Laclau and Mouffe make an excellent case study. Any theory of learning that can't establish why they should not be read is inadequate and intellectually debilitating. First the specific case, then the general theoretical/historical problem that this discussion eludes. Part One. Laclau, Mouffe, and some related observations I have read (or attempted repeatedly to read) their reply to Norman Geras in NLR. That performance -- particularly in the inability to state accurately a criticism made of them, an inability so extreme as to make it likely it was deliberate and malicious -- did not encourage one to believe that other works of theirs would profitably occupy time better spent in playing solitaire or watching the grass grow. Now I myself think the endless 20th century efforts to explain human motive (either of individuals or of groups) in terms of psychology are ultimately fruitless, but those who believe otherwise could perhaps provide us with at least a preliminary (empirical) account of how an individual scholar (assuming good will, intelligence, and anxiety to be fair) chooses which of some 1000 books and articles on a given subject she should read, which she should ignore the existence of, and which she should consider only as reflected in the writings of others. I guess my decision to put Laclau and Mouffe permanently on my no-read list would have emerged gradually from thousands of hours spent reading innumberable political/philosophical/historical texts in the years after 1965, from which reading (and from its context in my political practice of those years) I would gradually have built up an implicit list of "authors to be trusted." Doubtless, reading 10,000 other authors (selected by some sort of random bibliography generator) would have produced other results. But oh well. As the '50s banality had it, that's the way the cookie crumbles. And, since each author on that implicit list differed in various ways, some sharp, from other authors on the same list, I was of course forced (despite my principled suspicion of originality, my own or others) to be constantly "independent" and "original" (really undesirable characteristics) whenever faced with such variations. And I suspect that most (however much they might disagree with me on the "independence") go through a quite similar process in choosing their reading and formulating their responses to what they read. No one is really Adam in the Garden, leaping to his feet and expostulating like Enlightenment *philosophe* in utter autonomy from all prior social interchange. Leaving aside the great dead (Marx, Lenin, Luxemburg, Mao, Engels, Kautsky, etc), among those writers were (we'll skip the list), whose thinking was not just raw material for my precious individuality nor abstract external "influences" but to some extent *was*/*is* me. We really cannot ignore history. (A 1939/40 book by John C. Whittaker). And so Geras's critique in NLR, Wood's *The Retreat from Class: A New 'true' Socialism*, and Laclau/Mouffe's own clowinish response to Geras in NLR, seem to me to be a quite reasonable basis both for refusing to read anymore of the pair *and* to refer to them negatively whenver it suits me to do so. (Incidentally, posters on lbo and pen-l, as well as m-fem, regularly refer quite negatively to Barbara Fields, Thomas Laqueur, and Stephanie Coontz not only without reading those writers but without ever having heard of them, though to me they seem absolutely essential in understanding the radical change in the nature of justifications of exploitation which separate the 19th and 20th centuries from earlier western history, a change which is central to the elaboration of strategies and tactics to defeat racism and sexism.) And posters also refer (or more often simply don't mention) the law and justice and prison system of the U.S. without reference to (perhaps without knowledge of the existence of ) Wilbert Rideau, Ron Wikberg, Dan Pens, Paul Wright, and Jerome G. MIller, to name just a few. (Pens and Wright edit *Prison Legal News*.) Part II. On Reading in the Modern World. The central problem of intellectuals for at least 4 centuries now has been deciding what *not* to read. Of the various bourgeois artists, literary critics, and cultural and intellectual historians who have touched on it, only Milton and Pope confronted it at all honestly. The responses of Wordsworth, Whitman, Arnold, Sir Walter Raleigh (the literary scholar, not the nobleman), T.S. Eliot, I.A. Richards, Allen Tate, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, the new critics in general, Northrop Frye, the *Journal of the History of Ideas*, Harold Bloom, Alfred Korzybski, Kenneth Burke, Marianne Moore, Rosemond Tuve, the MLA, the NAS, the NCTE, Ruskin, Pater, George Saintsbury, the men (a few women) who construct reading lists for the Ph.D. in modern literatures, Derrida, Sartre, Jonathan Culler, the NYRB (passim), Diacritics, New Literary History, E.M. Forster (*Aspects of the Novel*), Deirdre McCloskey, Edward Hirsch, Robert Pattison (*On Literacy: The Politics of the Word from Homer to the Age of Rock*) have all been in a virtual conspiracy to conceal the crushing need for a philosophy of what not to read, all pretending that it was only bad books that one need not read. But (confining myself to a very narrow field: what one might call classic bourgeois imaginative literature). The fact is, that by any set of literary standards one can dream up, there is far too much "great literature" (poetry, as Arnold said, "of the very first order") for any one person to read, even one who earns her living as a professor and reader of literature. So judgments such as "you must read such and such" are, in this immense wealth of material, simply absurd -- or rather so obviously true that they reduce themselves to nonsense by the extravagant reading lists they produce. Doug somewhere mentions having worn out his first copy of the *Grundrisse*. I might say that one of the great tragedies of my intellectual life is that I haven't come close to wearing out my copy. I've worn out 4 copies of Capital I, but my copies of II and III and the *Theories of Surplus Value*, while heavily annotated are not even close to being worn out. Now Doug, tell me why I should read Laclau or Mouffe. Carrol Doug Henwood wrote: > Louis Proyect wrote: > > >Two of > >the better-known post-Marxists are Laclau and Mouffe, who I've never taken > >the trouble to read[...]
