>Then I'll specify the nature of the dishonesty. She is lying. The critics she
>is replying to, or the conservative marxists she is attacking, don't exist.
When I heard her delivering that paper at the Rethinking Marxism conference in December 1996 I had the same reaction. "Who the hell is she talking about?," I asked myself. Conversations, personal and electronic, with many Marxists over the next 3 years have convinced me that there are plenty of people like that. She defined the target too narrowly, though, by confining it to Marxists (though on re-reading it, I see she also referred to a "Left") - there are plenty of liberals and leftists of various stripes who entirely fit the bill. How often have you heard the "class not race" mantra? How often have you heard that talking about gender and sexuality is a diversion from "real" struggles? Haven't you any experience of the aesthetic and moral conservatism of a lot of self-identified Marxists?
Here's a bit from Butler's Rethinking Marxism talk. I think this is substantially identical to what was published in NLR, but I haven't done the line-by-line comparison. The end of this excerpt is similar to what I've heard Adolph Reed say, and no one would ever accuse him of being a "postmodernist."
>This resurgence of Left orthodoxy calls for a 'unity' that would,
>paradoxically, redivide the Left in precisely the way that orthodoxy
>purports to lament. Indeed, one way of producing this division
>becomes clear when we ask, which movements, and for what reasons,
>get relegated to the sphere of the merely cultural, and how that
>very division between the material and the cultural becomes
>tactically invoked for the purposes of marginalizing certain forms
>of political activism? And how does the new orthodoxy on the Left
>work in tandem with a social and sexual conservativism that seeks to
>make questions of race and sexuality secondary to the 'real'
>business of politics, producing a new and eery political formation
>of neo-conservative Marxisms.
>
>On what principles of exclusion or subordination has this ostensible
>unity been erected? How quickly we forget that new social movements
>based on democratic principles became articulated against a
>hegemonic Left as well as a complicitous liberal-center and a truly
>threatening right-wing? Have the historical reasons for the
>development of semi-autonomous new social movements ever really been
>taken into account by those who now lament their emergence....? Is
>this sitaution not simply reproduced in the recent efforts to
>restore the universal through fiat, whether through the imaginary
>finesse of Habermasian rationality or notions of the common good
>that prioritize a racially cleansed notion of class? Is the point of
>the new rhetorics of unity not simply to 'include' through
>domestication and subordination precisely those movements that
>formed in part in opposition to such domestication and
>subordination, showing that the proponents of the 'common good' have
>faield to read the history that has made this conflict possible?
>
>What the resurgent orthodoxy may resent about new social movements
>is precisely the vitality that such movements are enjoying.
>Paradoxically, the very movements this continue to keep the Left
>alive are credited with its paralysis. Although I would agree that a
>narrowly identitarian construal of such movements leads to a
>narrowing of the political field, *there is no reason to assume that
>such social movements are reducible to their identitarian
>formations.* The problem of unity, or more modestly, of solidarity,
>cannot be resolved through the transcendence or obliteration of this
>field, and certainly not through the vain promise of retrieving a
>unity wrought through exclusions, one that reinstitutes
>subordination as the condition of its own possibility. The only
>possible unity will not be the synthesis of a set of conflicts, but
>will be *a mode of sustaining conflict in politically productive
>ways,* a practice of contesation that demands that these movements
>articulate their goals under the pressure of each other without
>therefore exactly becoming each other....