Jay,
Just read your message and while I think it is important academically, I am
wondering how it all fits in a political context. The commentators contrast
the WTO protesters to the 60's and point toward how they are a thousand
points of light (unlike the 60's) . The governor of our state loves taking
advantage of the different discourses to destroy any type of collective
action. Welfare reform was a case in point when collective action was
beginning to develop between some policy makers, parents, and early child
educators he would through out carrots to one or another to dissolve any
emerging collective action.
So, when you say,
" So it is not a good time for any long-established theory about social
> systems, or any current theory for that matter, to expect to be more than
> one precursor to the radically transformed theories of later in this
> century. It is however a very good time to be saying new things, remaking
> old concepts, and generally riding the rapids.">
should not there be some hesitency or concern. What are these rapids
politically speaking?
Nate
----- Original Message -----
From: Jay Lemke <jllbc@cunyvm.cuny.edu>
To: XMCA LISTGROUP <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Sent: Friday, June 16, 2000 2:36 PM
Subject: historicity, gender, and social theory
> One of the areas of convergence between dynamical systems theory and
> (broadly marxist) historical materialism is the emphasis on historical
> contingency. Unfortunately, without a theory of relevant timescales,
> historicity in explanatory discourse can get embarassing.
>
> For one thing, you are obliged by reflexivity to account for the specific
> historical origins of your own discourse, and at least a guess at its
> historically specific limitations. For another, your theory has to have a
> fairly finite time horizon; you can't theorize about matters that don't
yet
> exist, just as you can't theorize about matters that may exist but are not
> yet culturally visible.
>
> These issues are more tractable if you can define the timescales on which
> various sorts of changes in social practices and discourses, including
your
> own, are taking place, and how they are linked to one another.
>
> Historicity, even in the present, involves quite a bit -- way too much in
> fact. The present historical circumstances include EVERYTHING that is
going
> on in the world. If you accept the many-to-one view of how discourses, or
> representations, match up to material processes, then YOU can't know or
> perceive a lot of what is going on, because you're only equipped with some
> discourses. If you are really wise (which most of us are not) you will go
> out and try to get hold of incommensurable discourses from people who are
> as differently socially positioned from yourself as possible. Then you
may,
> to the extent you can understand these discourses, be able to see more of
> present circumstances. But who should you talk to? their social distance
> from you is defined by the parameters of your own discourse/theory. If
it's
> a class-centered theory, you go talk to the workers. It may not occur to
> you to talk to your wife, or your ten-year old child, or a villager in
India.
>
> It was very insightful of Marx and Engels to connect legal equality (and
> workplace equality, and home equality, and financial equality, and
> generally power equality) to the possibility of (ie. the changed
historical
> conditions necessary for) gaining better understanding of gender
relations.
> But all they could do, in their own historical circumstances, was to see
> gender relations as an example of the same sort of relations they were
> theorizing for class. A sort of prototype of class relations. What they
> could see about gender relations in their capitalist society was how
gender
> relations in the nuclear family were useful to (used by) capitalism.
>
> None of that, of course, is at all like what gender theorists have to say
> about gender today. The ways in which gender relations are appropriated to
> the economic-productive order is taken to be secondary to bodily and felt
> experiencing of sexualities and human relationships; to the responses of
> gendered subjects to dominant discourses and practices, and especially to
> dominant attitudes and values; to the unique products, in the form of
lives
> lived, feelings felt, connections made, of gendered lives other than those
> stereotypically sanctioned by masculine norms and values.
>
> What happens to the objective category of social class when we begin to
> realize that gender is experienced differently across classes, and across
> age-groups and cultures? when we realize that there are not several
systems
> of social relations here, but ONE, with multiple, interacting dimensions?
> How do we have to reconceptualize social class to marry it to gender
> theory; to make both (and other elements) parts of a more powerful
> analysis? At the very least, for example, we have to wonder how social
> class is experienced differently with differences in gender and sexuality,
> and how it feels to be economically oppressed and oppressed by virtue of
> gender or 'race', indeed just how much it matters to the definition of
> social class how you _experience_ the 'objective' conditions of your
> economic relations (how you feel them as well as how you talk about them).
> Contemporary gender theory is on the forefront of theorizing without
> factorizing. Class theory has a lot to learn from it.
>
> But these new discourses and analytical perspectives are themselves the
> product of changed times, in part of exactly the differences in power
> relationships from a century or more ago needed to allow SOME contribution
> from publicly silenced subjects to be heard. Once it's heard, all sorts of
> new possibilities open up for hybridizing it (a sort of useful halfway
> house between replacement and incommensurability isolationism) with views
> inherited from earlier historical epochs. A lot depends on the relative
> timescales of social change (in women's power) and theory change (when
> class theorists decide to stop trying to assimilate the new paradigms to
> the old ones and try doing the reverse, or something still more
thoughtful).
>
> The timescale of global technological change has lately proved shorter
than
> that for global cultural change, at least insofar as the dominant old
> euro-patriarchal culture succeeded in its greed in getting its
economically
> productive and global-scale communications technologies distributed around
> the world before it succeeded in homogenizing the world's cultures in its
> image. That means that their relative power is increasing rapidly and our
> coupling to their cultures is also, so that various sorts of
> 'post-colonial' discourses are now producing and will continue to produce
> radically new social analyses.
>
> I'd be willing to bet on two more rapidly rising sources: transformations
> of gender theory coming from newly empowered voices of formerly taboo
> sexualities (from gay and lesbian, to TV/TG, to intersexual, to S&M, to
> everything in all combinations and mixed together in the lives of many of
> the same people), and totally new perspectives coming from younger age
> cohorts (at least the 13-20s and the 6-13s, maybe younger still on a
longer
> time horizon) and perhaps older age groups as well ... as these two
> increase in relative power and challenge the privilege sustaining myths of
> vanilla sexuality and 'adult' superiority.
>
> So it is not a good time for any long-established theory about social
> systems, or any current theory for that matter, to expect to be more than
> one precursor to the radically transformed theories of later in this
> century. It is however a very good time to be saying new things, remaking
> old concepts, and generally riding the rapids.
>
> JAY.
>
> ---------------------------
> JAY L. LEMKE
> PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
> CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
> JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
> <http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
> ---------------------------
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