>All I could think of was: "Yes. You, Wendy Brown, esteemed Professor of
>Women's Studies at U.C. Santa Cruz, you need to read a little less
>discourse theory and a little more by Paul Baran--or at least enough more
>by Paul Baran that you can figure out how to spell his name..."
To be fair to Brown, the text looks like it was transcribed from a tape, since there are several other misspellings that suggest that. Not that there's any excuse for botching Baran's name though.
But she also said what I've appended. Sure, her comments on Marx's LTV are just a bit off, but I think the only people who would find the answers to most of her questions to be self-evident are the sectarians who were booted early on from this list. Or maybe I'm wrong and the answers are as obvious as a sunrise.
Doug
----
Wendy Brown:
> Now what I 'm calling reactions to these challenges--to a set
>of theoretical works, to a set of disruptive insights, and to a set of
>political formations--these are really serious challenges to the
>orthodoxies of what was called the New Left, which we probably now have
>to call the Medium Old Left, a Left with which I very much identify. I
>think it is probably important to remember--and I think Jonathan Arac
>would have reminded us of this--that the challenges the New Left
>advanced to the Old were also terribly serious, terribly destabilizing,
>terribly infuriating, and I want to admit to being one of those Medium
>Old Lefties who sometimes feels challenged and destabilized and
>displaced by the insights and political formations that I've just
>briefly sketched. But my question for us all of us is: What are the
>possible rejoinders to these challenges?
> One: We want the Real back. We want Truth with a capital T
>back. I won't spell out all the reasons why but I think one thing we
>might talk about today is why some of us think you can't have it back.
>I've been for the past week and a half teaching Machiavelli and it
>reminded me just how long the Real and the True have been called into
>question in the political realm. The experience of reading Machiavelli
>again reminds me that this thinker, whom we often identify as the
>quintessential political realist (and certainly that was part of
>Gramsci's attraction to him), actually recognized that politics
>transpires utterly at the level of appearances, performances, and
>reputations. And those who think there is a Real underneath it all will
>be looking in the shadows and images and performances for something that
>is not there. Scientific conceits about the transparent nature of the
>social and political world may comfort many of us but that doesn't make
>them either true or effective.
> The second thing that one might say in response to these
>challenges is: We want materiality back. I don't think we can have that
>either. The particular form of materialism that Marx defined so
>brilliantly through the labor theory of value turned out not to have
>been any more exhaustive of the injuries and dynamics of capitalism than
>it was of the range of other injuries in societies that are striated
>along lines besides class. What is the materiality of racism, of sexism,
>of homophobia? And what criteria of material existence will be used to
>locate their materiality? What the past several decades of work these
>terrains has suggested is that while you can find apparently material
>dimensions of these powers, probably as important is that the way that
>race, for example, as articulated in science, law, policy, pedagogy and
>elsewhere, constitutes and reproduces a racialized social order, indeed,
>constitutes race itself. The way that gender is articulated in language
>actually produces gendered orders, gendered beings, gendered pain and
>gendered suffering. And to call that immaterial, from a Marxist or
>Medium Old Left perspective is to put us back in the position of having
>to prove that gender is not, as it were, a secondary contradiction, or a
>secondary problem where class is fundamental. One can make the same
>argument about class today, namely that its materiality as Marx defined
>it is probably the least important thing to identify when trying to
>bring class back to the fore of American political and public discourse.
>(I actually think that some of Rorty's recent polemics about class have
>operated in a distinct immaterial or anti-material fashion in order to
>bring class back into political discourse.)
> Now if social injury, social inequality and social domination
>function discursively, among other ways, then my question is: Why would
>those committed to emancipatory and egalitarian politics want to turn
>their back on this recognition? And I really mean that as a question,
>why would we want to turn away from a recognition of the ways in which
>race, gender, homophobia, and class are articulated discursively in
>politically significant ways, that cannot be reduced to materiality? One
>possible answer is that seeing these things as other than material, as
>less than obdurate, clear, and empirically definable, very deeply
>complicates and protracts the struggle against them. That is, I think
>despite the seeming pleasure that many take in discursive political
>struggle, it adds up to a less optimistic political vision than does a
>fight against an imagined material force.
> Now a third rejoinder to the challenges that some
>poststructuralists analyses as well as some late modern political
>formations have offered is that we simply want a unified movement back.
>But to do what? To oppose what? To demand what? And in whose name? To
>return to the dream that abolishing capitalism will abolish everything
>else bad along the way? Who dreams that dream still? Who dreams the
>dream of total revolution, of one people united by a common critique and
>common vision? We might talk more about this as well, but I think the
>fantasy or the call for some kind of consensus in a unified movement
>tacitly contains that dream even as it formally disavows it.
> Another rejoinder might be that we want a clear sense of
>accountable subjects and agency back, precisely what poststructuralism
>is said to destroy and what identity politics is thought not to be able
>to produce. In that cry for a clear sense of accountability and agency I
>wonder if we would do better to ask, What was it that accountability
>satisfied, at an emotional/political level, and what did it distract
>from politically? That is, what is satisfied by imagining all power to
>really be invested in something called an oppressor, or an oppressive
>structure, as opposed to understanding power as diffused through a
>variety of different sites, sources, and channels of culture, and indeed
>understanding ourselves as vehicles of our own subordination as that
>power courses through us? As for agency, I would say that it is very
>clear that we need all the theoretical complexity we can muster to
>understand why effective action is so difficult to plot in our time. We
>need to know why subjects today mostly don't act on behalf of their own
>emancipation, to understand how our political desires are constrained
>and turned against us, to understand how indeed we participate in or
>passively witness our own subordination.
> Another tacit, or non-overt rejoinder is simply that we want
>working class heroes back--we want the Joe Hills and the Union Maids
>that we don't have today. We don't want the terribly ambiguous icons of
>Mapplethorpe and Anita Hill and Rodney King and Mumia Jamal and Humboldt
>County Earth Firsters and, god help us, Paula Jones and Monica Lewinski.
>We Lefties can't rally around them, we can't stand by them, we can't
>identify with them. Alas, they are the icons we are handed in this
>political order. Now I am not, as I keep trying to make clear, entirely
>unsympathetic. A good enemy, a good union struggle, a righteous civil
>rights movement, a clearly imperialist war to resist, these things are
>inspiriting and inspiring. But I want to suggest that we don't have to
>jettison these things to recognize that most of contemporary political
>life is far more trying and ambiguous and also demands Left attention. I
>also think there is a certain projection of blame for the character of
>contemporary political life from what's being called here the
>conservative left, a blame for losses that we "posties" can't possibly
>shoulder. Without swaying too far into the psychoanalytic, it does
>recall for me a bit the ways that families and friends so often turn
>upon each other angrily in the face of certain unbearable losses.
> It would be a far better thing, I think, if we could all
>converse seriously about the political losses and political impasses we
>face today: Our collective difficulty on the Left of projecting an
>emancipatory future, our difficulty in sustaining as objects of
>critique, liberalism, capitalism, and the state, critiques that have
>quite literally defined the left for the last century, but no longer are
>the main subject of almost anyone's critique, including those being
>called left conservatives. Our difficulty in believing that there will
>ever be viable alternatives to capitalism, at least ones that the Left
>brings about. Our difficulty in believing that there's very much left to
>the history of class struggle in Euro-Atlantic nations. Our difficulty
>in imagining that the extraordinary powers of contemporary global
>capitalism and the state can ever be contested let alone brought down.
>Our difficulty in imagining that today's often nihilistic, apathetic,
>consumerist and media-saturated, increasingly wired population could
>ever be rallied for emancipatory struggle. And our difficulty in
>recalling whether the '60s we thought we lived through ever really
>happened, especially as we trace its faint yet vulgar traces in the
>current Presidency.