Charles Brown wrote:
> Charles: Isn't there much evidence
> that male supremacy or patriarchy (sexism) is
> pre-modern ? just as pre-modern
> as class exploitation ?
well, kinda. but this is a bit like saying that because societies produced a surplus before capitalism, then surplus-value (capital) has been around for yonks.
what we might call the racism of ancient times does not look much like what the racism of today is. it isn't organised in the same way, it doesn't have the same presuppositions. you can't begin t understand sexism if you think it is historically continuous, and i don't think you can defeat it if you make it into something that 'returns from the past'. (similarly, like you can't comprehend the nationalism of eastern europe if you believe it is the return of (to) something that has a more or less continuous relation to the past, only to have been freeze-dried by socialism (if you like to think in terms of modernization) or kept back from its fulfilment by socialism (if you happen to think this nationalism is a good thing). the nationalism of eastern europe is unthinkable outside the modern - it's an entirely modern thing, which nonetheless relies for its claims on a certain dream about the past.
now, 'lm' dreams about the future. they're utopians, and like all utopians they often say some interesting things, but they do so in a way in which the conflicts at the heart of what it means to be gay or lesbian (for instance) in the city is translated into a narrative of the joys of the city, thus pretending that there are no conflicts there - the conflict is implicitly presented as between the pre-capitalist and the capitalist, and anti-gay bigotry as a thing from the past. this is a dream, as zizek would say, of eradicating the antagonisms which are actually the condition and constitutive principle. and, before you think this is pomo stuff (zizek is not a pomo, but only is to those who think non-anglophone philosophy today is all pomo), here's the fat, hairy guy:
"... in the selfsame relations in which wealth is produced, poverty is produced also; that in the selfsame relations in which there is a development of the productive forces, there is also a force producing repression.... the humanitarian school, which takes to heart the bad side of present-day production relations. It seeks by way of easing its conscience, to palliate even if slightly the real contrasts ... The whole of this school rests on interminable distinctions between theory and practice, between principles and results, between idea and application, between content and form, between essence and reality, between law and fact, between the good side and the bad side. The philanthropic school ... denies the necessity of antagonism ... it wants to realize theory in so far as it is distinguished from practice and contains no antagonism. It goes without saying that, in theory, it is easy t make an abstraction of the contradictions that are met with at every moment in actual reality. this theory would therefore become idealised reality ... they want to retain all the categories which express bourgeois relations, without the antagonism which constitutes them and is inseparable from them." [marx, 'poverty of philosophy', progress press, 1978, pp115-16]
angela