[lbo-talk] "Nothing is too good for the working class"

[bitch at pulpculture.org]

At 09:12 AM 12/15/2007, B. wrote:
>"Fashion, n. A despot whom the wise ridicule yet
>nonetheless obey." -- Ambrose Bierce, Devil's
>Dictionary
>
>
>I think Doug's right. Fashion's appeal is often
>determined by how exclusive it is to a certain set.
>It's kind of like a college degree, the catch-all
>solution to some for poverty. The more people have it,
>the less it's worth.
>
>I think the report on the Vuitton-wearing politician
>was a pretty sleazy hit job. I am torn between
>admiring rock star-like champions of the people who
>are defiantly socialist yet have impeccably savvy
>taste, and between being pretty incredulous as to how
>sincere apparently champagne socialist types might be.
>A lot of fashion is merely the culture of the poor
>appropriated, repackaged, amped up on steroids, sold
>back to poor youth, etc., at multiple times the cost
>of how it began. Example is the faux vintage look --
>jeans that look washed, stained a certain, precise
>way, costing $500 or even more. That shit annoys me.
>Can't say that about Armani, I guess, but the appeal
>of these things doesn't seem to rest on a universal,
>objective sense of "good taste," just what rich
>tastemakers happen to like. When it's accessible to
>peasant stock, it becomes gauche.
>
>-B.


yeah. but the issue is the, for lack of a better term, essentializing of 
the oppressed term in the contradiction. what happens is that, if something 
is valorized in class society then it's assumed that, to valorize it's 
supposed opposite, is to engage in the proper kind of resistance. If the 
devil wears prada, I wear the unfashionable and therefore my political 
practice is not only correct, but morally supreme.

And the argument thus bogs down into assertions of horror, disgust at 
anyone who objects -- for that is what humans do when they feel someone is 
violating a normative (moral) rule as to what constitutes proper lefty 
politics.

I have to go dosome holiday baking, so I don't want to spend a lot of time 
unpacking Wendy Brown's unfortunately dense prose in _States of Injury: 
Power and Freedom in Late Modernity_. But I'll throw it out there and maybe 
get back to it. Brown is arguing against this tendency to engage in the 
politics of resentiment:

"I want to suggest that much of N. Atlantic (is that typically a term or 
typo? -- bitch) Feminism partakes deeply of both the epistemological spirit 
and political structure of resentiment and that this constitutes a good 
deal of our nervousness about moving toward an analysis as thoroughly 
Nietzschean in its warniness abou truth as postfoundational political 
theory must be. Surrendering *moral* claims against domination -- 
especially the avenging strength through *moral* critique of it -- and 
moving instead into the domain of the sheerly political: "wars of position" 
and amoral contests about the just and the good in which truth is always 
grasped as coterminous with power, as always already power, as the voice of 
power."

Later, she speaks to something I've written frequently about on the blog: 
the notion that the most oppressed group has the "truth" of, not only 
oppression and their experience of oppression, but has the truth about 
everything in their analysis of groups who have power,in their analysis of 
how power operates, and what to do about power. They have to how we 
proceed, politically, to eliminate oppression."

Time Out: this is the basis of Doug's objections to carrol re his 
insistence that we always center the concerns of people of color. However, 
I don't think Carrol is this simplistic in his formulation, which I've said 
before, is far more Marxist in so far as Carrol thnks that the answers lie 
in political practice, and not simply in the subjectivity of individuals or 
even group interests that are somehow articulated through consensus or 
something.

Anyway, this standpoint theory for the foundations for the good and the 
true was central to the rise of leftist political strategies -- not just 
feminism: the notion that, by locating the most oppressed class, we would 
locate the answer to how to get out of this place. They would _know_ the truth.

I just finished reading some feminist histories of the late 60s and early 
70s and this really was quite rampant. And I think most people are so 
enamored of this idea, even if they realize its limitations. They can't get 
out of it and what ensues is a kind of "More Oppressedor Than Thou" game 
that everyone wants to deny they engage in, but they ultimately do. It's 
forms the basis of the more authentic than thou dick swinging that goes on 
re: Ehrenreich: She wasn't really poor, so she can't have anything but a 
distorted view of the world. *I* know what it's like to be poor, I am poor, 
*I* have the truth.  To which someone can invariably snicker because there 
is almost always someone somewhere else who is even worse off. It's a 
stupid, fruitless game -- but it is tempting to engage in such moral 
one-upmanship.

Brown continues:

"I have situated feminist anxieties about postmodernity in its disruption 
and deauthorization of our moral ground -- our subject that harbors truth, 
and our truth that opposes power. But preference for moral reasoning over 
open political contest is not the only legacy of the modernist feminist 
story: modernity also bequeaths to us a preference for deriving norms 
epistemologically over deciding on them politically. Indeed.... much of 
Western political theory has derived ... the Good from the True, and 
feminist theory is no exception....

Feminist standpoint theory takes this effort further in its imitation of 
the Marxist effort to vest the class that is "in but not of civil society" 
with the capacity for a situated knowledge capable of achieving universal 
vision and containing seeds of universal norms. Not only the truth of 
oppression but the truth of human existence and human needs is apprehended 
by, because produced by, the daily experience of society's most exploited 
and devalued. With the unique capacity for seeing truth and their standing 
as the new universal class (the class that represents universal interests 
because its interests lie with the complete abolution of class), this 
population also has a singular purchase on "the good."


Later:

"The postmodern exposure of the imposed and created rather than the 
discovered character of all knowledges  ­ of the power-suffused, 
struggle-produced quality of all truths, including reigning political and 
scientific ones ­ simultaneously exposes the groundlessness of discovery or 
visions. It also reveals the exclusionary and regulatory function of these 
norms: when white women cannot locate themselves in Nancy Harstock's 
account of women's experience or women's desires. In African American women 
who do not identify with Patricia Hill Collins's account of black women's 
ways of knowing, are once again excluded from the Party of Humanism - this 
time in its feminist variant."






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