http://www.etext.org/Politics/AlternativeOrange/3/v3n2_olfp.html
just imagine sitting in a classroom with two or three of these wankers, bound and determined to find every opportunity to interrogate every fucking classroom practice. A fucking course evaluation ferchrisakes, which the author apparently doesn't want to fill out, is an instrument of class oppression and domination! Shocking! Trying to professionalize and mentor grad students -- the shame. Doesn't the prof know she's a capitalist tool!
As the author of the above piece writes, she also sent an open letter to the class explaining that the prof's "supportive pedagogy" was bad for us because we weren't subjected to the kind of criticism of our positions that would.... uh... turn us into the kinds of feminists the author of the piece, above, thought we should be!
People complain about their language--the neologisms and the run on sentences. That's not the problem. The problem was the tone: third person interrogative, infallibility, writing from Archimedes' point. Imagine someone grabbing a person by the collar, holding them up in front of an audience, and then talking about that person _to_ the audienec. They aren't interested in writing that understand that knowledge is a collective--even if a mostly agonistic--enterprise. For them, it's interrogation, with the object of criticism held up for a scolding.
I took this course, Feminist Critical theory, my first year of grad school . Having done my undergrad thesis on Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse, I thought it would be about _that_ kind of critical theory! Joke on me! Fortunately, we read widely among feminists so the course served me well. The best part was that the prof was this fabulous mentoring prof who insisted we write a paper for presentation/publication. She worked hard at creating a productive space for feminists from many disciplines to puruse feminist theory _and_ she cared about mentoring and professionalizing us. She understood how competitive the job market would be and, unlike baby boomer profs, she was prepared to help us navigate it.
Her course became the locus of departmental wars between the marxists and pomoistas. The m's and p's had formed an alliance to boot out the Almost Dead White Guys. Once the mission was accomplished, they turned upon themselves in a struggle for power.
Don Morton (who I really like as an individual--but see essay above, i'm just a capitalist tool for saying that!) and Mas'ud Zavarzadeh promoted what they called hostile pedagogy. The classroom is not a supportive space. It's a hostile space -- hostile to ideology. It's not a space for equal time. You won't hear your prof say, "You're welcome to write an essay explaining why Ayn Rand's smegma stained underwear smell like roses and that's why we must create a liberatarian society -- as long as you use logic, reasoned argument, etc. It's not about you getting _my_ views right; it's about teaching you how to argue for your thesis." No, in the hostile classroom there is one right answer, the answer the teacher has, and nothing else is tolerated.
Similarly, Morton and Zavearzedeh's proteges were sent out to the campus to bring hostile pedagogy to the rest of the campus. Their goal was to take all the theory courses offered on campus, from the most leftist profs, and disrupt the classroom by revealing how the prof and the theorists under consideration were not radically marxist enough. They seemed to abhor the notion of internal critique and subjected _everything_ to external critique.
bell hooks sucks because she's not a marxist. butler isn't one either. nor collins. nor iris young. they suck. that was the thrust of it. Except they spoke and wrote like this: bell hooks is complicit in regimes of post-al ludic politics that inscribe and reinscribe a subject-positionality imbricated in identitarian assumption of bourgeois imperialist imaginaries implicit in the de/re/territorialization of the discursive terrain, which foregrounds the un/re/de/il-logics of supplementarity but which re/de/in-tensifies the entrepreuneurial anarchism of the totalitarianism of difference/deference".
Every class was a drama. Morton and Zavarzedeh's proteges would wrest control of the classroom by turning everything under discussion to a consideration of why they author failed on marxist terms. Internal dept. dramas were also playing out, but I only grokked that later. At the time, it was just confusing.
I took contemporary social theory with a sociology prof, a course lots of people took because it was great for teaching you how to write, revise, rewrite under tight deadlines and by 'showing your work.' You'd turn it over to someone else in the class and the prof. They'd mark it up. Next week, you'd take in their crits and rewrite. STart all over again. New 8 pp paper every other week. Everyone wanted to take the course because it was good prep work.
Well! We never discussed much the first few weeks. We had to constantly contend with two of them trying to take over the classroom. Fortunately, the profs were on to them at this point and he wasn't interested in mollycoddling them.
Oh! and imagine their feedback on your paper about, oh say, black feminist thought. About as useful as balls on a priest! The message was always that we weren't marxist enough! Wow! Thanks! Never said I was a marxist -- most people in the class weren't!
Thankfully, one of them dropped by mid-semester, leaving only one in the class. Without a colleague, he pretty much shut his mouth.
"We live under the Confederacy. We're a podunk bunch of swaggering pious hicks."
--Bruce Sterling