Date: Mon, 16 Mar 1998 10:08:52 -0500
From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood-AT-panix.com>
Subject: Re: M-TH: listen, vanguardists!


Rob Schaap wrote:

>Is there a quote where Butler suggests what lefties should actually do
>instead, Doug?

Uh, she's a bit weak on practical politics. In "Merely Cultural," it sounds
like she's in favor of coalitions where "difference" never hardens into a
rigid identity, and where tensions are productively explored, not effaced
in a false unity. Here's one:

"Although I would agree that a narrowly identitarian construal of such
movements leads to a narrowing of the political field, _there is no reason
to assume that such social movements are reducible to their identitarian
formations._ The problem of unity, or, more modestly, of solidarity cannot
be resolved through the transcendence or obliteration of this field, and
certainly not through the vain promise of retrieving a unity wrought
through exclusion, one that reinstitutes subordination as the condition of
its own possibility. The only possible unity will not be the synthesis of a
set of conflicts, but will be a _mode of sustaining conflict in politically
productive ways,_ a practice of contestation that demands that these
movements articulate their goals under the pressure of each other without
therefore exactly becoming each other.... Here difference is not simply the
_external_ difference between movements, understood as that which
differentiates them from one another, but, rather, _the self-difference of
movement itself,_ a constitutive rupture that makes movements possible on
nonidentitarian grounds, that instialls a certain mobilizing conflict as
the basis of politicization. Factionalization, understood as the process
whereby one identity excludes another in order to fortify its own unity and
coherence, makes the mistake of locating the problem of difference as that
which emerges _between_ one identity and another; but difference is the
condition of possiblity of identity, or, rather, its constitutive limit:
what makes its articulation possible is at the same time what makes any
final or closed articulation impossible."

I find this intellectually appealing, but I'm not sure what it would mean
for actual organizations and programs.

By the way, I initially doubted Butler's claims about those who would
achieve unity through effacement or exclusion, but a number of inhabitants
of the Spoons lists convinced me she's exactly right.

Doug





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