Having joined this list only a few days ago, I’m excited by what I’ve found here. I’m really glad that this list is reading Judith Butler right now, in the mix with other matters.
As a preface, I must say that some of the few pieces I saw of LBO’s black nationalism thread started me to wondering if folks were resorting to too different an analysis for race/nationalism/sex/sexuality than for class. Sure, race IS an ascribed characteristic, but it’s hardly the first/only kind of mobilization that is rife with purist identity-claims and naïve identifications. I read Doug and others (I imagine there’s LOTS of others chiming in on this point but, hey, I’ve only been here since the 12th) as overcoming this tiresome partition in a way that anticipates the Butler reading. First Doug raises this point in a recent post:
>I think this also bears on the exchange over nationalism. Does something
>like black nationalism - and I'm framing this as a question not out of
>coyness but out of real uncertainty - suffer from using the tools of the
>power one opposes? Does it reproduce the same tendencies to exclude and
>hierarchicalize? Of course, since it's a stance of resistance to oppressive
>power, it's not an identical reproduction, but does this affinity harm the
>project from the start? Can you say the same of the various "Third World"
>nationalisms that ended by reproducing many of the political and economic
>structures of the colonizers? Ditto the USSR, in reproducing the czar's
>secret police and Germany's trusts and class society? Certainly there were
>exogenous factors at work too, like the IMF and the Pentagon (or
>domestically, the FBI), but were there endogenous factors at work too?
Likewise, Angela’s questions, if directed at all types of political identity--and not just political mobilizations concerned with nonwhite folks, females, queers--offer an excellent start:
>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.
Butler, by my reading, takes up their questions. For her, regardless of the identity to which we’re subjected, to the extent that subjection “works” (and some subjections work more than others, and work more on some people than on others), subjection usually depends on those effects--exclusion, hierarchization, totalization, etc.--about which Doug and Angela express reasonable concern above. The psychic development of the person seems to depend upon the initial exclusion and hierarchization. What was “bad” on the social level in the initial exclusion is now affirmed as good on a different scale.
What is crucial here, though, is that some of the problems which concern Angela, Doug, and others about racial identification in particular are potentially indistinguishable from the goals and features on which the power of subjection depends more generally. For example, recognizing oneself as a worker against capitalism depends upon recognizing capitalism as a system of exploitation
therefore, worker is a word that tells a story about recognizing and resisting the way capitalism makes the world. Feminist is a word that tells a story about the way in which gender differentiation makes the world. Queer
well, you get the drift. In each case we form awareness of identity on the ground of the initial exclusion, hierarchy, or oppressionimplicitly and explicitly we identify against a system and doing so means using its grounds. But that is unavoidable. On a related point, referring back to my opening interest in Butler and the black nationalism thread, you can’t resist a social fact by saying it isn’t a “real” fact. You can’t resist/oppose racism’s material effects by saying that “race” doesn’t really exist.
In her intro, I read Butler directing us to more general mechanisms where she writes:
“But there is another order of prohibition, one which falls outside the cuircuit of self-reflection. Freud distinguished between repression and foreclosure, suggesting that a repressed desire might have lived apart from its prohibition, but that foreclosed desire is rigorously barred, constituting the subject through a certain kind of preemptive loss. Elsewhere I have suggested that the foreclosure of homosexuality appears to be foundational to a certain heterosexual version of the subject.” (Butler, p.23)
What is crucial here is that many of the issues that regularly come up when discussing race/sex/gender/nation seem to anticipate a more general understanding of how folks are subjected to any social category. On this note, I concur with Doug’s suggestion that perhaps we often overstate the kind and amount of agency that we have in everyday life, as activists and as anything else.
There’s at least three things I like about Butler’s book.
(1) That she isn’t wasting time talking about the kinds of power that we know more abouti.e., power that “presses on the subject from the outside.” (p.2); rather she’s talking about their internal supplement. In this respect, she offers a terrific extension of sociologist Alvin Gouldner’s formal argument, in The Two Marxisms (1970?) about how constraint works.
(2) Butler finds new ways to try and dissuade culturally naïve lefties (like me) against either/both of two interrelated penchants: (a) a desire for a too-simple notion of agency (see pg17 where she says “neither does it restore a pristine notion of the subject, derived from some classical liberal-humanist formulation, whose agency is always and only opposed to power”) and (b) a desire for a homeland or future paradise that lies beyond the reach of social power.
(3)Using Hegel and others, Butler makes a more general form of the argument (#2 above) that she’s made earlier using feminist poststructuralist citations. The pains she’s taken to dissuade folks from a romantic and uncritical feminist or gay standpoint are certainly worth saying re other subjects. But at the same time, we might want to reserve, for political reasons, the right to critically and strategically reassert some select essentialist distinctions while understanding the danger of doing so (this is what Gayatri Spivak means by “strategic essentialism”).
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= The sociologist in me agrees wholeheartedly with Joshua’s point that the work he mentioned is also addressing some of these points in useful ways. But I don’t agree that Butler needs to get her hands more “dirty” with more empirical analysis in order to be useful to us. I think Butler’s trying to show that the sheer logic of how sexual subjection works should be sufficient to dissuade us from ever again thinking too romantically about agency and revolution.
Questions:
(1) What has to happen, in Butler’s view, for us to avoid the melancholy identification, the “condition of uncompleted grief”? (p.23) I wish I understood this better.
(2) Does Butler need to add anything more to address the psychic dynamics of class?
(3) We often blame the excluded groups for this general mechanism. Is that an ideological effect--that our own hand in its reproduction is invisible to us?
Ray Allen
__________________________________________________________ Raphael Allen................................. When making a mousetrap, Sociology Dept. ............................ always Rutgers, the State Univ, Box 5072... leave New Brunswick, NJ..08903-5072....... room for the rcallen at eden.rutgers.edu.....mouse. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/19990115/b8525a3f/attachment.htm>