intro...
i am kevin mahoney a phd student in the english department.  i am one of
the people who decided to start this listserv and this collective.  i
thought that as part of this introduction i would say a little about what
i want out of such a group and some of reason for starting this project.
 
first of all, and most importantly, despite being in the english
department here, my work and reason for being in graduate school has
little to do with emglish per se.  i chose to doi graduate study in
english--after a bachelor's in political science--because it was one of
the few fields i saw at the time where there was a concentration or at
least an interest in political theory, what seemed to me to be quite
radical in appearance.  yet, graduate school quickly took its toll on me,
and i quickly learned that the power of codes of civility, departmental
politics, and simple trying to 'learn the discourse' had an incredible
ability to de-politicize the most radical theory and for that matter to
instill a cynacism in me that was quite new to me.  i had been used to
direct confrontations in 'activist' work and student organizations, and i
did not have the tools--both politically and personally--to deal with
with the much more subtle forms of incorporation and subversion that were
integral to academic practice.
 
one thing that became more and more clear to me is that graduate school
has collected together some of the most rigorous intellectuals and
political thinkers i have ever been around, but then redirects the
energy, the passions, and in-short the labor of these intellectuals, into
the seminar, the department, the profession, which already directs our
practices along institutional lines.  i found consistently that in order
for me to make some basic arguments about marxist dialectics, the
international sexual division of labor, or the meaning of a mode of
production, i had to articulate all the groundwork and this history of
these categories before the point i wanted to make could ever be
intelligible.  while productive as an intervention i find myself craving
the kind of critical, honest, direct, and POLITICAL engagement that took
as its starting point the transformation of this exploitative system,
patriachal-capitalism, as opposed to the limited site of academic
institutional performance.  i want to be part of a site where codes of
civility--i.e. institutional niceness--is recognized as a form of
cooptation and silencing itself; where we are forced to find more
actively political terms by which to establish a collective political
practice.  so, to be frank, i am not intersted in getting other people to
collaborate with for the sake of collaborating, or to participate in a
space that is simply intersted in talking about how bad we have it, or
where we lament about a split in theory and practice, or the academy and
the streets.  i think we have the resources before us, in our work, in
our energy, our historical training, and our practices to establish
alternative starting points--a collective where we can build critical
knowledge for how to transform not only the site in which we work, but
the very way we do this work, and the end to that work.
 
so for me, in many ways, this is a test.  a test to see if it is possible
to build such a site here.  is it possible to build a politcal
organization, not an academic one?  i hope we can do this.
 
one last point, i want to be clear about one thing.  yes, i was one of
the people who started this project, but that does not mean that i am
here to set the rules, nor will i.  but i can promise you, and make you a
committment to argue with all i have for what i believe in, and from my
politics.  i hope i can expect that degree of engagement from everyone
else as well.
 
enough for now.
 
until...
[K]