Antonio Callari: > For you to use the example of the plenaries to >typecast the journal is simply to give free reign to the instincts you, and >orthers, to attack! attack! attack! Attack who? us? for not having had >balanced plenaries? Where is the public attack on other conferences that >also do not have balanced plenaries, or even as balanced programs as the RM >conference had? I don't understand why there is such an adamant refusal to engage with the political context which is the Sokal affair. This has opened up a big fault line within academic Marxism. On one side you have a constellation of thinkers like Sondra Harding, Vandana Shiva, Andrew Ross, yourself. On the other you have Meera Nanda, Ellen Woods, et al. What is at stake is the future of Marxism. If the SSC organizing committee neglects to have Stephen Resnick address a plenary, this has more to do I guess with rivalries within academia rather than what the agenda of Marxism should be. But when you have a conference in the name of Marxism, even if it is for "rethinking" Marxism, and have Vandana Shiva as a keynote speaker, the issue is politics not professional courtesy. What does Shiva have to do with Marxism anyway? What you were communicating, especially given the background of the Sokal affair, is that the big tent of Marxism should include her. I find this incomprehensible. Shiva is an ideological opponent of Marxism. Not just "orthodox" Marxism whatever that means, but Althusserite Marxism, post-Marxism, neo-Marxism, or whatever else you want to call it. When she says that there is some link between Rene Descartes and Mad Cow disease, somebody should have used the kind of hook they used to use in vaudeville shows and pulled her off the stage. Her offense was promoting idealistic obscurantism at a nominally Marxist conference. (I guess a hook should have been used for St. Balibar as well for the offense of self-love.) The reason there is so much tension around these questions is that you no longer face a docile audience at these conferences. Graduate students who I have gotten to know on PEN-L and the Spoons Marxism lists absolutely despise the idealist obscurantism of people like Vandana Shiva. Most of them are very reluctant to speak up publicly because they are afraid of getting blackballed when they are looking for a job. They rely on the self-employed like Doug Henwood to speak for them. He doesn't have to worry about tenure. This fear is real. One of the young Indian graduate students who yelled at St. Balibar came to me at the conference and urged me to defend her and her comrades because she was worried that you were going to jeopardize her academic career. As it turns out, her fears were probably an overreaction. In any case, if a graduate student can't speak their mind, then it's not really worth making a career in academia. They should follow the model of Spinoza who knew that his philosophy would never get accepted in official circles. He taught himself lens grinding and spoke truth to power on his own time. If you can't make a living lens grinding nowadays, there is always computer programming. Louis Proyect
