>someone mentioned to me an essay (in either _capital and class_ or some other
>journal) critiquing sennett and cobb's _hidden injuries_, but i've been
>unable to locate it. does anyone know where i might find it or similar?
i've no doubt that sennett's latest is rather conservative--it seems to be an affliction with well-known, older leftish intellectuals lately, no? as for critiques i can't tell you where to find what you're looking for. frankly, it'd probably be a good idea to rip it up on our own. if folks are really serious about this, let me know and we can organize this as we tried before. tho i hesitate b/c we're coming up on august which is a big conference and vaca month in the states. so perhaps sept. would be better?
that said, to angela:
what i think is interesting, tho, is that both sennett and cobb and ehrenreich's books get at precisely the phenom that doug describes, though without reversion to the lacanian theoretical frameworks. while butler deals with how the empty container is created to begin with and while zizek/balibar turn this into a more structural analysis of how the continual production and reproduction of the subject can be seen in everything from literature to immigration policies, i've not yet been convinced that such a formulation is an advance over other formulations that reach similar conclusions.
ehrenreich's _fear of falling_ comes up with the very same analysis: in response to structural economic shifts, the professional middle class experiences anxiety--a fear of falling. that is, in a capitalist political economy it is assumed that one's class position is a personal *achievement* --the result of one's personal success or failure at getting 'there' or maintaining being there. economic crises, then, become obvious, observable occasions for the production of identity: the winners are sorted from the also rans by attributing to each character traits, practices, beliefs that ostensibly explain who wins and loses and why. in doing so, the professional middle class, as in Ehrenreich's account, reserve all the 'good' character traits for themselves [anti-racism, anti-sexism, liberalism, etc] and project onto the white working class, the poor and the 'underclass' [read=black, latino] the 'bad' character traits that supposedly lead to their inability to make anything of themselves.
now, this hardly seems much different from anything zizek or balibar come up with. i keep turning to this literature hoping to find something more, something better but i've yet to find anything to suggest that there's a more powerful analysis. i keep coming up with the same complaint doug mentioned: so how do we transcend this? is this analysis of subject formation wholly ahistorical insofar as it provides utterly no theory of change. here i'm making a fine distinction between an analysis that locates subject formation in history--which asserts that the subject is an historical production--and one that has a theory of historical change. it seems to me that, given zizek and balibar's theoretical commitments, they clearly disavow such a theoretical commitment to begin with, particularly given post marxist critiques of humanism. so what is the new territory they're mapping? i keep reading this stuff and i can't seem to locate any attempt to answer this question.
and what's more interesting is this: presumably, the impetus behind the critique of the philosophy of the subject [the idea that there is an empty container to be filled] is that marxist humanism failed on many accounts. that is, the search for the revolutionary subject located in some subject position was inadequate because it subscribed to identity thinking,t he philosophy of the subject, etc those theories that sought out the rev. subject --[the working class, the intellectual vanguard [lenin], the isolated intellectual [horkheimer], the marginalized and deviant [marcuse], women [feminism] --revealed themselves to be entrapped in the present for they actually erased human agency and lacked a theory of historical change that didn't rest on the wholly inadequate marxist assertion of the driving force or motor of history. and yet, it seems to me that lacanian marxism doesn't escape this problem either.
not sure if i'm making sense. but, as i said to you a while ago, i'd truly love for someone to persuade me of the virtues of this approach. 'tis true i'm a bit lazy, i'll admit, but what else are listservs for?
kelley