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

2007-01-21 04:34:00

Oooops! I may be plagiarizing there. Whatev. I’ve been quite irked of late to read a lot of dismissals of theory and ideology, as if to say that asshattery and shitbagginess are caused by commitment to a political theory or ideology. I’m an ideologue and I am proud. Indeed, pretty much every single person writing in these discussions is guided by an ideology. Depends what you mean by ideology, of course, since it is what is known as an “essentially contested concept” in the social sciences and in political philosophy. Nonetheless, playing on the concept of ideology as wielded in these debates, I’d say that everyone has one and they are no less tenaciously committed to it (them) than is Heart or anyone else. Often, we are simply attached to the dominant ideas of our society, even when we think they are ideas opposed to and critical of society. After all, one way to criticize society is to hold that society up to its own ideals. Hence, when someone criticizes Heart as intolerant, they are criticizing her for failing to uphold a dominant idea that is part of what you could call an ideology of liberal enlightenment modernity: tolerance was, if you will, a buzz word of an era when political thinkers circulated their ideas furiously in an effort to undermine the political rulers of their day. They engage in political theorizing and critique in order to instantitate a new set of values that they felt were superior. (Like MIlton and Shelley in Hawkes’ essay on The Flames of Hell in Cyberspace (below). Consider, for instance, historic documents that established the idea of tolerance: Martin Luther’s The Freedom of a Christian, John Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration and the famous Two Treatises of Government, Voltaire’s A Treatise on Tolerance, John Stuar Mills’ On Liberty, Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies, and John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice. All of the ideas in these books and documents — sometimes at odds with one another — have been incorporated into our common sense understandings of what they good life *ought* to look like: we should have tolerance for others, etc. But that there is a problem when we have so much passion for tolerance that we are intolerant of the intolerant. hmmmm.) As I’ve mentioned, antipathy to “theory” and to “intellectuality” has deep roots in US culture. For some, this (snort) ideological antipathy to intellectuality, theory, and ideology is thought to be enshrined in a distinctive US philosophy that shaped many of our public institutions, especially schooling: pragmatism. (For a quickie overview of the main books on the issue see this H-Net review.) So, we are ideologues fighting against ideology — a well-worn US tradition. Gotta love it. In the meantime, here’s a bit from Halley as to why theory matters. Halley’s an ideologue, by the way. She’s an ideologue of the “internally riven”. She passionately upholds a politics, theoretics, and hedonics of internal rivenness. In her introduction to Split Decisions, Halley spells out why theory matters to politics and she names her interests (her dogs in the fight) and admits to her complete and total lack of objectivity:

“But even if I can’t convince a single reader to admit to a complex identification of the sort I’ve just confessed is mine (ahem), I think it is simply uncontestable that feminism itself is internally riven and has seen parts of itself break off and become — not merely diverse parts of feminism but — something else. I will argue that several of the intellectual/political projects that have resulted bring hypotheses about sexual life and power which are inconsistent with any version of feminism currently on offer. Certainly these alternative projects have constituencies that can’t be described as (women). That is, there is a political struggle going on right now among a range of constituencies and within many of their members — elements that promote various theories of sexual life. Each would imagine and thus wield power differently,; each would govern differently; each would precipitate different sexual possibilities and realities; each would distribute status and authority to different bodies, different acts, different relationships — and (let’s face it) take status and authority from different bodies, acts, and relationships. Apprehending this is, it seems to me, a simple predicate of responsible power wielding. And here I come up against the profound commitment of so many participants in the politics that engage me in this book — not merely feminist ones; gay ones, queer ones, trans ones also — to an understanding of themselves as utterly without power. The intellectual, institutional, and affective trends contributing to this attitude are many: the proliferation on the left of minoritizing identity-based vocabularies in which high-priority political and moral claims can be made only by the ‘marginalized’ and the ’silenced’; the subordination-theoretical assumption that power is always bad; … the seeming inability of most participants in these politics to move beyond a certain sentimental and moralistic view of law and legal action in which nothing short of complete and total moral vindication by the Supreme Court *is* legal power. I hope this book will sketch at least some ways out of at least some of these habits of mind.”

Her complaint is against identity political powerlessness, something BlackAmazon has been identifying over and over again. The way that groups posture themselves as victims and as not responsible for the power they wield. Halley is complaining about that throughout the book. She also identifies this with what she calls the moralizing character of cultural feminism. I’m sure she’d see it in other forms of political theory and practice, but this book is about feminism and specifically feminism as it pertains to theories and practices surrounding sexuality. She does take up her objections to moralizing identity political powerlessness in some aspects of the gay identity movement — Queer theory and political practice emerged as criticisms of the limitations of gay identity movements. I offer this, also, since I’ve also seen a few comments (I think it was at Belledame’s) about the way some feminism seems to want to deny that it has any power at all. In this case, this is right up Halley’s alley: this is precisely part of what she is on about. And it is why what she calls cultural feminism scares her the most, even though she used to be a cultural feminist: she sees this variant of feminist thought as the one which positions itself as powerless in its moralizing claims about how society works and should work — which is what theory is, after all. :) Anyway, more on Halley as time permits and my typing hands can stand.