>this is what i thought was helpful about doug's post earlier: that there are
>meaningful ways in which ignoring class is really not possible, even if
>you're not saying the word. you're soaking in it. and stuff.
>
><snip>
sorry to totally blow you off (and I did see your other email) I've just been .. well, it's going to be a grind the next few weeks. Lots of stuff going on and I'm on a serious reading jag and, when I have my druthers, it ain't sitting here reading the list or blogs or blogging. I can't get enough reading! On that note, I just rec'd Wendy Brown's _States of Injury_. So far, so good, though I only managed to read the Intro so far. Still promises to be interesting for fans of Foucault, Nietzsche, Marx.
I'll quote Brown getting at what she will explore later, and what we've been discussing here (and was also discussed in the book I mentioned, _Living for the Revolution: Black FEminist Organizations, 1968 - 1980_ (a must read if you're interested in identity politics, history, socialist feminist thought, black feminist activism/thought/etc.): the constitution of political identities. Which, you correctly surmised, is where Kimberly Springer when with political identity formation in _LIving for the Revolution_. (It's actual part of the social movement literature: the development of politicized identities)
Anyway, Brown:
Wendy Brown's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FStates-Injury-Wendy-Brown%2Fdp%2F069102989X%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dbooks%26qid%3D1182299248%26sr%3D1-1&tag=culturelab-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325<em>States of Inury</em></a><img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=culturelab-20&l=ur2&o=1" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important;" /> was waiting for me when I got done with work tonight. I did the usual, buried my nose in it as R drove the car. I drive in the morning, he after work. Then, with a cold drink, I sat on the patio and buried my face some more. :)
I'll just quote this interesting passage for now:
"Initial figurations of freedom are inevitably reactionary in the sense of emerging in reaction to perceived injuries or constraints of a regime from within its own terms. Ideals of freedom ordinarily emerge to vanquish their imagined immediate enemies, but in this move they frequently recycle and reinstate rather than transform the terms of domination that generated them. Consider exploited workers who dream of a world i which work has been abolished, blacks who imagine a world without whites, feminists who conjure a world without men or without sex, or teenagers who fantasize a world without parents. Such images of freedom perform mirror reversals of suffering without transforming the *organization of the activity through which the suffering is produced* and without addressing the *subject constitution that domination effects*, that is, the constitution of the social categories, "workers," "blacks," "women," or "teenagers."
(bitch sez: I have a quibble with the way she formulates this. That is, most political theory does not seek to eliminate the oppressors or create a world without it. Indeed, most also must grapple with the elimination of the identity, oppressed. Moreoever, I'm hard pressed to conceive of it simply as "a world without work". Rather, it is conceive dof as a world without exploitive work (and etc.). Similarly, it's not a world without men or sex that feminists usually want. It's a world without a certain *kind* of or *kinds* of men and, thus, women. Most of these theories, in their utopian moments (and I'm using that here in the way that Ellen Willis did in the book review I forwarded here not too long ago), conceive of entirely different ways of being in the world. That vision may not be fleshed out at all, not in the details (and it would, for many Marxists, be the antithesis of freedom to try to craft the blueprint). But the idea is that would forge an entirely new world and in the political struggle of doing so, forge entirely new selves. Someone like Carrol and one of my grad school mentors seems content not knowing what any of that will be and content just believing that it will happen. Me, I tend to think we need to work a bit more on the structural conditions through which those selves will be forged, here and now. But still, shying away from formal blueprints is often the approach, but generally I don't read folks who argue there will be no "men" or "women" -- just rather different kinds of men or women.
Anyway.... )
"It would thus appear that it is freedom's relationship to identity -- its promise to address a social injury or marking that is itself constitutive of identity -- that yields the paradox in which the first imaginings of freedom are always constrained by and potentially even require the very structure of oppression that freedom emerges to oppose. This, I think, is not only a patently Foucaultian point but is contained as well in Marx's argument that "political emancipation" within liberalism conceived formal political indifference to civil particularity as liberation because political privilege according to civil particularity appeared as the immediate nature of the domination perpetrated by feudal and Christian monarchy. "True human emancipation" was Marx's formula for escaping the innately contextual and historically specific, hence limited, forms of freedom. True human emancipation, achieved at the end of history, conjured for Marx not simply liberation from particular constraints but freedom that was both thoroughgoing and permanent, freedom that was neither partial nor evasive but temporally and spatially absolute. However, since true human emancipation eventually acquired for Marx a negative referent (Capitalism) and positive content (abolition of capitalism), in time it too would reveal its profoundly historicized and thus limited character."
More later! A serious case of joint pain is afflicting me and this bitch is going to put her feet up and relax. It's been a day.
Bitch | Lab http://blog.pulpculture.org (NSFW)