>On Sat, 27 Jan 2001, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
>> "I am led to embrace the terms
>> that injure me because they constitute me socially. The
>> self-colonizing trajectory of certain forms of identity politics are
>> symptomatic of this paradoxical embrace of the injurious terms. As a
>> further paradox, then, only by occupying -- being occupied by -- that
>> injurious term can I resist and oppose it, recasting the power that
>> constitutes me as the power I oppose...This is not the same as saying
>> that such an identity will remain always and forever rooted in its
>> injury as long as it remains an identity, but it does imply that the
>> possibilities of resignification will rework and unsettle the
>> passionate attachment to subjection without which subject formation
>> -- and re-formation -- cannot succeed" (104). This is, in essence,
>> the path toward a post-modern turn to secular religion (= a symbolic
>> solution to an imaginary understanding of a real problem).
>
>Not dialectical enough. It's a symbolic solution (which is fine, because
>symbols exert real power) to an imaginary understanding (all ideologies
>require the power of imagination, however feeble) to the *wrong* problem
>-- signification.
Butler (and theorists on whom she draws, e.g. Freud, Foucault, etc.) points to a real problem: the modern individual, as this "rational abstraction" is constituted through capitalism (the subject of "Freedom, Equality, Property, & Bentham") & liberalism (an autonomous legal person who bears rights). And then she offers re-signification as the solution, because while she does pay attention to the state & ideology, she doesn't pay attention to political economy (except tangentially in her criticism of Nancy Fraser, etc. "Merely Cultural" published in _New Left Review_ & _Social Text_).
To make an abstract problem concrete, consider, for instance, the case of homeless persons & how they are treated in the USA (and elsewhere, too). Lars Eighner's _Travels with Lizbeth: Three Years on the Road and on the Streets_ (NY: Fawcett Columbine, 1993) helps to illustrate the problem. In Chapter 9 "Phlebitis: At the Public Hospital," Eighner recounts how he -- then a homeless man -- was treated at the hospital. Though his illness was phlebitis, the hospital staff kept subjecting him to a battery of tests & questions that had nothing to do with his ailment.
***** My interview with the social worker made it clear that only three explanations of homelessness could be considered: drug addiction, alcoholism, and psychiatric disorder. The more successful I was in ruling out one of these explanations, the more certain the others would become. Professional people like to believe this. They like to believe that no misfortune could cause them to lose their own privileged places. They like to believe that homelessness is the fault of the homeless -- that the homeless have special flaws not common to the human condition, or at least the homeless have flaws that professional people are immune to. They are glad to go through the motions of helping the homeless -- and some, like the social worker, depend for their livelihood on there being homeless people to pretend to help -- but on the ladder of being, homeless people are not quite up to the level of professional people. (Eighner 149) *****
Within the ideology of the modern individual, if you are unemployed, homeless, or otherwise outside of the social "norms," your condition can be only attributed to your "choice" (since you are "autonomous") or "disease" like "drug addiction, alcoholism, and psychiatric disorder" (in that case you have a "flaw" that makes you an "exception" to the "rule of autonomy," thus preserving commodity fetishism). In Chapter 10 "Alcohol, Drugs, and Insanity," Eighner offers a more political & philosophical (though non-Marxist) criticism of this problem:
***** People who do not want to help the homeless seek to blame the homeless for being homeless. These people see alcoholism, drug addiction, and insanity as character flaws that somehow justify the condition of the homeless. This conservative line of thought is only one step removed from the conclusion that in addition to deserving homelessness, the homeless also deserve whatever mistreatment individuals or society may choose to mete out.
Those who wish to help the homeless, on the other hand, want to find a problem that can be fixed. Admittedly, alcoholism, drug addiction, and insanity are difficult problems, but something can be done about them. What is even better, for those who take the liberal view, is that what can be done for alcoholism, drug addiction, and insanity is likely to involve the creation of many jobs for social workers and administrators and other middle-class people. Although they find contradictory morals to it, both of these views subscribe more or less to a mythical history of the typical street wino. It is a myth that goes something like this: A man had a reasonably good job and reasonably happy home life. But he drank. At first it was only social drinking. But he drank more and more because he had either the disease of alcoholism or a character flaw that deprived him of the will to be sober, depending upon whether the myth is told in its liberal or its conservative version.
At any rate, he covered up his drinking for a while, but eventually everyone else realized he had a problem. Something dreadful happened at work, at home, or on the road, and the alcoholic had to admit, at last, that he might have a problem. Perhaps he tried one program or another, but without success because -- as they say in the programs -- he had not yet hit bottom. He lost his job, his family, and at last his home. And there he is, a wino clutching a brown sack, passed out in an alley. (Eighner 160-1) *****
What demands this myth? Why does the dominant ideology allow only the liberal & conservative explanations: a character flaw or a disease? Because the myth helps to preserve the economic myth of social harmony created through economic equilibrium which is supposed to result from "Freedom, Equality, Property, & Bentham" (no reserve army of the unemployed in this myth); because the myth helps to provide for "minor exceptions" (the drug addict, the alcoholic, & the insane) for the ideological "rule of autonomy."
The ideology of the modern individual is a real problem of "rational abstraction," for capitalist economy depends upon it, in reality & ideology. Butler, however, writes as if the problem of the modern individual were eternal, since she is not interested in the historical formation of the modern individual, unlike Foucault, for whom the _transition_ from the world before capitalism to capitalism & (within capitalism as a mode of production) the emergence of the modern welfare state with its "governmentality" are _implicit_ explanatory keys (only implicit, because Foucault wanted to say that he went beyond Marx & the Marxist tradition, so there is a lot of unacknowledged cribbing from Marxism). This may be less a problem of personal differences than a problem of different disciplines & modes of inquiry: Butler is primarily a (psychoanalytically-minded) philosopher, Foucault an (anti-psychoanalytic) historian (of ideas & institutions).
It is a failing of Marxism that it couldn't keep someone like Foucault within its tradition. Breaking with the Marxist tradition, Foucault, too, could come up with only either a libertarian answer or an aesthetic one. To take just one example, Foucault's libertarian stance of anti-psychiatry obscures real biological problems from which the mentally ill suffer. Giving the mentally ill the right to refuse medication solved some problems (problems such as forcing medications on the merely socially "deviant" because the state categorized social "deviances" as mental illnesses; coercing the mentally ill to take medications or undergo treatments whose bad side effects outweighed therapeutic virtues; etc.), but what of the mentally ill who refuse to take medications that _can_ actually help them and end up suffering from their illnesses, sometimes becoming homeless on the streets? The right to refuse medication, based upon the liberal premise that the mentally ill are rights-bearing autonomous persons, doesn't help them. While the liberal premise is preferable to the old coercive incarceration into mental hospitals, it collides tragically with biological realities of human sufferings.
Yoshie