kelley wrote responding to Michael Yates:
>my experience with leftists activists is much the same. >they sat around
> and waited to be served and cleaned up after >too. women and men alike.
i
> watched it happen while working with them and >while waiting on them.
the
> issue, ultimately, is about the blindness to the >world around you that
> comes from white skin and class privilege and >probably has little to do
> with how much of an activist you are.
In '92 listening to ILWU President Jimmy Herman and Frances Fox Piven at a DSA event and being slightly bored with the verbal huffing and puffing, I engaged one of the Chicana food service workers tending to our caffeine consumption in conversation. Asked if anyone tipped, either at the DSA event or at the Sierra Club convention being held across the floor in the same hotel. A roll of the eyes as a response, then to draw out further (since those eyes looked bloodshot) I asked if they were moonlighting and what they thought about the Hotel & Resteaurant Workers local they were in as evidenced by their union button. Not working double shifts at least, there or elsewhere, needed to 'cuz single Mom, minimal child support. On the union, she was active, and no she said lefties and enviros were lousy tippers. And I've seen the same from Old Lefties at the Vets of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade dinners I've been to 3 or 4 times, and some of the VALB'ers are after all these years are rather well off. I thought it was ,"No pasaran!" not I shall not tip or clean.
Nathan Newman wrote:
>I did hear on good authority (meaning >probably a leftwing urban legend)
of
>one Trot sect reduced to the leader, his wife >and son, until the wife and
>son left, leaving him along in his sect, until he >developed multiple
>personalities and a political split of course soon >followed.
Not a lefty urban legend, though Daniel Bell suggests it is apocryphal. From Bell's, Marxian Socialism in the U.S. (ironically the previous paragraph from which I took the Schactman quote from a post recently, page 156 in my edition, Princeton U. Press, there is an edition with a Michael Kazin intro) . Quoting," Mienov, Apocrypha relate, now alone, soon developed schizophrenia, and split with hemself." Mienov ran an outfit called the Marxist Workers League, a split from the Revolutionary Workers League. A contemporary RWL used to be around here in San Francisco which held ,among other positions, that the Sparts were not forthright enough in defending NAMBLA and that Workers World was insufficiently pro-Iraqi Baathist/pro-Saddam Husseinish. "For unconditional defense of Iraq" and Military not Political Support... During the Gulf War I went to a meeting at a ILWU hall to help organize. About 200 lefties spent hours in parliamentary maneuvers fighting the RWL and other miniscule sects until the one non-cadre type, a Mother from West Virginia with a son in the Army shut us all up with words to the effect that she couldn't understand all the anger and language we were all using, she just wanted the upcoming slaughter prevented.
Lastly re: Michael Yates and company on whether ones activist cred. is dependent on ones class/race/gender/sexual orientation or background , I'd recommend, a piece by Dick Pels, in Telos #108, Summer '96 and this response to Pels by Nino Langiulli.
Michael Pugliese
Magazine: Telos; Winter 1998
Section: Notes and Commentary:
ON DICK PELS' 'STRANGE STANDPOINTS'
-----------------------------------
The strange thing about Dick Pels' claim about the conventional view of knowledge in "Strange Standpoints" is that, in order for knowledge to be true, it must be "value-free, disinterested and universal."[1] Allegedly, the challenge to this conventional view comes from "standpoint epistemologies" which, to use the opposite terms descriptive of "true knowledge," are value-laden, interested, and particular. In short, "standpoint epistemologies" is an inflated term for what used to be and still is called subjectivism. Standpoint epistemologies are theories about knowledge claims. According to these epistemologies, any knowledge claim is always made from the perspective of the speaker (the view from somewhere in contrast to the view from everywhere or nowhere), whereby time, place, gender, race and class count as determinative of its troth- value. Pels mentions race, gender, and class as determinants, but he also makes the further distinctions of women and feminists, proletarians and speakers for proletarians (such as Marx and Ted Kennedy), women and feminists, black women and black feminists, and lesbian black feminists. Naturally, such categories ultimately collapse into the individual person.
One may be tempted to dismiss Pels' essay as a taking too seriously old fashioned epistemological relativism, but he does make some interesting comments, some of which are even true. The interesting ones have to do with the concept of "strange standpoints" which turns out to be a corrective for standpoint epistemologies. Those which are true have to do with such sentences as "Women's experiences, or the things women say, do not in themselves provide reliable grounds for knowledge claims." Pels is not a male chauvinist or, worse yet, a traditionalist. He maintains that "women's experiences ... must be informed and corrected by feminist theorizing and feminist political engagement in order to create truly critical perspectives" (85).
The "three" standpoint theories (class, gender, race) require the "strange" standpoint or else they become "intellectualist" or "essentialist." "Standpoints," urges Pels, "need spokespersons [sic] in order to be constituted as such; it is their representational work that ultimately 'defines the situation' for 'situated knowledge'." Pels continues with the remarkable claim that "It is [feminist intellectuals] who actually occupy epistemically resourceful 'contradictory' positions ('a woman thinker is a contradiction in terms') and may therefore exploit the frictions and dissonances which arise between their disparate experiences" (87).
Several questions come immediately to mind. Is the whole statement true? If so, then there are some statements that are not standpoint statements or opinions. Furthermore, it can be accepted on grounds that do not presuppose any strange standpoints. If it is not true, then it may be false or a standpoint statement. If it is false, it is to be rejected. If it is a standpoint statement, then it may be checked (and thus turn out to be true or false), and anyone can find it out by checking it the way ordinary people check things or by the more sophisticated scientific check. If it is just standpoint, then it is just a subjective assertion. But then it is true that Pels has said it even though its content is neither true nor false, but just another opinion.
Is the statement "a woman thinker is a contradiction in terms" itself truly a contradiction or is it just a contrary?[2] Or is it neither? Is it just plain false, as everyone believes it to be -- even male chauvinists and traditionalists? Thus Aristotle did not say that women do not think but that in politics their thinking lacks force or authority. Perhaps the statement is ironic or sarcastic? This is a reading most people would have of it. But the irony or sarcasm depends on the statement's opposite being true, i.e., a woman thinker is not a contradiction in terms. It is said that she is in order to mock those barbarians who might believe it. Pels does not take it as ironic or sarcastic, as the rest of his statement and the context implies. He believes it to be honorific, i.e., complimentary to women in that they have the conflicting experiences redolent of reality and therefore are better suited to make knowledge claims. Contradiction, in short, is a virtue. The confusion between contraries and contradictories remains and the reader remains baffled. To say that women have conflicting experiences and thereby can give a more complete account of reality is not to say that "a women thinker is a contradiction in terms." If "woman- thinker" were a contradiction in terms, one could not even conceive of a woman thinking, as one could not conceive of a mother not being a female parent or conceive of a circle being square. What is Pels talking about?
Consider again the opening statement of the essay. "'Standpoint epistemologies' have long counted among the most powerful challenges to the conventional view that true knowledge is value-free, disinterested and universal." The conventional view is that of ordinary folks who are epistemological realists and of such professional philosophers as Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas and Thomas Reid. They know that some statements are true, some false, and some are opinions waiting to be proven true or false. But Pels' treatment of the conventional view is a caricature created by the false disjunction perpetrated on philosophy by modernity and postmodernity. For the truth about true knowledge is not that it is value-free but that its value is precisely its intention to be disinterested (i.e., not private), universally or at least generally true. The statement that Michael Jordan is taller than John Stockton is true and would be true for everyone, once they know who the two basketball players are. That water freezes when it gets sufficiently cold is true and true for everyone. The laws of physics and the propositions of mathematics are true for everyone. If there are counter- examples such as objects do not fall when they are out in space or that water does not freeze at 0 degrees Centigrade in caves, this does not falsify the general truth. Such counter-examples are accountable by a more complete explanation and these explanations are accessible to everyone. The ruses of "the view from everywhere" or "the view from nowhere" are either the tricks of sophists who wish to be regarded as clever or wish to win debates. Or they are the false belief of those who think knowledge is possible only in the context of omniscience. As far as certainty is concerned, there is just as much as one needs. Those who need or want more simply have a false requirement for human knowledge, confusing the unlimited desire to know (which is human) with the unlimited possession of knowledge. Wanting to be God (and not like God) seems to lie behind the despair over knowledge in standpoint epistemology.
The fable of the blind men and the elephant may be useful to illustrate standpoint epistemology. Each of the blind men touches a different part of the elephant and declares that the part he touches and describes is the elephant when it is only the tail, the trunk, the tusk or the leg. What each of them knows is a part. What they describe is true of the part. If they infer from the part that it is the whole, their inference is false. They commit the metonymic fallacy, which Pels attributes to intellectuals. But what they know about the part is true knowledge, not opinion. The mistake is the false inference. This, however, does not prove that they have no knowledge. Nor does it prove that there is just a perspective or viewpoint. Indeed, the mistake or false inference is possible only on the basis of what they know.
The higher order false inference is made by standpoint epistemologists, for they claim that such a fable proves that we do not have knowledge but only a standpoint. Different viewpoints do not prove the absence of knowledge, only the presence of opinion. What is said from a standpoint can be true or false and this can be found out by anyone who attends to it. Falsifications contribute as much to knowledge as verifications. Being disinterested means freeing oneself from lies, prejudice, ideology and deceptions. It does not mean being uninterested. Do Pels and other class, race and gender attendants claim that such conditions rule out knowledge? If so, they fail to recognize that these conditions and much more important ones, such as the ability to perceive and the desire to know, are conditions of possibility for knowledge, not standpoints.
The interesting things that Pels has to say have to do with the notion of "strange standpoints." These proceed, as do most of Pels' assertions, from Marxian sociology, the chief idea being "alienation." According to Pels: "It is this convergent theme of the 'outsider within,' who enjoys 'double vision' which in my view establishes a powerful epistemological point, which might even be taken as the enduringly relevant 'summary' of standpoint theory in its various historical manifestations. What standpoint theories ultimately seem to offer is a more general or abstract social epistemology of the stranger, rather than a more concrete and particularized epistemology of class, gender, or race; an epistemology of diversity or 'crossover' identities, rather than the single and stable consciousness of 'taking responsibility for one's roots'" (73).
The "epistemology of the stranger" entails a recognition of a third position between the dominant and dominated classes of contemporary capitalism, and even more important, spells a return "to an element of the traditional 'transcendental' view of knowledge which standpoint theories have historically risen against." The stranger mediates between the politicized "view from somewhere" and the disinterested/universal view from nowhere. "It is the stranger," says Pels, "who somehow embodies and preserves the ancient philosophical promise of transcendence and distanciation" [sic]. Just when this glimmer of recognition on the part of Pels that truth and knowledge are public and therefore accessible to anyone who wants to know something, stranger or not, he regresses to "standpoint epistemology." For the stranger "simultaneously remains intensely placebound, committed, interested, and partisan." Although "[t]he stranger moves across contexts and encompasses them in double vision," he "does not float above interests, but embodies a different interest" (75).
If the stranger is insider and outsider at different times under different circumstances, then the stranger is like Plato's Eleatic stranger, who in the Sophist instructs Socrates on the concepts of existence-nonexistence, sameness-difference and permanence-change -- the ontological concepts on which all other knowledge rests. But if the stranger is both insider and outsider at the same time under the same circumstances, Pels has a contradiction which even he cannot sustain. It is plain nonsense, and he should give up trying to say anything at all. Indeed, he does not need the appeal to the stranger's viewpoint because it is either redundant or collapses into just another standpoint.
Pels' notion of the stranger and his viewpoint is a rightful and courageous attempt to move beyond the standpoint absolutized. The stranger or, better, the knower, starts from somewhere at some time and tries to say something about that sometime and somewhere that someone else can understand. In order to say something true or give an explanation, the knower does not need to be above interests or above contexts, but does need to begin from those interests and contexts to ascertain whether or not what he reports is cross-contextual and of interest to others. This is the meaning of the "different" interest of the stranger or the knower who wants to know; first and foremost, just to know. Just knowing is what makes the stranger different. If this knowledge can cross over to the domain of practice, so much the better and so much more is it trans-theoretical, trans-cultural and transhistorical. But it need not cross over to practice, such as some propositions of physics, mathematics and philosophy, such as those concerned with the speed of light, the area of a circle or the concept of difference.
It is difficult to say how Pels would classify many of the statements he makes throughout his essay. Are they true, i.e., fact? Are they universal? Are they true for the moment? Are they false? Consider some of these statements. "Given that all beliefs, including the best scientific propositions, are socially situated.... "(65). Pels speaks here of a fact and a universal proposition offered neither as a standpoint nor as the viewpoint of a stronger. Furthermore, on what grounds or viewpoint does anyone speak of the "best scientific propositions"? Does not speaking about the "best" here imply some knowledge, distinct from a viewpoint, which can be used to determine what is best; and even more important, what is worst? "In order to gain a critically objective view of society as a whole, the best method is therefore 'to start thought from marginal lives'" (68). Is this a fact? Is it possible to gain a critically objective view of society as a whole? From what Pels says elsewhere, it would not be possible. "[I]ssues of race always appear historically in articulation with other categories and divisions and are constantly crossed by categories of class and gender" (71). Always? Constantly? This looks like a compound universal statement. Does Pels mean it? Is it just a partisan view? "We are all ethnically located, but this insight calls precisely for a politics of ethnicity that is predicated on difference and diversity" (71). All? What does "all" imply? If, moreover, a politics of ethnicity is predicated on difference and diversity, then are the categories of difference and diversity objective categories? Furthermore, is politics then dependent on categories which are themselves not political? Might they be logical and ontological? Is talking about politics subject to logic? "This recurrent topos of alienation, and of the redemptive privilege of outsidership and marginality, remains a persistently magnetic theme across the entire history of standpoint theory, and only gains in visibility and pertinence in its present day elaborations" (72) . Recurrent topos? Persistently magnetic theme? Entire history? Does this statement come from a strange standpoint? Is it false? Is it just Pels' opinion?
Elsewhere, Pels quotes another author uncritically. "Against such roots- and rootedness-oriented conceptions, Gilroy associates the black experience of modernity with 'the standpoint of dislocation,' and prefers to view identity as a process of movement and mediation, as a 'changing same'" (73). But what if home was a horror for blacks and coming to America was a blessing as Keith Richburg argues in Out of America (1997)? What is a "changing same"? If such a thing could exist, is it not proper to ask what in it changes and what remains the same?
The next series of statements made or approved by Pels will be offered without comment or question. From them the reader can infer that Pels truly holds neither a standpoint nor a strange epistemology but, for want of a better name, a traditional one. All standpoints "need to be spoken for in order to become constituted as standpoints in the first place" (76). "It is in all respects (feminist) theory which constructs and validates experience, and effectively dictates how 'to see strange'" (86). "In principle, therefore, it is not necessary to have lived the experience of oppression in order to understand other oppressed identities..." (87). Feminism "teaches women (and men) how to see the social order from the perspective of an outsider..." (86). The black women's "standpoint may not be clear to 'black women themselves; which is why black feminist intellectuals must produce facts and theories about the Black female experience that will clarify a Black woman's standpoint for Black women'" (81).
Pels is critical of standpoint epistemologies. He wishes to correct them with a strange standpoint epistemology at once particular and transcendental, but not quite universal. He recognizes that theories about "'situated knowledge,' in sum, are likely to suffer from a vicious circularity which results from their efforts to derive objectivity claims from ontological 'situations' which must first be 'defined as real' before such claims can be contextually 'situated'." As the foregoing passage illustrates, both he and standpoint theories acknowledge the relevance of objectivity to knowledge claims. He also tries to salvage a version of objectivity by means of the outsider- within character of the strange standpoint. The outsider-within embodies an interest which mediates other interests. As outsider-within, he/she can achieve "local transcendences," can take "third positions" and forge "partial connections," all of which achieve, in turn, a measure of synthesis and objectivity which is still available in the chronic 'war of positions' which is waged in the social world" (91).
Since standpoint epistemology and strange standpoint epistemology require the terms of ordinary traditional epistemology, such as all, truth, falsity, valid and invalid and many more, they add nothing to epistemological discourse. They belong to sociology, whose meta- sociological import is either redundant or so particular as to have no import beyond their particularity. Even standpoints have to be a view of something and have to depend on some knowledge even to be a standpoint and even if they are about power, which Pels more than suggests. Knowledge is logically and ontologically prior to standpoints, although standpoints may be temporally prior. Standpoints, strange or otherwise, would not exist if their telos were not knowledge.
1. Dick Pels, "Strange Standpoints: Or, How to Define the Situation for Situated Knowledge," in Telos 108 (Summer 1996), p. 65. All subsequent references to Pels will be to this article, indicating in parenthesis the page number.
2. Pels uses the terms "contradictory" or "contradiction" ambiguously. Does he mean contradictory or does he mean contrary when he says (or quotes someone else as saying) "a woman thinker is a contradiction in terms"? Contrary terms are such as: tall-short, hot-cold, pleasure-pain, man-woman. There is usually middle ground between contraries and they are opposites in the same class. Contrary propositions are such as: All snakes are reptiles -- No snakes are reptiles; All men are mortal -- No men are mortal; All women think -- No women think. Contradictory terms are such as: tall-not tall; hot-not hot; pleasure-no pleasure; man-not man. There is no middle ground between contradictories and they are not opposites in the same class. Contradictory propositions are such as: All snakes are reptiles -- Some snakes are not reptiles; All men are mortal - - Some men are not mortal; All women think -- Some women do not think.
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intended solely for the use of the individual user. Source: Telos, Winter98 Issue 110, p135, 6p. Item Number: 439362