Check out these videos shot at some sort of festival in Vancouver. Journalist Avi Lewis is moderating a discussion between Chief Arthur Manuel of the Secwepemc Nation and writer Naomi Klein about social movements within the Canadian state. They cover issues such as the upsurge in visibility for Canadian movements in 2010, discussions about tactics, questions of alliance, and the tar sands. All of what they say is worth critical engagement. Some of what they say is great, some requires further critical reflection. I think the enthusiasm for the upsurge in activism in Canada in 2010 ignores to a certain extent the situation outside of the the three largest cities, for example, and I was troubled by Klein's repeated use of the metaphor of "insanity" to talk about capitalism. However, I thought her description of the current surge of frantic resource extraction efforts by states and corporations as a "final colonial pillage" was a great way to characterize what's going on. Anyway, have a watch and see for yourself!
Sunday, September 26, 2010
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Review: States of Race
[Sherene Razack, Malinda Smith, and Sunera Thobani, editors. States of Race: Critical Race Feminism for the 21st Century. Toronto: Between the Lines, 2010.]
When faced with the awful, violent, oppressive social world that produces each and every one of us, the basic question is, "What do I do?" That gets asked and answered in different ways depending on your particular experience of social relations -- the variant that sounds like "What issues should I get involved with?" is usually a product of privilege, whereas "How can I best engage in this fight that I've been forced into since birth?" is more a consequence of oppression, to give one simple example. However, it is a question of relevance to all of us.
One recurrent theme in debates surrounding social change activity and relevant academic theorizing over at least the last forty years can be understood as conflict about how and how much we should recognize that the real world is a pretty complicated place. It doesn't break down to an easy polarization, but one point upon which many variants of one side in this debate implicitly or explicitly depend is that our movements are weakened if we recognize complexity, and we should focus on thought/action that is simplified and speaks to as broad a range of people as possible. You can see this in lots of quite different contexts -- from (mostly-white, mostly-male) academic marxists being dismissive of politics grounded in close attention to race or gender, or to the importance of discourse; to simplistic economic populism being touted as an answer to the flagging fortunes of liberal and progressive politics; to the arrogance displayed by much of the male New Left towards women's struggles, and by many subsequent feminist formations to struggle and theory produced by radical women of colour; to the countless, constant ways in which very real limitations in capacity and resources in contemporary social movement spaces are used as excuses to justify reproduction of racism, sexism, ableism, heterosexism, and all the rest. Refusal to recognize the complexity of the world is generally not the fundamental issue in these cases -- usually it is a refusal to acknowledge and deal with privilege in a politically responsible way. However, the refusal of complexity is at least a way-station through which all of these different trains travel. And, obviously, such a rejection is politically troubling, to say the least, because it involves erasing, dismissing, silencing, derailing, and otherwise raising a big ol' middle finger to whoever is not centred in whatever simplification is being embraced. Which usually ends up being the same folks who are always on the receiving end of such treatment.
At the same time, complexity is, well, complicated. We can't do everything, say everything, take everything into account. No real world political practice based in a finite group of people can do it. No single piece of analysis can do it. The politics of purity and of paralysis that result from fear of ever messing up don't do anyone any favours. However, both in terms of political practices and in terms of written analysis, it is possible to adopt ways of approaching the partial slice of the complex world that you are dealing with that are responsible, that seek dialogue, and that are open to challenge and to transformation -- that is, that integrate a responsiveness to how complicated is the social organization of the awful violence and oppression that are endemic to current social relations.
This volume does not focus particularly on the question of action, but rather takes on the essential task of mapping out the ways in which oppressive social relations in particular corners are organized. It comes from that spectrum of political thinkers that has always been one of the most important sources of such complex, grounded, open, and responsible analysis: those who identify with (overlapping but not synonymous) labels like "anti-racist feminism" and "woman of colour feminism" and "womanism" and "indigenous feminism" and "critical race feminism." My sense is that this book is intended as one more small, steady step in elaborating those perspectives in the Canadian context.
The eight essays in this volume are written by critical race feminists based in the Canadian academy, including names I know like Sherene Razack, Sunera Thobani, and Patricia Monture, as well as several others whose work I have never encountered before. The essays cover a lot of ground, but the three themes that stood out most clearly for me are the academy, the so-called 'global war on terror,' and whiteness.
Patricia Monture writes about the struggles to survive and thrive that she and other racialized women have faced in Canadian universities. Malinda Smith traces efforts to redress historical barriers to white women and women and men of colour in the academy. Over time, universities have transitioned from a social justice frame for dealing with such questions to a neoliberal diversity frame, and along the way have implemented changes that primarily benefit white women as the principle "Other" and render racialized people and people marginalized in other ways as "other Others" whose full inclusion in the academy is perpetually deferred. Yasmin Jiwani examines media portrayals of Muslim women and the issue of veiling in the Canadian context in stories set within Canada and in those set in Afghanistan, the country in which Canadian troops are currently part of an army of occupation. Sherene Razack builds on her earlier work that expands Giorgio Agamben's idea of the 'state of exception' to examine yet another area of treatment of racialized Muslims by the Canadian state, in this case the situation of "security delayed" refugee claimants.
The one essay that does not quite fit the three central themes that I've outlined is Isabel Altamirano-Jimenez's discussion of indigenous women, nationalism, and feminism. She challenges the tendency among some indigenous nationalisms to subordinate the experiences and struggles of women to the cause of national liberation. She makes arguments based on a sensitive understanding of the cultural and political diversity of indigenous women that argues against the patrolling of political boundaries with the weapon of 'authenticity' and that points out the at least partially colonial character of many discourses of indigeneity that many such nationalisms are based on, given the powerful role of colonizing states and other oppressive institutions in shaping the idea of "the indigenous."
Sunera Thobani looks at writings about the so-called war on terror by three white North American women who embrace the label "feminist:" second-wave icon turned neocon Phyllis Chesler; postmodern feminist superstar and strong anti-war/anti-occupation voice Judith Butler; and socialist-feminist Zillah Eisenstein, who is also anti-war and anti-imperialist. Despite the diversity of their politics, Thobani identifies underlying elements that are similar across all three relating to their discussion of (or silences about) white supremacy and Western imperial supremacy. Sedef Arat-Koç's contribution is a fascinating article about the reconfiguration of whiteness in the neoliberal era, noting several ways in which the simple equation between whiteness and privilege has been shaken in the current era -- the erosion of welfare states expelling some of the white working classes from automatic access to certain privileges they have been able to count on for several generations; the tenuous hold on whiteness held by some Eastern Europeans in the new Europe; and the social whitening of some local elites in so-called Third World countries through immense class privilege. She points out, of course, that this complication of the social consequences of whiteness is not the same as the disappearance of white supremacy, or even its weakening, given the ways in which the so-called war on terror and various flavours of anti-immigrant politics are part of larger patterns "which simultaneously exclude and incorporate marginal whites in whiteness" and stabilize white supremacy [164]. The final essay is by Gada Mahrouse, and it uses the examples of transnational solidarity activism and socially responsible tourism to talk about ways in which uncritically embraced efforts to "do good," even with a social justice frame, can reproduce "racial liberalism" and therefore white supremacy when not examined through a critical race feminist lens [169].
In reading this book, I became quite conscious that despite the increasing availability of such rich, nuanced analyses of aspects of the social relations which surround me and produced me, far too often I feel that the variant of "What do I do?" that is most relevant to my decision-making is one embarassingly steeped in privilege and in the paralysis that poorly navigated privilege often produces. I have the sense that my interventions in the world which are organized around writing are at least partially (with no shortage of problems and perhaps more aspiration than realization) responsive to work like that in this volume. And my everyday, individual, non-writing interventions may not always reflect the courage that my politics demand, but the various imperatives to not be silent, to figure out your own stuff, and to generally be a responsible ally are knowable and, generally, known. But I feel that the collective interventions in the world to which I contribute these days have done much, much less to take up the challenge that such work makes to all of us. I'm thinking particularly of the white-dominated social movement left that is currently my main political home.
I'm not satisfied with any of the explanations I currently have for this lack of collective responsiveness. Though some of us prioritize such responsiveness in principal, many do not, and the combination of privilege-based resistance and privilege-based paralysis can be pretty toxic. However, I think one element beyond that is the unreflective attachment that many of our groups have to particular practices and tactics that are predicated on the existence of a clear (and oversimplified) external opponent and an implicit rejection of complexity, even though many of us know better. I think this is part of the reason why hard political work on practices at the individual level often fall down in the translation to collective practices, especially when it comes to things like grounding our political work in seeing our own complicity and to seeing ourselves as existing within-and-against oppressive social relations. Perhaps one fruitful path will be to combine the sort of analysis that Mahrouse begins to lay out in her essay with a greater willingness to set aside our existing biases about what "the real work" looks like.
In any case, this book is an important contribution by an important group of scholars whose work has not had nearly as broad an impact as it deserves. As the editors discuss academic resistance to change, they note, "With few exceptions, the disciplinary literatures evidence a kind of amnesia, containment of the 'race question,' or systematic forgetting" [10]. Those of us doing intellectual labour both within and outside the academy must continue to prioritize this struggle against "systematic forgetting," both as it manifests in ourselves and in its broader, social expressions.
[For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]
When faced with the awful, violent, oppressive social world that produces each and every one of us, the basic question is, "What do I do?" That gets asked and answered in different ways depending on your particular experience of social relations -- the variant that sounds like "What issues should I get involved with?" is usually a product of privilege, whereas "How can I best engage in this fight that I've been forced into since birth?" is more a consequence of oppression, to give one simple example. However, it is a question of relevance to all of us.
One recurrent theme in debates surrounding social change activity and relevant academic theorizing over at least the last forty years can be understood as conflict about how and how much we should recognize that the real world is a pretty complicated place. It doesn't break down to an easy polarization, but one point upon which many variants of one side in this debate implicitly or explicitly depend is that our movements are weakened if we recognize complexity, and we should focus on thought/action that is simplified and speaks to as broad a range of people as possible. You can see this in lots of quite different contexts -- from (mostly-white, mostly-male) academic marxists being dismissive of politics grounded in close attention to race or gender, or to the importance of discourse; to simplistic economic populism being touted as an answer to the flagging fortunes of liberal and progressive politics; to the arrogance displayed by much of the male New Left towards women's struggles, and by many subsequent feminist formations to struggle and theory produced by radical women of colour; to the countless, constant ways in which very real limitations in capacity and resources in contemporary social movement spaces are used as excuses to justify reproduction of racism, sexism, ableism, heterosexism, and all the rest. Refusal to recognize the complexity of the world is generally not the fundamental issue in these cases -- usually it is a refusal to acknowledge and deal with privilege in a politically responsible way. However, the refusal of complexity is at least a way-station through which all of these different trains travel. And, obviously, such a rejection is politically troubling, to say the least, because it involves erasing, dismissing, silencing, derailing, and otherwise raising a big ol' middle finger to whoever is not centred in whatever simplification is being embraced. Which usually ends up being the same folks who are always on the receiving end of such treatment.
At the same time, complexity is, well, complicated. We can't do everything, say everything, take everything into account. No real world political practice based in a finite group of people can do it. No single piece of analysis can do it. The politics of purity and of paralysis that result from fear of ever messing up don't do anyone any favours. However, both in terms of political practices and in terms of written analysis, it is possible to adopt ways of approaching the partial slice of the complex world that you are dealing with that are responsible, that seek dialogue, and that are open to challenge and to transformation -- that is, that integrate a responsiveness to how complicated is the social organization of the awful violence and oppression that are endemic to current social relations.
This volume does not focus particularly on the question of action, but rather takes on the essential task of mapping out the ways in which oppressive social relations in particular corners are organized. It comes from that spectrum of political thinkers that has always been one of the most important sources of such complex, grounded, open, and responsible analysis: those who identify with (overlapping but not synonymous) labels like "anti-racist feminism" and "woman of colour feminism" and "womanism" and "indigenous feminism" and "critical race feminism." My sense is that this book is intended as one more small, steady step in elaborating those perspectives in the Canadian context.
The eight essays in this volume are written by critical race feminists based in the Canadian academy, including names I know like Sherene Razack, Sunera Thobani, and Patricia Monture, as well as several others whose work I have never encountered before. The essays cover a lot of ground, but the three themes that stood out most clearly for me are the academy, the so-called 'global war on terror,' and whiteness.
Patricia Monture writes about the struggles to survive and thrive that she and other racialized women have faced in Canadian universities. Malinda Smith traces efforts to redress historical barriers to white women and women and men of colour in the academy. Over time, universities have transitioned from a social justice frame for dealing with such questions to a neoliberal diversity frame, and along the way have implemented changes that primarily benefit white women as the principle "Other" and render racialized people and people marginalized in other ways as "other Others" whose full inclusion in the academy is perpetually deferred. Yasmin Jiwani examines media portrayals of Muslim women and the issue of veiling in the Canadian context in stories set within Canada and in those set in Afghanistan, the country in which Canadian troops are currently part of an army of occupation. Sherene Razack builds on her earlier work that expands Giorgio Agamben's idea of the 'state of exception' to examine yet another area of treatment of racialized Muslims by the Canadian state, in this case the situation of "security delayed" refugee claimants.
The one essay that does not quite fit the three central themes that I've outlined is Isabel Altamirano-Jimenez's discussion of indigenous women, nationalism, and feminism. She challenges the tendency among some indigenous nationalisms to subordinate the experiences and struggles of women to the cause of national liberation. She makes arguments based on a sensitive understanding of the cultural and political diversity of indigenous women that argues against the patrolling of political boundaries with the weapon of 'authenticity' and that points out the at least partially colonial character of many discourses of indigeneity that many such nationalisms are based on, given the powerful role of colonizing states and other oppressive institutions in shaping the idea of "the indigenous."
Sunera Thobani looks at writings about the so-called war on terror by three white North American women who embrace the label "feminist:" second-wave icon turned neocon Phyllis Chesler; postmodern feminist superstar and strong anti-war/anti-occupation voice Judith Butler; and socialist-feminist Zillah Eisenstein, who is also anti-war and anti-imperialist. Despite the diversity of their politics, Thobani identifies underlying elements that are similar across all three relating to their discussion of (or silences about) white supremacy and Western imperial supremacy. Sedef Arat-Koç's contribution is a fascinating article about the reconfiguration of whiteness in the neoliberal era, noting several ways in which the simple equation between whiteness and privilege has been shaken in the current era -- the erosion of welfare states expelling some of the white working classes from automatic access to certain privileges they have been able to count on for several generations; the tenuous hold on whiteness held by some Eastern Europeans in the new Europe; and the social whitening of some local elites in so-called Third World countries through immense class privilege. She points out, of course, that this complication of the social consequences of whiteness is not the same as the disappearance of white supremacy, or even its weakening, given the ways in which the so-called war on terror and various flavours of anti-immigrant politics are part of larger patterns "which simultaneously exclude and incorporate marginal whites in whiteness" and stabilize white supremacy [164]. The final essay is by Gada Mahrouse, and it uses the examples of transnational solidarity activism and socially responsible tourism to talk about ways in which uncritically embraced efforts to "do good," even with a social justice frame, can reproduce "racial liberalism" and therefore white supremacy when not examined through a critical race feminist lens [169].
In reading this book, I became quite conscious that despite the increasing availability of such rich, nuanced analyses of aspects of the social relations which surround me and produced me, far too often I feel that the variant of "What do I do?" that is most relevant to my decision-making is one embarassingly steeped in privilege and in the paralysis that poorly navigated privilege often produces. I have the sense that my interventions in the world which are organized around writing are at least partially (with no shortage of problems and perhaps more aspiration than realization) responsive to work like that in this volume. And my everyday, individual, non-writing interventions may not always reflect the courage that my politics demand, but the various imperatives to not be silent, to figure out your own stuff, and to generally be a responsible ally are knowable and, generally, known. But I feel that the collective interventions in the world to which I contribute these days have done much, much less to take up the challenge that such work makes to all of us. I'm thinking particularly of the white-dominated social movement left that is currently my main political home.
I'm not satisfied with any of the explanations I currently have for this lack of collective responsiveness. Though some of us prioritize such responsiveness in principal, many do not, and the combination of privilege-based resistance and privilege-based paralysis can be pretty toxic. However, I think one element beyond that is the unreflective attachment that many of our groups have to particular practices and tactics that are predicated on the existence of a clear (and oversimplified) external opponent and an implicit rejection of complexity, even though many of us know better. I think this is part of the reason why hard political work on practices at the individual level often fall down in the translation to collective practices, especially when it comes to things like grounding our political work in seeing our own complicity and to seeing ourselves as existing within-and-against oppressive social relations. Perhaps one fruitful path will be to combine the sort of analysis that Mahrouse begins to lay out in her essay with a greater willingness to set aside our existing biases about what "the real work" looks like.
In any case, this book is an important contribution by an important group of scholars whose work has not had nearly as broad an impact as it deserves. As the editors discuss academic resistance to change, they note, "With few exceptions, the disciplinary literatures evidence a kind of amnesia, containment of the 'race question,' or systematic forgetting" [10]. Those of us doing intellectual labour both within and outside the academy must continue to prioritize this struggle against "systematic forgetting," both as it manifests in ourselves and in its broader, social expressions.
[For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]
Monday, September 20, 2010
Rally in Solidarity with Strikers at Northern Ontario School of Medicine
There is a rally supporting the strikers from 3 pm to 5 pm at the South Bay Road picket line on Wednesday, September 22. Here are the details I received:
If you are in Sudbury, please come on out! And, as I blogged earlier, anyone can get in touch with the presidents of Lakehead and Laurentian and tell them to use their influence to pressure for a fair deal for workers -- according to literature distributed by the strikers, you can get in touch with Dominic Giroux, president of Laurentian, by calling 705-673-6567 or emailing president@laurentian.ca. You can get in touch with Brian J.R. Stevenson, president of Lakehead, at 807-343-8200 or at bstevens@lakehead.ca. For the FaceBook event, go here.
Wednesday, September 22: Students and Workers United - Solidarity Rally with
OPSEU Local 677
Students and Workers United
Solidarity Rally
South Bay Road Picket line
Wednesday, September 22
3:00pm
Last Friday, talks between NOSM management and OPSEU Local 677 broke off with none of the central concerns of the workers having been addressed. OPSEU initiated negotiations in October of 2009 and has spent hundreds of hours at the bargaining table to try to defend the working conditions they already had.
Laurentian University claims that they are not a party in this labour dispute between OPSEU and NOSM. What they do not say is that Laurentian University and NOSM are interconnected.
Dominic Giroux is the vice-chair of NOSM’s board of directors by virtue of his position as the president of Laurentian University. NOSM diplomas and letterheads say Laurentian and Lakehead University, not NOSM. When recruiting future students, Laurentian University is quick to tell people that we have a medical school on campus.
Laurentian University also said that OPSEU agreed to provide free flowing access to the broader Laurentian community. This is absolutely false. OPSEU has never agreed to these terms either verbally or in writing.
Laurentian University says they are concerned about safety and security throughout this strike, but this misinformation has created a situation where picketers’ safety is at risk.
What are the real issues? The central concern for OPSEU is not wages. OPSEU concerns include:
Hours of work (management demands that they be available at any time)
Layoffs
Contracting out
Overtime
Transfer to other locations
Help us tell NOSM and Laurentian University that we will not accept bad faith bargaining and the denial of workers’ rights on our campus.
For more information, contact GSA@laurentian.ca
If you are in Sudbury, please come on out! And, as I blogged earlier, anyone can get in touch with the presidents of Lakehead and Laurentian and tell them to use their influence to pressure for a fair deal for workers -- according to literature distributed by the strikers, you can get in touch with Dominic Giroux, president of Laurentian, by calling 705-673-6567 or emailing president@laurentian.ca. You can get in touch with Brian J.R. Stevenson, president of Lakehead, at 807-343-8200 or at bstevens@lakehead.ca. For the FaceBook event, go here.
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
A Cool Anti-Poverty Conference
In gathering information for an article (or perhaps several articles) that I wish to write, someone that I hope to interview drew my attention to a cool anti-poverty conference attempting to bridge academic and community spaces that is happening in Kingston, Ontario, on October 14-16. It is called !nstigate 2010: Anti-Poverty Rant-In. The deadline to submit papers or workshops is long past, but there is still lots of opportunity to sign up to attend. The schedule of events can be found here.
Having just found out about it today, I'm not sure whether I'll be attending or not. Still, there's a lot to recommend it. Judging by all of the links above, the commitment to making it meaningfully based in communities in struggle has been important in shaping the event. Even many of the more obviously academic elements are clearly oriented towards thinking through and promoting efforts to create social change. The lineup of presenters looks amazing. I've read or heard all five of the keynote speakers before, and think they are all very worth listening to -- Margaret Little, Pat Capponi, Francis Fox Piven, Peter Kulchyski, and John Clarke -- and lots of the workshops and presentations look pretty awesome as well.
Like I said, I have no idea if I'll be there or not, but it seems like a pretty useful place to be for people concerned with struggles against poverty and against neoliberalism in the Canadian context.
Having just found out about it today, I'm not sure whether I'll be attending or not. Still, there's a lot to recommend it. Judging by all of the links above, the commitment to making it meaningfully based in communities in struggle has been important in shaping the event. Even many of the more obviously academic elements are clearly oriented towards thinking through and promoting efforts to create social change. The lineup of presenters looks amazing. I've read or heard all five of the keynote speakers before, and think they are all very worth listening to -- Margaret Little, Pat Capponi, Francis Fox Piven, Peter Kulchyski, and John Clarke -- and lots of the workshops and presentations look pretty awesome as well.
Like I said, I have no idea if I'll be there or not, but it seems like a pretty useful place to be for people concerned with struggles against poverty and against neoliberalism in the Canadian context.
Sunday, September 12, 2010
Review: Shame and Sexuality
[Claire Pajaczkowska and Ivan Ward, editors. Shame and Sexuality: Psychoanalysis and Visual Culture. New York: Routledge, 2008.]
Shame is a very unpleasant individual experience. Shame and its mobilization are also an important element of the processes which socially regulate behaviour and thereby help to maintain oppressive forms of social organization. This book is not, therefore, as far off the beaten track of this blog as it might first appear. Moreover, shame is part of one of the broad thematic clusters which I decided to explore in reading and writing after finishing my book project, both because of its personal relevance to me and because of its social importance. Reading and reviewing this book is, therefore, both an effort to think through some of my own experiences but also a step in developing a better understanding of shame so as to be able to write insightfully about it.
I'm not sure how far down the path of reflecting on this issue that this book has really taken me, though. Neither am I sure that what I'm writing here is specific enough to the book in question to count as a review. I am beginning from the multiple disadvantages not only of the hesitance about writing from experience that comes with excessive shame, but also my relative ignorance of the two scholarly discourses at the heart of this book and my significant skepticism about one of those. Nonetheless, I will proceed.
Shame and Sexuality is a collection of academic essays. Most of the essays draw on psychoanalytic theory and some of them also draw on visual cultural criticism. This pairing is based in part on the connection between shame and the visual -- an overwhelming need not to be seen can be part of the experience of acute shame, and habits of limiting one's visibility are common strategies for avoiding such acute experiences among those who are prone to shame. However, I also get the sense that it is a combination that the editors see as clever and a bit daring. And in principle, it seems like a worthwhile approach.
However, like I said, I don't know much about either of those things. I know a little bit about cultural criticism in general, but very little about how it applies to visual culture. As a writer, I tend to pay a lot more attention to narrative forms. That includes media with a visual component, like graphic novels or television, but I feel out of my depth when it comes to non-narrative (or not-obviously-narrative) visual arts. Still, I have an interest in and sympathy for the inherently imprecise and unstable efforts to understand the symbolic and discursive aspects of the social world, so in principle I'm open to learning more about visual culture and how to understand it critically.
I know similarly little about psychoanalytic theory. I've encountered it, certainly -- I have run across some discussion of it as it relates to therapeutic practice, particularly in the reading I did to prepare for the chapter I wrote about anti-psychiatry organizing in Toronto in the '70s and '80s, and I've had tangential encounters with the high falutin theorizing to which it gave birth in the context of the (particularly French) academy. So my reservations about it may be a result of my ignorance. However, I still hold those reservations.
My experience of psychoanalytic theory in this book was similar to my previous encounters in that there were specific moments and specific insights that resonated with my own experience or with the analysis of self and the social that I already hold. I like the close attention to experience and to listening that is at least one of the places where psychoanalysis grounds itself. I like that it sees the self as dynamic and as formed by experience (and therefore through social relations, even if many of what I would consider to be the interesting political implications of this are largely not of interest to psychoanlaytic theory), and that it sees the self as not the kind of simplistic unity implied by much liberal-democratic theory. I respect the fact that clinical outcomes do give it a kind of practical grounding -- if your analysis allows you to help people with the issues in question, then there must be something to it.
However, for all of its close attention to experience, psychoanalytic theory seems to me to take on a mantle of certainty, of a kind of knowledge production based on reproducible external events that gets associated in our culture with science, when in fact it is a very different kind of project. There are plenty of places where something that is out-and-out not observable is described in a way that makes it seem like the author regards the description as settled fact, such as the processes of the development of self in very young children. It seems to me like meaning in this area and others is created out of close observation of adults mixed with guesswork and large helpings of ideology to create stories that cover up the unknowable, and also that sometimes seem to generalize the particular. Perhaps I'm being too harsh, and perhaps some or all of this is that I don't know enough about how the foundations of psychoanalytic knowledge came to be. But there are still things presented as settled fact, or at least as solid explanation, in psychoanalytic theory where the underpinnings that are presented are not, in my judgment, sufficient to support the conclusions drawn.
Yet where should I turn in search of theory to understand shame in ways that sensibly ties together the scales from my own personal experience to highest level of social organization? What resources are there for those of us who refuse to ignore the social embededness of our lives to theorize what goes on inside of us as part of that whole? I haven't discounted psychoanalytic theory as potentially useful -- that is, I'm open to learning more about it -- but I want some other options too.
I will be thinking and reading and writing more about this.
[For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]
Shame is a very unpleasant individual experience. Shame and its mobilization are also an important element of the processes which socially regulate behaviour and thereby help to maintain oppressive forms of social organization. This book is not, therefore, as far off the beaten track of this blog as it might first appear. Moreover, shame is part of one of the broad thematic clusters which I decided to explore in reading and writing after finishing my book project, both because of its personal relevance to me and because of its social importance. Reading and reviewing this book is, therefore, both an effort to think through some of my own experiences but also a step in developing a better understanding of shame so as to be able to write insightfully about it.
I'm not sure how far down the path of reflecting on this issue that this book has really taken me, though. Neither am I sure that what I'm writing here is specific enough to the book in question to count as a review. I am beginning from the multiple disadvantages not only of the hesitance about writing from experience that comes with excessive shame, but also my relative ignorance of the two scholarly discourses at the heart of this book and my significant skepticism about one of those. Nonetheless, I will proceed.
Shame and Sexuality is a collection of academic essays. Most of the essays draw on psychoanalytic theory and some of them also draw on visual cultural criticism. This pairing is based in part on the connection between shame and the visual -- an overwhelming need not to be seen can be part of the experience of acute shame, and habits of limiting one's visibility are common strategies for avoiding such acute experiences among those who are prone to shame. However, I also get the sense that it is a combination that the editors see as clever and a bit daring. And in principle, it seems like a worthwhile approach.
However, like I said, I don't know much about either of those things. I know a little bit about cultural criticism in general, but very little about how it applies to visual culture. As a writer, I tend to pay a lot more attention to narrative forms. That includes media with a visual component, like graphic novels or television, but I feel out of my depth when it comes to non-narrative (or not-obviously-narrative) visual arts. Still, I have an interest in and sympathy for the inherently imprecise and unstable efforts to understand the symbolic and discursive aspects of the social world, so in principle I'm open to learning more about visual culture and how to understand it critically.
I know similarly little about psychoanalytic theory. I've encountered it, certainly -- I have run across some discussion of it as it relates to therapeutic practice, particularly in the reading I did to prepare for the chapter I wrote about anti-psychiatry organizing in Toronto in the '70s and '80s, and I've had tangential encounters with the high falutin theorizing to which it gave birth in the context of the (particularly French) academy. So my reservations about it may be a result of my ignorance. However, I still hold those reservations.
My experience of psychoanalytic theory in this book was similar to my previous encounters in that there were specific moments and specific insights that resonated with my own experience or with the analysis of self and the social that I already hold. I like the close attention to experience and to listening that is at least one of the places where psychoanalysis grounds itself. I like that it sees the self as dynamic and as formed by experience (and therefore through social relations, even if many of what I would consider to be the interesting political implications of this are largely not of interest to psychoanlaytic theory), and that it sees the self as not the kind of simplistic unity implied by much liberal-democratic theory. I respect the fact that clinical outcomes do give it a kind of practical grounding -- if your analysis allows you to help people with the issues in question, then there must be something to it.
However, for all of its close attention to experience, psychoanalytic theory seems to me to take on a mantle of certainty, of a kind of knowledge production based on reproducible external events that gets associated in our culture with science, when in fact it is a very different kind of project. There are plenty of places where something that is out-and-out not observable is described in a way that makes it seem like the author regards the description as settled fact, such as the processes of the development of self in very young children. It seems to me like meaning in this area and others is created out of close observation of adults mixed with guesswork and large helpings of ideology to create stories that cover up the unknowable, and also that sometimes seem to generalize the particular. Perhaps I'm being too harsh, and perhaps some or all of this is that I don't know enough about how the foundations of psychoanalytic knowledge came to be. But there are still things presented as settled fact, or at least as solid explanation, in psychoanalytic theory where the underpinnings that are presented are not, in my judgment, sufficient to support the conclusions drawn.
Yet where should I turn in search of theory to understand shame in ways that sensibly ties together the scales from my own personal experience to highest level of social organization? What resources are there for those of us who refuse to ignore the social embededness of our lives to theorize what goes on inside of us as part of that whole? I haven't discounted psychoanalytic theory as potentially useful -- that is, I'm open to learning more about it -- but I want some other options too.
I will be thinking and reading and writing more about this.
[For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]
Friday, September 10, 2010
Supporting the Strikers at the Northern Ontario School of Medicine
I spent a bit of time yesterday morning at the picket line of the support staff who work at the Northern Ontario School of Medicine (NOSM), who are members of Ontario Public Service Employee Union (OPSEU) Local 677. The strike has been going on since August 16, after almost a year of negotiations trying to reach a first contract. Yesterday was a day of solidarity, in which supporters -- particularly supporters in the broader campus community, given that it is the first week of undergraduate classes, but those of us from off campus as well -- were encouraged to stop by the lines and to attend a rally in the afternoon that turned into an action focused on the office of the president of the university. I wasn't able to go to the afternoon event because of childcare responsibilities, but it was good to spend some time on the line. I got to chat with folks I know who are on strike and others from the larger campus community who were also there to show support.
I think this mobilization was an important first step, though my preliminary sense is that much more work needs to be done to build support for the strike on and off campus, and to challenge the tendency of unions to restrict their vision to very traditional kinds of strike-related activities and to ignore the centrality of broader political mobilization in winning strikes in a neoliberal era. I noted the dangers of this tendency in the context of my post-mortem of the massive mining strike that dominated the Sudbury community for just under a year and ended in early summer with a sound defeat of the workers. The lessons in that piece need to be transposed a bit to account for the different character of this dispute, but my overall sense that broader (campus and non-campus) community mobilization is the key to a victory for workers is much the same.
Sudbury's local daily paper has a good article on yesterday's event, which I have included below, but before I get to that, I want to make a couple of key points that are important to the dispute at the moment. One is the line by the medical school administration that their hands are tied because of provincial government efforts to push wage restraint onto the broader public sector. While the wage restraint efforts by the province are hugely important and need to be a focus for organizing by unions and communities (in the context of larger resistance to the post-G20 austerity agenda that is sweeping the world right now), this particular rhetorical use of this phenomenon by the medical school administration is outright deceptive. From what I understand, wages have not even been discussed yet in the bargaining. What the workers want, and what the administration is refusing, are very basic quality-of-work and quality-of-life issues that do not fall under wage restraint at all. The workers, for instance, do not like the demand by management to be able to bring them in on evenings and weekends with minimal notice and no overtime pay. Go figure. The workers also want their already existing benefit package and various other already existing work process standards to be enshrined in a contract so they cannot be arbitrarily changed by the administration -- this strike is for a first contract for this bargaining unit, remember. These are all pretty basic things to expect in a collective agreement.
The other key point raised in yesterday's action was the attempt by Laurentian University administration to distance itself from the strike. Again, this is disingenuous at the very least. While there is some technical separation between the medical school and Laurentian -- the med school also has a campus at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, where support workers are also on strike -- the line advanced by Laurentian that they are completely separate is just a lie. NOSM is Laurentian's faculty of medicine. That is integral to how NOSM is organized, to how its role on campus is envisioned, and to how it carries out its mission to produce doctors for northern Ontario. Laurentian also derives a great deal of prestige from having the medical school, and frequently uses its accomplishments in promoting the broader university. Also, the two senior spots on the board of governors of NOSM are the presidents of Lakehead and Laurentian. And as someone pointed out to me yesterday, the only words on NOSM's official logo are "Lakehead * Laurentian * Medicine."
So I encourage people in Sudbury and people across northern Ontario to put pressure on the NOSM administration but also on the presidents of Laurentian and Lakehead and tell them you want them to use the power of their positions to push for a fair deal for NOSM support staff. According to literature being handed out by the strikers, you can get in touch with Dominic Giroux, president of Laurentian, by calling 705-673-6567 or emailing president@laurentian.ca. You can get in touch with Brian J.R. Stevenson, president of Lakehead, at 807-343-8200 or at bstevens@lakehead.ca.
Here is the article from today's Sudbury Star:
(I should add, in the interest of full disclosure, that my partner is also a member of OPSEU Local 677 and a worker at the medical school, but in the bargaining unit of that local that is not on strike at the moment. If you poke around my blog a little bit to get a sense of my politics, it should be clear that this hasn't resulted in me saying anything I wouldn't be saying anyway.)
I think this mobilization was an important first step, though my preliminary sense is that much more work needs to be done to build support for the strike on and off campus, and to challenge the tendency of unions to restrict their vision to very traditional kinds of strike-related activities and to ignore the centrality of broader political mobilization in winning strikes in a neoliberal era. I noted the dangers of this tendency in the context of my post-mortem of the massive mining strike that dominated the Sudbury community for just under a year and ended in early summer with a sound defeat of the workers. The lessons in that piece need to be transposed a bit to account for the different character of this dispute, but my overall sense that broader (campus and non-campus) community mobilization is the key to a victory for workers is much the same.
Sudbury's local daily paper has a good article on yesterday's event, which I have included below, but before I get to that, I want to make a couple of key points that are important to the dispute at the moment. One is the line by the medical school administration that their hands are tied because of provincial government efforts to push wage restraint onto the broader public sector. While the wage restraint efforts by the province are hugely important and need to be a focus for organizing by unions and communities (in the context of larger resistance to the post-G20 austerity agenda that is sweeping the world right now), this particular rhetorical use of this phenomenon by the medical school administration is outright deceptive. From what I understand, wages have not even been discussed yet in the bargaining. What the workers want, and what the administration is refusing, are very basic quality-of-work and quality-of-life issues that do not fall under wage restraint at all. The workers, for instance, do not like the demand by management to be able to bring them in on evenings and weekends with minimal notice and no overtime pay. Go figure. The workers also want their already existing benefit package and various other already existing work process standards to be enshrined in a contract so they cannot be arbitrarily changed by the administration -- this strike is for a first contract for this bargaining unit, remember. These are all pretty basic things to expect in a collective agreement.
The other key point raised in yesterday's action was the attempt by Laurentian University administration to distance itself from the strike. Again, this is disingenuous at the very least. While there is some technical separation between the medical school and Laurentian -- the med school also has a campus at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, where support workers are also on strike -- the line advanced by Laurentian that they are completely separate is just a lie. NOSM is Laurentian's faculty of medicine. That is integral to how NOSM is organized, to how its role on campus is envisioned, and to how it carries out its mission to produce doctors for northern Ontario. Laurentian also derives a great deal of prestige from having the medical school, and frequently uses its accomplishments in promoting the broader university. Also, the two senior spots on the board of governors of NOSM are the presidents of Lakehead and Laurentian. And as someone pointed out to me yesterday, the only words on NOSM's official logo are "Lakehead * Laurentian * Medicine."
So I encourage people in Sudbury and people across northern Ontario to put pressure on the NOSM administration but also on the presidents of Laurentian and Lakehead and tell them you want them to use the power of their positions to push for a fair deal for NOSM support staff. According to literature being handed out by the strikers, you can get in touch with Dominic Giroux, president of Laurentian, by calling 705-673-6567 or emailing president@laurentian.ca. You can get in touch with Brian J.R. Stevenson, president of Lakehead, at 807-343-8200 or at bstevens@lakehead.ca.
Here is the article from today's Sudbury Star:
Rally supports strikers: Graduate Students'Association organizes rally for Northern Ontario Medical School staff
by Carol Mulligan, Sudbury Star, September 10, 2010.
About 40 students, Laurentian University faculty members and striking support staff from the Northern Ontario School of Medicine took their protest from the entrance of the university to the office of Laurentian president Dominic Giroux on Thursday afternoon.
What started as a solidarity rally for 150 members of OPSEU Local 677, organized by the Graduate Students' Association at Laurentian, turned into a long, winding march up the hill through the main university entrance to Giroux's office on the 11th floor of the R.D. Parker building.
The delegation was noisy but orderly as it demanded Giroux use his influence to encourage Northern Ontario School of Medicine Dean Dr. Roger Strasser to bargain in good faith with office and technical workers who are striking for a first contract.
They came carrying a paper chain whose links carried the names of students demanding Giroux get involved in the dispute.
Giroux was away in Ottawa and is not due back until Monday, but other top administrators with the university met demonstrators in the narrow hallway outside Giroux's office.
The delegation demanded that Giroux, who is vice-chair of the medical school's board of directors, put pressure on the rest of the board to settle a collective agreement.
Rafiq Rahemtulla, president of the Graduate Students' Association, told administrators that students throughout the university, not just those at Northern Ontario School of Medicine, are being affected by the strike.
There have been delays at the university entrance caused by picketers distributing literature, but that is the least of the inconvenience being experienced by students, said Rahemtulla.
Some research projects are being affected because medical school support staff are off the job, he said.
Striking members work at everything from clerical support to fundraising, provide Internet technical support for a school that relies on telemedicine and co-ordinates residencies for fourth-year medical students.
The delegation charged that the university is distancing itself from the labour dispute when, in fact, the Northern Ontario School of Medicine is the university's faculty of medicine and Strasser reports to Giroux. Some pointed out that medical degrees are granted by Laurentian University.
Chris Mercer, chief of staff at Laurentian, explained to protesters that the medical school is a separate legal entity from Laurentian and said the university is not represented on the Northern Ontario School of Medicine's bargaining committee, nor is it privy to negotiations.
The school has a second campus at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay and its OPSEU support staff are also on strike.
Local 677 went on strike Aug. 16 after a year of trying to bargain a first collective agreement.
Strasser has said the medical school's hands are tied because the Liberal government of Premier Dalton McGuinty has essentially frozen private-sector salaries.
But OPSEU Local 677 president Tyler England said the strike is not about money. Members want a collective agreement that puts in writing the wages and benefits they now have, says England.
The opposing factions met for two days of bargaining with a provincial mediator Sept. 1 and 2, but the talks were adjourned and could not be rescheduled for almost two weeks because the mediator was unavailable. They are set to resume Sept. 14-17 in Thunder Bay.
England said Thursday his bargaining team would have lking without the mediator, but he said the school's negotiators would not agree to that request.
Several Laurentian professors brought their students to the picket line Thursday. Political science professor John Peters, who is vice-president of the Sudbury and District Labour Council, said the labour community will give OPSEU strikers what they need to win a fair contract.
Sociology professor Gary Kinsman essentially held a first-year class on the picket line and spoke about his frustration at having to cross a picket line for the first time in his life, something he finds morally objectionable.
Peters, Kinsman and others are members of the Laurentian University Faculty Association and are required to report to work under the terms of their collective agreement.
A young woman representing undergraduate students said it made her sick to have to cross a picket line, but said she felt duty-bound to attend class.
Kinsman and others warned that picket lines could turn nasty -and even violent -as students and others on their way into the university are delayed by strikers.
Mercer agreed that strikers have the right to lawfully picket, but the union and others charge the university is misleading students saying picketers do not have the right to detain them.
That is leading to hard feelings and frustration for motorists, one of whom dodged through a line of picketers during Thursday's rally.
Mercer promised to arrange a meeting with Giroux next week if possible. Protesters promised to return if that meeting were not set up.
Political science professor Alan Shandro brought his class of students to the picket line and advised them on ways in which they could get involved in the labour dispute.
He urged them to contact the president's office or write letters, asking Giroux to get involved in settling the strike.
In August, the Canadian Federation of Students-Ontario, which represents more than 300,000 college and university students, passed a resolution supporting OPSEU Local 677, and encouraging members to write letters and participate in solidarity events.
(I should add, in the interest of full disclosure, that my partner is also a member of OPSEU Local 677 and a worker at the medical school, but in the bargaining unit of that local that is not on strike at the moment. If you poke around my blog a little bit to get a sense of my politics, it should be clear that this hasn't resulted in me saying anything I wouldn't be saying anyway.)
Monday, September 06, 2010
Bad Movies and Capitalism
When it comes to bad movies, I frequently place a big portion of the blame squarely at the feet of capitalism -- and I don't just mean individual movies that are bad, but also broader problems that are quite common among mainstream feature films, including ones that I like. Yet that exists in tension with my sense of the feature film as a media form that is extremely capitalist, in that it often involves extensive mobilization of resources to produce not-very-much. I have trouble seeing how anything but the possibility of generating profit could motivate that kind of use of resources on any regular basis. So what's an anti-capitalist who really likes going to the movies to do? What might post-capitalist films look like?
This somewhat silly and vaguely tongue-in-cheek post was inspired by me seeing a spectacularly awful movie on Saturday night. I went to see "Piranha 3D". It is a prime example of how capitalism is to blame for bad movies.
See, movies currently exist to make money. In order to make money, they must sell tickets. In order to sell tickets, they must attract people -- as many people as possible. To attract people to buy movie tickets, you don't actually need a movie that has a good story, that is well-written, or that is overall well done. Those things don't necessarily work against you, but they are secondary to having enough arbitrary pull-factors in the same two-hour package to get bums into seats. So, for instance, having a big name star in a movie is a pull-factor. Having lots of cool explosions can be a pull-factor. Drawing on a reliably popular story form -- the buddy cop flick, the boilerplate romantic comedy, etc. -- can be a pull-factor, perhaps with the inclusion of a novel twist that is intriguing but not threatening. Having lots of sex in the movie can be a pull-factor. Being connected with a well-known and well-liked pop culture franchise can be a pull-factor. You put enough of these together, and sink enough money into telling people that you have them through ads and trailers and such -- or into deceiving people into thinking you have them when the movie really doesn't -- and you can make money. A good story that is well-written is not necessarily the most easily mass marketable aspect of a movie, which means (in combination with the social organization of feature filmmaking in which creative decisions are often made by committees of executives and not actually content creators themselves) that even many films that we experience as "good" are actually this mish-mash of pull-factors stuck on top of stories and writing that are mediocre or worse.
"Piranha 3D" exemplifies this in an almost ridiculously extreme way. It has a small number of pull-factors. The horrible-terrifying-creature-eating-people trope is popular enough to guarantee some interest. Since that was about all I knew about the film when I bought my ticket, that's what got me. There are some points of pop culture cleverness that may bring in a few people via word-of-mouth, such as the intense references to Jaws, including a cameo by the rapidly eaten Richard Dreyfuss singing "show me the way to go home"(which I have to admit I quite enjoyed), and the small role for Christopher Lloyd playing, well, a generic Christopher Lloyd character. Perhaps the biggest pull-factor beyond the premise is the staggering amount of screen time given to extremely hetero-male-gaze-ish shots of bikini-clad and naked young skinny mostly-white women who meet dominant definitions of attractiveness, all in 3D -- the stereotypical thirteen year-old hetero boys will be sneaking in in droves, and many older hetero men whose sexualities continue to resemble those of stereotypical thirteen year-old boys will be paying full price. The film will probably make money, given it likely cost a reasonably modest amount (by Hollywood standards) to make. But it's an awful, awful movie. The story and writing are run-of-the-mill Hollywood bad, with plenty of implausible holes, dubious dialogue, and blatant cribbing from a hundred prior films.
The need to maximize profit and therefore mass appeal and the power over creation exerted by committees of businesspeople are also at least partially responsible for lots of the other things that are distasteful about movies in general, including many "good" movies. However you apportion the blame between actual processes of audience formation -- who has the money, who spends the money, why they spend it -- and ignorant, prejudicial assumptions about audience formation by studio executives, this drives the powerful imperative in Hollywood whereby dissident aesthetics, marginalized voices, and critical politics are kept in their subordinated places.
In terms of what post-capitalist movies might look like, there are at least a couple of ways to try and answer this question. One is the really deep and clever way. I read an essay a few months ago in a book of marxist commentary on science fiction -- "Art as 'the basic technique of life': Utopian art and art in utopia in The Dispossessed and Blue Mars" by William J. Burling. It didn't talk specifically about cinema, but about the arts more generally. It argued in ways that I'm not going to get into that transforming the means of production would result in changes in human consciousness such that art-like endeavours in a post-revolutionary society would be unrecognizable as such to people whose consciousness has developed under capitalism. I'm not sure I totally agree -- it struck me as a bit over the top -- but I suspect that there is something to the notion that radical differences in social organization would mean that arts and music and all of that would shift sideways and diagonally in ways that are hard to imagine from where we are now, though I think speculation could be fun. But I don't have it in me to make stuff up along those lines right now, so we'll move right along to more prosaic speculations.
I think in a post-capitalist world, films would have more variety and better writing but less spectacle. I think that a society that made decisions in some sort of decentralized, democratic way would, even if entertainment was highly valued and even if resources were not in short supply, be unlikely to regularly sink the resources equivalent to tens or hundreds of millions of dollars into producing two hours of entertainment. However, I suspect production and distribution systems would be very decentralized, which would allow for much greater variety in form and content than we currently see. This would probably include lots of things with very niche appeal, including lots that I would have no interest in but inevitably lots that would strike my fancy. Even better, I think such a world would have better written films because the drive to maximize inclusion of pull-factors would no longer crowd out good storytelling, and there would be more scope for creative vision to reach the screen without being filtered through committees of profit-conscious suits.
I have to admit that part of me would miss the spectacle, though. The improved writing and much broader range of form and content would be a fair trade, but I'd still miss the spectacle from time to time.
I wouldn't miss it if "Piranha 3D" didn't exist, though.
This somewhat silly and vaguely tongue-in-cheek post was inspired by me seeing a spectacularly awful movie on Saturday night. I went to see "Piranha 3D". It is a prime example of how capitalism is to blame for bad movies.
See, movies currently exist to make money. In order to make money, they must sell tickets. In order to sell tickets, they must attract people -- as many people as possible. To attract people to buy movie tickets, you don't actually need a movie that has a good story, that is well-written, or that is overall well done. Those things don't necessarily work against you, but they are secondary to having enough arbitrary pull-factors in the same two-hour package to get bums into seats. So, for instance, having a big name star in a movie is a pull-factor. Having lots of cool explosions can be a pull-factor. Drawing on a reliably popular story form -- the buddy cop flick, the boilerplate romantic comedy, etc. -- can be a pull-factor, perhaps with the inclusion of a novel twist that is intriguing but not threatening. Having lots of sex in the movie can be a pull-factor. Being connected with a well-known and well-liked pop culture franchise can be a pull-factor. You put enough of these together, and sink enough money into telling people that you have them through ads and trailers and such -- or into deceiving people into thinking you have them when the movie really doesn't -- and you can make money. A good story that is well-written is not necessarily the most easily mass marketable aspect of a movie, which means (in combination with the social organization of feature filmmaking in which creative decisions are often made by committees of executives and not actually content creators themselves) that even many films that we experience as "good" are actually this mish-mash of pull-factors stuck on top of stories and writing that are mediocre or worse.
"Piranha 3D" exemplifies this in an almost ridiculously extreme way. It has a small number of pull-factors. The horrible-terrifying-creature-eating-people trope is popular enough to guarantee some interest. Since that was about all I knew about the film when I bought my ticket, that's what got me. There are some points of pop culture cleverness that may bring in a few people via word-of-mouth, such as the intense references to Jaws, including a cameo by the rapidly eaten Richard Dreyfuss singing "show me the way to go home"(which I have to admit I quite enjoyed), and the small role for Christopher Lloyd playing, well, a generic Christopher Lloyd character. Perhaps the biggest pull-factor beyond the premise is the staggering amount of screen time given to extremely hetero-male-gaze-ish shots of bikini-clad and naked young skinny mostly-white women who meet dominant definitions of attractiveness, all in 3D -- the stereotypical thirteen year-old hetero boys will be sneaking in in droves, and many older hetero men whose sexualities continue to resemble those of stereotypical thirteen year-old boys will be paying full price. The film will probably make money, given it likely cost a reasonably modest amount (by Hollywood standards) to make. But it's an awful, awful movie. The story and writing are run-of-the-mill Hollywood bad, with plenty of implausible holes, dubious dialogue, and blatant cribbing from a hundred prior films.
The need to maximize profit and therefore mass appeal and the power over creation exerted by committees of businesspeople are also at least partially responsible for lots of the other things that are distasteful about movies in general, including many "good" movies. However you apportion the blame between actual processes of audience formation -- who has the money, who spends the money, why they spend it -- and ignorant, prejudicial assumptions about audience formation by studio executives, this drives the powerful imperative in Hollywood whereby dissident aesthetics, marginalized voices, and critical politics are kept in their subordinated places.
In terms of what post-capitalist movies might look like, there are at least a couple of ways to try and answer this question. One is the really deep and clever way. I read an essay a few months ago in a book of marxist commentary on science fiction -- "Art as 'the basic technique of life': Utopian art and art in utopia in The Dispossessed and Blue Mars" by William J. Burling. It didn't talk specifically about cinema, but about the arts more generally. It argued in ways that I'm not going to get into that transforming the means of production would result in changes in human consciousness such that art-like endeavours in a post-revolutionary society would be unrecognizable as such to people whose consciousness has developed under capitalism. I'm not sure I totally agree -- it struck me as a bit over the top -- but I suspect that there is something to the notion that radical differences in social organization would mean that arts and music and all of that would shift sideways and diagonally in ways that are hard to imagine from where we are now, though I think speculation could be fun. But I don't have it in me to make stuff up along those lines right now, so we'll move right along to more prosaic speculations.
I think in a post-capitalist world, films would have more variety and better writing but less spectacle. I think that a society that made decisions in some sort of decentralized, democratic way would, even if entertainment was highly valued and even if resources were not in short supply, be unlikely to regularly sink the resources equivalent to tens or hundreds of millions of dollars into producing two hours of entertainment. However, I suspect production and distribution systems would be very decentralized, which would allow for much greater variety in form and content than we currently see. This would probably include lots of things with very niche appeal, including lots that I would have no interest in but inevitably lots that would strike my fancy. Even better, I think such a world would have better written films because the drive to maximize inclusion of pull-factors would no longer crowd out good storytelling, and there would be more scope for creative vision to reach the screen without being filtered through committees of profit-conscious suits.
I have to admit that part of me would miss the spectacle, though. The improved writing and much broader range of form and content would be a fair trade, but I'd still miss the spectacle from time to time.
I wouldn't miss it if "Piranha 3D" didn't exist, though.
Thursday, September 02, 2010
Review: Crack Capitalism
[John Holloway. Crack Capitalism. New York: Pluto Press, 2010.]
I'm pretty sure I've observed before that it makes me wary when I like a book of political theory -- not just agree with it or find it interesting, but like it. "Like" can mean a bunch of different things, I suppose, but in this case it means that there is significant resonance between major elements of this book's approach and my own political sensibility. That goes a bit deeper than just tallying up points of agreement at the level of politics-as-explicit-propositions. Despite this resonance, however, I also have some serious questions about the analysis advanced by this book.
John Holloway is an Irish-born academic who has lived and worked in Mexico for almost twenty years, and who writes his work in tight conversation with the political theory and practice of the Zapatistas. His earlier book, Change The World Without Taking Power, has stimulated a great deal of discussion, both favourable and scornful, in the global justice movement and the left more broadly. He regards Crack Capitalism as the "daughter" of Change The World [10].
The Method of the Crack
The argument in this book revolves around two central points. The first is an observation of how struggle against capitalism is currently happening and how it should happen. He argues for taking action that breaks with the logic of capital, that refuses to have our every moment and our every effort mobilized in the service of profit and control and then uses that moment of refusal to build something that works otherwise, something that reflects our humanity, our desires, our impulse towards sociality. He argues that such moments happen all the time:
This continuity between revolt against the logic of capital that is everyday and untheorized with that which makes its anti-capitalism explicit is central to his politics. He argues, moreover, that such cracks have validity all on their own, whether they expand and grow or whether they disappear after their moment has passed -- that moment of human dignity is good enough reason for having acted that way. Yet he advocates an approach to social transformation that seeks to create resonances between cracks that begin in different particularities, that seeks to grow the cracks, network the cracks, and to struggle in confrontational ways against the violent pressures of capitalism to close the cracks and reduce all that is to the service of accumulation. This approach relies on all of the ways that all of us already revolt against capital without realizing it, and all of the ways that people work together to carve out spaces of dignity.
I quite like this part of the analysis. I think seeing the importance of everyday acts and their continuity with those things more often recognized as resistance is crucial. It is grounded in what is already happening and in theorizing ways to expand that. It is centrally about struggle which will truly liberate, which seeks to reweave the social flow of doing on the basis of our whole selves and our full desires, rather than moments of liberation which will be recaptured and re-reified in a new oppressive totality as with struggles which seek to take power from above. I'm wary of where this understanding could go if taken up in sectarian or fundamentalist ways, but as a loosely held starting point, I like it.
Doing Against Labour
The other central point is based on a particular re-reading of Marx. For Holloway, the method of the crack and everything else in his theory rests on Marx's insight into the dual character of labour, which he argues was regarded as hugely important by Marx himself but which has largely been neglected by subsequent theorists. In presenting this point, he uses constructions that those who read his earlier book will be familiar with, in which human beings whose lives are limited by oppressive and exploitative forms of social organization constantly exist within, against, and beyond those social relations -- constrained yet never quite fitting, disciplined but always rebelling. For Holloway, it is the dual character of labour that is the original example of this. That is, human doing which is creative and whole and directed by our desires and wishes and needs and knitted into an organic social flow of doing is, in capitalism, forced to become labour -- that is, work that is alienated, that is controlled by bosses and, more importantly, by the tyranny of value and the need not to starve. The social flow of doing is broken, and relations among people are transformed, both in discourse and in actual practice, into relations among things. Yet unalienated doing is constrained in the form of abstract labour, but it constantly strains against that containment. From this particular kind of subordination, which was both the essence of primitive accumulation in the early years of capital and which is the essence of the everyday violence of capitalism today, he trace the ways in which other forms of violent reification have taken hold, from gender, to a reshaping of the experience of time, to our relationship with nature.
I am less invested in this central point, though I'm sure Holloway would see it as the more important one. His understanding of the self existing within, against, and beyond oppressive constraints has always resonated with my own everyday experience and felt like a useful tool for understanding both the importance and the limitations of the ways in which our lives are shaped by social relations (which is often talked about in the reified language of "identity") so this particular way of using that approach feels pleasing to me as well. And it feels familiar. I know that feeling of alienated labour in my own everyday life, and I know that feeling of unalienated doing resenting, resisting, pushing against, sneaking around, leaking through, existing in tension with the alienation which constrains it. The larger theoretical use to which this is put feels, however, like it might be putting elegance ahead of messiness -- and in most places, Holloway is very attentive to the messiness of reality. So I guess what I'm wary of is hanging an entire approach to social transformation on an idiosyncratic reading of the work of one dead white guy, especially when I'm not convinced that many of the valuable things in this book are as dependent on this one point as it seems to claim. I'm not dismissing the point or the argument, but I'm holding it somewhat tentatively.
Affinities and Questions
There are lots of other bits and pieces that I like. I like the exhortations against sectarianism and purity politics, and against what one might call "correct line politics," even though Holloway does not use that exact term. I like its embrace of uncertainty. I like his skillful, at times even lyrical, writing. I like the emphasis on tools that give us insight into many diverse struggles but that are not premised, even implicitly, on forcing those struggles to adopt our language, our practices, our tools. I like that in seeing the ways in which experiences/categories shape and bind us, the book does not (usually -- there are a few exceptions) just dismiss the categories and by implication those who inhabit them and derive (limiting but real) strength from them, but seeks to open the categories, to go beyond, to be this-and-more. I like the emphasis on the everyday and its continuity with more visible forms of resistance. I really like the emphasis on critique that sees its role as unearthing the role of human beings and what we do in every and any phenomenon -- not abstract structures, not things, not "forces", but us. I like the way that this creates opening for transcending the supposed opposition between "individual" and "social." I like the emphasis on the importance of the particular. I like his skepticism of the state forms. I like the willingness to take seriously aspects of struggle usually neglected in marxist theory, such as gender and sexuality.
But, like I said, I have questions too.
For instance, take the last point in the paragraph above. He does treat things like gender oppression and sexual oppression as integral to capital, rather than just including them in a laundry list that is peripheral to the analysis a la the Trotskyist group that operated on campus when I was an undergraduate. I respect this and see it as a strength of Holloway's work. However. I agree that a big part of the history of the last five centuries has been the emergence of a totality -- the knitting together of social relations into a whole where before it was fragments and partiality and local relations. I agree that changes in relations of production have played a huge role in that, and that preexisting oppressive social relations (e.g. patriarchy) and oppressive social relations co-created with capitalism (colonization, white supremacy) have been transformed by and have also transformed relations of production. However, I am not convinced that the energy and logic of every single one of these can be reduced to the struggle of the dual character of labour. It is important, yes. It has an influence on all of these other oppressions, yes. But I just do not buy a single pivot point. I do not buy that there are no other oppressive logics, no other sources of energy driving the oppressive character of social relations.
I am also wary of Holloway's emphasis on negativity, which I think he inherits from the Frankfurt School. I see some value in it, some liberatory potential. But this emphasis on negativity, on rejecting the oppressive now and refusing to constrain in advance the self-determination in the liberatory tomorrow, means that the social spaces the book calls "cracks" are spaces of danger as well as opportunity. This aspect is dangerously undertheorized in the book. On the one hand, I agree that for self-determination to merit the term, we can't foreclose it, we can't impose on those who exist and create that space. I also appreciate that the book acknowledges that cracks are not pure spaces, not places that offer some kind of magical escape from oppression. Holloway writes,
Even leaving aside the unwarranted optimism about currently existing movements, the combination of leaving the content of the cracks in capitalism largely untheorized because of commitments to self-determination and negativity, and an admission that we strive towards rejecting these oppressive practices but do not always succeed, feels to me like a recipe for reproducing oppression and covering it with a vagueness that we won't talk about or can't talk about or deplore but feel we can get away with not challenging. After all, oppressive practices that are happening but that are organized such that it is extremely difficult to register it in discourse is increasingly a way that such relations are perpetuated now, under neoliberalism, as in the "racism without racism" that David Theo Goldberg writes about.
There also seems to be an element of resisting the urge to define cracks in some kind of formal way while still retaining the right to know them when you see them, which waves a similar kind of red flag for me in that it potentially helps to organize our perception of and response to oppressive practices in ways that are not necessarily useful. I can imagine, for example, some sort of rural compound populated by fundamentalist Christians who reject capitalist social relations and are largely self-sufficient, but who are explicitly and virulently patriarchal. I suspect Holloway would argue this is not really a crack based on the quote above and some of the surrounding material, but it isn't clear to me, given how it is currently theorized, that this has any more of a basis than just not liking that particular grouping. Such a space could quite conceivably reject the logic of capital but still be horrendously oppressive. In contrast, I can imagine some sort of rural, vaguely anarcho-inspired, hippyish commune that says all the right things, is explicitly against all forms of oppressive nastiness, but that through various cultural practices and material barriers is a pretty unfriendly place for people of colour and not very supportive of everyday political work of/in communities of colour. I can imagine, moreover, such a place being regarded by broader left-ish publics as a genuine crack, and worthy of forms of solidarity and cooperation and admiration that the compound above is not. I'm not saying anything about how these two hypotheticals should be regarded and responded to, just pointing out that the book's minimalist approach to the content of spaces that break in some respect with the logic of capital and try to do things differently but that (by the book's own admission are likely to) reproduce oppressive practices and relations in other respects is basically to avoid the issue, which is unhelpful.
So. The point I'm making is that cracks and their potentially oppressive contents are undertheorized and I can see ways in which that undertheorization and the ways in which it is justified could be ways to escape dealing with that oppression, even given an acknowledgment that imperfections are inevitable.
There are also some tensions in the theory that deserve more attention. For instance, there is no question that the book opposes sectarianism and puritanical politics, and encourages ways of work that avoid them. Yet there are also passages in which florid language about refusing to compromise with the state, and about the centrality of the revolt against labour rather than of labour, sounds pretty sectarian and puritanical. Again, this is an inevitable tension, and one that can only be resolved in the course of doing things. But I would still like to have heard more of what Holloway had to say about navigating such tensions in practice.
I also feel a faint anxiety that this approach would lead to us -- meaning people struggling against capitalism and other oppressions in diverse ways and under diverse banners -- to miss something, in the sense that its rejection of the state form and its rejection of dissident theorizing that is done from the standpoint of the totality might cause us to overlook something. I fundamentally agree with both of those stances, but I think it is probably good that people in revolutionary traditions that do not accept them will continue to challenge them.
I want to end on a more personal note. On my August trip to southern Ontario, one of the many social occasions in which I participated involved spending some time with folks with whom I used to do political work. As tends to happen on these occasions, two of these old comrades (both of whom identify as anarchists) got into a variation of the same argument they always get into when we get together. In this case, the focus was another individual in the community who has had lots of success recently mobilizing people around particular issues though whose politics are still pretty unformed. One of my comrades was pointing out some very real dangers in terms of reinforcing oppressions that can result from populist mobilizing among relatively privileged people that lacks political grounding, but at moments it sounded like he was saying that only people who have fully formed analyses should do anything at all. The other was enthusing about the importance of getting people in motion and figuring it out as you go along, but at moments sounded like he was saying that having a solid and grounded analysis was not just not necessary to start acting but was actively harmful. Personally, I thought this iteration of their argument was one of the more productive ones, for reasons I won't go into. But all of this is leading to the point that even as we were engaged in our drunken disputations, it occurred to me that Crack Capitalism might provide a basis for them to find the common ground that I know exists: It emphasizes that not only is it okay for all of us to rebel starting from where we are, but that we all do already, in ways small and large. It emphasizes that we do not need some sort of correct line to get in motion. At the same time, it also sees grounded critique and analysis not just as important but as integral to any effort to expand and multiply the cracks in capitalism. All of this ties into one of Holloway's favourite political maxims, the Zapatista slogan which is translated variously as "Asking we walk" or "Walking, we ask questions."
[For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]
I'm pretty sure I've observed before that it makes me wary when I like a book of political theory -- not just agree with it or find it interesting, but like it. "Like" can mean a bunch of different things, I suppose, but in this case it means that there is significant resonance between major elements of this book's approach and my own political sensibility. That goes a bit deeper than just tallying up points of agreement at the level of politics-as-explicit-propositions. Despite this resonance, however, I also have some serious questions about the analysis advanced by this book.
John Holloway is an Irish-born academic who has lived and worked in Mexico for almost twenty years, and who writes his work in tight conversation with the political theory and practice of the Zapatistas. His earlier book, Change The World Without Taking Power, has stimulated a great deal of discussion, both favourable and scornful, in the global justice movement and the left more broadly. He regards Crack Capitalism as the "daughter" of Change The World [10].
The Method of the Crack
The argument in this book revolves around two central points. The first is an observation of how struggle against capitalism is currently happening and how it should happen. He argues for taking action that breaks with the logic of capital, that refuses to have our every moment and our every effort mobilized in the service of profit and control and then uses that moment of refusal to build something that works otherwise, something that reflects our humanity, our desires, our impulse towards sociality. He argues that such moments happen all the time:
In some cases, this is direct and un-theorised: the friends who form a choir because they like to sing, the nurse who really tries to help her patients, the car worker who spends as much time as possible on his allotment. In other cases, it is part of an understanding that the rule of money is the centre of a whole system of social organisation, a system of domination that we call capitalism: in that case, the refusal to let money determine our activity is part of a conscious rejection of capitalism and understood as part of the struggle against capitalism... [21]
This continuity between revolt against the logic of capital that is everyday and untheorized with that which makes its anti-capitalism explicit is central to his politics. He argues, moreover, that such cracks have validity all on their own, whether they expand and grow or whether they disappear after their moment has passed -- that moment of human dignity is good enough reason for having acted that way. Yet he advocates an approach to social transformation that seeks to create resonances between cracks that begin in different particularities, that seeks to grow the cracks, network the cracks, and to struggle in confrontational ways against the violent pressures of capitalism to close the cracks and reduce all that is to the service of accumulation. This approach relies on all of the ways that all of us already revolt against capital without realizing it, and all of the ways that people work together to carve out spaces of dignity.
I quite like this part of the analysis. I think seeing the importance of everyday acts and their continuity with those things more often recognized as resistance is crucial. It is grounded in what is already happening and in theorizing ways to expand that. It is centrally about struggle which will truly liberate, which seeks to reweave the social flow of doing on the basis of our whole selves and our full desires, rather than moments of liberation which will be recaptured and re-reified in a new oppressive totality as with struggles which seek to take power from above. I'm wary of where this understanding could go if taken up in sectarian or fundamentalist ways, but as a loosely held starting point, I like it.
Doing Against Labour
The other central point is based on a particular re-reading of Marx. For Holloway, the method of the crack and everything else in his theory rests on Marx's insight into the dual character of labour, which he argues was regarded as hugely important by Marx himself but which has largely been neglected by subsequent theorists. In presenting this point, he uses constructions that those who read his earlier book will be familiar with, in which human beings whose lives are limited by oppressive and exploitative forms of social organization constantly exist within, against, and beyond those social relations -- constrained yet never quite fitting, disciplined but always rebelling. For Holloway, it is the dual character of labour that is the original example of this. That is, human doing which is creative and whole and directed by our desires and wishes and needs and knitted into an organic social flow of doing is, in capitalism, forced to become labour -- that is, work that is alienated, that is controlled by bosses and, more importantly, by the tyranny of value and the need not to starve. The social flow of doing is broken, and relations among people are transformed, both in discourse and in actual practice, into relations among things. Yet unalienated doing is constrained in the form of abstract labour, but it constantly strains against that containment. From this particular kind of subordination, which was both the essence of primitive accumulation in the early years of capital and which is the essence of the everyday violence of capitalism today, he trace the ways in which other forms of violent reification have taken hold, from gender, to a reshaping of the experience of time, to our relationship with nature.
I am less invested in this central point, though I'm sure Holloway would see it as the more important one. His understanding of the self existing within, against, and beyond oppressive constraints has always resonated with my own everyday experience and felt like a useful tool for understanding both the importance and the limitations of the ways in which our lives are shaped by social relations (which is often talked about in the reified language of "identity") so this particular way of using that approach feels pleasing to me as well. And it feels familiar. I know that feeling of alienated labour in my own everyday life, and I know that feeling of unalienated doing resenting, resisting, pushing against, sneaking around, leaking through, existing in tension with the alienation which constrains it. The larger theoretical use to which this is put feels, however, like it might be putting elegance ahead of messiness -- and in most places, Holloway is very attentive to the messiness of reality. So I guess what I'm wary of is hanging an entire approach to social transformation on an idiosyncratic reading of the work of one dead white guy, especially when I'm not convinced that many of the valuable things in this book are as dependent on this one point as it seems to claim. I'm not dismissing the point or the argument, but I'm holding it somewhat tentatively.
Affinities and Questions
There are lots of other bits and pieces that I like. I like the exhortations against sectarianism and purity politics, and against what one might call "correct line politics," even though Holloway does not use that exact term. I like its embrace of uncertainty. I like his skillful, at times even lyrical, writing. I like the emphasis on tools that give us insight into many diverse struggles but that are not premised, even implicitly, on forcing those struggles to adopt our language, our practices, our tools. I like that in seeing the ways in which experiences/categories shape and bind us, the book does not (usually -- there are a few exceptions) just dismiss the categories and by implication those who inhabit them and derive (limiting but real) strength from them, but seeks to open the categories, to go beyond, to be this-and-more. I like the emphasis on the everyday and its continuity with more visible forms of resistance. I really like the emphasis on critique that sees its role as unearthing the role of human beings and what we do in every and any phenomenon -- not abstract structures, not things, not "forces", but us. I like the way that this creates opening for transcending the supposed opposition between "individual" and "social." I like the emphasis on the importance of the particular. I like his skepticism of the state forms. I like the willingness to take seriously aspects of struggle usually neglected in marxist theory, such as gender and sexuality.
But, like I said, I have questions too.
For instance, take the last point in the paragraph above. He does treat things like gender oppression and sexual oppression as integral to capital, rather than just including them in a laundry list that is peripheral to the analysis a la the Trotskyist group that operated on campus when I was an undergraduate. I respect this and see it as a strength of Holloway's work. However. I agree that a big part of the history of the last five centuries has been the emergence of a totality -- the knitting together of social relations into a whole where before it was fragments and partiality and local relations. I agree that changes in relations of production have played a huge role in that, and that preexisting oppressive social relations (e.g. patriarchy) and oppressive social relations co-created with capitalism (colonization, white supremacy) have been transformed by and have also transformed relations of production. However, I am not convinced that the energy and logic of every single one of these can be reduced to the struggle of the dual character of labour. It is important, yes. It has an influence on all of these other oppressions, yes. But I just do not buy a single pivot point. I do not buy that there are no other oppressive logics, no other sources of energy driving the oppressive character of social relations.
I am also wary of Holloway's emphasis on negativity, which I think he inherits from the Frankfurt School. I see some value in it, some liberatory potential. But this emphasis on negativity, on rejecting the oppressive now and refusing to constrain in advance the self-determination in the liberatory tomorrow, means that the social spaces the book calls "cracks" are spaces of danger as well as opportunity. This aspect is dangerously undertheorized in the book. On the one hand, I agree that for self-determination to merit the term, we can't foreclose it, we can't impose on those who exist and create that space. I also appreciate that the book acknowledges that cracks are not pure spaces, not places that offer some kind of magical escape from oppression. Holloway writes,
Where capitalism treats people as means to an end, or as abstractions, or as groups which can be labelled, the push towards mutual recognition [in cracks] means the refusal to accept sexism, racism, ageism and all those other practices which treat people not as people but as the embodiment of labels, definitions, classifications. Although not always observed in practice, the rejection of these forms of labelling has become a universal principle in anti-capitalist movements throughout the world. [39-40]
Even leaving aside the unwarranted optimism about currently existing movements, the combination of leaving the content of the cracks in capitalism largely untheorized because of commitments to self-determination and negativity, and an admission that we strive towards rejecting these oppressive practices but do not always succeed, feels to me like a recipe for reproducing oppression and covering it with a vagueness that we won't talk about or can't talk about or deplore but feel we can get away with not challenging. After all, oppressive practices that are happening but that are organized such that it is extremely difficult to register it in discourse is increasingly a way that such relations are perpetuated now, under neoliberalism, as in the "racism without racism" that David Theo Goldberg writes about.
There also seems to be an element of resisting the urge to define cracks in some kind of formal way while still retaining the right to know them when you see them, which waves a similar kind of red flag for me in that it potentially helps to organize our perception of and response to oppressive practices in ways that are not necessarily useful. I can imagine, for example, some sort of rural compound populated by fundamentalist Christians who reject capitalist social relations and are largely self-sufficient, but who are explicitly and virulently patriarchal. I suspect Holloway would argue this is not really a crack based on the quote above and some of the surrounding material, but it isn't clear to me, given how it is currently theorized, that this has any more of a basis than just not liking that particular grouping. Such a space could quite conceivably reject the logic of capital but still be horrendously oppressive. In contrast, I can imagine some sort of rural, vaguely anarcho-inspired, hippyish commune that says all the right things, is explicitly against all forms of oppressive nastiness, but that through various cultural practices and material barriers is a pretty unfriendly place for people of colour and not very supportive of everyday political work of/in communities of colour. I can imagine, moreover, such a place being regarded by broader left-ish publics as a genuine crack, and worthy of forms of solidarity and cooperation and admiration that the compound above is not. I'm not saying anything about how these two hypotheticals should be regarded and responded to, just pointing out that the book's minimalist approach to the content of spaces that break in some respect with the logic of capital and try to do things differently but that (by the book's own admission are likely to) reproduce oppressive practices and relations in other respects is basically to avoid the issue, which is unhelpful.
So. The point I'm making is that cracks and their potentially oppressive contents are undertheorized and I can see ways in which that undertheorization and the ways in which it is justified could be ways to escape dealing with that oppression, even given an acknowledgment that imperfections are inevitable.
There are also some tensions in the theory that deserve more attention. For instance, there is no question that the book opposes sectarianism and puritanical politics, and encourages ways of work that avoid them. Yet there are also passages in which florid language about refusing to compromise with the state, and about the centrality of the revolt against labour rather than of labour, sounds pretty sectarian and puritanical. Again, this is an inevitable tension, and one that can only be resolved in the course of doing things. But I would still like to have heard more of what Holloway had to say about navigating such tensions in practice.
I also feel a faint anxiety that this approach would lead to us -- meaning people struggling against capitalism and other oppressions in diverse ways and under diverse banners -- to miss something, in the sense that its rejection of the state form and its rejection of dissident theorizing that is done from the standpoint of the totality might cause us to overlook something. I fundamentally agree with both of those stances, but I think it is probably good that people in revolutionary traditions that do not accept them will continue to challenge them.
I want to end on a more personal note. On my August trip to southern Ontario, one of the many social occasions in which I participated involved spending some time with folks with whom I used to do political work. As tends to happen on these occasions, two of these old comrades (both of whom identify as anarchists) got into a variation of the same argument they always get into when we get together. In this case, the focus was another individual in the community who has had lots of success recently mobilizing people around particular issues though whose politics are still pretty unformed. One of my comrades was pointing out some very real dangers in terms of reinforcing oppressions that can result from populist mobilizing among relatively privileged people that lacks political grounding, but at moments it sounded like he was saying that only people who have fully formed analyses should do anything at all. The other was enthusing about the importance of getting people in motion and figuring it out as you go along, but at moments sounded like he was saying that having a solid and grounded analysis was not just not necessary to start acting but was actively harmful. Personally, I thought this iteration of their argument was one of the more productive ones, for reasons I won't go into. But all of this is leading to the point that even as we were engaged in our drunken disputations, it occurred to me that Crack Capitalism might provide a basis for them to find the common ground that I know exists: It emphasizes that not only is it okay for all of us to rebel starting from where we are, but that we all do already, in ways small and large. It emphasizes that we do not need some sort of correct line to get in motion. At the same time, it also sees grounded critique and analysis not just as important but as integral to any effort to expand and multiply the cracks in capitalism. All of this ties into one of Holloway's favourite political maxims, the Zapatista slogan which is translated variously as "Asking we walk" or "Walking, we ask questions."
[For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
