debates was guilty / innocent was debates

Miles Jackson cqmv at pdx.edu
Wed Oct 18 09:16:15 PDT 2000


On Wed, 18 Oct 2000 kenneth.mackendrick at utoronto.ca wrote:


> I'm a student and a professor. These two things impose contradictory
> demands on me - especially when I'm involved with Union activities.
> They don't fit together nicely. I experience a radical disjunction
> between the obligations of both. Likewise, as an administrator, I'm
> split again, as a colleague, a friend, again... I don't experience
> these things in a unified way. Each role requires a different persona

[snippage]

This is Soc 101--role conflict. This has nothing to do with the claim that people must be unitary subjects. There are different roles associated with different statuses; psychoanalysis is irrelevant to understanding that. When I claim that people must be unitary subjects, I don't mean people must act and think and inhabit the same status and its associated roles in every situation. This obviously doesn't happen. Rather, there are stable roles associated with particular stable statuses (e.g., gender, race, lawyer, gay/straight). Perhaps my point is too simple: imagine what would happen if every time we were asked to identify ourselves we said "it depends".

Are you a republican? Are you a U.S. citizen? Are you a woman? Are you white? Are you a college professor? Are you gay?

We are constrained by the daily, bureaucratic functioning of the social institutions in our society to provide yes/no answers to these sorts of questions on government forms, job applications, financial aid forms, hate crime surveys, political polls. If you doubt the fact the the unitary subject is reinforced by these mundane social factors, try saying "it depends" next time you answer the gender question on a survey.

Note that the role conflict I experience as a college professor and a father and a guitar player is real; my behavior and thinking are inconsistent in these different contexts. But this is completely irrelevant to the point I'm trying to make above.

Miles



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list