Progress: Culture, history, and action

Phil Graham (pw.graham who-is-at student.qut.edu.au)
Mon, 09 Aug 1999 22:29:00 +1000

'A Klee painting named "Angelus Novus" shows an angel looking as though he
is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes
are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one
pictures the angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where
we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps
piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel
would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed.
But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with
such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm
irresistably propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while
the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call
progress" (Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History").=20

The exchange on xmca regarding Daly and the conditions surrounding her
de-tenuring, for me, exemplifies the recent (30-something year) history of
progressivism. Initially, the Daly thing seemed like two clear-cut and
mutually exlusive issues at stake:=20

1. De-tenuring a scholar because of teaching methods.
2. Exclusion of a student on the basis of gender.

Paul initially took up the contentious issue of exclusion based on gender
and the barely latent hypocrisy in calls for support. His evaluation of the
situation was contentious only because the student was male and stood in
opposition to what has come to be called the "politically correct"
position. I agreed with him off-list (thus I am no longer anonymous in this
respect and Paul is mitigated in his reference to at least one "anonymous
off-list person").=20

Paul made the very pertinent point that the formal and real subsumption of
female labour under capital is now well worked through to the point that
women such as Madeleine Albright, Bronwyn Bishop, and Margaret Thatcher (to
name but a few) can count themselves amongst the most modern and up-to-date
and thoroughly efficient war mongers, sabre rattlers, dealers of death,
oppressors, and exploiters of the common wealth, both at home and abroad.
Thus he recontextualised the issue in a readily identifiable, broader
historical trajectory within western culture. My own thoughts on this
trajectory have been well-aired on this list and nobody would be surprised
to see me being sympathetic to such a position.

Paul's argument was recontextualised in a number of ways that has led to
the "relativism vs absolutism" red herring emerging as the main issue:
truth claims, elephant metaphors, partial truth claims, and - inevitably -
appeals to what has become known as "identity politics". This is fairly
much the progressive movement as I have seen it work itself out over the
duration of my conscious life; a temporally compressed microcosm of the
left's phylogenesis, if you like.=20

Underpinning progressivism today is an obsession with relations of
domination. Phillip's "bad boys" are now the only safe group one can
denigrate in comfort and remain "progressive": the homogenous class of
"privileged white boys/men". They are, unquestionably as far as the voices
of progress are concerned, the group responsible for all society's ills:
they are the oppressors; the dominators. Thus they are fair game and have
no historically valid recourse to any attack whatsoever. They are evil.
They are the Other.

I want to leave behind the self-negating aspects of identity-based
argumentation and appeal to a recontextualisation of the argument, and of
the progressive agenda, from relations of domination to relations of
exploitation. Exploitation is by far the most neglected issue on the part
of progressives (the terms left and right have no meaning any longer
precisely because of this).=20

Domination and exploitation often go hand in hand. But this need not be the
case. Parents and teachers necessarily dominate children but need not
necessarily be exploitative of them. The converse is not true: if one is
exploited, oe is always dominated. Children - as a group or class - are the
most grotesquely exploited people on earth. The "Third World", which also
exists within the "First World", is the most massively exploited group,
economically speaking, that has ever existed =96even if only by historical
weight of numbers.=20

Such a recontextualised question about the Daly situation, then, would
become: "Who is being exploited here?"=20

The answers become no less easy or clear-cut.=20

It could be that Daly's students are being exploited. If they need
somewhere safe to learn, they are quite probably damaged (and isn't
everybody?) and a safe place that generates revenue and acclaim for a
"knowledge-mongering institution" is exploitative of societal fear.=20

It could be (and most likely is the case) that Daly is being exploited. Her
name is revered and thus the threat of de-tenuring is a strong bargaining
chip for the administration in maintaining her name whilst getting her to
"toe the line", so to speak.=20

Perhaps the boy is being exploited in his exclusion. He may have been the
perfect excuse for the administration to rid themselves of an academic with
particular convictions who has no place in an increasingly utilitarian
education system. After all, how is learning about feminism going to help
someone get a job? (I say this ironically and not to denigrate feminism -
my opinions of utilitarianism in education are also well-aired here). He,
too, may well be damaged goods.

Perhaps the entire education system is being exploited by capital. Perhaps
Daly's de-tenuring is no more than another blip on the way to an entirely
commercialised, utilitarian system in which the only asset that a
university has is its ability to serve commercial interests. Demand and
supply; funding and fish; neo-liberalism at its most insidious: the
university as "the marketplace of ideas", which will necessarily tend
towards monopoly or oligopoly under free-market conditions (like any other
market), is the way that capital would have it.=20

Or, it might be just another incident of decreasing tenure -
"flexploitation" - not only in the education system world-wide (except
perhaps in Brussels where the traditions that Jay described are still
entrenched in one university that I know of), but also in every nook and
cranny of the world of work.=20

Perhaps Paul is right. Perhaps the Daly issue is significant of a wider
movement that is political and _not_ personal; neither modern nor
postmodern; neither theoretical nor intellectual. Perhaps this trajectory
is an historical truth in itself and not something that can be resolved by
philosophical conjecture or theorised away. Whichever is the case, it
requires organised, coherent political action rather than fragmenting,
theoretical post-pissing.

Phil

Phil Graham
p.graham who-is-at qut.edu.au
http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Palms/8314/index.html