary understandable political discourse. For instance, it seems clear that the way the machinery of state (independent of political details) justifies its grip on power is not the primary issue that separates political systems. They are all equally adept at commandeering the symbols of state to articulate the appropriate grammars of ideological justification. The critical point here however, is not necessarily how they are organized economically, but to what extent these grammars are resistant to localizing corruptible effects? Indeed, it is these similarities that define itself as their canonical common base. Thus the arguments about the integrity of the system have been turned on their heads. It is the ability to resist corruption rather than whether labor is or is not being exploited that speaks to the integrity (and ultimately to the ethics) of the system. And all the systems we know of so far are equally vulnerable to this weakness at their respective centers, whether they be democratic, where elements such as money, labor exploitation and racism are the culprits; or whether they be socialist, where brutal anti-democratic (or totalitarian) tendencies may be the culprit. In either case, it is the integrity of the system rather than the ideologies or their grammars of articulation that should be the focus of discussion. Returning to the first question, is it not also this question of what are the reasonable alternatives to capitalism that is lurking not so well hidden in the background and that animates and lies at the crux of all the author's discussions about ideology and theory? Is it unfair to ask why he is NOT dealing with this question straight up? At least from where I sit (outside the halls of academia), all of the rather ornate, abstract and often contorted constructions (on either side and no matter how well-argued) seem desperately trying to avoid confronting the reality of whether or not there exist any realistic alternatives to capitalism. As contemporary examples and recent history have shown, capitalism's chief rival, communism, has proved to be a rather dismal failure. And in instances where it has not yet been determined to be a complete failure, if the truth were told, it has become simply a cheaper imitation of, or a more relaxed form of, (or in the case of Russia, a more virulent, vigilante and renegade form of), capitalism. Being neither an economist nor an apologist for the capitalist mode of economic production and organization, I have no horse in this race. However, I recognize obfuscation when I see it. And what seems obviously missing from most of these discussions is that, as imperfect as... Read more ›
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