Last night I read the Lingua Franca article on the decline and fall of the
Duke Literature department with morbid fascination. ("The Department that
Fell to Earth," David Yaffe, Feb. 99) While not quite as scandalous as the
discovery that Paul De Man, Yale's post-structuralism guru, had been a
pro-Nazi journalist during WWII, the collapse at Duke should remind us how
tenuous the whole postmodernist/poststructuralist enterprise is
intellectually. Now that the material base for these trends is dying
down--namely, the economic expansion of the 1980s-- it should be apparent
that much of the intellectual energy will begun to dissipate. That is the
real story behind Duke's debacle.
What you might also find interesting is that the Marxism list at Panix is
actually the spawn of a mailing-list that a Duke literature major started
over five years ago. There is a core of people, including me, who met each
other on that list and who have stayed together in one permutation or
another for around a half-decade.
Jon Beasley-Murray was a member of the Spoons Collective, a group of
students and non-academic intellectuals who shared an interest in cultural
studies. They already had begun lists on Deleuze-Guattari, Bataille,
Lyotard, etc, when they decided it would be useful to have one on Marx as
well. They saw Marx not as a proletarian revolutionary, but as an
intellectual forerunner to Frederic Jameson! Jameson was Beasley-Murray's
professor at Duke and I would be the first to admit that Jon was closer to
Marxism politically than the rest of the Spoons Collective put together. He
was strongly influenced by Jameson, Deleuze-Guattari and Bourdieu. His
papers are online at:
http://lists.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/marxism/marxpapers.html
Mostly what Jon was interested in was escalating the importance of culture,
as opposed to underlying class relations that supposedly typified classical
Marxism. This paragraph from his paper on "Value and Capital in Bourdieu
and Marx" should give you an idea where he is coming from:
"Traditionally, only the exchange at the cash register concerns economics.
In Marxist terms, the price paid is related to the book's value which is a
combination of: the value of its means of production; the value of the
variable capital (wages) required for the reproduction of the socially
necessary labor time; and the value of the surplus, which is more or less
equal to profit. Everything else concerns use value. On the other hand, for
Bourdieu this is only the beginning of the story: selecting and then
reading the book require a certain amount of cultural (particularly
linguistic) capital, and the benefits of such investment yield an amount of
cultural capital which may acquire a new form of exchangeable value at an
academic dinner party or job interview, or with the granting of an
educational diploma. Thus while for an orthodox economist the choice of
Great Expectations over Neuromancer (say) is of no concern, for the
economist of cultural capital such distinctions are the essential points of
analysis. Indeed, Bourdieu appears to overturn the common economistic
conception that use is the immediate and uncomplex satisfaction of need.
Rather, he demonstrates the way in which use value is transformed into a
new form of value, and thus produces cultural capital, at a scene removed
from the initial, economic exchange. The question now is that of the
relation between these two moments of exchange."
The Spoons Marxism list was characterized by internal contradictions from
the very beginning. The post-Marxists like Beasley-Murray were frustrated
by the direction the list took, when activists and classical Marxist
academics signed up. By the same token, this camp found itself at war with
sectarians from across the political spectrum who thought that they were in
the Russian Duma of 1911 rather than a mailing-list. Jon, in keeping with
the free speech metaphysic that had been institutionalized by Duke
department head Stanley Fish, insisted that the list remain unmoderated. It
was only during the course of a particularly bitter flame war with
supporters of Peru's Shining Path that a decision was made to moderate the
list. Unfortunately, one of the moderators turned out to be not only
incurably sectarian, but certifiably insane, so we were forced to look
elsewhere. Doug's LBO-Talk list and the Marxism list at Panix are the
grandchildren of Jon Beasley-Murray's original list.
I suspect that the internal crisis at Duke and other shake-ups in the world
of postmodernism have taken their toll on Jon. He was profoundly shaken by
the Sokal affair and wrote a short article on how this had made him
reconsider many of his theoretical assumptions. Unfortunately, his web page
no longer has the piece otherwise I would have included it.
The most interesting observation in the Lingua Franca article is that
nearly all of the Duke literature professors had gone off on a
memoir-writing jag. Postmodernism, with its obsession with the "subject",
seems to have compelled all the various professors to describe how their
own subject was constructed. Hence, confessional writings became the norm
for such superstars as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who dwelt on childhood
spankings in her anthology "Tendencies".
David Yaffe observes that "In retrospect, the department's memoir-writing
phase seems virtually predestined, an inevitable turn for an institution
that made little effort to foster a sense of collective purpose or identity
among its members, stressing their value as individuals instead."
This is the underlying logic of all postmodernist thought, and is at the
root of Judith Butler's philosophy as well. "Collective purpose" is nowhere
to be found, as each individual seeks his or her own personal liberation.
Bracketing out politics and society seems essential to this enterprise.
Once you do this, you end up with the sort of extreme individual isolation
that characterizes existential philosophy.
I know that Duke was driving Jon a bit crazy. Now that he has gone back to
England and is a lecturer in the Department of Hispanic Studies at the
University of Aberdeen, Scotland, he must be a lot happier. I can't help
but wondering whether a class he gave at Duke might be a commentary on the
insanity that was taking place all around him at the time:
Lit 20s.01: Why Education is Bad for You (and for everyone else you know)
Instructor: Jon Beasley-Murray
Synopsis of course content: This course will look at debates concerning
school and schooling from a variety of perspectives, and in a variety of
media (social theory, literature, film, etc.). Particular (but not
exclusive) attention will be given to the suggestion that the function of
educational institutions is above all to perpetuate and legitimate an
unjust social order. This suggestion will be compared above all to the
contrasting proposals either that a) schooling can be a force for
liberation or b) that it is possible to liberate oneself from schooling.
Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
