Cliopatria Welcomes Guest Blogger Graham Larkin ...

Graham Larkin is a Humanities Fellow in Stanford University's Department of Art & Art History. His doctorate is from Harvard's Department of Art and Architecture in 2003. This post continues a dialogue that Larkin has held with David Horowitz since September 2004.

Major Research Breakthrough: Left Described For First Time Ever

In a recent interview in the Chronicle of Higher Education, L.A. tabloid editor David Horowitz explained that he terminated his graduate studies at Berkeley in the early sixties because"[e]verything had been mined" and there was"nothing to research that was interesting anymore."

History almost proved him right. Since that fateful spring of '62, it is indeed true that no one has come up with a single worthwhile thought, theory, movement or domain of study.

Or rather, to be fair, no one had come up with anything new until Horowitz himself single-handedly ended the intellectual drought with his release of the Discover The Network (DTN) web site in February 2005. As he judiciously noted a few days ago in a congratulatory blog entry,"[t]he appearance of the site ... is the first time anyone has ever attempted to describe the left."

The whole notion of"the left" has since become such common coin that it is hard to remember how political theory functioned before Horowitz's groundbreaking description. We can perhaps forgive the likes of Plato, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke and Hamilton for blindly groping their way through this territory without any conception of"the left." But the pre-Horowitzian lacuna seems much more gaping when we survey the past century and a half. Just imagine how greatly theories of conservatism or fascism could have been enriched by an attempt to actually describe the left!

Ironically, it is not the conservatives, but rather those leftists avant la lettre –socialists, anarchists, Islamofascists and other liberals from Marx and Engels to Lukács, Gramsci, Orwell, Althusser, Žižek and Ebert– who could have benefited the most by beating Horowitz to his momentous discovery. (And to think that they accuse their enemies of false consciousness!) Should we – can we – forgive Jürgen Habermas or Pierre Bourdieu for wasting their time with petty critiques, instead of undertaking the serious labor of piercing the benign facade of"perky Katie Couric" or Patriot Act detractor Phil Donahue? For the first time, as Horowitz notes, we are finally able to have"a discussion about the nature of the left and its role in American political life."

More than just a brilliant intellectual, Horowitz belongs in the pantheon of"initiators of discourse," to use the term that Foucault memorably applies to Marx and Freud. While there can be no doubt that both the theory and the practice of politics will be fundamentally reoriented by Horowitz's pioneering discovery, it is too early to say what the results will be. We can, however, be sure that DTN will soon join PC, USA and AT&T as an acronym we can scarcely live without. It is surely time for the academics who so dismally failed Horowitz to finally heed his clarion call ("Give it a look if you haven't already and let a friend or a radio talk show host know about it if you haven't"), and to grant him the intellectual legitimacy he so desperately craves.
Graham Larkin