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  • Question and Answer Period UC, Santa Cruz, 1/31/98
Audience:

There were two hours worth of discussion and I think that is one of the questions that I would have about the format. Also, it is very hard to respond to everyone’s points, especially since they were strongly made. In fact, I feel a little bit like a mosquito at a nudist colony: I don’t know where to begin.

Chris Connery:

Maybe start with one of your questions, and then we can move on.

Audience:

I have two basic responses. Both of them are directed to Professors Butler and Brown. First, I want to point out the rhetorical strategy of the panelists, which I thought was quite brilliant, but I want to reveal the legerdemain and how it was done. Second, I want to talk about the political implications of the kind of knowledge which I think you are espousing in this discussion.

First, I’m a paranoid mosquito, according to Professor Butler. I was one of the people who in fact helped draft the statement, and I can’t speak for the others except to say that we felt some response was in order. If you look at the left conservatism workshop description, it starts with “a specter is haunting intellectual life in the United States.” In fact that’s the brilliance of what you folks have done, a kind of jujitsu of what you are trying to do, which is to attack people who criticize or depart from your version of the ‘60s, your version of theory — which as I’m going to suggest is a teleological version of theory — by using ridicule. I mean, to call me and other people paranoids, to yuk it up, is, I think indicative of the slight of hand. Or, as Professor Butler said, to talk about or ridicule people who think texts are too difficult, or too hard to read — I disagree with your positions which I’ve read at great length —

Butler:

You can call me by my first name.

Audience:

OK. I didn’t mean to be disrespectful. So, on the one hand you’re saying that there are all these left conservatives or people who are intemperately attacking all the common sensical, or ironically, true versions or theory, like Alan Sokal or whatever, and at the same time you then talk about how people who don’t accept your position are reactionary. You talk about this reactionary refusal, and I think that is quite ingenious the way you’ve constructed your rhetorical argument. In terms of the element of your rhetoric, I want to point out that both of your positions, Wendy and Judy, operate, or seem to me to work from straw arguments. You are accusing the left conservatives of lumping all the postmodernists together, even though Wendy, you use the term, we posties, at one point. But you set up this kind of fictional, economistic Marxist who hasn’t existed since Pletkonov, or before — for instance, the idea that the material world is transparent, that we can just know things, or the Truth, with a capital “T,” which has been problematized, not only by Gramsci, but by Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and a lot of other thinkers, and obviously you’d have to be a total ignoramus not to see these things.

In fact, what I am hearing in your critique, Wendy is a sort of New Left critique of the old Left, which was very important, but that was thirty years ago. And I don’t know anyone who defends the notion that we should bring back the working class hero, or that the base-superstructure model, as Professor Butler was saying, hasn’t been — even Marx didn’t believe in this kind of duality. A man named Sayer has a book called “The Violence of Abstraction” on this issue. So, to sum up, just in terms of the rhetoric, I think that it is just a complete straw argument, the whole way through, because I disagree with your positions, ok, but I don’t believe in any of things you said. So that struck me as curious.

This brings me to my...

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