Theory & Event

What I have is to offer not really a position,but rather a set of general reflections on certain divisions which are evident within leftist thought. Last year I heard Judith Butler give a paper at the Rethinking Marxism conference at the University of Massachusetts. (The paper has just published in Social Text.) Following the delivery of her paper I heard the phrase, “left conservatism” used and discussed in informal discussions in the corridors outside the main conference room. At that time, I wondered, for reasons I will explain in the paper, whether I would fall into the category of a left conservative. So I’m not here to argue for one side against another; and you will see at the end of my rather scattered reflections why I feel uncomfortable by the effort to determine whether one is a “left conservative” or not. Nonetheless, I am convinced that if this were not a battle but a provocation for reflection, it could prove very valuable.

As the flyer announcing the workshop states, the current polemics about the leftist, or non-leftist, or pseudo-leftist character of poststructuralist thought, “bring to the fore long unresolved questions about how the left conceives the nature and stakes of critical work over the past fifty years and into the future.” This is undeniably the case; yet one is also compelled to ask: to whom do these questions matter, and why is it worth the effort to try to resolve them? To the overwhelming majority of the population, these questions are not just uninteresting but incomprehensible. Indeed, most will never even hear about them; whereas many of those vaguely aware of the controversy—normally through some journalistic account or slick, more caricatured version of it—are either mildly amused by it, or angered by the fact that well-paid professors are busily engaged in esoteric debates when they should be imparting to their sons and daughters the kind of “useful” knowledge and profitable (or marketable) skills for which they are paying astronomical tuition fees; or else they are rubbing their hands in glee at the prospect of assorted leftists, radicals, and crypto-communists annihilating one another.

So, is the discussion of these questions yet another example of the huge divide separating the intellectuals ( and, more specifically, in this context, left intellectuals), from the “people?” In a sense it is; and because left intellectuals are especially sensitive to and concerned with the plight of subaltern, subordinated, exploited and repressed social groups, they spend a lot of time lamenting, arguing about, and blaming one another for this divide or rift. To be sure, there are many good reasons to be worried about this, and I don’t mean to suggest in any way that the issues and problems pertaining to the relations between left intellectuals and “the people” should be set aside. In fact, the debates surrounding these issues are often conducive to salutary auto-criticism. Not infrequently, however, they are also debilitating and even paralyzing—and never more so than when they fail to take into account the extent to which the seemingly arcane philosophical, theoretical, and critical work carried out by left intellectuals has not just contributed to but, in many instances, prepared a good deal of the necessary groundwork for struggles and initiatives that resulted in the amelioration of the social and/or economic status of those very same “people” who are ignorant of that work, or fail to understand it, or ridicule it, or worse still, revile it.

However, that they are beyond the grasp, crude and instrumental though that may be, of political commentators and polemicists, who are not especially known for their theoretical sophistication, and have no patience for the intricacies of the critical exchanges among academic intellectuals. By way of an example, I’m going to quote a passage from a commentator, whom you have all heard about, but I doubt you have read. His name is Rush Limbaugh. (We normally don’t read this stuff; but being a Gramscian, I subscribe to Gramsci’s view that you also need to read the trash to know what’s going on. He read whatever was...