it is an advance over notions of power as either you have power or you do not have power -- and it's those kinds of analyses that give rise to what wendy brown see as a form of victimized identity politics.
janet haley, in _split decisions_, absoulutely shows how deeply problematic is this form of identity politics and its twin, state power politics. the best exposition of this is an article she has online where she goes by the nym, "Ian Halley". Do a search on it -- it's at Duke Uni's archives. It's quite excellent.
the reason why it matters is that, if you go with older analyses, everyone's just powerless until the magic moment when something snaps. take a look at catherine mackinnon's early work for an example of how women do not exist at all because utterly everything about them is created to please men. there are no gaps or fissures in the system to split open. it's one great wall of power, held by men, and never by women. women's sexuality simply doesn't exist. we don't know what it is. we don't know what "woman" is. we only know what men's version of women is.
and i can simply point to blog wars for examples of how terrible this view is: white feminists thing that, because they have no power (as compared to men), anyone who points out how their behavior can be problem in terms of racism, heterosexism, etc. is met with a *gasp*: how can *we* have any power. look over there, at the men. they are the ones who have power. not us.
etc.
and you see it replicated within groups of women of color, and within groups of disabled women, and within groups of lesbian women, and on and on. everyong pointing to the people who really hold power.
they can't imagine that the kinds of cliques and ganging up that they engaged in are a problem -- the kind of problem outlined by jo freeman in her lengthy analyses of how the women's liberation movement, in denying that it had power (the power of moral judgment, the power of class position, etc.) and in insisting that they shouldn't aspire to attain anything like power, was rifled through with all kinds of mechanisms of power -- and some of it seriously messed some people up, did damage to the movement, pushed priorities some ways instead of others, etc.
so, as we make our way toward the revo, laboring under different conceptions of power, it seems to me that we are going to pretend we never have any and exercise the same idiocies over and over again. worse, we won't ever get a handle on how it operates. blah blah.
and not ever understanding how the power of normative judgement works as part of systems of oppression seems to me the stupidest thing in the world for anyone who thinks that what we should be doing, here and now, is at the very least, tilling to soil in preparation for a time when our shared practices and institutions will have helped bring forth the revolution everyone is waiting for.
now, i'm off to have the packing removed from my wound. later. isn't it cool to have health insurance? yes, indeedy.
p.s. -- of course, the extraordinarily widely read tahir knows all this
already, just can't be bothered to actually, you know, mention it. *yawn*
At 03:11 PM 6/28/2008, Carrol Cox wrote:
>Since others may be (like myself for the most part) deleting Tahir's
>posts without reading them, I wanted to salvage what seems to me an
>important paragraph in his post on this subject.
>
>
>*****Tahir: This captures the problem nicely that I have with the notion
>of power that is under discussion. The trouble with it is it's such a
>dead end. So this is all power. So right, so what? What have we gained
>by subsuming all of this under one 'signifier'? Talking about 'forms of
>power' moreover reinforces the notion that all of these phenomena are
>just 'forms' of (essentially!) the same thing. But why should they be?
>In what sense is the exploitation by the big boss the same as the
>passive resistance of the alienated employee the same as the action of
>the whistleblower etc. etc.? Let's add a few. Let's also talk about the
>'power' of the disabled person to make others feel sympathy, the 'power'
>of the homeless beggar to make me feel guilty, my 'power' to tie my own
>shoelaces, the 'power' of women when they deny sex to men friends. And
>so on. Yes this could all be power in some very general sense. But
>'power' here is just as good, or as useless, as calling all of these
>things by some other universal -- 'life', 'force', 'vitality',
>'control', 'manipulation' -- anything you like.****
>
>I have reviewed a long thread on this list re "power" in December of
>2002 -- and that thread leads me to about the same conclusion Tahir
>argues here: Power is not a very useful explanatory concept, but merely
>a sometimes useful label for relations which must be analyzed without
>prior recourse to the concept of power. As an analytic concept it is a
>bit of vular Platonism.
>
>Carrol
>
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