From: PMC-Talk THREAD: Silber, Strauss, and Post-Democratic Politics in the Academy (11/30/93 – 1/6/94)

 
 
 

(Excerpted from the Discussion Group PMC-talk@ncsuvm, 7/92-8/92)

 

PMC-TALK digest: postings for the period ending 11-30-93. PMC-TALK is the discussion group for the electronic journal _Postmodern Culture_ (PMC-LIST). Subscription to PMC-TALK is independent of subscription to PMC-LIST; if you are not subscribed to the journal itself, and would like to be, send your first and last name and a request for subscription to PMC@UNITY.NCSU.EDU (internet).

 

Today’s Topics: Boston Univ.’s Pres. Silber

 

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Sender: “Joseph H. Hesse”

Subject: Boston Univ.’s Pres. Silber

 

Hello. I am new to this list (to e-mail as well) and I feel a responsibility to produce some text for this list, rather than just sit in my room consuming the text of others.

 

Has anyone else been reading about Pres. Silber’s recent letter to the faculty of Boston University. There was an article today in THE BOSTON GLOBE. They quote his letter as saying:

 

“Boston University has resisted the imposition of doctrines that would curtail intellectual and academic freedom. It is plain that some versions of critical theory, radical feminism and multiculturism, among other intellectual positions, are ideological in character and inhospitable to free intellectual inquiry.”

 

“Marxism, structuralism, feminism, etc., do not, in and of themselves, threaten academic freedom, but each of these views is highly susceptible to being formulated as dogma, impervious to any arguments or evidence not already in conformance with the basic tenets of the dogma.”

 
“Any university that takes academic and intellectual freedom seriously has an obligation to spot these epistemologies and head them off.”

 
The Globe reports that areas of study that Silber mentioned in an earlier report to the trustees were:

 
“Critical legal studies, revisionist history, Afro-centrism, radical feminism, multiculturalism, the Frankfurt school of Critical Theory, structuralism and deconstructionism, dance therapy, gay and lesbian liberation and animal liberation.”

 
I found so much of this article troubling, on so many different points, that I hardly know where to begin with a commentary on Silber’s statements. And so, I will wait and see if anyone is interested in this subject before I clutter up this list with my text.

 
Any Comments or additional information on Silber?

 
Joseph Hesse

jhhes.mvax.cc.conncoll.edu

 

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PMC-TALK digest: postings for the period ending 12-2-93.

 

[ . . . . ]

 

Today’s Topics: President Silber of Boston University’s reported remarks

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS TO NOBODADDIES

CALL FOR PAPERS: Meeting of Society for Literature and Science

 

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Sender:

Subject: Re: President Silber of Boston University’s reported remarks

 

As someone who works with both deconstruction and structuralism, I am profoundly disturbed by President Silber’s reported remarks. Are we in for another round of McCarthyism in American academe? And in what ways is dance therapy a threat to the powers that be?

 

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PMC-TALK digest: postings for the period ending 12-4-93.

 

[ . . . . ]

 

Today’s Topics: Re: President Silber of Boston University’s reported remarks Re: Silber

 

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Subject: Re: President Silber of Boston University’s reported remarks

 

>As someone who works with both deconstruction and structuralism, I am

>profoundly disturbed by President Silber’s reported remarks. Are we in for

>another round of McCarthyism in American academe? And in what ways is dance

>therapy a threat to the powers that be?

 

Don’t you know that dancing leads to sex?

 

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From: bssimon@helix.ucsd.edu (Bart Simon)
Subject: Re: Silber
Date: Fri, 3 Dec 93 8:40:58 PST

Forwarded message:
> From Michael.Lynch@brunel.ac.uk Thu Dec  2 11:40:10 1993
> Date: Thu, 02 Dec 1993 19:39:20
> From: Michael.Lynch@brunel.ac.uk (hsstmel)
> To: bssimon@helix.ucsd.edu
> Subject: Re: Silber file
> Message-Id: 
> In-Reply-To: 
> 
> 
> 
> I'm writing this in response to Joseph H. Hesse's message about
> Boston Univ. President John Silber.  Hesse quotes from an article
> in the Boston Globe, regarding Silber's response to a Faculty
> Council inquiry about academic freedom.  Hesse states: "I found
> so much of this article troubling, on so many different points,
> that I hardly know where to begin with a commentary on Silber's
> statements."  I too found this troubling.   I spent six years at
> Boston University, and left two months ago after a very bitter
> battle with the BU central administration over my tenure case.
> I would be happy to discuss my case further with anyone who is
> interested.  However, in this message, I would like to elaborate
> on Hesse's message, and suggest that anyone who finds Silber's
> remarks ominous (and believe me, he substantiates his words with
> deeds) should write to Silber to give him a piece of your mind. 
> I recommend it highly; it is a rare opportunity to engage a
> genuine tyrant in dialogue:
> 
> John Silber, President
> Boston University
> 147 Bay State Road
> Boston, MA 02215
> 
> Be sure to cc. the following parties:
> 
> James Iffland, Chair
> Faculty Council
> Department of Modern Foreign Languages
> Boston University
> 718 Commonwealth Ave.
> Boston, MA 02215
> 
 [ .... ]
> 
> Alice Dembner
> Higher Education Correspondent
> Boston Globe
> 135 Morrissey Blvd.
> P.O. Box 2378
> Boston, MA 02107-2378
> 
  [ .... ] 
> There is a genuine chance that if the academic community
> supports Iffland and Faculty Council against Silber, that we will
> see the end to 23 years of demoralization at BU.  Among the
> reasons for getting involved in this battle are that BU, in the
> aftermath of a faculty strike in the late '70s offers a model of
> a university with a weakened faculty and an administration that
> micromanages the faculty's academic affairs.  Administrators at
> other universities may get ideas from this model.  Silber is not
> the only problem at BU.  His Provost, a fellow named Jon
> Westling, is a particularly nasty piece of work, as is the Dean
> of the College of Liberal Arts, Dennis Berkey.  Silber and his
> gang oversee all appointments and promotions, and consequently
> they have built a substantial base of support among faculty (and
> especially department chairs).  Nevertheless, there are very many
> faculty at BU who would rejoice if Silber's reign came to an end,
> but they rarely speak up for fear of getting their salaries
> frozen, suffering departmental budget cuts, or being denied
> tenure.    
> 
> The following is a series of quotations from the Silber report
> that gave rise to the current flap about academic freedom.  The
> administration's response to a very mild Faculty Council request
> gives some indication of the Orwellian atmosphere of the place.
>

---

> 
> Excerpt from John Silber, President's Report to the Trustees,
> Boston University, April 15, 1993, pp. 93-95.  (The Report was
> delivered as a slide show, and then published for distribution
> to parents and others at the time of Boston University's
> graduation ceremonies.  It was not distributed to the faculty.)
  [though it was subsequently reprinted in the Boston Globe --ML].)

---

> 
> ". . . let me speak of another way in which the stewardship of
> the Board [of Trustees] can be judged.  Beyond anything you've
> seen so far, but just as important, this University has remained
> unapologetically dedicated to the search for truth and highly
> resistant to political correctness and to ideological fads.  In
> my view, it is not too much to say that among this country's
> major research universities we are one of the very few that still
> deserve to be called a university in the true meaning of the
> term. . . .
>  
>      We have resisted relativism as an official intellectual
> dogma, believing that there is such a thing as truth, and if you
> can't achieve it, at least you can approach it.  We have resisted
> the fad toward critical legal studies, which I've mentioned
> [earlier].  In the English Department and the departments of
> literature, we have not allowed the structuralists or the
> deconstructionists to take over.  We have refused to take on
> dance therapy because we don't understand the theory of it.  We
> have resisted revisionist history.  We've resisted the fad of
> allowing every student to do his own thing by determining his own
> curriculum, thereby turning the University into a buffet in which
> the student has whatever kind of mis-education he, in the midst
> of his ignorance, decides he wants.  In the Philosophy Department
> we have resisted the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory.
> 
>      Across the board we have refused to accept hiring quotas,
> either of females or of minorities believing that we should
> recruit faculty on the basis of talent and accomplishment rather
> than any other consideration.  We have resisted the official
> dogmas of radical feminism.  We have done the same thing with
> regard to gay and lesbian liberation, and animal liberation.  We
> have refused to introduce condom machines into University
> buildings and thereby compete with drugstores.  We refuse to
> believe that students at Boston University need a college
> education in how to perform the sex act.  We believe that
> students in America who haven't figured that out before they get
> to college are too dumb to come to college.  And we have no wish
> to share any responsibility whatsoever for what they do with
> their knowledge.  We will not serve as procurers or facilitators
> of sexual liaisons.
> 
>      We have resisted the fad of Afro-centrism.  We have not
> fallen into the clutches of the multi-culturists.  We recognize
> that Western culture, so-called, is in fact a universal culture. 
> Western mathematics is the mathematics of the world; Western
> science is the science of the world; and the Western culture has
> been philosophically oriented from the start toward finding the
> truth, and starting to approach it as closely as possible.  It
> was in the Western cultural tradition that people began to
> develop courses in anthropology, in the history of foreign
> countries and in comparative religions.  Buddhism, for example,
> was brought into German Universities by Kant and by Hegel.  This
> is a part of the very meaning of Western culture and
> civilization~not to be parochial, but to be universal in one's
> concern."
>

---

 
> The Boston University Faculty Council got hold of this report,
> and in recent weeks the Council's Committee on Academic Freedom
> requested of Silber that he "clarify" what he meant by "resisted"
> in the above remarks.  Silber did not respond for a few weeks,
> and Faculty Council Chairman James Iffland discussed Silber's
> report in the BU student newspaper (The Daily Free Press).

  [....]

 [In response, Silber's Assistant General Council wrote a letter 
  to the student newspaper, in which he objected, incredibly, that
  Silber's academic freedom was violated by the Faculty
  Council's questioning of Silber's statement to the trustees. --ML]

---

> Another BU official was quoted in the Boston Globe (November 25,
> 1993:  'BU official denies curbs on academic freedom' by Alice
> Dembner):
> "'No credible claims of violations of academic freedom have ever
> been made against the university administration,' Carol Hillman,
> vice president for university relations said in a statement. 
> 'Prof. iffland's reported statements are nothing more than a form
> of acadmic McCarthyism:  innuendo based on secret 'evidence' that
> does not in fact exist.'"

---

> 
> Silber finally did respond to the Faculty Council's request, but
> as the quotations in Joseph Hesse's e-mail message indicate, he
> dug in his heels.  I am told that during a recent Faculty
> Assembly meeting Silber accused Prof. Iffland of being a liar and
> a coward.  Clearly, the BU Administration believes that a vicious
> offense is the best defense against criticism.  Iffland and the
> Faculty Council are being pilloried by Silber's propaganda
> machine.  They need support. 
> 
 [The Faculty Council Committee on Academic Freedom
 and the AAUP are currently looking into questions about
 academic freedom at BU, including tenure and promotion
 cases, intrusive efforts by BU administrators to edit
 dissertations and dissertation abstracts, and numerous other
 complaints. --ML]

---

PMC-TALK digest: postings for the period ending 12-7-93.

[ . . . . ]

Today's Topics:
     Re: [anti-ideology politics]
     [ .... ]

---

 
Sender: Jay Lemke 
Subject:      Re: Digest ending 11-30-94

Regarding the anti-ideology politics of Dr. Silber:

My deepest sympathy to the faculty of BU to find the intellectual
leadership (*is* that what Presidents do in our universities?) of
their institution entrusted to a political demagogue whose audience
is clearly not the serious intellectuals of the BU faculty, but
the media and the mass-market for fear-based, anti-intellectual
politics.

The specific targets mentioned by Dr Silber are exactly the intellectual
movements of our time that challenge establishment orthodoxies and
social and cultural privilege. His claim that they lend themselves
to dogmatic formulations could be made about almost *any* belief
system, including scientific rationalism (have a look at how science
is taught at BU, or almost anywhere, for the evidence).

The best defense of critical intellectual movements is their offense
against established views. Use the tools of these perspectives to
demonstrate the ideological character of modernism, patriarchy,
science, rationalism, and all the historically specific and still
politically dominant intellectual formations which had their origins
in the interests and values of a very small segment of humanity, who
continue to be privileged by them. Demonstrate exactly how these
values, discourses, and practices do in fact favor the interests of
one social caste over those of others. Demonstrate the fallacies of
its claims to universal validity independent of history and culture.
And take the demonstrations beyond the academy to the same media,
and wider political constituencies to which Silber appeals.

If he believes ideology has no place in the academy, convict him
of his own ideology./

I recently had occasion to reply strongly to an editorial in a
professional journal warning of the "slippery slopes of postmodernism".
I am now on the editorial board of that journal. And I received
a lot of support reaction from other professionals in the field,
especially younger, more vulnerable ones, who confirmed my claim
that such statements are not just statements of editorial opinion,b
but, because of existing power relations, create a chilling effect
on intellectual freedom. Silber is apparently using his own position
in a somewhat similarly irresponsible manner. It is actions like
his which constitute the threat to academic freedom, not ideas that
challenge the established wisdom.

I think we have a responsibility to say so, publicly.

JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
BITNET:    JLLBC@CUNYVM
INTERNET:  JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU

---

PMC-TALK digest: postings for the period ending 12-14-93.

[ . . . . ] 
Today's Topics:
     [Re: BU demagoguery]
     leo strauss

---

 

Sender: KESSLER

Subject: Re: Digest ending 12-7-93

 

I am working backwards, up the e-mail in my files, but re Lemke’s remarks about BU: What is a “political” demagogue, in distinction from a demagogue? 2) Who are the “serious intellectual faculty” at BU, as distinct from the mere faculty? 3) Name, please, the “social castes” we have in the USA, and I mean as “caste”? What journal is Lemke helping to edit? he doesnt say? and pardon me if the answers are to be found in previous emails that I will work up the list to look at? And, while I am clear about the note from Lemke, 4) how are faculty nowadays to be distinguished from the mass media, the politicos, etc.?

 

They were not different in the Borking of Thomas, and the Borking of Bork, or the Borking of Guinier, etc. One cannot be a tenured mandarin and ride the rails of hardnosed politics to DC too, can one? ONe never know, nowadays, do one? as FW used to ask. Jascha Kessler, living in this post-Kantian, if not post-Cantian day of ours.

 

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Sender: kv10@cornell.edu (Kazys Varnelis)

Subject: leo strauss

 

The recent discussion of Boston University President John Silber on this list led me to wonder about his possible connection with the academic/political cult/conspiracy/movement around conservative academician Leo Strauss. While I didn’t find any connection, I would like to bring up the question of Leo Strauss, who is a fascinating – and terrifying – ((post) modern) figure for me and I would like to know what other members of the list think about him and his work.

 

For anyone who doesn’t know who Leo Strauss is, the following article, ought to be a start. (I should mention that I have explicit permission from the Nation to reproduce this article on pmc-list).

 

For further reading I would probably start with:

 

Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, (Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, 1952)

 

and

 

Shadia B. Drury, The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988).

 

Kazys Varnelis

Ph.D candidate, History and Theory of Architecture

Cornell University

 

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

 

[Because the permission granted by _The Nation_ covered only one posting in PMC-Talk, most of the article has been deleted in this republication. Anyone wishing to retrieve the original logs from PMC-Talk can do so by anonymous ftp to ftp.ncsu.edu, cd pub/ncsu/pmc/pmc-talk, and get 9312. Or, of course, you could get the magazine… –Ed.]

 

The Nation magazine,

Copyright (c) 1992, The Nation Company Inc.

 

November 2, 1992

 

SECTION: Vol. 255 ; No. 14 ; Pg. 494

Minority report; Leo Strauss Column

by Christopher Hitchens,

 

[ …. ]

 

The votaries of Leo Strauss form a sort of cult movement that is crucially ambiguous about the idea of elitism. The core belief of Strauss himself, and the mantra of his many rather odd followers, most of them located in the academy and in the “think tank” culture, was:

 

Liberal education is the necessary endeavor to found an aristocracy within mass society.

 

The key word here is probably “within”; Strauss made a special study of the esoteric and the cabalistic, and believed that since ancient times authentic philosophers had occluded their true meaning so as to make it clear only to a class of adepts.

 

[ ….. ]

 

Subscriptions:

The Nation, PO Box 10763, Des Moines IA 50340-0763. 1-800-333-8536.

 

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PMC-TALK digest: postings for the period ending 12-17-93.

[ . . . . ]

Today's Topics:
     Leo Strauss
     BU Demagoguery
     re: THE NATION piece

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Sender: Jay Lemke 
Subject:      Leo Strauss

The posting about Leo Strauss did indeed push me to think further
about the relation of the academy to democratic ideals. One can
read there an invitation to an elitism with the rather serious
modernist weakness that it imagines that one caste, narrow in its
experience and view of the world, should project its own perspec-
tives as universal and itself as fit to lead the whole of
society. Mistaking the part for the whole does not seem a very
sound foundation for policy-making.

But... Just how realistic is it to imagine instead that someday
everyone is society will take the time, have the interest, ac-
quire the skills, to relate their own perspectives on policy to
*any* model of the social system as a whole? Some policies are
purely local; for them a stakeholder model of participatory demo-
cracy seems reasonable. But other policies necessarily must be
grounded in overviews that encompass relations among many social
groups, agendas, activities. Such overviews will always, in the
division of labor, the specialization of perspective and inter-
est, be the speciality of *some* groups in society. They need not
be monolithically masculine, middle-aged, middle-class,
heterosexual, Christian, Eurocentric, etc. But neither are they
likely to encompass most members of a large, diverse society.
They need not necessarily be allowed the power to impose their
policy choices on the rest of us, but they will be in some sense
in a better position to consider such matters. A lot of the time,
a lot of us just won't care.

And ... Plato, at least, often sounds the theme that people in
general need to believe in certain values, or gods, (or
ideologies) for a social order to operate at all, and that there
is a considerable danger to the social order (*any* social order,
not just the ones we are critical of) when intellectual start to
undermine general confidence in established beliefs. Intellec-
tuals are specialists in critique. We are not supposed to stop at
anything (cf. Descartes, Nietzsche, Postmodernism) in our criti-
cal inquiries. But there is a danger that we could (if we were
listened to, which usually we are not) disturb the social order
in ways that would lead to conditions far worse than those we are
critical of. It seems very plausible to me that Plato wrote with
such notions in mind, and that his works do somewhat cloak his
most dangerous ideas (in the indirectness of the Socratic
dialogues, in the famous allegories and "religious" passages,
etc.). Given the conditions under which many scholars and philos-
ophers have written, even in modern times, not only a moral con-
cern for the danger of their ideas to society as a whole, but a
defensive concern for the danger of repercussions on themselves,
may have led to a certain intertextual "encoding" of their mes-
sages.

We are the intellectual descendants of an elitist tradition. We
know that democratic ideals are the product of a bourgeois (and
masculine, and middle-aged, and modernist, etc.) culture, which
we pride ourselves on criticizing and deconstructing in every
other way. So what exactly might a post-democratic politics be?

JAY.

JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
BITNET:    JLLBC@CUNYVM
INTERNET:  JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU

---

Sender: Jay Lemke 
Subject:      BU Demagoguery

Jascha Kessler asks a few questions about my remarks in the Sil-
ber discussion. The first two seem miss the distinction between
qualifiers and classifiers in English semantics. Social "caste"
is a rather useful idea for postmodernists, I think, since it al-
lows us to refine the matrix of categorial social differences and
name its smallest cells: class by gender by age by cultural back-
ground by .... The term may be less familiar, but the notion is a
useful one, as in the work of Pierre Bourdieu and many feminist
theorists. Only one such caste has traditionally been politically
dominant in our society. ... The journal I co-edit is
_Linguistics and Education_ (thanks for the opportunity to ad-
vertise).

As for what really seems to be bothering our correspondent, I'd
say it is the touchy relationship between the political and the
academic. Personally, I'd be happy to see more intellectuals (and
not many academics today are, I think) enter electoral politics,
or even just the arenas of public opinion-making. What is being
objected to in the case of Dr. Silber is an attempt, not within
the context of civil politics but within that of an academic in-
stitution, to control opinion rather than to lead it. And I take
it some are suggesting that he is motivated as much or more by
the approval of such a move by those outside his university than
by his responsibilities to the university itself.

I am not, I hope, naive about the inevitable political dimensions
of all institutions and indeed of all intellectual inquiry. But
direct politically motivated efforts to control what are or are
not acceptable theoretical perspectives within the academy should
be resisted. The result of such efforts tends to intellectual
monoculture, and extinction.

JAY.

JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
BITNET:    JLLBC@CUNYVM
INTERNET:  JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU

---

 

Sender: KESSLER

Subject: Re: Digest ending 12-14-93

 

re: THE NATION piece. Why, one may ask, the phrase “CYNICAL briefing”? Why the use of the term briefing, and why the adjective. If one must not put one’s trust in princes, neither should one put one’s trust in “Nations(s).” Let us not forget where that journal is coming from, and who is the cynical editor of it, an unreconstructed Stalinist, to say the best and the least of him, who assumes that his view of the world is a true one. Talk about simpletons in the PM parish. Str.is one thing; Quayle is another. And William Kristol is a lad with a rather superior education and IQ, as indeed is his father. Please don’t start conflating Strauss, Straussians, Kristol and Quayle. It would be rather shoddy argumentation, about anything. Thinking, it is not. Kessler

 

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PMC-TALK digest: postings for the period ending 12-19-93.

[ . . . . ]

Today's Topics:
     Re: Digest ending 12-17-93  [Plato's ideas]
     Re: Digest ending 12-17-93  [Avoiding bad faith]
     Re: Digest ending 12-17-93  [evil geniuses of poststructuralism]

---

 

Sender: KESSLER

Subject: Re: Digest ending 12-17-93

 

One suggestion may be to ask, What is dangerous about Plato’s ideas? And to whom are they dangerous? And why are they dangerous? What is meant by “post-democratic”? Alpha Beta Delta Gamma, out of bottles? as Huxley suggested in BRAVENEW WORLD? What is a caste? Where are the intellectuals J Lemke speaks of? What makes them intellectuals? Professors are intellectuals? Intellectuals are professors? Such a glibness and fluency of talk is rather worrisome, as it assumes a complaisant audience, knowingness and agreement on categories as defining the world we live in according to this sort of academic argot. Sentimental, suicidal, canting, and bullying in the extreme. As if the folks quoting a Christopher Hitchens did not realize that he publishes in journals supported by megabucks in foundations that are based upon extraordinary wealth. IN Italy years ago, this talk emanated from the “mink coat Communists.” IN the States, today, it is the limousine liberals and their academic janissaries, who know not what they say or do. In a word, it is sheer bad faith. Pontificating bad faith. Kessler here, not even breathing hard, but waiting for a sign, give us a sign.

 

---

Sender: CYWB000 
Subject: Digest ending 12-17-93

I was distressed but not shocked by Kazys
Varnelis' message to pmc-talk about Strauss.
The first two paragraphs of _The Nation_
article seem to demonstrate well enough that
the article is confusing, not very interesting,
boring, probably easy to take apart. But who
wants to comment? I was going to wait to
hear other PMCers reactions, but would like to
address this message by K. Varnelis as a show
of some kind of dissatisfaction with the ideas
of, what I see as the L. Strauss club, and show
my support for those who counteract the LS
club (perhaps by adding a "D" to the end of
"LS").

A question in my own mind seems to be, "If I
only had the force of A.R. Stone or A. Kroker--
featured in the most recent Mondo 2000-- I
could clear up my own confusion, and perhaps
push this issue over the edge?" What little
force I have is the wish to see A.R. Stone,
Kroker, H. Giroux, C. Penley, and D. Haraway
(there are others) placed in the same room
with these folks (the LS club). Perhaps other
PMCers can tell me if this Leo Strauss crowd
would be an easy target.

My reaction is central to the problem of
epistemological battles that go on in
individuals' lives everyday. By
epistemological battle I mean the frustrations
of everyday life-- where proof and burden of
proof are too overwhelming to accumulate
against some wrong that is being committed
to you or to anyone else. The aggression of
silence is a good example. Silence does not
seem to be a discourse, and as Marika Finley-
de Monchy says, the "(silence of) death is not
a discourse". An academic elite, or whatever is
being referenced (I am not familiar with the
texts being discussed; although I know that
Henri Giroux has a major contention with
Bloom, and I side with Giroux), seems to be a
community of silence. It's hard to pin these
kinds of opinions down, not simply because
they are not available but because they are so
unpleasurable. [It is obvious that they are
available, K. Varnelis was given permission to
distribute the article in question.]

The discussion on PMC has been a difficult
one. The reason people and individuals arm
our/them/onesel(f)ve(s) with theories, words,
texts, languages, codes, intellectual tools, etc.,
is specifically so individuals and people can,
as Bourdieu advocates, avoid bad faith, and
get on with the business of creating. I suppose
people and individuals might also arm
our/them/onesel(f)ve(s) with good vocal
skills, good writing skills, and a bit of time to
address all these potential threats to the
creations and creativities many would like to
see and do-- not just an intellectual elite.

I am dissatisfied with the issue at hand. It
gets nasty but not nasty enough. Perhaps
Alphonso Lingis is monitoring PMC-talk and
could respond. Perhaps J. Bigras could
respond from the grave. I feel lucky that
Lemke is around; the BU situation is very
gray. I hope we are living something post-
Kantian. Lemke, as for ""post-Cantian"",
well responded to.

Brennan Murray Wauters,
cywb@musica.mcgill.ca

---

Sender: AYEAMAN@cudnvr.denver.colorado.edu
Subject: Re: Digest ending 12-17-93

Seems to me that there are some worthwhile points of view being
discussed here beyond the slurs against what Spivak ironically calls
the evil geniuses of poststructural and postmodern inquiry. (See
Spivak's chapter in Reading & Writing Differently.)

I wonder, with a smile, if President Silber took lessons in Resistqnce
from Henry Giroux? 

        --Andrew
Internet: ayeaman@cudnvr.denver.colorado.edu

Dr. Andrew R. J. Yeaman
7152 West Eightyfourth Way #707
Arvada, CO 80003
(303) 456-1592

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PMC-TALK digest: postings for the period ending 1-4-94.

[ . . . . ]

Today's Topics:
     RE: democratic developments at the end of the twentieth-century 
     Post-democratic politics

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Sender: Peter Stupples, University of Otago, New Zealand

pstupples@gandalf.otago.ac.nz

 

I was struck by the importance of the issues raised by Jay Lemke in response to the Leo Strauss exchanges. Is seems to me that the recent and current events in the former Soviet Union illustrate the problems involved in democratic developments at the end of the twentieth-century. The Communist system, as it had evolved under Lenin and Stalin, was clearly non-democratic and had also lost the support of the majority of Russian intellectuals. Communism, in the form it had genetically assumed, has been destroyed and replaced by a swiftly changing array of models that have the appearance of being democratic in the Western tradition. These changes have been accompanied by an almost complete economic collapse. Where stakeholders have had the opportunity to voice an opinion over the past few years they have tended to favour either 1. a return to a form of Communism (better the devil you know – we were better off under Brezhnev – there was a class system in operation in which everyone had a stake and knew the rules) or 2. an inchoate, archaic nationalism (Russia for the Russians, we need a slavonic solution to a slavonic problem, we are the only ones who know how to deal with our historical development). The academy, which was enthusiastically behind forms of socialism in 1917, no longer has a voice – certainly not a voice that is listened to. However I was impressed on a visit to the Russia provinces in May 1992 how well local governments were capable of running their own affairs, able to coordinate local groups of stakeholders into purposeful activity. There seems to be something that can be learnt from this, such as – you cannot interfere with the genetic development of historical processes – Russia is going back to 1916 and rerunning the issues that are pertinent to it – the power of *modern* central governments must be anti-democratic because of the distance from the stakeholders and the self-interests of a vast bureaucracy that is not answerable to those stakeholders. Centralised government is a *modern* idea, it is paternalistic, at best the state looking after the less privileged, who remain without privileges, hope, education, a stake, but are kept fed, clothed and housed to stop them being a social nuisance – post-modernist debates point to the break up of centralising tendencies in the interests of giving stakeholders and stakeholder groups a greater voice and giving room for a diversity of living-choices within communities.

 

The Platonic idea that people in general need to subscribe to a set of beliefs for social order to be possible is one of those leaps of faith that we no longer need to make. When all *beliefs* are undermined then we can all start looking at the construction of the real world, at the hopes and aspirations of real people and try to find the obviously very complex mechanisms that will allow them to flourish. This is not *post*-democratic politics but, perhaps for the first time, real democracy, the voice of the people, all the people, not simply being listened to by the political-class-patriachy representatives. We do not need beliefs but knowledge. Beliefs distort any objective view of the world. Knowledge leads to respect for the views and aspirations of others. Government structures need to be deconstructed in a physical sense until they are responsive to local interests. Policy-making should be local policy-making with pacts between localities to cover equity issues such as the funding of health and education.

 

Silber’s comments are part of the defensive response of the patriarchy concerned about critical ideas that break down belief and reveal a real world and real issues that might be uncomfortable for the elite. Leo Strauss gives such ideas an intellectual gloss but are promted, it seems to me by a disrepect for the views of others, a quest for modernist simplicity at the expense of real-life diversity.

 

Sorry to go on at length and in such prolix randomness. But Jay Lemke posed a question on the nature of post-democratic politics and I thought it wortha response, even one hurriedly and badly put together.

 

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Sender: Jay Lemke 
Subject:      Post-democratic politics

Maybe PMC is more flame-proof than other lists, but KESSLER's ef-
fort to foreground critical perspectives and lament complaisance
seemed somewhere between negative and incendiary in its tone. I
certainly think it unwise to reply in kind. I also suspect that
his specific questions were rhetorical (What makes someone an in-
tellectual? Why are/aren't professors intellectual? etc.) and his
point that we should not take it so much for granted that the
common wisdom of the moment on such matters is enough for our
discussions. But we all know that every assumption, every few
words of every discourse, presents an opportunity for endless
critical re-examinations, none of which ever lead to definite
conclusions, though they are certainly essential to the process
of coming up with newer discourses that serve us in some practi-
cal ways. On PMC I assume that we are not in search of "truth" or
old Believers that somewhere there is one such true and flawless-
ly reasoned discourse which must then prove to be, if not the
only useful one, then the most useful one. All the practices of
life are carried on, often quite well, with discourses in which
any of us could "find" numberless flaws.

I read in Kessler's message (Digest 12-17-93) a certain im-
patience with political superficiality, suggesting someone who,
like me much of time, is more satisfied by analyses of how power
sustains privilege and wraps itself in pseudo-intellectual
mystification and misdirection. But these are old discourses.
They have been around and widely circulated in our communities
for more than a couple of generations now. They feel old,
modernist, not-ours. They seem wonderfully satisfying as critique
and totally useless as a guide to constructive action. Their
political heart, which I largely share, needs a new voice, and
their theoretical assumptions need a good post-modernist updat-
ing.

What would a post-democratic politics be indeed? How can there be
a democracy of equals when we have no idea how in practice to
make a society of equals? when this ideal assumes a privileging
of the isolated individual as the ultimate political unit, and we
know that this assumption is itself a specifically bourgeois
ideological creation? What is the context in which we pose the
problem of politics but that of the bourgeois State, a creation,
like many before it, for the imposition of control by some upon
all. Is there a solution to the paradox of scale in politics that
what works in small communities does not generalize to extremely
large ones? Can an entity like a nation-state operate as a com-
munity except by illusion and artificial manipulation? How can
there be a single ideal of politics in the absence of a coercive-
ly dominant ideology? If political ideals are inseparable from
cultural systems as wholes, what other domains of cultural prac-
tice and belief most influence them? If all political critique is
situated and positioned, then how is the modernist critique of
capitalism, and the subsequent critical obsession with coercive
power relationships itself limited, itself a product of masculine
perspectives, of middle-class perspectives, of middle-aged per-
spectives, of European and Judaeo-Christian perspectives, and of
their specific interests?

I think that postmodernism has largely held back from critical
confrontation with modernist political ideals (and I do not mean
classical liberal representative democracy, I mean neo-Marxist
post-revolutionary participatory democracy) because we would also
indict the political status quo and have not had any alternative
to offer. It may also be because p-m is just crossing over from
the humanities to the social sciences (by dissolving the
modernist boundary between them).

JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
BITNET:    JLLBC@CUNYVM
INTERNET:  JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU

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PMC-TALK digest: postings for the period ending 1-6-94.

[ . . . . ] 

Today's Topics:
     Postmodern politics

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Sender: Jay Lemke 
Subject:      Postmodern politics

Most of the replies I have had, on and off the list, to my
queries about postmodernist, if not post-democratic, politics,
have been seriously thoughtful and I am grateful for their per-
spectives. They all, as well as responses I have had to this
question from others lately, point toward localism as the key.

I am as much in favor of localism as anyone, for dealing with lo-
cal issues, and in earlier posting I pointed out that the
participatory democracy ideal seems workable locally, on the
scale of relatively small human communities.

Many people also noted that the idea of nationwide (much less
worldwide) political ideals or systems is a modernist, centralist
one. And at least one person believed that they were not neces-
sary to large-scale communities.

But I do not think that these answers are good enough. Even the
premise of "Think globally, act locally" assumes that local ac-
tions must take account of a larger view of needs and conse-
quences. Local actions interact. They contribute to emergent ef-
fects on higher scales of organization of self-organizing
ecological-social systems. They produce conflicts which are not
resolvable except by appeal to the interests of some larger sys-
tem. Some forms of action require trans-local cooperation,
whether on the scale of large cities, nation states, world
regions, or globally.

Our present political solution to these problems is an unstable
compromise between the older nation-state system (treaties, EEC-
like confederations, wars, economic power-leveraging, etc.) and
the emerging global economic-communication order (multi-
nationals, economic interdependence, global information
networks). The older system was already shifting from an owners-
decide model to an experts-and-managers-decide model as the scale
and complexity of the systems to be controlled grew; that has now
been accelerated by the transnational developments. This is not a
system that entirely works; it is still biased by the dis-
proportiate representation in it of elite caste interests, but it
has the capacity in principle to take mass popular interests and
perceptions into account, insofar as those trained to do so can
in fact appreciate them. At least this is a model, however
flawed, which has evolved naturally within the social system, and
which faces up to the fact that many decisions require a degree
of global knowledgeability that is not possessed locally.

This basically technocratic political model is thoroughly
modernist. It has a horrendous ideology that buries values issues
under "expert-knowledge" issues. It regards its knowledge as ob-
jective rather than viewpoint-limited. It is still an elite suc-
cessor to the previous elite, making common cause with it against
the rest of us at the same time that it is displacing it. Its
worst failures result from the unrecognized subcultural bias of
its perspectives. But at least it faces global issues realisti-
cally. Localist politics seems to me to be romanticist and
utopian by comparison.

Postmodernism, I believe, is itself a consequence of the
strengthening of global integration, the second stage following
colonialist-imperialist domination, when the exchanges across
cultures (and to some extent genders and classes) have started to
become more reciprocal as power differentials have leveled out
somewhat. It is in that climate that the voice of the Other could
effectively challenge orthodoxies, even among the dominated. I do
not really believe that localism is postmodernist. But neither do
I believe in the modernist ideal of global homogenization to the
culture of the presently dominant elite. Diversity is good, we
want it, and no one could have succeeded in getting rid of it in
a viable world social order anyway. Diversity implies a mosaic of
differences, with coherence on local scales, and global integra-
tion based on horizontal interdependence rather than vertically
imposed control. It is the world social-political order as
ecosystem rather than as organism-writ-large, or as the patriar-
chal family-writ-large.

How is this system going to deal with global issues? The very
distinction between local and global is disappearing as the sys-
tem becomes more integrated! It's getting harder and harder to
find a strictly "local" issue, in terms of impact, means for ef-
fective action, causes, stakeholders .... Granted that there are
going to be many diverse local ways of coming to grips with these
kinds of problems, each of those local communities will find it-
self already embedded in something larger, and limited in per-
spective within it.

One can say, Let's just go local and see what happens -- let the
system self-organize. Perhaps we CANNOT get the kind of global
perspectives on these systems needed to make better local deci-
sions. Certainly we cannot hope to control the systems from
within them (or from the individual-level of organization), but
we are still going to have to make decisions. Those decisions are
part of the activity of the system. If they are made strictly lo-
cally, I suspect the system will re-organize away from global in-
tegration, back toward greater local autonomy, and back toward
the kinds of ideologies and political practices characteristic of
that kind of system (neo-feudalism, anyone?). Such a political
alternative is not going to compete effectively with the present
trend toward greater technocracy. What can? what should? (and if
English had a plural interrogative pronoun, Whats, I would have
used it!)  JAY.

PS. Perhaps we have no choice but to evolve through technocracy
to something else, something we couldn't envision until we're al-
ready living in the new postmodern global system. Maybe that
presumption releases us from moral responsibility for political
vision. Somehow, though, I doubt it.

JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
BITNET:    JLLBC@CUNYVM
INTERNET:  JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU