planting a tree as metaphor for long term organizing

    I recently read a most likely apocryphal story about Hegel during the period of the French Revolution.  The story isn't terribly complicated; Hegel, Holderlin, and Schelling took the time from their studies to plant a tree of liberty.  Despite the very different directions the three thinkers took, the fictional act gestured towards a commitment to the radical possibilities embodied by the revolution.  The act of planting a tree doesn't strike me as the worst metaphor for a radical political project.  It gestures towards three substantial aspects of any political project committed to radical and systemic transformation, the fact that any such project will take time, the care that needs to be put into such  a project, and finally, the immense contingency implicit in such a project.

      Time:  The act of planting of tree implicitly has a fairly long period of time in mind.  It's going to take most trees at least twenty of thirty years to develop any significant growth, and even fast growing trees take a few years to take hold.   Most radical or progressive reformist groups work within a considerably shorter period of time, often only thinking about the next rally or, if the group is particularly ambitious, the next year long campaign.  Even NGOs tend to think within a shorter timeline, developing, at most, five year plans.  In this sense, we can think of the activities of most radical or reformist organizations as being profoundly opportunist in their organizational practices, if not their rhetoric, in the framework that is implicit in both the work of Paulo Virno and V.I. Lenin .  Within both thinkers' frameworks, opportunism operates on the premise of accepting the rules set of the existing system without challenging the rules and structures of that system.  By refusing to or perhaps more significantly being unable to create long term goals and projects, radical and reformist projects find themselves playing by the rules of the systems that they ostensibly oppose.  I think this opportunist framework is an effect, rather than a cause of the profound destruction of the counter-systemic movements of the second half of the twentieth century.  However, it's difficult to imagine escaping this situation without having the resources and foresight to begin the process of developing meaningfully long future projects.

      It's notable that the thirty year time period that it takes for a tree to grow is remarkably close the the medium time-frame that Immanuel Wallerstein posits as the length of the medium term project that is largely ignored by the counter-systemic movements of the present within the United States. Wallerstein opposes this medium time frame to a set of long term goals, which take the form of large, global projects that take the form of abstract concepts such as communism, the end of exploitation, etc.  Short term goals take the form of an organizing campaign such as organizing a workplace, a campaign to end a particular practice at an institution such as using sweat shop labor, or often in the case of subcultural activism, simply organizing a demonstration or an action.  This work involves immediate goals.  How do we get people to the rally?  Can we get media attention?  Can we disrupt the actions of decision makers in a way that causes them to change their behavior?  These are all important questions, but they don't lead to giving any meaningful thought to the larger goals that the movements ostensibly have.  Instead, their framework is largely negative.  How can we disrupt?  How can we translate that disruption into policy makers changing their actions?  I'm not saying that these are irrelevant questions, but they abandon the element of planning to the structures we ostensibly oppose.  They also abandon the question of how we form new forms of social structure and create new modes of governance within those forms of social structure, and what kinds of representation will define new forms of democratic practice.

Care:  To return to the metaphor of the tree, it takes quite a bit of care to get a tree to take root and adjust to the environment in which you have place it.  This is notably true for Southern California because of the lack of rain and its poor soil.  However, it's a metaphor that works elsewhere.  At the most obvious level, the creation of any social structure is dependent on formal and informal structures of social reproduction.  You need to not only bring new people into an organization or movement, but you need to create social spaces that cause those people to stay in those structures, to allow them a sense of meaning and participation in those organizations and movements, and to create structures of care.  These are questions that are taken quite seriously at the most immediate level by anarchists, particularly the focus on self care.  However, those same organizations have difficulty imagining how you might participate in these movements when you're thirty or forty, rather than twenty, or how to be a part of a movement when you have children or you have a disability.  I don't think these are problems that can be solved through a movement that continues to operate as a subculture, that is as a community largely produced through voluntary and informal labor.  It should be additionally noted that those informal structures tend to unduly burden women with the 'traditional' tasks of reproductive labor, leaving them unpaid and undervalued.  We need structures and institutions that we can plug into, and that is going to involve getting people money to do those jobs.  There's a real question of how we do this and continue to hold onto forms of democratic governance and representation, but refusing to pose those questions by refusing to create any kind of formal structure has clearly not translated into either sustainability or equality.

Contingency:  There is quite a bit of contingency implicit in the act of planting the tree.  The most obvious contingency is the fact that trees can die, even with all the care of the world that is put into the project.  Analogously, projects fail, even with the best intentions and plans.  However, at a more modest level, even when a tree lives and grows, it doesn't grow in precisely the way you plan it to grow.  That is to say, there is a need to recognize that as a plan develops and perhaps even progresses, the means and even the ends of that plan are going to change.  That doesn't mean that you don't plan, but that you recognize that your plans are going to change.  We're good at dealing with that kind of contingency at the level of the event, and even the campaign, but we don't spend a lot of time thinking beyond that. At the level of a lot of subcultural activism, we rarely even spend much time discussing what succeeded or failed within an individual event afterwards, often leaving events as isolated and unrelated events.  When criticism does occur, it often spirals out of control becoming a circle of mutual incrimination.  We lack the mechanisms for a form of collective and individual assessment that operates constructively, rather than disastrously destructively, a mechanism that would teach organizers better practices and encourage them to engage in those practices. At some level, we need forms of self-criticism primarily for organizations, but also for individuals, but in a manner that somehow escapes from the logic of the confessional within which that mode was initially created.  Just as significantly, we need forms of institutional knowledge that will preserve that knowledge to direct future campaigns and future actions, and we need to be able to think about what the successes and failures of those actions say about our longer term plans.

To draw off the example of an old friend, we might look at the anarchist project in Spain.  We think about the high point of anarchism in the mid to late 1930's, but in doing so, we miss out on the fact that it took decades of organizing, starting withing the middle part of the nineteenth century for this wave of militancy to occur.  It involved engaging in and creating institutional and educational structures, and involved creating forms of engagement that were not simply accessible to the young. When we simply look back nostalgically at the height of a moment of struggle without recognizing the conditions that produced that struggle, we're going to lack any ability of how to advance our own goals of creating similar or more successful movements.  We have to see those movements with the context of the long duree of time, and the day to day work that occurred in that time frame.  The question is how to return to that form of longer term thinking.

The Labor of Academic Writing

     Our analysis of academic life is curious.  We have increasingly recognized that most aspects of academic life can be understood through the category of labor, whether in the form of grading, our interactions with students or colleagues, or in the construction  of courses.  We've been forced to recognize this fact because of the privatization of the university, a process that has taken away our job security, increased our workload, and has decreased the time to accomplish that work.  Although rarely explicitly recognized, we might note that embedded in this shift is precisely the logic of the panopticon, the process of constructing hierarchies, of individuating subjects, and of making grids of intelligibility.   Through that process, we have also considerably lost our academic freedom, or ability to teach and engage in research as we see fit, even if that right has been, at best, never fully in place, and at times, an illusion.  The figure of the adjunct has come to stand in for this process, although that process has impacted all but a very few in academic life, albeit unevenly.

      However, when we begin to discuss academic writing, our tone changes.  We are suddenly shifted from the world of disciplinarity and precarity, to curiously sovereign space, one in which our production can only be understood individually, as our own burden.  Academic writing operates as a sort of empire within an empire, to borrow a phrase from Spinoza, an arena that operates outside the logic of the university, of capital, and squarely returns us to a fantasy of the sovereign individual.  We lose touch of the world that this writing is produced in, its structures, institutions, and the collective life that is embedded within it.  And through that erasure, we are offered a curious construct, a writer that has far more control over that process of literary production that we would ever recognize in or field of analysis, and yet a sovereign who inevitably fails or betrays us.  We are poor stylists.  We fail to engage the multitudes.  Often, we even fail in saying anything of significance in our dense, jargon-laden prose. In a sense, this mystification is understandable.  Our writing is only connected to our position within the academy indirectly.  After all, we are generally not directly paid for this work, either as writers or as editors or proofreaders.  Instead, we are paid by the opportunity to enter into a sort of lottery, the prize being a tenure track position, which can itself only be guaranteed through publication. One might say that we do know, but we act.

     I don't doubt that there is a lot of bad academic writing, and no doubt, I have done as much as anyone else to contribute to that problem.  But what if we moved away from the myth of the sovereign academic writer, the god who must inevitably fail, to an understanding of academic writing as an ordinary process.  That is to say, what happens if we understand academic writing a collective material process, produced in institutions, by subjects who are at least in part themselves produced by those institutions, operating within the terrain of the processes of capitalist accumulation, and the struggles that act as the engine of that process.  This is not to say our role in that system has as direct connection to the processes of accumulation as say a worker in an auto plant or a cashier at a grocery store or even a commercial engineer, but that our role must be understood in the reproduction of that system, both in the production of educated subjects that can work in that system, and in the production of forms of knowledge for that system.  Increasingly, we are demanded to reproduce the cultural logic of that system of accumulation through a regime of instrumental reason and immediate results.  In crude terms, we are facing a speed up of the production process, and an externalization of the costs of social reproduction.  Whether willingly or grudgingly, we are required to enact this grotesque pageant in order to gain a foothold in this process.

      Not surprisingly, I'm not in a position to develop this point with the sort of depth it deserves, which would involve something like the scholarly investigation of the public university produced by Christopher Newfield.  However, I will try to produce a rough sketch of some of the points that produce the sort of writing that is so often and understandably criticized.  We might start our investigation at the point that we enter into the university as potential scholars, that is when we become graduate students.  Our coursework spends a great deal of time developing our skills as writers, but rarely do we discuss the process of writing in such detail.  Instead, we push the process of writing to the last weeks of the class, to be produced in hurry isolation, and to produce essays to which we rarely return.  Often, we get very little in the way of response about this writing from our faculty, who are, after all, producing their own work. Once we move out of course work, we frequently lose any collective working environment, beyond those fragile ones we set up for ourselves, often in the form of small groups that are occasionally recognized and sanctioned by the university.  But more often, we write alone with the interventions of our advisers and committees.  I'm not attempting to criticize the individuals in this system, but if we want to prioritize writing, perhaps it would make sense to construct a system of instruction that incorporating developing those processes into it, of recognizing and incorporating the collective process of writing into grad school itself.

      By all descriptions, the process only becomes worse when you leave graduate school.  To begin, you're expected to produce published work in order to both enter into the tenure process, and to receive tenure.  David Harvey once noted that it used to be exciting if you put out a book, even more so if you put out two, but people started wondering if you were neglecting your students with the third book.  We've replaced this more modest system with a far greater demand for publishing, making the publication of a book as the precondition for tenure, and increasingly, the publication of material, a precondition for being hired at one of the increasingly dwindling tenure track jobs.  This demand has led to a glut in publishing, and frequently translates into us pushing out material that is insufficiently developed and hasn't gone through the editing process that it needed.  It's also led to a hyper-specialization that has led to more and more materials that are not of much interest except for a very small audience.  Moreover, non-specialized knowledge production, particularly for popular audiences is not terribly valued in the tenure process. In addition, the labor that allows for the publication, the process of editing, of the peer evaluation process, etc. is extraordinarily undervalorized, and is viewed as a voluntary labor that generally is the understandably last concern of those involved in the process.  Often, even established academic presses will demand that authors pay for the basic costs of indexing and books, rather than taking on those costs themselves.  At a basic level, we might say that the basic social processes of producing an interesting and readable text have been externalized, and placed back on the authors, who are patently ill equipped to deal with that process.

      In a sense, our former illusion perhaps becomes a bit more understandable.  After all, if the figure of the sovereign writer must inevitably fail, it still offers a fantasy of control that becomes impossible when begin to explore the process as ordinary labor.  We can harbor the illusion of choice.  We can choose not to be this bad subject, or perhaps more honestly, there will be a time when we will choose not to be this bad subject.  But when we turn to the material and collective process of writing, we have to face a system that shows no interest in putting in the necessary money to produce quality writing, to create the social structures that would allow for us to write differently.  Each of the problems I mention earlier in the essay is easily solvable, but it would require the funding that is increasingly being taken away from the humanities and social sciences, and has never really existed in the STEM fields.  We have to face a capitalist system that no longer sees our labor as central to its reproduction.  Therefore, our ability to produce quality writing feels very impossible, as that the precondition for creating the social tools needed to produce a different form of academic writing would involve a profound social transformation, one that would probably not be simply limited to refunding the humanities, the social sciences, or creating other writing opportunities for the STEM fields.  It's a transformation that I must confess that I find difficult to imagine at this point, but even with that difficulty, I prefer posing that as a project than continuing down a moralistic path of mutual incrmination.

On the Hugo Award finalists

     I thought I would write a very brief update to the comments that I posted on Tuesday, March 21st, while on spring break.  Within that post, I noted that I planned on writing about the upcoming Hugo Awards, notably discussing my voting process.  I also expressed my hopes that the award finalists would not be as affected by the chicanery of the Sad and Rabid Puppies, two groups of conservative fans who had previously attempted to manipulate the nomination process through slate voting.  Both groups attempted to present their manipulation as an effort to bring forgotten and suppressed works back on the finalists list, either in the name of traditional science fiction or in the name of a suppressed politically conservative science fiction, but both groups tended to create their lists based on group identity, nominating friends of the primary organizers of both groups.  The work itself ranged from mediocrity to abject failure with a small number of exceptions.

      I was fairly optimistic that we weren't going to see the same kind of influence that we saw in the past couple years.  The Sad Puppies had abandoned the slate process last year and embraced a largely ineffectual and unpromoted recommendation list  They even abandoned that pretense this year, and presented no recommendations.  The Rabid Puppies didn't entirely abandon the fight, but presented a list of recommendations that only included one or two recommendations per category.  With both groups ending their efforts to choose the entire slate of finalists, it was fairly probable that, barring some secret and highly unlikely cabal of slate organization, we were going to see a list of candidates that more faithfully represented the interests of science fiction fans and readers.  Now that the finalists have finally been released, we can see that the influence of the puppies is fairly minimal.  Only sixteen of the list of twenty-two Rabid Puppy nominees were nominated, and three of those were disqualified. (look here for a more thorough analysis)  Additionally, it would be easy to imagine that the work of a number of the endorsed nominees (for instance, China Mieville and Neil Gaiman) would have received nomination without the influence of the slate, which further reduces the impact of the slate.  A number of people have given credited the recent reforms in the voting process for the reduced impact of the slates, but if there was an impact, it was more in its encouragement to abandon the practice of slating than in its actual impact on the vote totals.

     The resulting list of finalists is fairly exciting, and I'm looking forward to the process of reading the works.  For the most part, it's material that I have not read yet, although I read N.K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season, which her recent nomination, The Obelisk Gate is a sequel, along with the first two books in the series by Cixin Liu.  I've also seen all of the nominated films, except Hidden Figures, and have been a fairly faithful reader of Ms. Marvel, which received another nomination. However, it's material that seems to have received primarily positive critical attention, and looks like a distinct step away from the tedium that defined too much of the last couple years of nominations.  I'm currently in process of placing the novels available at the library on hold.  Additionally, I'm hoping that this breadth of quality works will also translate into a more interesting competition.  My voting choices over the past year were also largely chosen by the majority of other Hugo voters.  I think that this is less a sign that my views are representative of that majority, and more a sign of the lack of meaningful choice among the nominees.  I suspect that the introduction of some real competition will lead to much less predictability in the winners, which will also make the process more interesting.

     You can still get involved in the voting process if you are interested.  You just need to get a supporting membership for $40 and you can vote.  Recently, voters have received electronic packets with some of the nominated material, a process which will probably be repeated this year.  You can find information here.

A Short Essay on Decline of Western Civilization, Three

           If one thing immediately stands out about the third installation of Penelope Spheeris's The Decline of Western Civilization series, it is the lack of innovation in the music.  Final Conflict sounds good, but are playing music they composed a decade earlier, from their 1987 lp, Ashes to Ashes.  The rest of the acts, Litmus Green, Naked Aggression, and The Resistance, who are perhaps even more obscure than the other bands, largely produce music that similarly could have been written a decade ago, or perhaps even earlier. This lack of innovation also really stands out when you look at the kid's t shirts. Everyone is wearing band shirts from groups that started in the late 70s or the 80s, Conflict, Misfits, Rudimentary Peni, etc. It's as if the whole thing had hit a dead end.  This, for lack of a better term, retrograde dimension places a gulf between the music of the film and the earlier two films, both of which represent both far diverse aesthetic streams in their respective subcultures, and represent music that it would be impossible to imagine as having been produced at any earlier time.  In the first film, we find ourselves immersed in the 'year zero' world of punk rock, exploring its various branches, from the art world of Catholic Discipline to the suburban hardcore of The Circle Jerks.  In the second film, we find ourselves in a far older world, defined by the newer stream of glam metal that dominated the strip at the time, along with the rising stream of thrash, but that world was supplemented with interviews with older acts in the genre, from Ozzy to Lemmy and a couple members of KISS.  In both cases, we are being introduced to aesthetic novelty, new forms of art, new forms of subjectivity.  The third film represents a subculture that no longer is creating something new, and a subculture that was on its way out, representing the endpoint of a musical moment, the punk revival, that began in the late 1980's and was in the process of closing.

            However, the film is worth watching because of its shift in focus.  Rather than focusing on the bands, which are the almost exclusive focus of the first film, and the dominant focus of the second film, the third film focuses on the primarily homeless punk kids who were the backbone of that scene.  We can already see a shift to a kind of ethnographic gaze with the second film, which brings in a bunch of kids who imagine themselves becoming the next big thing, but that engagement is far more limited.  We don't get a sense of how those kids live, and we don't get a real sense of their individuality.  Instead, we're offered a set of remarkably thought-free clichés, an exploration of the spontaneous ideology of Reaganism, really.  Spheeris really spends a lot of time with the punks in the third film, though.  We see how they live, make money, find places to sleep, etc.  There's a real sense of trying to create that sort of ethnographic engagement, of exploring an unknown way of life, of trying to understand its social mechanisms and driving motivations.  The film also explores some of the causal mechanisms of why these kids wound up on the street, which aren't terribly surprising, and involve a lot of issues around abuse and abandonment.  Just as significantly, through this engagement, we meet a group of young punks who are far more thoughtful, politically engaged, and sympathetic than the participants in the first two films.  The film series effectively moves from a focus on interviews and live footage of the bands to a film that focused on the daily lives of the subculture.  It also shifts from what can effectively be called a participant-observer document to a document from the perspective of an outsider.[1]

            And in a sense, it's that sense of estrangement that produces such a rich engagement with the scene, and effectively communicates why such an fascinating subculture produced such formulaic music.  Embedded in the film, are a number of short interviews with participants in the original LA punk scene, who are there to create a sense of change over the years.  One of the most significant interviews is with Flea, who talks about how the city had changed from his time as a homeless punk in the early eighties.  He noted that he was a kid in the scene there was so much more of an infrastructure to support him, from art venues to places to sleep.  The kids that were living on their own in the mid to late nineties had so much less to support their survival.  It was at that point that the lack of creativity made so much more sense.  Despite its fantasy of a 'year zero', the original punk scenes had a scaffolding of the counter-culture of the 1960's and 1970's to create itself within.  Veterans of those scenes helped provide venues for kids, found funding for them, and contributed to the cultural and political educations of the new folks involved in the scene.  Perhaps even more significantly, the welfare infrastructure that had been produced by the Johnson administration in the mid-century effort on the part of the political class to create what might be called a capitalism with a human face had not been entirely eviscerated by the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations.   

          The punks in the third film are left with only the dregs of both that counter-culture and the mechanisms of support that so many of the subculture could depend on in the first film.  Within such a situation, it's not surprising that the art that got produced within that scene didn't have the vibrancy and creativity of the earlier scenes.  The participants had to focus so much more on survival. The film deliberately creates this effect through its focus on the mechanisms of survival, eating, sleeping, drinking, and raising the money for those activities, contrasting those activities with the memories of the memories of participants in the earlier formation of the subculture.  The film further reveals the precarity of the life of its subjects through the depiction of two tragedies: the murder of one of its primary interview subjects, Squid, who was allegedly killed by his girlfriend, and the tragic death by another interview subject in a squat fire. If the first film points to a new sense of self-destructiveness, and the second film is largely about decadence and thoughtlessness, the final film is a film of exhaustion, the exhaustion of the subcultural formation, of the participants, trying to survive, and perhaps even a whole series of social reproduction.  Within that exhaustion, we find a rich cultural life, and actually a thoughtfulness lacking from the first two films, but it's so much harder to imagine transformation in that world.

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[1] Watching the first film for the second time, it's fairly obvious that Spheeris is effectively translating the formal structure of the fanzine for film.

A Response to the Critiques of Intersectionality

The past few years have been defined by a debate over the value of what can roughly be called intersectionality.  There has been a sustained critical attack on the framework by a loosely associated group of self-described Marxist thinkers, many of whom have coalesced around a radical journal, Jacobin.[1]  Despite some real differences in its participants, this group can be defined by two qualities: the interest in returning to a party form, whether in the form of a reformist, social democratic organization or in the form of a more radical, Marxist formation, and the tendency to want to center those organization on a more class focused analysis.[2]  It’s important to note that this group isn’t the first group to critique the framework, and critiques of intersectionality have come from a variety of perspectives, ranging from feminist critiques of the framework to Afro-Pessimist and social reproduction theory.  These critiques point to the real contentions over the now dominant theoretical framework and its perceived limitations.  More significantly, there are points that these frameworks make that potentially show the limitations of the intersectionality framework
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 However, Jacobin oriented critique has defined the present debates, rather than the more limited and nuanced critiques presented by social reproduction theory and the rather blunter rejection of the theory by Afro-Pessimism.  The problem with this mode of critique is that it rejects the close materialist analysis of the theory ostensibly embraced by the group making the critique.  Rather than taking a close look at how the framework was created, how it evolved, and how it became a dominant theoretical framework for a variety of academic and activist groups and institutions, the perspective has the tendency to reduce the theory to its primary metaphor, the intersection, and places that in opposition to the superior Marxist framework.  In effect, rather than taking on the kind of immanent critique embraced by Marx in his work, this work jettisons Marx’s methodology, while holding onto his image as one worthy of veneration.   It’s notable that these critiques have generally occurred within the interstices of academic and political discourse, in twitter battles and Facebook comments, effectively avoiding the need for substantial engagement through the limitations of the media. In intend to begin this discussion by closely reading one such intervention, and then to contrast that engagement with a sketch of what such a materialist engagement would need to take on to live up to that framework.

We can see this framework spelled out by a Facebook posting that was widely distributed by this grouping, a statement made by R.L. Stephens, who states:

"The sooner we accept that intersectionality is a bad theory, the better off we'll be. As a moral principle or ethos, it's alright. But it cannot properly explain the world as it exists nor as it should one day be. 

Taking race for example, intersectionality posits that race and class intersect, which implies that they are distinct. That's ahistorical. Race only exists because of class, and because of a particular moment of class conflict at that. Intersectionality (by virtue of its roots in Title VII anti-discrimination law) is based on the premise that race is immutable, meaning unchanging and constant. Yet, we make and remake race every day because race is an ideology wholly dependent on class, not an abstract transhistorical "immutable characteristic" as the law says.

If we abandon the idea of essentialism, of fixed immutable identities, then we've rejected a critical underlying premise upon which the *theory* of intersectionality is built. I am not criticizing people's moral or ethical desire to be inclusive and fight against discrimination. I share that principle and I've dedicated my life to pursuing it. Intersectionality as a theory is not a proper worldview, and it cannot help us get to the world we want to see."

The statement is attempting to do a lot of theoretical work within a very short space, so it’s going to take a while to break down that material.  The statement wisely begins by separating the notion of intersectionality as a theoretical framework from the broad ethical commitments that are implied by that framework.  In effect, the comment wants to avoid impinging on the commitment to opposing racism and sexism within the framework, while challenging its ability to understand the causes of such phenomenon.  No problem so far, but as the analysis shifts into the second paragraph, and moves into the actual critique, it starts to go off tracks.  It begins implying that intersectionality posits the notion that class and race exist independently of one another, but the very notion of intersection rejects this independence.  The passage is, in effect, making a very elementary mistake, confusing categories of analysis with the reality that those categories of analysis are designed to help us understand.  The more significant impact of the framework is that no one category of analysis is going to be sufficient to understanding that reality. Stephens may reject this framework, and want to place a primacy on class and class struggle to understand this complex phenomenon, but the argument that this framework sets up race and class as distinct phenomenon doesn’t really hold up.

Moving on, Stephen argues that the framework of intersectionality has its beginnings in the construction of title VII anti-discrimination law and that both have the same theoretical shortcomings, notably that both operate on the premise that “race is immutable, meaning unchanging and constant.” While it’s true that a few notable creators of the intersectionality framework, notably Kimberle Crenshaw have a background in legal studies and probably had an impact on the framing of the law, it doesn’t necessarily hold that those thinkers hold by the framework of the law that they might have influenced or even helped write.[3]  But by doing so, Stephens argues that the legalistic framework of title VII with the theoretical framework of intersectionality are equivalent, a critique of one can stand in for a critique of the other.  Because the law frames race as ‘immutable’, the thinkers of intersectionality must accept the same premises.  Stephens then points out how foolish that assumption is because “we make and remake race every day….”[4] The rest of the analysis is an outgrowth of this critique.

This critique would be fairly damning if it were true.  The meaning of race is continually mutating and is defined by a series of ongoing and uneven struggles over its meaning, and efforts to fix its meaning are primarily linked to efforts to shore up racist institutions and practices.  But the argument is premised on the notion that the framework of intersectionality is homologous to the law.  I don’t think this works.  To understand why not, we need to turn to the origins of the intersectional framework.  The narrative that follows offers a very rough sketch of this process, and one that has been better explained by quite a few people, but it will do for the present.  That work exists in a very specific feminist context.  From the late 1960’s to the mid 1970’s, feminist theoretical work was defined by a variety of efforts to understand how women operated as a class.  This work drew from the ideas of Marx and Freud, but more significantly, was influenced by structuralism, which attempted to identify ahistorical structures that defined the daily lives of individuals, often at the unconscious level.  It rejected the phenomenological emphasis on experience to argue that experience itself had to be understood as being structured by a series of rules sets that defined social life.  Radical feminism drew on this work, and attempted to understand the experiences of women through the framework of patriarchy, which set and enforced a series of untenable rules upon the lives of women.  The work of Kate Millet, Shulamith Firestone, Juliet Michell, and Gayle Rubin[5] in their own individual ways, attempted to show how patriarchy shaped and defined the lives of women. The cultural feminism of the early to mid-1970’s only intensified the trans-historical tendencies of radical feminism.

The concept of intersectionality arose out of a variety of black feminist critiques of this feminist tradition, beginning with the work of the Combahee River Collective.  The work argued that the experiences of black women were left out of the efforts to frame women as a class, which based its structural analysis based on the experiences of white women.  That work emphasized that its existence was based on a series of common struggles in response to the intertwined forms of oppression and exploitation that defined the experience of black women.  Far from claiming that these forms of oppression were timeless and trans-historical, the collective framed the existence of its politics in relationship to the transformation of the society in the post-WWII era.  The framework found in the initial statement of the collective can be found in almost all the work that started the framework of intersectionality.  Far from attempting to claim that the category of race was trans-historical, the framework used experiences of racism to challenge the structuralist assumptions of radical feminism. When we start to look at Crenshaw’s work on the subject, we see a legal theorist looking at a series of projects that operate under either the premise of the radical feminist ‘women as a class’ or the legal categories of oppression created by civil rights legislation.  What she finds is that these frameworks of analysis produce reform projects that cannot or will not deal with the needs of the women who are supposed to be aided by these actions, whether in the form of legal decisions or the form of spaces designed to allow women to escape from domestic assault.  Far from emphasizing the trans-historical nature of race, Crenshaw’s analysis emphasized the particularity of the experience of oppression, one that needs multiple vectors of analysis to understand.

This is further complicated by the both implicit and explicit critiques of the concept of race as developed by black nationalist figures of the period by black feminists, challenging their emphasis on the primacy of race as a category of analysis and perhaps more significantly, the essentialist understanding of race within these analyses.  These critiques can be seen in the work of bell hooks, Michelle Wallace, and Audre Lorde, and largely destroy any remaining shred of the legitimacy of Stephens’ critique.[6] Intersectionality, rather than a framework of timeless essentialist identities, argues for an analysis of concrete struggles that engages in multiple frameworks of analysis.  It attempts to complicate previous frameworks of analysis, and uses that complication to engage in an analysis of historical struggle.  There is space to critique this framework for analyzing and engaging in those struggles, but those critiques must actually take on the history of this form of critique.  It’s also worth noting that intersectionality theory has taken on a multiplicity of meanings and forms over the past thirty years, and newer forms might have begun to engage in the essentialism that Stephens discussed, but a critique of those transformations needs to engage in those specific analyses, rather than claim their problematic claims as standing in for a whole of intersectionality that often stands against those claims.  Similarly, one cannot ignore the radical roots of this theory if certain contemporary strands seem to support or reproduce the logic of the contemporary neoliberalism.  Critique needs to be immanent and materialist, which has largely been ignored by current debate.

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[1] I’m specifically referring to intellectual and political networks here, rather than the editorial policies of the publication.

[2] I should note that the first position is held more strongly than the second position, where there is more diversity in the group.

[3] As far as I know, there is no indication that any significant thinker within the framework helped create these laws.

[4] Stephens frames this slightly differently than is framed here, arguing that the shifting meaning of the definition of race occurs because of its dependence on class, but even if one accepts such a premise, class itself goes through similar transformations. The more significant critique is the notion that intersectionality ignores the very real transformations of the meaning of race, which is why I focus on that critique, rather than the larger framework.

[5] To name a few significant thinkers in this framework.

[6] One can also see this in the work of Marlon Riggs.

Thoughts on the blog while on spring break

     I've spent the past week and a half trying to recover from a cold, which has led me to neglect the blog a bit.  It turns out that feeling tired and coughing up phlegm doesn't inspire occasional writing.  For the most part, I've spent my energy working on setting up the lesson plans for my students, giving those students feedback on their papers, and teaching classes.  My schedule doesn't massively overwork me, but this limited activity is all that I've been able to accomplish lately.

     However, I'm now on spring break, and am hoping to spend some more time writing for the blog.  At this point, I don't see myself covering too much political material, primarily because I haven't been very politically active lately, but also because a lot of the recent political kerfuffles haven't been very interesting.  For instance, most of the conflicts over Jacobin context has been rather dreary, and the most recent twitter battle just looks depressing.  I like the publication, but a lot of the material that has gotten coverage lately seems to be dedicated to dredging up battles that were tedious twenty years ago.  Other than that, so much of political debate seems to be negotiated through dreary clickbait pieces that don't even particularly look worth reading, let along spending any substantial time in response.  I suspect I will make an exception to write a review about publication of Stuart Hall's 1983 lectures on cultural studies, but that's more of an academic topic.  If there are some particularly interesting recent political interventions, please let me know.

      On the other hand, I have some potential ideas for topics focused on science fiction and genre fiction.  It's material that often falls on fallow ground with my small and activist oriented audience, but its a topic that I'm still interested in.  I'm planning on writing a sort of review of Nisi Shawl's Everfair.  For those who don't keep up on these matters, Shawl has produced a sort of revisionist steampunk novel.  Building off the critiques that the genre has tended to ignore the racism and imperialism that defined the era it fetishizes, Shawl has produced a novel that is set in the colonial space of the Belgian Congo.  The narrative constructs an alternative history that imagines a challenge to Leopold's colonial project in the form of an unstable alliance of Fabian socialists, African American abolitionists, and a substantial indigenous resistance.  I don't think Shawl lives up to the monumental task she sets up for herself with the project, but it's a very interesting failure and I want to write about that failure.

     In addition, I'm planning on writing about the Hugos.  I've been a part of the voting process for the past two years, which is something anyone can do if they are willing to spend forty bucks to join up, but I want to write about my process of voting this time.  My hope is that we have seen the end of the reactionary puppy campaigns to subvert the election process and that we will have a lot more interesting science fiction to read and discuss in the top nominations of the year.  I've avoided writing about the material before this year because of the tedious nonsense nominated by those campaigns, and I'm hoping we will see an end to that trend.  I'm also going to finally start writing about the Stephen King and Margaret Atwood novels that I have been reading for the past year or so.  I'm not entirely sure what I want to write about in regards to Atwood, but I really want to think about the moments that King discusses race and racism in his early novels.  (If you're interested in the topic, I recommend looking at It and Carrie in particular.)    

Brecht's Measures Taken as an Activist Pedagogical Project

     I've been periodically thinking about a series of didactic plays written by Bertolt Brecht in the early 1930's, which are commonly grouped under the rubric of the "learning plays", for the past few years.  The learning plays were a collection of experimental theatrical works put together by Brecht and his collaborators in the late 1920's and early 1930's, designed to explore the concepts developed in his theoretical writings.  The plays were designed to break down the barrier between audience and actors, transforming the theater into a space of learning and engagement.  More specifically, I've been thinking about a play that was written for amateur workers' theatrical groups, Measures Taken.  You can see my initial thoughts about the play here.  Despite the fact that the play was explicitly written as a direct political intervention into the crisis of the Weimar Republic to be presented by workers' groups outside traditional theatrical settings, very little effort have been made to read the plays within this political context.  In a sense, it's understandable.  After all, the play itself was a failure, rejected by the structures of the German Communist Party and performed minimally. But, exploring that framework can provide a useful lens for thinking about the process of organizing, as well as the roll of organizers.

      The narrative structure of the play can be understood as an elaboration of two previously written learning plays, "He Said Yes" and "He Said No."  Each were thinly rewritten versions of classical Japanese No plays.  Both narratives were substantively the same; in each case, a journey is taken to deliver a set of documents, and in each case, the delivery of those documents is potentially put in danger by the misbehavior of one of the younger members of the party, who is injured due to this misbehavior.  The decision made on how to rectify this situation, however, radically differs.  In the first play, the individual decides to sacrifice his life in order to allow for the journey to continue, while in the second play, the individual rejects that idea, and simply proposes that the party returns to take on the journey at a different time.  While the ethical implications to each situation is radically different, each frames the ethical quandary of the play through this moment of decision, between life and death, between a strong commitment to duty and a commitment to the well being of the individuals involved in the upholding of that duty.

       However, when we turn to the narrative structure of "The Measures Taken", we a substantial transformation of the narrative.  The setting shifts from the setting of the classical No plays to the revolutionary situation in contemporary China, as defined by the crisis in the party after the destruction of the party by the Guomindang.  The play is no longer defined by a single moment of decision.  Instead, the narrative structure is stretched out, and is defined by a long series of small decisions, each of which has its consequences, but ones that are set up a new framework of choices, which themselves lead to the need for other decisions.  In each case, the figure of the young comrade makes a mistake in the process of organizing, a mistake of solving the immediate problem himself, rather than seeing the problem as an organizing opportunity, that is to say, as an opportunity to help the people involved self-organizing skills.  In each situation, the young comrade is given the opportunity to self-criticize, and in each situation, the young comrade recognizes her or his errors and commits to the revolutionary project.  The narrative ends with a moment of crisis.  Something has gone deeply wrong, and the young comrade is badly injured.  She or he insists on sacrificing herself or himself, rather than jeopardizing the project.  Indeed, its this very act of sacrifice that allows the revolution to go forward, and the committee members reporting back note that it was a contribution that the party had not expected.

      However, to fully understand the implications of the play we need to move beyond the simple structure of the narrative and to take a little bit of time to discuss some of the basic framework of the performance of the play itself.  Designed for street and other contingent modes of performance, the play requires minimal set work.  One could go farther and argue that the play is designed for very small groups, for political discussion groups, for educational groups, etc.  Rather than imagining the theatrical experience as spectacle, the play is designed for the actors and the audience to discuss the play, for the play to be an educational experience for all involved.  More significantly, the cast, who are in masks, rotate roles in the play, which means that every individual, at some point takes on the role of the young comrade.  In effect, the play asks each of the actors, who is most likely an activist or organizer herself or himself to reflect on a moment of failure, of a moment in which she or he caused the failure of an aspect of a project through a set of mistaken actions.  Moreover, it implicitly recognizes that any organizing project is going to be littered with these moments of failure.  The difference between the failed project and the successful project, at least the difference that can be controlled, is not the lack of failure, but the recognition and acceptance of that failure, and the commitment to develop new practices from those inevitable moments of failure.

     The play, in effect, becomes a meditation on the experience of failure and the mechanisms to learn from that failure and change, rather than slipping into despair or into defensiveness.  By doing so, it marks failure as a normal part of organizing, as something that must be dealt with and moved beyond.  Additionally, there will be many occasions when those failures were caused by the fairly ordinary mistakes made by the organizers and activists involved in the project.  But, perhaps more significantly, the play forces its participants and small audience to recognize that there is going to be a moment where they are the young comrade, that is, where a small or large error they made translated into a moment of defeat for the project.  It attempts to deflate the impact of that experience, to create the conditions in which that individual can recognize that error and attempt to make amends.  It's a process that I believe we rather desperately need within the structures of subcultural activism that I had been a part of for a number of years, which is ironic, because we fail so often, at so many levels.  But we lack the structural mechanisms to engage with that failure, to make its experience ordinary, to neutralize the trauma involved in it to allow for reflection.  I'm not sure how to do it, perhaps a return to this theatrical experimentation would provide a framework for thinking about the process.