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

probably shouldn’t speak so soon but so far, so good on new meds. no racing heart after upping the dose. yay. mom thinks i should do the heart monitor. bah.

Meanwhile, on the way to dinner yesterday, R and I were talking about the crazy that are republican candidates for president, which got me ranting about Corey Robin.

I’m explaining the problems I see with the book, the slippery shifting between conservatives and reactionaries, especially focusing on the way that using Robin’s framework, you can’t really address the “partial” reactionaries: namely, progressive men and women who for one reason or another can deal with leveling among *certain* groups or attempts to level hiearchies when the person happens to think those hierarchies are legitimate.

R: So you are gonna sit in the car and read a book which sounds stupid?

Me: Well, it’s interesting for tidbits of intellectual history. Certainly the situationality (word?) of reactionary thought is a proposition worth examining even if it remains unconvincing as a sweeping claim about all conservatives, though it may be applicaple to all reactionaries… But yeah, there’s something weird about this book. There are so many inconsistencies. There’s no rigor when it comes to defining terms, which is weird for a book if targeted at an academic audience. Characters from intellectual history are introduced with little explanation which is weird for a book targeted at general audience…

R: So, you are gonna sit in the car and read a book which sounds like the only reason it got published is that the author just happens to know the right people to get crap published? (Being a non-academic who likes to deal in cliches, just to get a laugh, sometimes R cuts to the chase.)

Me: Well, exactly! To borrow TINA’s characterization, Since I’m a smarty pants, I want to read it to find out why all these people think it’s so great and then reveal what a piece of crap the book is. Sheesh. Isn’t that obvious? (R tries to maintain a stone face as he stares ahead at rush hour traffic, but I see a smile curving his lips beneath the mustache and beard that needs trimming.) I mean, it’s like TINA said, I’m a smarty pants right? Of course I have to read a book that lots of lefties think is effin’ brill, just so I can explain why it isn’t effin’ brill. Duh!

And to that, we start laughing. None of which stops me from complaining about the whole gender issue that troubles me. As I noted on FB recently, I’m really irked by the way Robin writes about women’s oppression in the book.

First, he tends to want to be so sweeping in his claims, not just about reactionaries and conservatives, but about pretty much everything he writes about. Again, I’m only 25% into the book, but like Michael Pollak said, why waste a perfectly good opportunity to spout off?!

So, early on in the book, Robin writes about a social process whereby oppressed people, defined in relations of subordination to those considered their superiors, press against those constraints and rebel. This causes a reaction and we call these people reactionaries. He then speaks of the way secretaries must deal with bosses, much as workers in factories must deal with managers, serfs must deal with lords, even wives must deal with husbands. Now, the first time I read this, the word “even” jarred me. Initially I thought, well, it’s a book written to a general audience, so he might have to hold hands on that topic, warm people up to the idea that oppressive relations exist within a marriage. Good on Robin!

But then I wondered, why are factory workers the default male here, while one has to point specifically to the existence of female workers, secretaries. And then I thought, why are there workers in factories — kinda generic — but a specific occupation, secretaries. WEll, obviously, he wants to be incluuuuuuuuuuuuusive.

But then he repeats this way of listing illustrative oppressions throughout the rest of the introductory chapters where we lose the pairing secretary/boss and the only one preserved to point at gender is husband/wife. So, I keep reading sentences that include pairings like this: worker/boss, serf/lord, husband/wife. And I’m all like, wait a minute. He is ignoring all the interesting work done on oppression, for one thing: theorists have delineated the way different oppressions work and where those concerned with structural accounts of society have pointed out the problem with individualizing assumptions. I mean, if you are trying to list oppressions with illustrative pairings, then you run into some problems with, say, race. or with heterosexuality. disability. You get my point? Robin is pointing to social roles — as we might call them in sociology– but there isn’t a corresponding social role that makes sense to his formulation for other forms of oppression. Slaveholder/slave might make sense, but what about white/black? Whiteness/race? Heterosexist/homosexual? Ablist/disabled? Even women/men doesn’t work when you have a list composed of serf/landlord, worker/boss, etc.

Basically, he’s trying to say something while preserving some sort of literary decorum - where people get the basic point with gestures at social phenom. I guess. It’s like he’s trying to point at a complex issue without having to get into the boring details, without having to disrupt the grammatic flow. (tee hee, like that phrase or what?) I get the sense that this is to preserve, what?, the integrity of the writing? So you don’t let the demand for intellectual precision trip up the flow of the sentences?

Dunno. All I know is, it seems a huge shame to ignore a rich body of literature from Eric Olin Wright, Iris Marion Young, John Roemer (I think, I’m pulling this out of memory and not googling), feminists on the topic of oppression and how it works, etc. Wright, for instance, talked about people in different class locations to capture the phenom of occupations and social roles where individuals in them didn’t necessarily benefit from the direct exploitation of labor but who nonetheless existed in relations of superordination to subordinates.

Blah blah. But this constant reference to wives and husbands continued to bug the shit out of me. So I did a search on Kindle to see if women were mentioned elsewhere. As I said to R in the car, why on earth constantly refer to husbands/wives as a signifier of gender oppression?

I mean, I don’t have to be married to you to experience oppression such as when my old boss always asked me, the only woman in the room, to do secretarial type things. Or the time one of the guys told me that women weren’t good at computing. Or listening to the guys, day in and day out, make jokes about sleeping with each other’s wives. As in, “Yeah, that’s what your wife told me last night.” As in, “Where you at?” “Over here with your girl and a forty o’ beer.”

So, WTF? Searching on the words woman/women to see where gender might be dealt with in a more careful way in the book, I note that a later chapter deals with heterosexism. So, clearly, he must have concerned himself with the difficulty of individualizing relations of oppression such that labor and capital becomes factory workers/boss (I mean, why not computer programmers and boss?), such that men/women become for a moment, secretary/manager, but mostly is simply described as husbands/wives (and one, IIRC, it becomes men/wives). You can’t really do that with other forms of oppression which operate by constituting hierarchical relations between groups of people but simply don’t do so necessarily through relations of superordination/ subordination.

As I said to R, I don’t understand how such sloppy thinking gets a pass. I guess I’m used to political theory written by people with some training in the rigors of analytic school of philosophy. Those folks lay out an argument and then always present the counterarguments, and their objections to them — if they can mount an objection. If they can’t, they simply list them as noted, as problems for their account. But even the supposedly sloppy continental philosophers seem to be a bit more disciplined than what I find in this book. And even when they aren’t, it’s generally because the audience is assumed to be acclimated to the specialty and thus in no need of coddling. References to certain technical bits and uses of certain words/refs to authors are shorthand arguments for the continentals. Which is why it frustrates people who read them without the background in the lingo.

One of the reasons why he does this is that he has an “issue” with the operations of power in civil society - in the “private” sphere. He seems to think that too much attention is paid power as it operates in the “public” sphere. Which I’ll get to in another post. For now, here are some quotes to capture what I mean:

“One of the reasons the subordinate’s exercise of agency so agitates the conservative imagination is that it takes place in an intimate setting. Every great political blast …. is set off by a private fuse: the contest for rights and standing in the family, the factory, and the field. Politicans and parties talk of constitution and amendment, natural rights and inherited privileges. But the real subject of their deliberations is the private life of power.” (I have no idea what page this is b/c I’m using a Kindle and haven’t figured out how to figure out page numbers as they correspond to a print version. *sigh*)

That pretty much captures the obsession with private life. It also captures the simplistic dualisms. There’s “political” deliberation, constitution, amendment, rights. And then there is “private” stuff which is, apparently, not political. Alrighty then. I mean, to interpret this in a better light, you could say that what he’s trying to do is capture the always already political character of private life to begin with. But why write as if this is a new insight? Why deploy the dualisms at all, why deploy them without interrogation if he felt he must make use of them. Perhaps it’s important to deploy them, in order to demolish them via your theory? This is like a little kid putting up blocks to smash them, no?

More on the private sphere and conservativism:

“Conservatism, then, is not a commitment to limited government and liberty — or a wariness of change, a believe in evolutionary reform, or a politics of virtue. These may be the byproducts of conservatism… But they are not its animating purpose. Neither is conservatism a makeshift fusion of capitalist, Christians, and warriors, for that fusion is impelled by a more elemental force - the opposition to the liberation of men and women from the fetters of superiors, particular in the private sphere. “

Ahh. see? You can see the problem, right? His fetish for the private, and his fetish for individualizing relations of oppression starts here: he wants to be interesting and different in his focus on how these things take place in a private sphere by which he means intimate relations (such as that between husband/wife, boss/secretary, slaveholder/slave). Relations of superordination/subordination are intimate, individual, personally felt. In order to constantly strike that iron, you have to constantly retreat to this issue of the personal, private, individual, emotional, felt, feeling to make a point thereby. Your sieve captures nothing else.

“Despite the very real differences between them, workers in a factory are like secretaries in an office, peasants on a manor, slaves on a plantation — even wives in a marriage — in that they live and labor in conditions of unequal power. They submit and obey, heeding the demands of their managers and masters, husbands and lords. They are discplined and punished. They do much and receive little.”

Which is interesting because the formulations seem so archaic. No one calls themselves a secretary any more. LOL. But the funnier thing is, why not just say computer programmer and manager? Why is a factory worker perceived as fitting into this relationship of superordination/subordination. Why call out secretary? Why not insurance sales rep? Why not graphic designer? Or marketing event manager? Copywriter? All jobs that tend to be held by women. Why are managers and bosses seen as people who think they are superior to others. Really? These days? Even long ago? I’m reminded of the book, Foreman’s Empire. Factory workers and foreman, who definitely had more intimate one on one relations with line workers but whose role just doesn’t fit into this framework.

And then there’s this bit that reminds me of the famous essay “and some of them were brave”. Elizabeth Spelman and Maria Lugones called it the “ampersand problem in feminist thought.” It was a reference to the way oppression subtly worked among men and women leftists during the 60s. The list of oppressions would proceed as: women, blacks, workers, homosexuals, hispanics, aboriginals, etc. The point of the title was to underline how the word “women” was used in a way that revealed the author’s unconscious thought: that the identity woman could be separated from race, ethnicity, nationality, class, sexuality, etc. Are workers women? Why is it “blacks and women”? Should it be, more accurately, “black men and women and white women”? etc. (Sorry, again I’m being lazy and not looking up exact details of essays here. I believe the ampersand problem was in an article called, “Have we got a theory for you!”, which was also a reference to the way white women in feminist thought tended to theorize *for* women of color….)

So, I’ma gonna hit the gym. It’s pouring, so no ride today. But you can see why I was disappointed in this book. I wanted to like it, but so far I’m disturbed by what in yesterday’s entry I described as “platitudes.” It feels like these essays trade in platitudes carried around by well-meaning liberals where the struggle against oppression is something other people do and worry about, and about which they like to expound, but do not get themselves too dirtied up in the details to worry about things like the ampersand problem in their thought.