> I think
>the gist of Blair Sandler's message was correct: that traditional,
>orthodox, views of activism were not the dominant ones in the plenaries,
>and in fact were not very welkl represented in the plenaries, and that
>those who held those views mistook the non-dominance/presence of these
>views as an absence of activism itself: which is simply incorrect. One
>other point to be made is that, perhaps, the distinction between academics
>and activists is sometimes overdrawn. The proper distinction should be
>between activist academics and non-activist academics. Most of the people
>who talk a lot about activism are themselves either academics (either
>students or professors) or enmeshed in a network of academic discourses and
>processes; just as people who are academics are often enmeshed in activist
>discourses and practices, even if they do not advertise it=themselves, or
>glamorize it=themselves, or romanticize it=themselves.
>
>Antonio Callari
>
I don't think anybody in their right mind came to the Amherst conference
looking for an activist focus. The conferences have been around long enough
for people to know what's up. Back in the late 1980s a friend of mine who
was active in Sister Cities Projects and who worked as a nurse went up to
the conference (it might have been the first) and returned with the
observation that she did not understand a single word that anybody was
saying. Pretty soon the word got out. Activists stayed home.
So as this filtering process started to take place, the people who did make
the trek *understood* what the conference was about. It was an academic
conference not that much different from MLA conferences, etc. This
conference was a gathering of the post-Marxist tribe. Every graduate
student in America who was into Althusser, Zizek, Bourdieu, etc. would
have to consider putting money aside for hotel and transportation costs.
Later in hotel rooms people would drink Jack Daniels from the bottle and
gossip about goings-on in the groves of academe.
What happened in December 1996 was unexpected. A whole number of people,
possibly a majority of the conference attendees, came with a theoretical
approach to Marxism that was much more in line with what I call classical
Marxism. People like Ellen Meiksins Wood, John Bellamy Foster, Doug Henwood
and Meera Nanda have been carving out a space for this current for a few
years now. When graduate students and louts like me came up to the
conference with an identification with this current, we clashed with the
post-Marxists. The clash could have been avoided if the organizers had the
good sense to not have such lopsided plenaries. That they lacked such good
sense reminds me of the public relations failure of Social Text after the
Sokal Affair. It became tempting for Andrew Ross et al to label Sokal as an
enemy of multiculturalism rather than to engage with his ideas. Likewise,
it became easier for the Amherst conference organizers to view the
disruptions from the floor as evidence of intolerant behavior on the part
of others rather than their own exclusionary practices.
Louis Proyect
