angela
btw, paula, how about a big group woooosh?
(why is my formatting going silly?.....)
-------- Original Message -------- From: rc&am <rcollins at netlink.com.au> Subject: Re: [PEN-L:2099] was 'discourse' now identity politics To: pen-l at galaxy.csuchico.edu
apologies michael for extending this, but i thought it might be important to situate this debate for those who have not read the entirety of it.
Doug Henwood wrote:
> Louis Proyect wrote:
>
> >If anything, there is a strange disjunction in your thinking on
> >so-called identity politics, where you are an enthusiastic
supporter of
> >Judith Butler but turn around and get apoplectic on similar trends
in the
> >black movement.
>
> Actually, Butler's writing destabilizes identity, which is what
queer
> theory is about - blurring boundaries. Some people don't like her
for that,
> in fact.
a good part of what is happening here, and what explains louis et al's
(i think rather formulaic) response is that when they hear a critique of identity, of a politics founded on identity, they are immediately hurtled back into the great debates of the 1960s, when the then-old stalinist marxist left denounced identity politics as a distraction from the tasks of (as the stalinists conceived it) proletarian unity. that people like louis, ken and charles were able to show, clearly show, that this version of unity was little more
than the fortification of the presumed universality of a 'white, male working class' identity was indeed a great step forward. no one can minimize the importance of that particular struggle.
various organisational forms arose on the ground of that step forward,
the pantheon of marxist and left histories was extended to include important figures like james, malcolm x, and so on.
for those of us who grew up in the struggles of more recent decades (the 1980s and 90s), the notion of identity as the basis for politics appears as a whole host of problems, not least of which how one can practice a unity whilst recognizing the infinite range of specificities of location and 'identity' within anti-racist struggles or what have you. part of the critique being expressed er louis et al's position is that it too enacts a universalisation within the deployment of things like 'black identity', one which downplays the 'subalterns' - if you will - within these terms and seeks to verify african-american, heterosexual males as the standard, the identity which generates the presumed necessity for a coherent politics, or at least for a presumed externality through which to adjudicate upon what such politics may or may not consist of. now, it's not so simple as all that, i know, but this is where the dispute has led us.
when those like doug and myself and others are trying to grapple with these issues, and grapple we are - we don't have easy answers, and are not entirely convinced by the certainties put forward by louis or charles or ken -,
to get jumped on with accusations that border on a kind of panic that the certainties of a previous generation of activists are now crumbling becasue of the
things that myself or others are saying, is to make this process a highly painful one for all concerned.
the point is, that for activists like myself who spent the last two decades working within the organisational forms that charles seems to think are the answer (or at least the answer that was
established for him from previous decades), i can only say that i have
discovered serious problems therein. these certainties have already crumbled, and the issue i would like to see addressed is how does one arrive at a politics that does not lead to the infinite proliferation of specific identity politics (as is occurring now, and which still fails to address the complexity and range of specificities that even a single person may - does - confront), a politics which generates a basis for unity of practice but which does not at the same
time found that unity through the universalisation of a specific identity (implicit or otherwise) or the making of identity as something external to practice and hence as something which is not open to the effects of practice or is inoculated against it. these are still open questions. but we are not on the same terrain as we were two decades ago with this stuff. is this progress? not at all. but it is a different set of circumstances that need to be dealt with, and
dealt with with less than the hostility that they have thus far.
angela