oops! left out the best quote about the identity politics of the middle class. as you can see, she's certainly into Nietszsche, yet says some things, using a postermodernist approach, that ought to make the most resolute anti-postmodernist, class politics is the real politics leftist stand up and pay attention. I've attached packages of smelling salts to this message :p
[W]hat we have come to call identity politics is partly dependent upon the demise of a critique of capitalism and of bourgeois cultural and economic values.[10] In a reading that links the new identity claims to a certain relegitimation of capitalism, identity politics concerned with race, sexuality, and gender will appear not as a supplement to class politics, not as an expansion of left categories of oppression and emancipation, not as an enriching augmentation of progressive formulations of power and persons -- all of which they also are -- but as tethered to a formulation of justice that reinscribes a bourgeois (masculinist) ideal as its measure.
If it is this ideal that signifies educational and vocational opportunity, upward mobility, relative protection against arbitrary violence, and reward proportion to effort, and if it is this ideal against which many of the exclusions and privations of people of color, gays and lesbians, and women are articulated, then the political purchase of contemporary American identity politics would seem to be achieved in part through a certain renaturalization of capitalism that can be said to have marked progressive discourse since the 1970s. What this also suggests is that identity politics may be partly configured by a peculiarly shaped and disguised form of class resentment, a resentment that is displaces onto discourses of injustice other than class, but a resentment, like all resentments, that retain the real or imagined holdings of its revolted subjects as objects of desire. In other words, the enunciation of politicized identities through race, gender, and sexuality may required -- rather than incidentally produce -- a limited identification through class, specifically abjuring a critique of class power and class norms in so far as these identities are established vis-a-vis a bourgeois norm of social acceptance, legal protection, and relative material comfort. Yet, when not only economic stratification but other injuries to the human body and psyche are enacted by capitalism -- alienation, commodification, exploitation, displacement, disintegration of sustaining albeit contradictory social forms such as families and neighborhoods -- when these are discursively normalized and thus depoliticized, other marker of social difference come to bear an inordinate weight; indeed, they may bear all the weight of the sufferings produced by capitalism in addition to that attributed to the explicitly politicized marking.
If there is one class that articulates and even politicizes itself in late modern North American life,it is that which gives itself the name, "middle class". ....
From Wendy Brown's _States of Injury_ pp 59-60
At 09:07 PM 6/20/2007, bitch at pulpculture.org wrote:
>At 09:00 PM 6/19/2007, you wrote:
>
>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.....
"You know how it is, come for the animal porn, stay for the cultural analysis." -- Michael Berube
Bitch | Lab http://blog.pulpculture.org (NSFW)