I will hazard a longish post, including a few non-social security specific legal examples. It's my hope, it can give some kind of epistemological grounding to the question of "gendered" Social Security. Women receiving less social security than men, the institution of marriage and social security, and the political and economic inequities the gendered "ignorance" such an institution perpetuates.
Max, do the speech act dynamics, the power dynamics, outlined below sound familiar (I'm not exactly sure, but you spend time debating these issues, right?)? If so, how does one put a wedge in them (in debate, for instance), so to speak, to start influencing structural change at *that* level, of persuading the other side, or, if you will, the enemy.
[for the sake of space I'm excising footnotes. If anyone's interested I can send them off-list. Biblio info in my previous decadence post]
p.4
Knowledge, after all, is not itself power, although it is the magnetic field of power. Ignorance and opacity collude or compete with knowledge in mobilizing the flows of energy, desire, goods, meanings, persons. If M. Mitterand knows English but Mr. Reagan lacks--as he did lack--French, it is the urbane M. Mitterand who must negotiate in an acquired tongue, the ignorant Mr. Reagan who may dilate in his native one. Or in the interactive speech model by which, as Sally McConnell-Ginet puts it, "the standard . . . meaning can be thought of as what is recognizable solely on the basis of interlocutors' mutual knowledge of established practices of interpretation," it is the interlocutor who has or pretends to have the *less* broadly knowledgeable understanding of interpretive practice who will define the terms of the exchange. So, for instance, because "men, with superior extralinguistic resources and privileged discourse positions, are often less likely to treat perspectives different from their own as mutually available for communication," their attitudes are "thus more likely to leave a lasting imprint on the common semantic stock than women's."4
Such ignorance effects can be harnessed, licensed, and regulated on a mass scale for striking enforcements--perhaps especially around sexuality, in modern Western culture the most meaning-intensive of human activities. The epistemological asymmetry of the laws that govern rape [or, social security -Alec], for instance, privileges at the same time men and ignorance, inasmuch as it matters not at all what the raped woman perceives or wants just so long as the man raping her can claim not to have noticed (ignorance in which male sexuality receives careful education).5 And the rape machinery that is organized by this epistemological privilege of unknowing in turn keeps disproportionatly under discipline, of course, women's larger ambitions to take more control over the terms of our own circulation [again, social security here, with obvious difference -Alec].
. . .
Although the simple, stubborn fact or pretense of ignorance (one meaning, the Capital one, of the word "stonewall") can sometimes be enough to enforce discursive power, a far more complex drama of ignorance and knowledge is the more usual carrier of political struggle. Such a drama was enacted when, only a few days after the Justice Department's private-sector decision, the U.S. Supreme Court correspondingly opened the public-sector bashing season by legitimating state antisodomy laws [I know, we're straying from SS, but bear with me, it's still an instance of the "complex drama of ignorance and knowledge [as] the . . . usual carrier of political struggle" -Alec] in *Bowers v. Hardwick*.9 In a virulent ruling whose language made from beginning to end an insolent display of legal illogic--of what Justice Blackmun in dissent called "the most willful blindness"10--a single, apparently incidental word used in Justice White's majority opinion became for many gay or antihomophobic readers a focus around which the inflammatory force of the decision seemed to pullulate with peculiar density.11 In White's opinion,
to claim that a right to engage in sodomy is "deeply rooted
in this nation's history and tradition" or "implicit in the
concept of ordered liberty" is, at best, facetious.12
What lends the word "facetious" in this sentence such an unusual power to offend, even in the context of a larger legal offense whose damage will be much more indelible, has to be the economical way it functions here as switchpoint for the cyclonic epistemological undertows that encompass power in general and issued of homosexual desire in particular.
. . .
[Alec: I would think the "gendered" nature of SS, as with marriage, is tethered to a great epistemological undertow. Any way of addressing this at the practical level, towards structural change?]
. . . [more Sedgwick] . . .
Inarguably, there is a satisfaction in dwelling on the degree to which the power of our enemies over us is implicated, not in their command of knowledge, but precisely in their ignorance. The effect is a real one, but it carries dangers with it as well. The chief of these dangers is the scornful, fearful, or patheticizing reification of "ignorance"; it goes with the unexamined Enlightement assumptions by which the labeling of a particular force as "ignorance" seems to place it unappealably in a demonized space on a never quite explicit ethical schema. (It is also dangerously close in structure to the more palpably sentimental privileging of ignorance as an originary, passive innocence.) The angles of view from which it can look as though a political fight is a fight against ignorance are invigorating and maybe revelatory ones but dangerous places for dwelling. The writings of, among other, Foucault, Derrida, Thomas Kuhn, and Thomas Szasz have given contemporary readers a lot of practice in questioning both the ethical/political disengagement and, beyond that, the ethical/political simplicity of the category of "knowledge," so that a writer who appeals too directly to the redemptive potential of simply upping the cognitive wattage on any question of power seems, now, naive. The corollary problems still adhere to the category of "ignorance," as well, but so do some additional ones: there are psychological operations of shame, denial, projection around "ignorance" that make it an especially galvanizing category for the individual reader, even as they give it a rhetorical potency that it would be hard for writers to forswear and foolhardy for them to embrace.
Rather than sacrifice the notion of "ignorance," then, I would be more interested at this point in trying, as we are getting used to trying with "knowledge," to pluarlize and specify it. That is, I would like to be able to make use in sexual-[or gender- AR]political thinking of the deconstructive understanding that particular insights generate, are lined with, and at the same time are themselves structured by particular opacities. If ignorance is not--as it evidently is not--a single Manichaean, aboriginal maw of darkness from which the heroics of human cognition can occasionally wrestle facts, insights, freedoms, progress, perhaps there exists instead a plethora of *ignorances*, and we may begin to ask questions about the labor, erotics, and economics of their human production and distribution.
<end excerpt>
So...
Does this excerpt suggest any strategies for dealing with the structural gender bias of Social Security (for instance), through practical means, say, the dynamics of knowledge and ignorance (as outlined above) in dynamic debate with the other side re, let's say, gender progressivity. Is it possible on some practical level to get into their argument further to dig out the opacities, or would the practical politics of it still be too messy or restrictive, and too daunting (would it require tackling the institution of marriage, for instance?)? Any practical heft here?
-Alec
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