[lbo-talk] On the Threat from Religion

shag carpet bomb shag at cleandraws.com
Sat Nov 22 11:43:23 PST 2008


why I gave up moralizing politics for lent *snort*: _Split Decisions_ which contains the most compelling analysis of what is so incredibly wrong with moralizing identity politics (and why it would be a mistake to import it back into class politics), and _States of Injury_. Curious if Heartfield's had a chance to get his hands on either. Not that anyone will actually read it, but I do have a question: Why does it matter to you whether politics is driven by ethics? or morality for that matter? What do you think such a politics gains? What do you lose if politics is built on something other than moralizing demands for action?

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"[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. 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." </quote>

The quote, from Wendy Brown (_States of Injury) is part of her argument that feminist identity politics, as well as the identity politics of other oppressed groups, took up a what they saw as a standpoint theory of knowledge and justice: 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. **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, they are once again excluded from the Party of Humanism - this time in its feminist variant.** (my emphasis) </quote>

<...>

Brown goes on to examine why the decline of a class-based politics and the emergency of identity politics. It was because class-based politics already contained the seeds of a moralizing identitarian politics. Brown argues that the middle classness has its own form of identity politics ­ with a twist. Here Brown asks, how does the middle class figures as a foil in identity politics, an identity politics that *requires* the middle class in order to makes its claims about exclusion, marginalization, cultural imperialism, etc. Does it want to be part of the middle class it so insistently critiques? Or what?

If there is one class that articulates and even politicizes itself in later modern North American life, it is that which gives itself the name of the "middle class" But the foregoing suggests that what this is not a reactive identity in the sense, for example, of "white" or "straight" in contemporary political discourse. Rather it is an articulation by the figure of the class that represents, indeed depends on, the naturalization rather than the politicization of capitalism, the denial of capitalism s power effects in ordering social life, the representation of the ideal of capitalism to provide the good life for all. Poised between rich and poor, feeling itself to be protected from the encroachments of neither, the phantasmic middle class signifies the natural and the good between the decadent or the corrupt on one side, the aberrant or the decaying on the other."

"It is a conservative identity in the sense that it semiotically recurs to a phantasmic past, an imagined idyllic, unfettered, and uncorrupted historical movement (implicitly located around 1955) when life was good ­ housing was affordable, men supported families on single incomes, drugs were confined to urban ghettos. But it is not a reactionary identity in the sense of reacting to an insurgent politicized identity from below. Rather, it precisely embodies the ideal to which non-class identities refer for proof of their exclusion or injury: homosexuals, who lack the protections of marriage, guarantees of child custody or job security, and freedom from harassment; single women, who are strained and impoverished by trying to raise children and hold paid jobs simultaneously; and people of color, who are not only disproportionately affected by unemployment, punishing urban housing costs, and inadequate health care programs, but disproportionately subjected to unwarranted harassment, figured as criminals, ignored by cab drivers. The point is not that these privations are trivial but that without recourse to the white masculine middle class ideal, politicized identities would forfeit a good deal of their claims to injury and exclusion, their claims to the political significance of their difference. If they thus require this ideal for the potency and poignancy of their political claims, we might ask to what extent a critique of capitalism is foreclosed by the current configuration of oppositional politics, and not simply by the "loss of the socialist alternative" or the ostensible "triumph of liberalism" in the global order. In contrast with Marxist critique of social whole and Marxist visions of total transformation, to what extend do identity politics required a standard internal to existing society against which to pitch their claims, a standard that not only preserves capitalism from critique, but sustains the invisibility and inarticulateness of class ­ not accidentally, but endemically? Could we have stumbled on one reason why class is invariably named but rarely theorized or developed in the multiculturalist mantra, "race, class, gender, sexuality"? </quote>

<http://blog.pulpculture.org/2007/06/19/world-without-oppressors/>A world without oppressors

"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."

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 hte 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." </quote>



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