Surprise! A Valentine's Day cupcake to give you pleasure, guilt, and social anxiety.
So, here's a question. Should be it be socially acceptable to, in the middle of a work gathering at which everyone is eating food, whip out your iPhone and start recording your food consumption in an application called Lose It!? In front of one co-worker who struggles seriously with her weight, and myriad others who may or may not have a history of eating disorders, body image issues, food-related guilt, and other human phenomena?
I'm going to go with no. I guess it's an example of thin privilege that you can publicly discuss your new calorie-counting, exercise-recording, weight-loss software, but you'd better not overeat in public if you're fat.
Delicious image courtesty of clarescupcakes.co.uk
Saturday, February 14, 2009
On the Street: Calorie Counting Edition
Race problems are "not as big as we think"
Check out this excellent, quite troubling article by the New York Times' James C McKinley Jr. As the article reports, already terrible race relations in the town of Paris, Texas have been inflamed by the recent murder of a black man by two white friends of his. Brandon McLelland was struck by a pickup truck and dragged 40 feet before he died; the two accused initially lied to investigators and still deny their involvement.
The article is a rude, brutal awakening from the daydreams of racial harmony that have pervaded our media since Barack Obama's election.
his gruesome death has reignited ugly feelings between races that have plagued this small town for generations, going back to the days 100 years ago when it was the scene of brutal public lynchings. Blacks complain that the justice system is tilted against them; whites complain about the crime, teenage pregnancy and drug use ravaging black neighborhoods.
[Isn't it wild that white people are allowed to complain about horrific living conditions in black neighborhoods? As if that's some kind of retort against accusations of institutional racism? Black people say, "There's institutional racism." White people say, "Yeah, well, your neighborhoods suck!" Presumed response from black people: "Yeah, we know, ass holes."]
Mr. McClelland’s death comes a year after another incident stirred up accusations of racism here. Shaquanda Cotton, a 14-year-old black girl, was sentenced by Judge Superville to juvenile prison after she shoved a hall monitor into a wall. Three months earlier, Judge Superville had sentenced a 14-year-old white girl to probation for burning down her family’s house.National civil rights groups protested what they called the unequal and harsh treatment of Miss Cotton, who spent a year in a West Texas juvenile prison.
Here's what mayor has to say:
The mayor of Paris, Jesse James Freelen, who is white, dismissed such complaints as the result of “a lack of communication.” He pointed out that the town previously elected a black mayor and now had a black mayor pro tem.
“Once we start communicating,” Mr. Freelen said, “I believe we will find out the problems we believe we have are not as big as we think.”
Communicating? Yikes. And we wonder why people start burning shit.
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Popular finance: It isn't the system, it's you.
Look out evolutionary psychology, popular finance may be overtaking you as the most egregious contemporary movement that prides itself on explaining powerlessness and inequality with status-quo loving pseudo science.
Take this delightful Slate article on entertainer/finance guru Suze Orman:
Orman is that most modern breed of capitalists, the human-industry, self-mythologizing. "Suze has a unique grasp of the role money plays in our lives, as well as the gift of timing: she tells us exactly what we need to know, precisely when we need to know it." So, at least, claims the jacket copy of one of her books. She addresses her fans either as "my friends" (learned from John McCain, perhaps?) or as "girlfriend." Although she published a comprehensive—and very useful—guide to personal finance in 2001, her first two best-sellers focused on the "emotional roadblocks" to financial freedom. Suze has a lot to say about emotional roadblocks, among other things: "Falling in love is simple—or so it often seems in retrospect"; "Tears are God's way of forgiving you"; "You will never achieve a sense of power over your life until you have power over your money"; and "The stock market is like a pot of soup."Like evolutionary biology, popular finance relies on the illusion that there is some advanced science for understanding why things aren't as good as they should be. But worse than evolutionary biology, popular finance also tells us we are the reason for our own economic "failings," that there is a science to it, but we could change the result if only we really wanted to.
She has less patience for statistics. Although study after study has shown that personal bankruptcies are caused primarily by catastrophic events like divorce, job loss, and, above all, medical bills and that most of us are struggling with a gap between our income growth and the soaring cost of necessities like housing, Suze tends toward psychological causes that invariably blame the victim. Who is struggling these days, according to Suze? "People who grew up without much money and later earn a comfortable living sometimes spend too much to make up for what they didn't get as children. ... People who feel entitled to the good life, or are unconsciously copying a mother or father who lived beyond her or his means. ... If you feel the need to impress people with what you have rather than with who you are, you are at high risk for credit card abuse." This from a woman who spends $500,000 a year chartering private jets and who sells "Cruise With Suze" packages on an Italian luxury liner.
[...]
Suze, my friends, has been lying to us, and we know she knows she's been lying because she herself tells us that she ignores her own advice. (Apparently, it's more important to brag about how many books you've sold than to hang with your peeps.) Which brings us to the awful truth: What we're supposed to love about Suze Orman is not her knowledge and certainly not her prescience, but her ability to turn circumstances to her advantage, the resilience of a waitress-turned-bank-vice-president who squandered a great gig only to make a fortune off of you and me by having the courage to be rich. We are to admire her, just as many of us secretly admire Bernie Madoff (who promised remarkably similar returns to Suze Orman's 11 percent stock market) and the equally smarmy CEOs of those crooked banks that she tells us to trust for their gumption. Despite her obvious flaws, we admire Suze so much that millions of us will fork over more of our dwindling dollars for her new FICO kit—co-branded with Fair Isaac Corp., the largest credit-scoring company in the country—because she now assures us that a high FICO score is the key to our financial future. True, her previous book promised us that we would never be a financial victim again. Not only that, but we would receive the life we deserved, which sounds suspiciously like one of those insidious credit card offers, but whatever. When was the last time an evangelist predicted anything correctly or the phone psychic told you something that you didn't already know? So what if we cannot retire because Suze has been telling us to buy stocks and trust the fat cats? Suze, my friends, possesses the courage to be rich. The rest of us are suffering from a collective emotional roadblock.
'America's most miserable' magazine: Forbes is the winner!
Alright, so I'm quite aware I'm being baited on this one. Also, I understand that responding to anything in the magazine[sic] 'Forbes' is basically the equivalent of tee-ball when it comes to exposing it for the moronic, tight-wad bourgeois drivel that it is. Nonetheless I have to say something about their recent "10 most miserable cities in the US" list.
Chicago, according to this list is #3. Why? Well because Chicago is the capital of "lousy weather, long commutes, rising unemployment and the highest sales tax rate in the country".
Rising unemployment, last I checked, was a nation-wide (global, to be exact) trend that is increasing rapidly due to macroeconomic factors. Find me a large city that is not experiencing increasing unemployment. Read about NYC lately? I'm sure Boston, San Fran and LA are surging right now in terms of job creation.
Lousy weather. Alright, point taken. It's cold here. But its fucking cold in Boston, Providence, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and NYC as well. I hardly hear anyone say "I'm moving to Boston (or Philly, NYC, etc) just for the winter because its fucking beautiful up there this time of year!". The only place that has good weather in the winter is Florida and Southern California. Is this news to anyone? The summers are gorgeous in Chicago, and the fall and springs can be quite nice as well. But I guess I should move to a retirement home in a resort-town in FL so that I can enjoy the good weather and the tax shelter.
Which brings me to the next source of 'misery' in Chicago: the high sales tax. Yeah, its fucking high. It should be exchanged for a progressive city income tax (or better yet: federal funding allotted relative to federal tax revenue generated from the city, so that rich tax-evaders can't simply to try to move away from city taxes). But that's not what the idiots at Forbes would say: They give '#4 most miserable' Memphis 'extra points', for instance, because TN has no state income tax. Bwahaha. Didn't Forbes himself run for President as a Republican on a platform to scrap the federal income tax and replace it with a sales tax on the order of 28-35%? According to this moronic logic, Forbes should be rejoicing at the highly regressive city sales tax in Chicago and praising the city for having no income (or other, more progressive) tax. At least Chicago exempts food purchases from its exorbitant sales tax, which is not something I can say for other 'tax shelter' states like TN, for example, who hits their residents with a whopping 9.25% sales tax on all FOOD puchases. But TN gets 'extra points' from Forbes for having no state income tax. I'm sure the real beneficiaries of TN's lack of an income tax (the schmucks who live in the plantation-mansions in Bellemeade) really sweat paying an extra 9.25% on their food purchases.
Finally, Chicago is miserable because of 'long commutes'. This has got to be the worst complaint o this pathetic 'top ten' list. Long commutes for who, exactly? The morons who drive themselves from the loop to Glencoe (40 min north of city limits) every day? I thought we were talking about the CITY, not the stupid cookie-cutter suburbs surrounding it. Getting around town is extremely easy using trains and buses in Chicago, even if you are going from one end of the city to another. Also -if you are one of the douchebags that actually reads Forbes regularly, then likes are you have the cash to live virtually whereever you like, which means you could very well live quite close to your cushy place of employment. Where's the commute there?
The article also mentions that Chicago is trying to get the Olympics which, they suggest, might help improve transportation in the city. But that's rather vague, isn't it? I certainly hope the anti-tax zealots at Forbes aren't insinuating that the transportation infrastructure (which is all publicly owned) will improve with more funding (i.e. higher taxes). Also -which infrastructure are they talking about? Mass transit (rails, buses), the roads, the prevalence of bike-lanes, the interstates? They don't bother to say. That's because this isn't a serious article... its a largely a thinly-cloaked jab at the city "where one if its own just became the most powerful person in the world". It's almost as though Obama is the reason Chicago is so high on the list, and the rest of the 'knocks' against it are contrived to fit this end. Nonetheless, I dont want to suggest that anything about the criteria that Forbes uses is legitimate: its crude, suburbanite white conservative crap.
In fact, if we apply the criteria Forbes seems to rely upon consistently, it seems to me that the #1 most miserable city in America is clearly New York City. After all, unemployment is on the rise there, the city budget is in trouble, its not warm and tropical, commutes are 'long' and busy if you're trying to drive your Bentley from lower Manhattan to the Hamptons every day, the city has much higher taxes than Chicago, and its pro sports teams didn't win championships last season (the Giants just went 0-1 in the playoffs and the Yankees stunk).
But the only thing, however, that is really miserable here at all is this criteria used by Forbes to evaluate 'cities' (nevermind that they hardly discriminate between alpha world cities and small towns). According to their logic, the place to be right now (assuming you are an old, crusty, filthy rich straight white man) is some unincorporated tropical island that has no taxes whatsoever, nice beaches, no minorities (except for servants, of course) and is conducive to effortless drives from the country club to the beach mansion.
I guess things like the following are not relevant when evaluating a city:
-How walkable it is (fyi Chicago is the #4 most walkable in the US)
-How good the schools are (k-12, amount of Universities in area)
-Intellectual climate (public lectures, events, symposia, etc.)
-Culture (music, art, theater, film, museums, etc.)
-How cosmopolitan and diverse it is
-Architecture
-Natural beauty (umm... like natural bodies of water, for example)
-How Bike-friendly the city is
-Amount of space allotted for public parks
-Political climate
-Safety factor for non-heterosexuals
-Race relations
-Cost of living
-Comprehensiveness of public transit
-Food possibilities
-History
-Pollution factor
Etc, etc...
On The Street: This Sucks! Edition
Here we begin a series in which we share snapshot moments that matter: the little day-to-day interactions that reveal political, social, and economic forces at work in our communities.
We stood at the Grand Red Line station in downtown Chicago. The paint was peeling, the ceiling was leaking, and the bare bulbs dangled from their chains. They haven't quite gotten around to repairing this station yet. Tonight, there were significant delays, as both Northbound and Southbound trains had to run on the same track.
When our long-awaited Northbound train arrived, and passengers hurried off the train, a sweaty, crazed-looking white man could be seen and heard shouting: "CTA sucks! THEY SUCK!" Presumably he'd been stuck on that train for quite awhile.
Just another frustrated advocate for capital funding for mass transit.
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
You're privileged; now what?
Courtney Martin was certainly brave to post her "Day in the Life of a Feminist Writer/Activist" this week. Why? Because, as the New York Times Style section has pointed out repeatedly, it's in poor taste these days to flash your privilege on the street. You're supposed to wrap your recent Kate Spade purchase in brown paper and get it home as fast as you can. The blogging parallel is that you're supposed to hide your morning yoga class, takeout sushi, and relaxed work schedule from your readers. Maybe you're also supposed to hide the fact that you can to rent a house with a yard in Queens, or that your parents have a nice vacation home, or that you took a trip to Thailand after you took the bar exam, or that you can afford to attend happy hour gatherings in Manhattan ... you get the picture.
I don't think living a privileged life makes you evil. Indeed, I understand Courtney's impulse to take the "secrecy" off of privilege and reveal her own lifestyle for what it is. I could do a similar unveiling of my own lifestyle. For example: I go to the Symphony, eat Asian food out regularly, cook nice meals at home, and sometimes buy overpriced drinks in coffee shops. I do work that I really enjoy and that's reasonably well paid. I have so few financial obligations that I was able to work in Africa for virtually no money, and have the experience of a lifetime. I have the financial freedom to be an aspiring professional violinist, and to write songs. My student loans would be twice what they are if my parents hadn't been able to help finance my education. My partner and I both have jobs. We're healthy. We're college educated.
But there's a reason that the above paragraph is so boring. Identifying your own privilege is important, but if you're going to call yourself an activist -- a term I have come to bristle at sometimes -- you have to do more than that.
Courtney goes too far when, in the comments, she asserts that "privilege comes from secrecy." That is decidedly not where privilege comes from. If privilege came from secrecy, some of us could reveal our salaries, mortgage payments, trust fund balances, etc. while others revealed their long work hours, low wages, and total lack of financial resources -- and then somehow things would be better. In some ways, this is what Arvilla is talking about when she critiques a representational approach to feminism: include certain voices, include certain stories, and feminism will magically do its work of Making the World Better.
Privilege comes from whiteness. It comes from generations and generations of economic advantage. It comes most of all from a racist, exploitative economic system that leaves entire populations to perpetually subsist on the bottom rung of the economic ladder.
Taking that system apart -- for ourselves and for each other -- is perhaps one of the most important ways we can actually become "activists," and that we can move beyond sheer representation into real analysis. Like Lauren, I'm frustrated with the lip service to class issues. I resolve to do better.
Praxis. Let's take that ideology debate and try to apply it
Lauren at Feministe has a post on "Feminism and Class and Context," (posts on class and feminism are so rare that they often get extremely general titles like that, so that one who wasn't already familiar with the blogger might think she was just barely sensing class might have anything at all to do with feminism).
She's concerned that the emerging class of "professional feminists" around the blogosphere will insulate themselves from other feminisms and feminists. Her concern is primarily about being able to find representation of working class women in mediums that only seem to cater to middle class, successful, "professional" types.
Class issues are abound in feminism as they are everywhere else. In today’s economic hierarchy some of us will be stuck on Maslow’s lower rungs while others celebrate their own impending self-actualization. This isn’t a debate. But only the climbers get the microphone, and their world is pretty insular. As a friend wrote via email:Let's make sense of this from the perspective of all the posting we've been doing lately on ideology and identity and subjectivity.The problem with hearing the voices of working people is structural. Even if folks have the time and energy to write, it’s a lot to expect folks to self-educate so that they have the tools to express something about their experiences, even if they had the time. Some folks do; my mother was incredibly widely read coming from poverty and with only a high school education. But broad references and eloquence are going to be much more common among folks trained for them. That leaves the intelligentsia to speak for everyone else; but they’re not so good as seeing past their insular class experiences. I have no idea how to fix this.
Neither do I.
And part of this is why I’m bothered with some aspects of the feminist movement, specifically the feminist blogging movement, as so many of the people who take part in it are beginning the tricky business of quitting their day jobs and monetizing their writing. Most feminists are not Professional Feminists — they are Professional Something Elses and have to hang their feminism along with a whole host of other political beliefs at the door to pay the bills. And I wonder too if those making feminism their career change the message to remain marketable? Will the new Professional Feminist have to set aside some of her feminist beliefs to keep the paycheck rolling in? Will she self-censor? Will her experiences, now that she’s begun the insular work of writing, continue to resonate with non-writers? I don’t know. I know I sense a disconnect.
The old argument was that Professional Feminists, aka academics, were out of touch with non-Professional Feminist women. Feminism has long been criticized for its inability to get off campus, and now that it really has, thanks in part to the work of bloggers and writers reviving feminist media, now what? We’ve widened our feminist economic circle, as it were, to include a whole host of actual jobs that actual feminists can fill to perform actual feminist work and get an actual paycheck. But most stable, paying work isn’t that. Will the professionals remember us?
1-This post includes an approach to critiquing feminist politics taken straight from the playbook of cultural criticism--like I mentioned earlier--by focusing on representation instead of say, justice.
2-It relies on identity to frame its concerns and its demands. Working women are the subjects Lauren is concerned about. She fears that middle class or professional feminist women (she even creates her own identity class, in order to make sense of the difference she senses) will contribute to their marginalization.
But again, what she demands for the working-class women is not an economic system that will provide for them a room of their own, but instead representation by their professional feminist counterparts. Take the below quote from T's post on Butler, and where it says 'women,' think instead, 'working-class women,' for the sake of considering Lauren's post.
The idea that representation of 'women' (uncritically accepted as an unproblematic category, unmarked by power) is all that is necessary to facilitate emancipation, overlooks the structures (legal, educational, cultural, economic, etc.) which actually produce the subjects in question. In other words, merely quibbling over the Senate's gender makeup is not going to cut it. Butler acknowledges, though, that such concerns are hardly reactionary, indeed by and large we inhabit a world where the pervasive social/cultural condition is such that women's lives are "misrepresented or not represented at all". Nonetheless, 'representation' must not go uncriticized as the goal of feminist politics. For Butler, feminist political practice requires a "radical rethinking of the ontological constructions of identity appears to be necessary in order to formulate a representational politics that might revive feminism on other grounds." What this means more specifically, is that "the identity of the feminist subject ought not to be the foundation of feminist politics, if the formation of the subject takes place within a field of power regularly buried through the assertion of that foundation."So, Butler is sympathetic to the desire to want representation, since there is indeed a notable lack of representation. But that can't be the goal of our class-conscious feminist politics, not if the formation of that working-class woman as a subject takes place in the very field(s) of power in which we're seeking representation. If capitalism has created the working-class woman, then a feminist with her very feminism tied up in capitalism cannot liberate her by representing her (this isn't my opinion, just what happens if I try to apply Butler's logic to actual apparatuses and subjects)...
If Butler doesn't like Lauren's identity-based, representation-seeking approach, what does she prefer? That's where I'm stuck.
I'm tempted to say, stop worrying about whether your experiences are going to be represented, and start fighting whatever it is you think is forcing this experience of working-classness on you to begin with. But as I noted earlier, talking about and altering representation are a lot easier than talking about and altering the material conditions behind those representations. So? How do we perform this subjectless feminism?
Monday, February 9, 2009
Just to reiterate....
There's been a lot of hubbub surrounding the Obama administration's decision to cap executive pay. As has already been noted on this blog by all of its contributors at some point or another: this move by Obama is, to paraphrase arvilla, "a tepid crowd-pleaser" meant to obscure any criticism of capitalism, as such.
I think it's worth re-posting some of Krugman's breakdown of the issue:
My response to this prospect is: so? If taxpayers are footing the bill for rescuing the banks, why shouldn’t they get ownership, at least until private buyers can be found? But the Obama administration appears to be tying itself in knots to avoid this outcome."Right: because they think public ownership is the devil. But they shouldn't they be hard pressed to say, as they have been saying, that this whole 'solution' about 'keeping private enterprise private'. If that were truly what it was about, then the private enterprises would be privately fuct. Were they truly the private, ebullient beacons of free-market glory that the Administration wants to pretend they are, they would be imploding and collapsing before our eyes. If private investors give the banks capital, then they demand partial ownership. If the Federal Government gives the banks hundreds of billions of dollars, they demand nothing except (after some public criticism) that the really, really fat cats keep their compensation under a half million. Is this a joke?
It's also worth re-posting an excerpt from a Willem Buiter column in the Financial Times from a while back. While Krugman suggests that the banks should be taken into public ownership "at least until a private owner is found", Buiter wonders why certain types of banking should be privately-run affairs at all:
[...]
Badiou on Althusser: "Subjectivity without a Subject"
To complicate matters more, here is another critical account of Althusser's Marxism and the role of 'the Subject' within it. I will forgo any introduction of Alain Badiou, first of all because I feel totally unqualified to do so (I know nothing of his 'philosophy' proper, only of his concretely 'political' writings (on Sarkozy, for example) and his radical/activist personal history and his involvement with Maoist organizations). This critique of Althusser appears in Metapolitics (2006) put out in English by Verso. Don't ask me what the title of the chapter "subjectivity without a subject" is supposed to mean.
On Badiou's account, in Althusser no theory of the subject is possible, nor could there ever be one. He summarizes the point:
"For Althusser, all theory proceeds by way of concepts. But 'subject' is not a concept. This theme is developed with utmost clarity in his work. For example: the concept 'process' is scientific, the concept 'subject' is ideological. 'Subject' is not the name of a concept, but that of a notion, that is, the mark of an inexistence. There is no subject since there are only processes."For Badiou, the question we should ask of Althusser is: What does eliminating the subject from theory mean for politics?
The danger is that politics collapses into ideology, because in Althusser there is always a hard and fast distinction between science and ideology. For Althusser, (social) science is the project of parsing out ideology from objective features of political, social and economic processes. Yet this conception of science, as Badiou emphasizes, is only about 'processes', not 'subjects'. But if we're only left with analysis of the 'processes' by which economic/political structures overdetermine the social field, where does this leave the possibility of purposive political action?
Now Althusser is a self-proclaimed Marxist, that is, a radical committed to changing the world, not merely interpreting it. But what room is there for political action in the anti-humanist Althusserian framework?
Of course, Althusser doesn't want to commit himself to leaving no room for political action. He, after all, conceives of philosophy itself as only properly undertaken as part of the 'class struggle in theory'. But I'm not interested in merely what he said or in what conclusions he deigned to avoid: I'm interested here in how his theory actually functions with respect to politics.
Althusser says on many occasions that politics is neither science nor ideology. As Badiou charts it: "In 1965 Althusser distinguished political practice from scientific and ideological practice. In 1968, he explained that every process is 'in relations'... Finally Althusser posits that only the 'militants of the revolutionary class struggle' really grasp the thought of 'the process'... that is, only those engaged in political practice genuinely understand the 'processes' by which the social/political field operates."
But who are these militants? I'm not sure I understand.
For Althusser, Bourgeois ideology is characterized by "the notion of the subject whose matrix is legal and which subjects the individual to the ideological State apparatuses: this is the theme of subjective interpellation." Thus, Badiou concludes, in Althusser's sense the subject is a function of the State (where 'State' is construed broadly to include 'Ideological State Apparatuses' (e.g. Churches, Schools, media institutions, etc.) that extend beyond of the coercive State proper).
But if subjectivity is itself a function of the state, there cannot be a political subject for Althusser, because any properly revolutionary politics ipso facto cannot be a function of the state since it consists of a commitment to the overthrowing of the State altogether.
But if there aren't any political subjects (since 'subjects' are ideological), then where does this leave politics in relation to the science/ideology distinction? Science, as we've seen, consists entirely in uncovering what is objective (the concrete functioning of ISAs, the processes by which ideology clouds the reality of the economic/social field). But politics, Althusser says, is not about objectivity; which is to say, politics is not a science. Where then, in the Althusserian universe, is politics?
Althusser uses terms like 'partisanship', 'choice', 'decision', 'revolutionary militant', etc. which all lead in the direction of subjectivity. They all presuppose or indicate that there is someone for whom 'partisanship' and 'militancy' inhere as predicates or actions. Badiou asks here, somewhat enigmatically, whether we should attempt to read Althusser as trying to 'think subjectivity without a subject'. I'm not sure I understand what that means.
Badiou ends the chapter abruptly by making some remarks indicating some of Althusser's worthwhile contributions to radical political theory while trying to salvage some of his insights. For example, Badiou argues that we read "overdetermination" in Althusser as a limitation on the politically possible. But possible for whom? I'm again unsure what to make of any of Althusser's insights at all unless we risk reinstating some conception of the subject. After all, who is it that authors texts that are purportedly scientific, that aim to show the functioning of ideology? I don't want to say that either subjects are located within ideological structures or they are completely outside them. Nonetheless, we must be careful not to close off the possibility within our theorization of ideology of explaining how it is that we, as subjects, came to theorize about it in the first place.
It seems to me to be a serious problem that Althusser's project cannot account for its own conditions of possibility. Moreover it seems obvious that the choice between homo-economicus and the ultra-functionalism of Althusser's approach are not exhaustive possibilities. Yet since Claude Lévi-Strauss and subsequent 'structuralists' in social science introduced the idea of the subject, as such, as a product of determinate social processes, this problem has persisted in French thought. My limited engagement with some recent French theory suggests to me that the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction, such that vague invocations of 'subjectivity' or 'singularity' are taken to be obviously good.
Butler, Structure and Subject
Since I'm reading Gender Trouble right now (for the first time) and recent posts have been focusing on the interepellation of subjects and feminism, it seems timely to relay some recent insights I've gleamed from Butler on this topic.
Butler's project takes its point of departure from politics: the aim of the book is, at least in one concerted sense (i.e. this isn't an exhaustive aim), to critically evaluate the assumption among some feminists that a unified conception of 'woman' is a necessary condition of political action for feminists. The point of doing this, for Butler, is to locate ways in which the feminist project is in some ways complicit with oppression, thus enabling her to gesture at ways we might more effectively (and fully) resist or subvert the oppressive regime of sex/gender.
The opening sentence of the book is as follows:
"For the most part, feminist theory has assumed that there is some existing identity, understood through the category of women, who not only initiates feminist interests and goals within discourse, but constitutes the subject for whom political representation is pursued."Instead, Butler wants to complicate and criticize the idea that representation (which requires an antecedent conception of 'woman') should be the goal of feminist politics. Part of her reason for pursuing this goal is that she sees subjects as produced, as interpellated by oppressive structures. Her point of departure owes much to Foucault, who held that "juridical systems of power produce the very subjects they subsequently come to represent." Of course, Foucault was a student of Althusser's who is very much a part of the tradition of 20th century French philosophy which emerged from 'structuralism' and held 'anti-humanist' views about subjectivity.
She continues:
"The question of 'the subject' is crucial for politics, and for feminist politics in particular, because juridical subjects are invariably produced through certain exclusionary practices that do not 'show' once the juridical structure of politics has been established. In other words, the political construction of the subject proceeds with certain legitimating and exclusionary aims, and these political operations are effectively concealed and naturalized by a political analysis that takes juridical structures as their foundation."This seems to jibe with a point Arvilla made in the previous post. The idea that representation of 'women' (uncritically accepted as an unproblematic category, unmarked by power) is all that is necessary to facilitate emancipation, overlooks the structures (legal, educational, cultural, economic, etc.) which actually produce the subjects in question. In other words, merely quibbling over the Senate's gender makeup is not going to cut it. Butler acknowledges, though, that such concerns are hardly reactionary, indeed by and large we inhabit a world where the pervasive social/cultural condition is such that women's lives are "misrepresented or not represented at all". Nonetheless, 'representation' must not go uncriticized as the goal of feminist politics. For Butler, feminist political practice requires a "radical rethinking of the ontological constructions of identity appears to be necessary in order to formulate a representational politics that might revive feminism on other grounds." What this means more specifically, is that "the identity of the feminist subject ought not to be the foundation of feminist politics, if the formation of the subject takes place within a field of power regularly buried through the assertion of that foundation."
'Identity' is also regularly invoked as a concern within feminist politics. But for Butler, to return to this theme about the social/discursive-constitution of subjects, we must ask "to what extent do regulatory practices of gender formation and division constitute identity, the internal coherence of the subject, indeed, the self-identical status of the person?" She answers: the "coherence and continuity of 'the person' are not logical or analytic features of personhood, but rather, socially instituted and maintained norms of intelligibility." Thus, she continues: "Intelligible genders are those which in some sense institute and maintain relations of coherence and continuity among sex, gender, sexual practice, and desire." Accordingly, "the very notion of 'the person' is called into question by the cultural emergence of those 'incoherent' or 'discontinuous' gendered beings who appear to be persons but fail to conform to the gendered norms of cultural intelligibility by which persons are defined."
For Bulter,
"The cultural matrix through which gender identity has become intelligible requires that certain kinds of 'identities' cannot 'exist' -that is, those in which gender does not follow from sex and those in which the practices of desire do not 'follow' from either sex or gender. 'Follow' in this context is a political relation of entailment instituted by the cultural laws that establish and regulate the shape and meaning of sexuality."Later in the book, Butler undertakes an immanent critique of Monique Wittig's revolutionary 'lesbian materialism' (see Wittig's marvelous short book of essays titled The Straight Mind). Butler's main bone of contention with Wittig is the alleged humanism underlying her theoretical writings. Butler accuses Wittig of putting the project of feminist politics in the following way: either you accept the prescribed normative regime of heterosexuality (and by this she means the traditional marriage of 'man' and 'woman' with all of its patriarchal, violent and oppressive qualities) and you are complicit, or you radically reject this regime and refuse it. To refuse it means, concretely, to destabilize the regime of heterosexism and lesbianism seem to be, for Wittig, the only serious means of resistance. Because according to Butler's reading of Wittig, the goal of the latter's politics is to explode from within and eliminate the compulsory norms of heterosexuality and to thus recover some prior-existing "I" which had been oppressed and weighed down by dense layers of ideology (sexual dimorphism.) Unsurprisingly, Butler takes aim at this supposedly pre-discursive "I" which must be recovered and freed within Wittig's emancipatory project.
But I'm unsure of what to make of Butler's critique. I suppose this unsureness really speaks to my uneasiness with the whole 'anti-humanism' of the tradition of French thought from which Gender Trouble in some sense emerges. Are we really stuck choosing between the "humanism" of classical liberalism (the pre-social, unencumbered, 'homo-economicus' rational chooser) or the "anti-humanism" of post-Althusserian French philosophy in which there simply are no 'subjects' at all, where the notion of 'the subject' is always already an ideological category? My sense is no. But don't ask me for a third alternative yet. I dont think one necessarily has to have that figured out in order to find problems with the structuralist/poststructuralist animosity toward 'the subject' as such. Their critique of the bourgeois conception of agency is well taken, as is Butler's elaborate and very compelling deconstructurion of gender/sex. But are we really left with no subjects at all?
Here I'm tempted to think here of Adorno (paraphrased here by Gillian Rose) who held that "any theory which sought completely to deny the illusory power of the subject would tend to reinstate that illusion even more than one which overestimated the power of the subject".
I must also admit that my acquaintance with French theory (particularly Structuralism and Poststructuralism) is highly influenced by Perry Anderson's account in his short book (itself based on a series of lectures) called In the Tracks of Historical Materialism. (Incidentally, his other short book Considerations on Western Marxism is probably the best summary of 20th century Marxist theory there is). The chapter on "Structure and Subject" is particularly relevant to this discussion. There, Anderson situates French structuralism/poststructuralism historically and politically as a mode of engaging the 'structure versus subject' problematic, in other words, the "nature of the relationships between structure and subject in human history and society."
This has always been an insoluble problem within the Marxist tradition. As Anderson points out (and as I alluded to in my post on Althusser, when describing the controversies over the precise nature of the 'economic base' in the theory of ideology), "there is a permanent oscillation in Marx's own writings between his ascription of the primary motor of historical change to the contradiction between the forces of production and the relations of production, on the one hand (think Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy)... and to the class struggle (think of the Communist Manifesto) on the other."
So, for Anderson, Marxism (in France, at least) was challenged on its own turf by structuralism/poststructuralism (that is, the turf of structure vs. subject) and the latter has obviously supplanted the former as the dominant intellectual force in France today. But what is to be said of the anti-humanist 'solution' to the structure/subject problematic offered by structuralism/postructuralism? Anderson identifies a few key aspects of the way it has been fleshed out among theorists associated within this intellectual milieu (e.g. Foucault, Lacan, Derrida, Deleuze, Kristeva, etc.). First, there is the 'exorbitation of language'. In poststructuralism, there is a huge emphasis on language, on the linguistic, on 'discursive practices', on the symbolic and the circulation of signifiers. Put succinctly, there is a "fundamental expansion in the jurisdiction of the linguistic" in structuralism, a "speculative aggrandizement of language". The result, for Anderson, is the "gradual megalomania of the signifier" in which we are left with "a system of floating signifiers pure and simple, with no determinable relation to any extra-linguistic referents at all".
As Anderson points out:
"High structuralism was never more strident than in its annunciation of the end of man. Foucault struck the characteristically prophetic note when he declared in 1966 that 'Man is the process of perishing as the being of language continues to shine ever more brightly upon our horizon.' But who is the 'we' to perceive or possess such a horizon? In the hollow of the pronoun lies the aporia of the program."I am tempted to agree with Anderson who concludes that structure and subject are 'interdependent categories', that must be understood with a 'dialectical respect for their interdependence.' But where does this leave us? This post has meandered on long enough, from Butler's denunciation of 'identity politics' to her rejection of 'the Subject' and the alleged underlying humanism in Wittig, through Althusser and structuralism/poststructuralism and eventually to a sort of dialectical proposal to engage the subject/structure problematic.
I've spent a lot of time sorting through theory here, but what I'm really interested in is what it means for political practice. Perhaps a proper appraisment of this aspect of the above theoretical musings will have to wait for a later post. What I'm really interested in is what the tension between Butler/Wittig means for feminist political practice. More on this to come.
Incorporating Althusser's theory of ideology with contemporary feminism
Inspired by T, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about ISA’s (Ideological State Apparatuses), particularly about how well Althusser’s theory of ideology and its role in the creation of social subjects, which one can reasonably assume was built mostly around explaining economic phenomena, relates to contemporary feminist theory and explanations of the status quo when it comes to gender relations and hierarchy.
Just looking at the feminist blogosphere, it seems very common practice to assume culture, in particular, works like Althusser’s ISA in reaffirming gender inequalities and creating certain kinds of gendered subjects. Look no further than the large number of posts around the blogosphere on sexist advertisements during the Super Bowl. This sort of media or cultural criticism makes up a bulk of mainstream, non-academic feminist analysis (and I think one could quite easily make the argument that even most academic feminism is about culture). This criticism is done almost with the assumption that all readers understand the impact that culture has on promoting sexism (or negative experiences of gender even)—that the portrayals of gender relations and roles in commercials and on tv shows and in movies and in music contribute to the normalizing (or, reifying the status quo) of gendered hegemony.
In this sense, Althusser’s theory of ISAs seems to meld really well with mainstream feminism. But, here’s my question: why is there an inordinate amount of feminist focus on culture as an ISA, at the expense of some of the other ISAs T mentions in his post (education, the legal system, the political system)?*
Here are a few ideas I’ve come up with so far:
1-Talking about culture is easier than talking about popular economics or the education system and pedagogy or any of those other spheres.
Why is it easier? Late capitalism seems to require a certain level of consumer savvy for mere survival. People in general are trained to look at advertisements or really any representational mediums with a certain degree of scrutiny. We’re always asking, what are you trying to sell me and how are you doing it? This doesn’t only apply to actual products but to representations anywhere. We ask it even of the most inane sitcoms. What is the Debra character on Everybody Loves Raymond trying to tell me about being a wife and mother? We don’t need college degrees to feel adept to discuss culture.
2-It’s more fun to talk about culture than to talk about other ISAs. I don’t know that this requires an explanation or that I could even provide one, but on nine out of ten days I’d rather talk about sexism in the Millionaire Matchmaker than in pedagogy in our public education system.
3-It is easier to pinpoint and affect the bad guy behind advertisements than it is to address the “bad guy” behind these other ISAs. When NBC airs a series of sexist ads and runs a series of sexist shows, we know who is to blame and we know how to assign that blame. We write letters, we boycott products. It might not always be effective, but at least we have a line of attack.
Such it is amid liberal-capitalism. We have more control of products than we do of our own government. Maybe we could articulate what is going on with gender in these other ISAs, but even then, what would we do about them? Vote every couple years? I don’t think I’m alone in feeling more than a little powerless in our so-called democracy. Power is distributed throughout the state in such a way that it’s difficult to say where the abuse is originating, let alone to decide how to take it on.
I think the fact that it’s more difficult to attack other ISAs makes it more frustrating and, therefore, less pleasant to focus on.
I’m sure there are other possible explanations for focusing on culture, but, maybe more importantly, what is the effect of the dearth of analysis of other ISAs? Here’s my hypothesis:
1-We become more inclined to accept liberal state-ism, which causes problems like the acceptance of the sorts of unfreedom created by the state, which scholars like Wendy Brown have tried to take on. Instead of focusing on the underlying forces producing culture and reaffirming it as good (these other ISAs), we focus on more surface issues like Pepsi commercials and the waist sizes of the average super model. Those issues can be important to talk about too, but soon we start thinking the problems aren’t with the basic, unjust structure of our global society, but just problems with companies here and there and the way they talk about things. Not only is the state not part of the problem, but maybe it’s even part of the solution to these private instigators. Maybe we can regulate these representational problems to a certain extent? Maybe we can threaten corporations with economics and government? We start to side with the state and see it as our ally. We become pawns of the state, even if we don’t want to be. You know, the same state perpetrating violence all over the world, the same state thriving off of the prison-industrial complex, the same state that affords more rights and freedoms and support to corporations than it does to its people.
2-We attempt to analyze other ISAs with the same formulas we use for analyzing culture as an ISA. Even when we talk about sexism perpetuated by government, or say, the military, or by economists, we have a tendency to talk about representation instead of looking at the ways they institutionalize hegemony. We ask questions like, how many women senators are there? How gender neutral is the language here?
These questions might be important to ask, and they may yield productive answers. But, what aren’t we asking? It may be great that Hilary Clinton is Secretary of State, but why aren’t we talking about how little her policies have done to help young women in Palestine? What if the representation we gain with a woman heading State is actually a curse because it further embeds and normalizes violence we once associated with masculine leadership? The violence might still disproportionately affect women, but now, by praising a minor representational advancement in an institution we might otherwise consider criminal, we’ve signed up for it too. In a way, we’ve laid out our priorities.
3-We fail to realize how intricate the ties between culture and the other ISAs have become, how mutually reliant each ISA is on the other. And I don’t mean this in an abstract sense. I mean, literally, we fail to see that the executives behind NBC are pulling the strings of our legislators. We might not notice that NBC takes the cues of the State Department when it airs certain stories on its nightly news and even adds certain plots to its TV shows. We might see stories about battered Muslim women on Law and Order SVU who were liberated by noble American soldiers, only to be abused again by their families in the U.S., only to be later saved by the noble U.S. justice system. How did these storylines come to be and who stands to benefit when we accept them?
Now, I don’t think it’s that these questions are never asked in the feminist blogosphere or elsewhere, but I think it’s problematic that they seem to be rarely asked relative to the number of questions we ask about culture.
That's all I've got right now. This theory is in its baby stages. Please feel free to rip it to shreds or add to it in any way you can.
*Please feel free to argue this point with me if you don’t think there is an inordinate focus on culture in most feminist circles.
Saturday, February 7, 2009
Hard times
“That is pretty draconian — $500,000 is not a lot of money, particularly if there is no bonus,” said James F. Reda, founder and managing director of James F. Reda & Associates, a compensation consulting firm. “And you know these companies that are in trouble are not going to pay much of an annual dividend.”
Somewhere in the distance I hear the faint sounds of the world's smallest violin...
