REVIEW
David Johnson's thoughts on De Kock's response.
                                                                David Johnson
   I am grateful to the editors of Transformation for the opportunity to reply to
Leon De Kock's response to my review of his book Civilising Barbarians in
Transformation 31 (1996): 101-4.
   Reviewing is a generous act, hardly worth the free copy of the book, and my
review was written in a generous spirit. Rather than reproduce safe platitudes of
the 'worthy-addition-to-the-field' type, it sought to offer within the limits of the
review a summary of the book and introduce Transformation readers (most of
whom have only a passing interest in English studies and historiography) to
current debates in English studies about travelling theory, critical method, and
the place of Marxism. De Kock's response is instructive in demonstrating the
extreme sensitivity of these debates.
   De Kock ignores the main thrust of my critique, and objects to three errors, all
of which are incidental to the substance of the review. I deal with them separately.
About the first one, apologies to Ian Tromp for not acknowledging his editorial
contribution to The Heart in Exile: South African Poetry in English, 1990-95.
   The second error is more interesting. De Kock thinks the failure to tell the
difference between Scrutiny 2 and scrutiny2: issues in english studies in southern
africa (with an editorial distancing itself from F. R. Leavis's original effort)
reveals a lack of subtlety on my part. To this charge I plead guilty. But I would
like to add that De Kock's attempt to effect 'the ironic distancing between
Leavis's Scrutiny and scrutiny' relies - as does all irony - on the assumption of
an audience sharing common values. In this case, my own impoverished sense
of irony might be attributed to a distance from those assumed common values,
and also to my understanding of the history of the original Scrutiny. Francis
Mulhern's concluding assessment of Leavis's journal in his definitive study The
Moment of 'Scrutiny' (1979) runs as follows:
        the basic and constant discursive organization of the journal...
        was one defined by a dialectic of 'culture' and 'civilization'
        whose main and logically necessary effect was a depreciation, a
        repression and, at the limit, a categorial dissolution of politics
        as such. Nothing could be more disorienting for socialist
        cultural theory than the ingestion of [such] a discourse (330-1).
TRANSFORMATION 33 (1997)                                                          91


REVIEW                                                                      JOHNSON
   Is it therefore surprising given this history that a new literary journal in South
Africa in the 1990s re-invoking the title 'scrutiny' might be viewed with caution
from the left? anti-scrutiny or CONTRA-SCRUTINY might have conveyed the
ethos De Kock claims his journal embraces, but scrutiny21
   Finally, De Kock is distressed at the way I abbreviated his remarks on
Marxism. I am happy to re-produce 'the complexity of [his] original (long)
sentence':
          And when I tried to patch things up with the likeable but
          formidable Nic Visser, he told me you can't compromise on
          Marxism: it either is or isn't a theory of the last word. For him it
          must be that, or it is nothing at all. I can't agree with that kind
          of Marxism, and neither can the Subaltern Studies scholars who
          were at the conference, nor, for that matter, will you find many
          scholars in the 1990s anywhere in the world who will say that
          as forbiddingly - and as honestly - as Nic Visser does.
          (Southern African Review of Books July/August 1996: 20)
   Nic Visser to my knowledge has never committed himself to print in quite
these terms. However, it is not for me to defend Visser: he discusses De Kock
and other South African postcolonial theorists and their relationship with
Marxism at length in Yearbook in English Studies 27 (1997: 79-94). For anyone
interested, these issues are re-visited in essays by Kelwyn Sole and Shane Moran
in Alternation 4.1 (1997). Rather, I need to elaborate very briefly on my
juxtaposition of De Kock and Jacques Derrida on Marx. Most South African
literary critics since the end of apartheid - like 'many scholars in the 1990s
anywhere in the world* - have with a sigh of relief declared an end to Marxism
in English Studies, thus consigning much of the political criticism of the 1980s
to a conveniently closed chapter of local literary history. De Kock concurs here
with this version of the discipline's recent history. In quoting from Derrida's
 'Spectres of Marx' in my review, I sought to alert Transformation readers to the
arguments of but one of many other scholars in the 1990s in the world, who have
rejected this kind of comfortable eclecticism pervading literary studies, and have
argued instead in favour of a renewed critical engagement with Marx and the
Marxist tradition.
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