I've been thinking about deleting this blog and starting over, but I'm far too much the pack rat to do it right now.

During second semester of sophomore year of college i took the comp lit department's intro to lit theory class. I hated the professor, the course's methodology, and most of the readings until, late in the semester, we made it to the marxists, the feminists, deconstruction, and the postcolonialists. During the week on the New Critics when i tried to make a point about the social and historical context of the denial of referent beyond the text, (and I'll admit to not having done the reading, too busy wallowing in depression and waiting for the revolution) my TA ended the class by gesturing at me and declaring "and here we have our Marxist." This, combined with the anti-union (all four of them) professor's narcissistic posturing at the lectern about whether or not he was a Marxist led me to attend sections and lectures even less, but vituperative pedagogy isn't really my point here - what is is the being fingered as "the Marxist," however inaccurate such a designation may actually be for my particular political and theoretical commitments. Come to think of it, we could include my 1oth grade history teacher's somewhat condescending but fondly exasperated statement to me that it was good to have the voice of Marx in the classroom, to which I, with mild indignation, responded, "But I'm an Anarchist!" (Saw her last year while standing on the picket line.)

I felt that peculiar discomfort about being interpolated within a particular discursive construction of "the Marxist" which seems inadequate, innacurate, and insufficient given the actual scope of Marxian interventions in Cultural Studies in class yesterday evening during a discussion of Wallerstein on World-Systems and Michael Denning's 1986 essay on "The Special American Conditions" and American Studies's history as a substitute for Marxism. Maybe I myself was being a bit narcissistic, and the politics and circumstances of the two classes and groups of folks involved were very different, thank jeebus. But there were offhanded comments in the hallway during the break, and I had a more general discomfort with the collapsing of
New Left-influenced marxist cultural studies with big M Marxist political theory methodological
orthodoxy. I certainly wasn't the only person in the room for whom Marxist cultural theory is important or useful. Maybe what I'm frustrated with is the ease with which folks who drift towards poststructuralist interventions sometimes make their break with Marx in ways that strike me as counterproductive and dependent upon extremely limited and limiting readings of Marxists and Marxism. This was especially infuriating in the Postcolonial Marxism class I took last semester. This is coming out way more polemical and less sensical than I intended it.

I'm still not willing to call myself a Marxist, whatever my investments in certain moments of Marxist cultural theory. I have huge problems with Marx and many other figures in the tradition. I have similar reservations about anarchist interventions from Proudhon and Bakunin forward. But even as Marxist descriptions of "faddish" poststructuralisms and postmodernisms and postcolonialism have always made me cringe, so do the totalizing oversimplifications with which some dismiss more recent reconfigurations of Marxian frameworks. Maybe I'm just not cracked up for this academic thing.

It's six in the morning and I woke up to reread George Fredrickson's Racism: A Short History, which I had tons of issues with four years ago, most of which are not dispelled by another go-round.