i'll just pull a chuck grimes. :)
If you want to read an awesome critique of identity politics from a *postmodernist*, then read brown. even if you only read it to get a more sophisticated way to pummel the identity politicos you so despise, you should read it. In it, Brown makes mincemeat out of queer politics and the like -- mincemeat because of their wounded attachment to endlessly circling around their own powerlessness.
Carrol might find the brief passage on Platos defense of Socrates against the Sophists innarestin, also. He already knows it, but he might find it innarestin' in the hands of someone reading it with Nietszche in mind. (Which of course is because it's N's analysis. hee.)
So, I came home, buried my nose in Wendy Brown's States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity while having my coffee -- ahhhhhh -- on the patio. ahhhh. I was so thrilled with the page I read during a short break at work, I was soooooooo tempted to hop on the blog and explode with excitement. Alas. Not interested in surfing to my own blog while at work.
What I was thrilled about was that Brown formulates the same arguments I'd been writing about last summer with regard to feminist identity politics and standpoint theories. (andie read one of these diatribes/seminars and thought I was hopelessly out of touch with contemporary theory as I recall).
Of course, no surprise there re my own ideas and Brown's overlapping. I didn't make the critique up, nor did she. Still, it was good to know that she's on the same track -- though I'd be hard pressed to imagine how she couldn't be given her theoretical proclivities toward postmodernist politics. Thus, writing about feminist attachment to identity politics and the standpoint theories upon which they are based, Brown argues:
"[P]reference 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. ... Feminist standpoint theory takes this effort furthest 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 the seeds of universal norms."
(NOTE: for those who followed along last summer, I wrote about this in terms of the master-slave dialectic -- how the notion is that the slave can know the world better, know the truth better, precisely because the slave is most oppressed. Now, go read the Combahee River Collective. That part about how, as the most oppressed (triple jeopardy they sometimes called it according to Kimberly Springer's book), they might be able to take a "revolutionary leap" at a moment's notice. That is, black lesbians were the ones to lead the way to the revolution!
Of course, most folks have tried to move beyond all that. But the point of Brown's book -- and my arguments as well -- is that, most of the time, they haven't. And if I'm right, I'm guessing that Brown doesn't move beyond all that. It was in fact my own criticisms of what is an otherwise excellent argument (coz I've been making it too. ha!) are what prompted me to take a revolutionary leap off my ass and rush in from the patio and plop my fat ass at the keyboard and start tapping away at the keyboard.
So the whole "the slave knows the truth" of society, the "truth" of oppression thing == you'll recall my discussions of that last summer, right? Now, read Brown:
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 their 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 abolition of class), this population also has a singular purchase on "the good."
Now, you may have heard people refer to "The Good, the True, and the Beautiful". That's a reference to philosophy's three central endeavors: what is good or just? what is true? and what is beautiful? Ethics. Metaphysics, epistemology and ontology. Aesthetics.
Brown says that, on this view (standpoint theory) not only do the most oppressed know the truth of the world in a way no other group can, especially not the oppressors. They also have "the good" on their side. If we want to know what should be or what ought to be, how we should act, etc., than an investigation into the knowledges, practices, etc. of the most oppressed, or at least making decisions on the basis of how our society meets *their* needs, will be a way to come to a decision about justice, judgement, morality, ethics.
Brown continues:
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. <strong>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."
Thank you.
This is what I've been circling around for the last few weeks -- well, since last summer when I read Janet Halley's Split Decisions.
Of course, in its empirical form, Kimberly Springer is investigating the exact same issue in Living for the Revolution.
And funny, but I'd anticipated that I'd probably be reading Tricia Rose's book full of the accounts of black women about their sexuality (Longing to Tell) alongside this book, States of Injury. I'd figured that there couldn't be two more different books. Well, they are.
But the funny thing is, Tricia Rose's book is also a wonderful empirical example of precisely what she says here. In that book, the lives of some of the women she interviews stand in stark contrast to the idealizing claims Patricia Hill Collins makes about the cultural tradition of African American woman. Othermothers are unknown to some of them -- they live exceedingly middle-- and upper-middle class lives. Or, they have access to Othermothers but don't articulate anything like a progressive politics. Or lives of such chaos, despair, and brokenness that Othermothers simply aren't there for there is no community to turn to for parenting as the Old Heads used to do in the day. (An empirical account of the demise of the social institution of the Old Head can be found in Elijah Anderson's work.) There's more in Tricia Rose's book, as well as Kimberly Springer's, that gives lie to the notion that, while there are plenty of those traditions to be found in African American culture, their uniformity, their influence, their ability to shape and constitute African American subjects, women, is exposed as, ultimately, a dream of deliverance. It exists, but precariously. It exists, but is constantly undergoing flux and change. It exists, but can only be sustained by concerted political effort, in which case, the culture (which replaced nature and/or god) that is supposed to epistemologically ground the standpoint of black women, is constituted in the very act of naming it. The activity of writing and speaking about -- discoursing on this culture of the oppressed -- actually creates that very culture, which wouldn't exist on its own otherwise.
Of course, Patricia Hill Collins does wrestle with this a bit, but I think that, unfortunately, the popularized versions of her thought are taken up by those who end up trying to *naturalize* culture -- to pretend as if it somehow exists outside of the human creation of it. That it is somehow only natural that the culture of the oppressed is this way. But, what empirical research shows is that it is both/and. It both exists and doesn't exist on its own, outside of the act of discursively examining and elaborating it. It isn't simply present to any particular black women who came of age in the last half of the 20th century, as Tricia Rose's book shows.
And thus you have black women who can read Patricia Hill Collins's account of black women's ways of knowing and feel no connection to it whatsoever.
And the only move that can be made, all to often, in order to rescue that account from the experience of those marginalized by the marginalized is to claim....
wait for it....
that they are male-identified, haven't examined themselves sufficiently, they're bourgeois, middle class, "rich whities," or "white people of color." Even in a milder form, the claim is often that they don't 'get it' -- have a different political view -- because they are not actively part of the community of resistance within which they forge that political view.
In which case, power certainly isn't absent from the constitution of those political identities, as Kimberly Springer's historical account of black feminist organizations reveals.
Oh, yes, I should end there, even though it gets better as Brown goes on to explore feminism's identity politics, particularly the identity politics of the marginalized within feminism. Here, she argues that feminism laid the groundwork for an identity politics that has a wounded attachment to its own oppression. In plain words, identity political consciousness has its advantages -- and it finds those advantages in the constant construction of its own powerlessness.
In this way, Brown would say that BlackAmazon is absolutely right about Sophia Coppola feminism, but she would argue that, in most forms, all version of feminism, even women of color feminism, reinscribes its wounded attachment to the construction and reconstruction of its own powerlessness. Its disavowal, finally, that it ever has any power at all -- and if it does, it is only to be found in a recreation of the hierarchy of centering the voices of the most oppressed, the most wounded, the most harmed, the most marginalized, the most silenced. Feminism, in almost all is versions, even in its postmodernizing impulses -- what Janet Halley calls feminism in its divergentist mode -- is a feminism that constantly positions and repositions itself as powerless.
Even those feminisms that celebrate resistance, she argues, celebrate a resistance that "goes nowhere in particular, has no inherent attachments, and hails no particular vision." Its "resistance is an effect of and reaction *to* power, not an arrogation of it." (which is, by far, the best argument against Full Frontal Feminism's cover I've encountered yet. :)
My own criticism, which I'll mention briefly, is that while Brown criticizes the hidden impulse within feminist identity politics to find the resolution to its aporia by grounding its claims to truth and justice in reason or science, she does so by arguing that the alternative -- the specifically postmodernist alternative -- is to not ground truth and justice at all, but to forge space for political discourse.
My problem with this is that, while she holds on to a notion of discursive practices and political spaces as not at all clean, neat, loving, productive, and well-lit, I'm not sure how she's going to escape the charge of proceduralism. IOW, if liberalism's answer to our inability to ground politics in anything extra-political -- there was not Good, True, or Beautiful existing out there, beyond politics, if we couldn't ever agree that there were ethical principles around which we should forge political life -- was to say, Fuck it. Let's just make sure the rules of the game are fair. Fucket, let's just make sure we have procedures through which to adjudicate competing interest claims, truth claims, etc. Let's have scientific methodology through which to ensure that our scientific discoveries were made by adhering to procedures we can all agree are fair, rational, and determined to exclude political desire from the process of scientific discovery -- as best we can. Let's be sure that, in our juridical-legal system, we adhere to an adversarial system, where the rule is that each side must fight for its side the best way it knows how, with clear guidelines for adjudicating disputes and out of that agonistic struggle, justice will prevail. Or, at least, we'll have determined that someone is "not guilty". Perhaps not "innocent" but at least "not guilty". It's as close to the Truth as we'll ever get.
In the same way, what I've read of Brown throughout the first three chapters is that her focus on politicized, agonistic discursive *spaces* can be similarly criticized for the focus on procedures as a way to adjudicate the operations of an irrigated, dispersed, multifaceted, and dynamic/generative power. It does not escape, I suspect, the charge that, it too, is simply another mode of formal or technical rationality that Brown otherwise criticizes.
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