Angela wrote:
<<...ken and Yoshie pronounce on the need for giving Alex a good thrashing, or at least insisting that he shut up, because the question itself constitutes sexism....>>
Yoshie replied:
"Folks who read and talk _so_ much about Foucault, Althusser, Butler, etc. should know that ideology works through the manner in which a problematic gets set up, or so I thought, rather naively. (Perhaps because I didn't mention the term _problematic_ the last time around? You guys need to have _everything_ spelled out?) I'll try again. I wrote:
..coming back to the subject of abortion, I'd say that we police ourselves and become good subjects by arguing with the Right on the Right's terms: "Is abortion 'murder'?"; "Is abortion 'moral'?"; "Are pro-choicers 'rigid' and 'inflexible'?"; and ad infinitum."
hi Yoshie,
you began your post by saying I agree with ken' if I recall... so then, if you had wanted to argue in terms of evading the dominant problematic, then, yes, you should have spelt it out. not because I cannot read, but because you have clearly signaled otherwise in what was a debate increasingly run as if the trenches were obvious. moreover, none of the questions you cite had actually been asked by Alex. he did not ask a question from within these terms. you would agree I think that the abortion debate has been pretty well dominated by the two slogans 'pro-choice' and 'right to life', both of which emanate from a liberalist discourse. these are not the only slogans or analysis. 'free, safe abortion on demand', which you noted, does not speak to a liberal subjectivity, or at least not in quite the same ways, and doug's reply was not founded on talk of the rights of the individual; and, it was this that Alex was asking for. he mentioned Catholicism, not as an inroad to 'abortion is murder', but in order to signal his discomfort with protestant, individualised conscience claims. Doug and Charles answered this, admirably and concisely. Alex's question did not need to be taken as that which threatens the coherence of pro-abortion activism and positions - that it was struck me as strange, since activism, by definition, includes answering such questions daily.
you also wrote:
"See, first the Right sets the terrain of ideology, and then they ask us to formulate our demands and justifications on that terrain. That's their game. We must refuse to play by their rules. (You must have read enough Marx & Foucault to get my point here.)..."
no, the right has already set the terms, and it also pervades the slogans from pro-abortion activists, but not all. and, no, I have never read 'enough' marx and Foucault. but I have read enough of them to know that they do not talk about ideology as error or infection, not something you can refuse to tarry with in the hope that it will go away. sure, focussing on the problematic is important, crucial, but is this a meta-discourse, is meta-discourse possible?
angela