From: cbcox-AT-rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu (Carrol Cox)
Subject: M-I: Teresa Ebert and space for debate
Date: Sat, 31 May 1997 16:33:51 -0500 (CDT)


    I have finally begun the reading of Teresa Ebert's *Ludic Feminism
and After* and have completed Chap. 1, though I will have to re-read
and think further on it before attempting a detailed response on the
list.

    But the conclusion of her 1st chapter caught my attention because
I think it highly relevant to some of this list's current and near-
past difficulties. I will quote the last two paragraphs nearly in
full.


    To critique the contradictions, the blind spots or aporias in
feminist theory; to relate what the theorist does say to what to
she does not say; to expose the hidden assumptions and power re-
lations in her work, and above all, to relate her discourses to
the suppressed realities and contradictions over the social division
of labor, is not trashing or one-upmanship or a power game, as Gallop,
Hirsch, and Miller maintain. Rather, it is an effort to understand
the way racist, patriarchal capitalism limits how and what we know
and to try to articulate new frontiers, new parameters, for our
knowledges. It is only through a rigorous critique exposing the
hidden social relations of production underlying a theory that
it is possible for us to begin to break through these historical
limits. It is, I believe, only through a collectivity of critique
that feminists can together rupture the historical and ideological
constraints on our knowledges in order to perceive and explain
the systematic operation of patriarchal capitalist exploitation
and, out of this knowledge, act to change society and end social
injustice.

    Thiis book is a contribution to building an oppositional critique
and the transformative knowledges it enables. However, by critique I am
not referring to the ludic notions of what Richard Rorty calls
"conversations"--polite exchanges in which every point of view has a
say. A politically effective critique cannot confine itself to
the bourgeois notion of a dialogical or pluralist space in which
a diversity of positions are represented with the complacent notion
that they are all equally powerful. Pluralism, as it is widely prac-i
ticed in postmodernism and, more generally, in the social and
cultural relations of a racist, patriarchal capitalism, is not
simply a neutral open space. Rather plurality, multiculturalism,
multiplicity, and complexity have frequently been deployed to
silence and suppress, occlude, and marginalize other positions
and to suppress a *fundamental* or *radical* diversity: the
differences of the social division of labor, of class antagonisms
and the revolutionary struggle to overthrow the existing exploita-
tive social relations. The dialogical, in short, masquerades as
openness, but it is, in fact, a restricted, closed space in
which the dominant frames of intelligibility--especially in
ludic postmodernism--violently exclude not only oppositional
knowledges but also suppress the "real" material relations of
exploitation. In the face of such historical repression and
silencing, the project of building an open space for critical
exchange cannot be limited to a pluralistic dialogue *within*
a single framework but rather requires a *dialectical* critique
*in relation to the dominant knowledges that are widely dis-
seminated and celebrated. *Real* openness in an unequal society
is not given: it must be struggled over and built through a
dialectical contestation that challenges the violent exclusions
and breaks the silence of hegemonic frames of intelligibility.
A collectivity of critique does not need polite conversation
so much as it requires strong, rigorous advocacy of the silenced
positions and sustained rigorous critiques of the limitations
and hidden assumptions and effects of the privileged discourses.
A collectivity of critique, in short, is a productive site in
which to participate in the social struggle over theory and to
build, through dialectical contestations, the necessary and
effective knowledges for an emancipatory praxis.

    Teresa L. Ebert, *Ludic Feminism and After: Postmodernism, Desire,
and Labor in Late Capitalism* (Univ. of Michigan Press, 1996), pp.
43-44.
===========================================
    Before returning to what, in this passage, seems to me to be
peculiarly apropos to this list, I want to make some general ob-
servations concerning Ebert, on whose work I want to report ex--
tensively over the next two months. (I believe one or two other
members of this list have already stated a desire to discuss her
work.) Subscribers to this list who also are subscribed to marxism-
international probably remember with a sour taste the invasion of
the Buffaloes (two grad students from SUNY Buffalo) several weeks
ago, and might be prejudiced against Ebert on the basis of that
episode of craziness. I want to urge, however, giving careful
and respectable attention to her work, the importance of which
is not touched either by unfortunate political alliances or by
political errors that might or might not show up in the journals
*Transformations* or *Red Orange* (both of which, in any case,
publish very useful material). Moreover, rather than complicating
the simple (as the Buffaloes tended to do), Ebert shows real
ability to make as clear as possible the complex, and to eliminate
false and deceptive forms of complexity. In any case, I believe
this book is important and deserves to be read, thought over, and
discussed prior to engaging in any listing of its possible errors.

                    * * * * * * * * * * * *

    This list, in the last three months, has faced three challenges
to its very existence. (1) The sheer lack of activity on it over
a lengthy period of time. (2) The objections of a number of its
members to the presence on the list of others. (3) The presence of
two or three whose postings constituted sheer noise, threatening
to blank out any form of conversation, and giving greater grounds
both for those who chose only to "lurk" and those who desubbed
from the list in disgust. (I bracket these de-subbings under (2)).

    I believe we are dealing here with the need to make two sets
of distinctions. First, between what Mao called "contradictions
among the people" and "the enemy." Second, between "contradictions
among the people" and simple criminality.

[I'm sorry; I am expecting an important phone call, and this
message is taking longer to write than I expected. I will have
to break off here and continue in a later message.]

Carrol


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