Brown's comments remind me of Butler's piece in New Left Review that I began to review for PEN-L a while ago. I've interspersed my comments below. I've tried to pare down Brown's comments to the parts I disagree with, even though she says lots of stuff that I like.
>Wendy Brown:
>>...
>> One: We want the Real back. We want Truth with a capital T
>>back.... .... The experience of reading Machiavelli
>>again reminds me that this thinker ... 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.
Part of my problem with this sort of argument is that it is so terribly abstract. To say that "politics transpires utterly at the level of appearances, performances, and reputations" is to distort the accessibility of much of politics to investigation and explication. Perhaps she is exaggerating, but I find the "Real underneath" the images not terribly difficult to discern, particularly with the aid of people like Thomas Ferguson, Noam Chomsky, Doug Henwood, Katha Pollitt, Alexander Cockburn, Michael Perelman, Mike Davis, etc., who have made an effort to dig beneath images and to present arguments clearly and in language that can be understood by people without a PhD. This is not to say I find no value in abstract (even esoteric) intellectual pursuits --- far from it. But, I must say that I share, at least to some degree, the "Scientific conceits about the transparent nature of the social and political world."
All I know (in my own mind) is that I believe racism, sexism, homophobia, capitalism, etc., share one blatantly obvious, very Real, very True property: they all fundamentally rob people of rights for no justifiable reason. That is, they each embody a relationship between haves and have-nots --- what I think is best called a slave relationship. In some instances we seem to have recognized, even partly successfully challenged, these relationships. In other instances, the going has been more difficult. This is where, I think, opponents of capitalism can learn from the fight against sexism. In the fight against sexism, there has been (to my American male eyes) more progress, more of a recognized opposition to the fundamental relationship, than there has been in the fight against capitalist relationships. Imagine living in a world in which the latest blather from the Southern Baptists (a wife submitting herself graciously to her husband), is *not* seen as spectacular idiocy and is accepted as easily as a breath of air. Imagine living, by contrast, in a world in which a different cult came out with a similarly desperate statement about workers ("A worker is to submit graciously to the servant leadership of the employer") because the general social consensus had shifted, however tenuously and incompletely, away from that position.
>> ... gender is not, as it were, a secondary contradiction, or a
>>secondary problem where class is fundamental. ...
There's no real doubt about this in my mind. Again, though, I do think that class issues are more submerged than gender issues. There is an overt tension about this issue, and I think the same (more or less) can be said about racism.
This is where I think those interested in class issues can turn for, at least, inspiration (and more hopefully, concrete ideas and strategies). I believe the feminist movement is stronger than the worker movement (if you wish to call the fight against capitalist relations itself that). There has been a recognition that to place a woman in a slave relationship with a man is unjustified --- why is that? What reasoning has been employed, at the most basic level, to say "This is intolerable and unjustified, therefore it must be overturned"?
>> 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.
Here I am going to strongly disagree, with the caveat that I may be totally misunderstanding Brown's use of the word "empirical". Why should we not try to see "race, gender, homophobia, and class" as "empirically definable"? The "mental organs" that underly language are not open to direct inspection (perhaps never will be). Does that mean they are not "empirically definable"? Why can we not build an understanding of race, gender, etc., that is based on some of the work of cognitive science, or in some of the studies by, say, Amos Tversky et al (I'm in particular thinking of a piece called "The Perseverance of Beliefs")?
>> ... 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.
My only objection to this is that I do dream of a "common critique and common vision"; I dream of one in which the various struggles are, of course, seen as equals. The various forms of subjection are all *equally* intolerable, because they are all essentially slave relationships that are unjustified. That doesn't mean that the different movements must always coalesce into one --- for that to happen, each of the movements would have to recognize that the others merited the same fundamental recognition as a valid opposition to unjustified subjection. But that is a practical matter, and at least parts of the various movements can be unified, and hopefully a movement toward common ground will become stronger; many within them can be convinced to see the similarities. Once this is done, one becomes an opponent of general subjection, and becomes just as incensed about racism, heterosexism, etc., as about capitalism, because the particulars of how this general subjection are brought about are entirely irrelevant to the conclusion that it must be overturned, no matter the form.
>> ... 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. ...
I find this revealing and disturbing. Why should one assert that what is needed *a priori* is "theoretical complexity"? Was this a problematic Freudian slip, or does she mean richness, rigor, clarity? Again, I also question the extent to which this is true across the various forms of subjection. Is "effective action so difficult to plot" in all arenas? I think that in some senses, women have learned (or to be less optimistic, have started to learn) how not to "participate in [their] own subordination", how to fight back, etc., whereas workers are only dimly aware of the moral high ground that they occupy, and are reduced to struggles saying "Don't beat me with the stick, just ask me nicely, and I'll obey", rather than asking "Why should I listen to you at all?".
Bill