SIGNATURES OF THE POSSIBLE: WRITING AND POLITICAL RUPTURE IN THE ARCHIVES OF INDUSTRIAL UNIONISM By MICHAEL VASTOLA A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2010 1 © 2010 Michael Vastola 2 To my parents, Janis and Anthony Vastola, and to my wife, Jessica Livingston This would not be possible without their love and almost pathological generosity 3 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation has benefited from the advice and guidance I have received throughout my time at the University of Florida. My dissertation director Sidney Dobrin consistently encouraged experimentation and even audacity in my writing. My committee members supplemented that license to experiment with some brutal lessons during my exams. John Leavey coached me into a deeper understanding of what was at stake in the differences between the theories I was then ham-handedly trying to compare. Raul Sanchez compelled me to clarify my ideas and to more rigorously articulate their relationship to existing scholarship in my field. Those difficult lessons, as well as the valuable encouragement of my outside reader, Robert Hatch, were instrumental in shaping the document I would ultimately defend. The drafts of several of my chapters benefited significantly from the advice of my fellow traveler, Jeffry Ginger Rice, who was even more valuable in his capacity as a sounding board for my incessant complaining about academic conventions. But my wife, Jessica Livingston, was just as important an outlet for my frustrations. Without her encouragement and vocal insistence that I finish in a timely manner, this project would have surely stalled numerous times, and might have even been abandoned. Lastly, none of this would have been conceivable without the support of my parents, Anthony and Janis Vastola. They never missed an opportunity to tell me that they were proud of me—even when the first two decades of my life provided a seemingly infinite number of reasons to feel differently. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .................................................................................................. 4 ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................... 7 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: PEDAGOGY OF THE STATEMENT ........................................... 9 Situating the Intervention .......................................................................................... 9 The Pedagogy of the Statement ............................................................................. 15 Badiou and Derrida: Toward a Theoretical Framework........................................... 26 Derrida, Writing, and the Metaphysics of Novelty ................................................... 38 Badiou, Ontology, and Politics ................................................................................ 45 Lazarus and the Rarity of Thought .......................................................................... 51 The Cultural Pedagogy of the Archive .................................................................... 58 On Naming, Subjectivity, and the Structure of the Dissertation (Notes Toward an Investigation) .................................................................................................. 68 2 EUGUENE V. DEBS AND THE SUBJECTIVITY OF THE NEW MAN .................... 81 Debs and the Road to Industrial Unionism .............................................................. 86 The Many Faces of the New Man ........................................................................... 92 Man and Revolution .............................................................................................. 101 3 INDUSTRIAL UNIONISM WILL NOT BE COUNTED: DANIEL DELEON ............. 111 DeLeon: An American Marxist .............................................................................. 112 The Party and Revolution ..................................................................................... 117 Unionism and Industrialism: Socialist Strategies .................................................. 122 The manifesto genre: Vision, Division, Strategy ................................................... 129 Democracy and the State: A Conclusion through Separation ............................... 139 4 THE FORMATION OF ONE BIG UNION .............................................................. 144 The Founding Documents ..................................................................................... 148 A Textual Event? .................................................................................................. 154 The Anarchist Consciousness .............................................................................. 162 Bill Haywood and IWW Theory ............................................................................. 176 Histories of a Union............................................................................................... 183 Industrial Unionism: A Unique Duration ................................................................ 190 5 EMANCIPATORY STATEMENTS AND THEIR CONSEQUENCES..................... 196 The Regime of Things Provided ........................................................................... 199 5 The Inexcusable Banality of Liberal Reason ......................................................... 207 Follow the Prescription: An Exercise in Sloganeering ........................................... 218 Consequences, not Conclusions .......................................................................... 232 LIST OF REFERENCES ............................................................................................. 237 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .......................................................................................... 246 6 Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy SIGNATURES OF THE POSSIBLE: WRITING AND POLITICAL RUPTURE IN THE ARCHIVES OF INDUSTRIAL UNIONISM By Michael Vastola August 2010 Chair: Sidney I. Dobrin Major: English Signatures of the Possible: Writing and Political Rupture in the Archives of Industrial Unionism analyzes the archives of industrial unionism from the early twentieth century in order to demonstrate that they contain one of the United States‘ most inventive political ideas. This dissertation is particularly interested in what those archival documents tell us about the relationship between historical research and critical theory. More specifically, it examines how historical narratives about industrial unionism can, and often do, subordinate the theoretical originality and significance of that politics to linear, progressive histories and to the authority of antithetical principles and ideas, without regard for the specificity of their object or the aptness of their comparisons. Industrial unionism refers to industry-wide union organization and activism, which is contrasted with trade-specific unionism. The organizational form of the former emerged during the late nineteenth century in the U.S. Yet the theoretical underpinnings of that organizational ideal would find their most consequential and enduring expression in 1905, with the establishment of the Industrial Workers of the World. In order to comprehend the originality of the theories that led to the founding of the IWW, this 7 dissertation begins with a broad framework meant to distance its analysis from the approaches of the major histories of industrial unionism. After elaborating a framework for the analysis to follow, chapters two, three, and four forward a new history for the archival documents of industrial unionism—one that demonstrates the importance and sophistication of their ideas. The primary lessons of those ideas are distilled to four categories in the final chapter—namely, the role of political prescriptions, discipline, organization, and ―idea‖ of communism—which can help inform how we understand critical theory today. Ultimately, this dissertation is a critical theory project that is relevant to scholars interested in new ways of approaching labor history, archival research, composition studies, and political theory. 8 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: PEDAGOGY OF THE STATEMENT Situating the Intervention A certain kind of interdisciplinarity can still represent a scandalous approach to scholarship in the humanities. Though research that effectively traverses various academic discourses, borrowing something from each, is widely valued, some semblance of specialization remains productive for establishing the expertise of authors, so as to ensure even their most experimental projects address a definite conversation within their respective field. To step outside of such enclosures makes it difficult to evaluate the quality of an author‘s work, not mention its relevance to the institutional context from which it emerged. But the question of rigor is not central to interdisciplinarity‘s capacity to scandalize. That capacity rests in the question of to what extent (and even whether) we need discrete ―fields‖ of knowledge. In a New York Times op-ed that received scathing reviews from the academic blogosphere—in large part because of its opposition to tenure in favor of seven-year renewable contracts—Mark C. Taylor writes that ―The division-of-labor model of separate departments is obsolete