[lbo-talk] Is this the new left?

info at pulpculture.org info at pulpculture.org
Sat Jul 22 13:28:52 PDT 2006


This was written in response to the feminist sex wars that have been plaguing us for the past month.

What does it have to do with this discussion? Well, in it, I try to talk about how we can be "engaged fallibilistic pluralists" and I draw on the work of a philosopher, Richard Bernstein. He wasn't writing about feminist wars, but about philosophical ones.

Although I love Tekjani [1] and this post was wonderful from Jill at Feministe, and I don't want to start another shit storm, I do gotta say this. I think that, to expect most radical femnists (exceptions exist, of course) to ever agree that they should work on improving the lives of sex workers misses the point.

As I understand a radfem analysis, patriarchy is like an engine powered by three fan belts:

1. rape - alternator belt 2. prostitution - timing belt 3. porn - water pump belt

If you want to make the motor stop running, you need to bust those belts. Anything else is like trying to get a car engine to stop working by chipping the paint or taking a sledgehammer to the hood.

The control of women's sex is central to patriarchy. All the other stuff is epiphenomenal to it. For them, it's ok to work on other things, but what truly counts are those three things.

Asking them to make the lives of sex workers better by, say, fighting to legalize or decriminalize prostitution is asking them to totally reject the very theory that defines their feminism. It's asking them to stop trying to get rid of the thing that they believe will kill the patriarchy or at least bring it to its knees so we can kick it in the head till its dead dead dead. And since bringing the patriarchy to its knees will improve the lives of all women, they reckon, then they would be shirking the goal of liberating women.

So, I think that, if we want to respect their approach, as I would want them to respect mine, then asking them to make this compromise is just too much to ask. And, it's also just not understanding their framework -- and I've been a-harping on that and a-harping on that. I dunno, I guess I think that, to build a vibrant community, we have to have some base-level agreement that we really do understand there are multiple feminismS and do our level best to respect that.

This leaves me feeling a little frustrated when I see a huge chasm between a race/class/gender analysis advanced by bell hooks, Patricia Hill Collins, and socialist feminists versus the feminists who argue that gender trumps race and class. Because, there too, the oppression of women is what is real, everything else is epiphenomenal to it. Racism and what radfems call "caste" do exist, but they are secondary to the primary oppression, the oppression of women as a class by men as a class.

I don't know what to do about this one. I side will Jill [3] at Feministe when she says we'll just have to get used to the fact that there will be this war. But, here's the problem, don't some of the approaches have to be more right than the others? If there are such stark differences and angry divides, there must be something important at stake for us to be so tenacious about it all -- and on all sides of the issue. Even sticking, doggedly, to your 'why can't we all get along?' view and criticizing everyone is the criticism of others for not buying into your way of seeing the world and it is a theoretical framework, though not exclusively feminist.

Is every feminist approach just equal?

That can't be so. If it feels like -- and you can show how -- some of those approaches are actually part of the problem, the problem that can make your life miserable on a daily basis, then what to do? [4] Why should you settle for anything less? Because, if you are the one experiencing oppression from your fellow feminists, why should you be the one to orient yourself to them? That makes no sense. This isn't just about competing ideas, it's about claims that there are structures of oppression operating within feminism -- as they do in all movements for social change.

When people insistently deny this, and particularly when they complain that feminism is so weak and how can you say anyone is brokering structures of oppression within feminism, it's denying other people's experience and it's denying a large body of literature that has been around since the early second wave. Chalking it up to different experiences and interpretations and gee there is no one right way to understand this is not only unhelpful, it is embracing privilege and strengthening it. It's giving it the food it needs to thrive and grow and dig its roots ever more deeply into feminism.

Still, you want to be a good person who respects the ideal of tolerance because you're a feminist and you want to work with others on the issues that matter to you. But, tolerating everything means that you might just have to tolerate people who are not working with you to make the oppressions you experience go away. In fact, they are making them worse.

Maybe we can figure out some way of building this wonderful feminist community -- because if you can step back for a moment and play along with Sappy Bitch, this really is a beautiful thing we are doing here. Maybe we can figure out a way that will recognize these fundamental differences, but doesn't mean that we have to be engaged in what I call 'flabby pluralism.'

I take the term from this dewd I like, Richard Bernstein, who contrasts it with 'engaged, fallibilistic pluralism.' This is where my debt to Habermas reveals itself, but also my debt to the antifoundationalist critiques of the post-structuralists such as Judith Butler. Which is funny, because Habermas and the post-structuralist are usually seen as mortal philosophical enemies. But I always find something really productive about always walking between the Scylla and Charybdis of two theories so counterposed and trying to feel my way toward the commonalities while tracing my fingers always around the sharp differences. Hmmm. Sounds kinky.

What helps to bridge the gap for me, as it does for Richard Bernstein, is a good old healthy dose of American Pragmatist philosophy, my first philosophical sweetheart. I'm going to quote a passage on the problems with pluralism where we have Babel and a confusion of tongues. "What we face today is this ever increasing proliferation of 'different vocabularies .. and voices demanding to be heard ... where we speak such radially different tongues that we are unable to understand what even our closest neighbors are saying .... There are dangers and challenges in that situation."

First, he describes different kinds of pluralism and then advances the idea that the one we need to embrace is "engaged fallibilitic pluralism":

The type of pluralism that represents what is best in our pragmatic tradition is an <em> engaged, fallibilistic pluralism.</em> such a pluralistic ethos places new responsibilities upon each of us. For it means taking our own fallibility seriously -- resolving that however much we are committed to our own styles of thinking, we are willing to listen to others without denying or suppressing the otherness of the other. It means being vigilant against the dual temptations of simply dismissing what others are saying by falling back on one of those standard defensive ploys where we condemn it as obscure, woooly, or trivial, or thinking we can always easily translate what is alien into our own entrenched vocabularies. [[[ ahem ]]]

Sometimes understanding rival traditions requires what Alasdair MacIntrye characterizes as learning a second first language where we come to recognize the ways in which rival traditions are and are not translatable. What makes this task so difficult and unstable is the growing realization that there are no uncontested rules or procedures which will tell us how agreement can be reached or what would settle the issues ....

But this doesn't mean that we have to fall back to some version of what Popper called the 'myth of the framework' where we are prisoners caught in the framework of our theories -- our expectations, our past experiences, our language -- and that we are so imprisoned into these frameworks that we cannot even communicate with those imprisoned in radically different frameworks.

Or rather, to the extent that this does happen, it is ... an ethical failure rather than a cognitive or linguistic one. Ultimately the appeal to the regulative ideal of a community of inquirers or interpreters is -- as the pragmatists emphasized -- an ethical or normative ideal.

[[[This is what I was getting at in the Breaking Wind thread in [5] this comment post about how I saw the politics of provocation play out (not very well, thank you) when working on civic democracy projects.]]]

...

But because there are no uncontested procedures for adjudicating the claims of rival (positions), it is always a task to seek out commonalities and points of difference and conflict. ... Conflict and disagreement are unavoidable in our pluralistic situation. There is little reason to believe that 'we' philosophers will ever achieve any substantive permanent consensus, and there are many good reasons for questioning the desirability of such a consensus. What matters, however, is how we respond to conflict. The response that the pragmatists call for is a dialogical response where <strong>we genuinely seek to achieve a mutual reciprocal understanding -- and understanding that does not preclude disagreement.

One of the consequences of the analytic movement has been to encourage the "adversarial" or "confrontational" style of argumentation. ...

But there are dangers in this style of argumentation when carried to extremes. For in being primarily concerned with exposing weaknesses, with showing the absurdities in what is taken to be mistaken, we can be blind to what the other is saying and to the truth that the other is contributing to the discussion.

The adversarial confrontational style can be contrasted with a model of dialogical encounter. Here one begins with the assumption that the other has something to say to us and to contribute to our understanding. The initial task is to grasp the other's position in the strongest possible light. One must always attempt to be responsive to what the other is saying and showing. This requires imagination, sensitivity and perfecting hermeneutical (interpretative) skills.

There is a play, a to-and-fro movement in dialogical encounters, a seeking for a common ground in which we can understand our differences. The other is not an adversary or an opponent, but a conversational partner. Conflict is just as important in dialogical encounters, because understanding does not entail agreement.

On the contrary, it is the way to clarify our own disagreements. Gadamer states the point succinctly when he writes: 'One does not seek to score a point by exploiting the other's weaknesses; rather, one seeks to strengthen the other's argument as much as possible so as to render it plausible. Such an effort seems to me to be constituitive for any communication.'

[1] http://blog.shrub.com/archives/tekanji/2006-07-18_342

[2] www.amptoons.com/blog/archives/2006/07/18/in-which-i-call-a-truce-on-the-sex-wars-thing/

[3] http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2006/07/21/why-hello-there-strawfeminist/

[4] And I'm not saying that people who are interested in advancing a radical feminist framework don't, likewise, feel that other forms of feminism are thier oppressors. In fact. I've consistently tried to argue that this is exactly why they get so angry with those of us who don't agree: they feel we are part of the patriarchy and the things we support are what make their lives miserable on a daily basis.

[5] http://blog.pulpculture.org/2006/07/20/breaking-wind-or-im-gonna-scream-and-break-windows/#comment-9079

Bitch | Lab http://blog.pulpculture.org



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