Wear Clean Draws  (because there’s 5 million ways to kill a ceo)

2006-09-11 18:24:35

I’m sitting here in voicemail jail, trying to get through to Very Large Gubmint Agency. I’m skimming the parts of Halley’s article that I haven’t read yet. It is a tough essay, I won’t kid: it’s very much a conference paper written to other specialists. I suspect KH will dig the astute analysis of the loss of agency that takes place in extreme structuralist accounts such as those MacKinnon presses. I’m really curious if KC Sheehan has heard of Halley (most likely) and what she thinks of the work.

Anyway, Belledame responded to the MacKinnon quote with a reference to Calvinism. This caught my eye and I couldn’t help quoting it since it resonates so much with the way BD put it in comments. If you read the context, you will immediately see that Janet Halley is, to put it mildly, playing with fire here. The things she’s doing in this essay upend the conventional moves made in so much of feminist theorizing, discoursing, and politics. Were this in the hands of someone more accessible, it would appear as a kind of shock jock approach. But in her rather serious hands, the reversals are simply matter-of-fact. Oh, pshawwww. Never you mind. This is just what we do, because we want to push our theories and politics to the limit to ask what happens when we do: do they still hold up to scrutiny? Anyway, blurb to think about here:

What can we say about Sheila’s decision if we take Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals as our theoretical ground? In the following extractions, I rewrite the “slave revolt in morals”131 as if it were achieved not over the broad sweep of human history but by an individual: 1. The historical starting point of slave morality is the slave’s perception of himself as dominated and as suffering under the will of the master. He sees his [*pg 45] as a passive location in the world: the master is active; and in his passivity the slave suffers. 2. Though originally the slave could have understood his suffering as bad and the master’s activity as good (and could have sought to be active too), this is not what happens. Instead, he translates the power relation into a moral one: he is good and the master is evil. It is now a relationship of dominated virtue and dominating vice. Morality is born as a covert mechanism of power, a sublimated form of domination. 3. This translation removes any reason for the slave to experience himself as having a will. Will is now evil. The rage of the slave against his suffering — his own will to power — is now denied. 4. His will, his activity, do not go away, though. Instead, translated yet again into ressentiment, they are rerouted both out, against the master, in gestures of meek but biting vengeance, and in, against the slave himself, in a new form of suffering, under the whip of his own morality, the new innerness of a guilty conscience. 5. Slave morality wreaks itself with splendid sadism on the master, and with stupefying intensity it also punishes the slave himself for his own active impulses — impulses without which the whole terrible cycle would never have started. It establishes a third human class, the priestly class, with powers that are made more uncanny because they are waged under the sign of weakness and use not the pathetic devices of physical coercion but the intimate stringencies of conscience and inner pain. “Bad air! Bad air!”132