Doug Henwood wrote:
> Carrol Cox wrote:
>
> >Doug Henwood wrote:
> >
> >>
> >> If they are equal in importance, why do so few PEN-Lers write about them?
> >
> >That is not a correct way to word the question. It resembles the following
> >nonsense question:
> >
> >Are the denominator and numerator of a fraction of equal importance or is one
> >more important than the other?
> >
> >To ask is race more (or less) important than class is to make nonsense of
> >both race and class.
>
> I really don't know how I'd get along without you patrolling the
> borders of sense and nonsense.
>
> Let me add to the polling question. Monthly Review is probably the
> leading English-language popular Marxist journal in the world. New
> Left Review, despite its recent ideological peregrinations, is one of
> the leading English-language Marxish journals in the world pitched to
> a less popular audience. How many articles have either published in
> the last 20 years on gender or sexuality? How many articles have
> either, for that matter, published that were written by women?
>
> I await explanation of why these are nonsensical questions.
That was how I started this post. But on rereading my first draft I paused a bit
and looked again at your questions. All you ask for is a couple of numbers. We are
as far away as ever from any questions that it is politically worthwhile to
answer.
I think we see here why what I continue to see as the dishonesty of Butler's
critiques is so objectionable: it seems a deliberate attempt to maintain a
universe of discourse isolated from actual political practice ("cozy little
workshop," etc.). To name names (which of course is not at all the same as
namecalling) would open her (and her readers) up to the world of serious
scholarship and serious politics. You usually name names? Why are you so anxious
to defend a practice which you yourself avoid? Why so unwilling to apply the same
standard to Butler that you apply to those who object to "postmodernism"?
Incidentally -- what do you mean by your references to "representation"?
Carrol
Incidentally, in my previous post I was plagiarizing more or less from Barbara
Jeanne Fields (a woman writing in NLR). The following excerpt was my source:
*****
Nothing so well illustrates that impossibility as the conviction among
otherwise sensible scholars that race "explains" historical phenomena;
specifically, that it explains why people of African descent have been set
apart for treatment different from that accorded to others.[12] But *race*
is just the name assigned to the phenomenon, which it no more explains
than *judicial review* "explains" why the United States Supreme Court can
declare acts of Congress unconstitutional, or than *Civil War* "explains"
why Americans fought each other between 1861 and 1865.[13] Only if *race*
is defined as innate and natural prejudice of colour does its invocation
as a historical explanation do more than repeat the question by way of
answer. And there an insurmountable problem arises: since race is not
genetically programmed, racial prejudice cannot be genetically programmed
either but, like race itself, must arise historically. The most
sophisticated of those who invoke race as a historical explanation--for
example George Fredrickson and Winthrop Jordan--recognize the difficulty.
The preferred solution is to supose that, having arisen historically,
race then ceases to be a historical phenomenon and becomes instead an
external motor of history; according to the fatuous but widely
repeated formula, it "takes on a life of its own." In other words, once
historically acquired, race becomes hereditary. The shopworn metaphor
thus offers camouflage for a latter-day version of Lamarckism.
12. Inseparable from this conviction is the reification of race that
impels many scholars to adopt and impose on others, as a pious duty, the
meaningless task of deciding whether race is more "basic" to historical
explanation than other--and similarly reified--categories; a waste of
time to which I draw attention in "Ideology and Race in American History,"
p. 158. Someone might as well undertake to decide in the abstract whether
the numerator or the denominator is more important to understanding a
fraction, instead of settling down to the more sensible task of trying to
define and specify each one, recognizing their difference as well as their
relationship and their joint indispensability to the result. A recent
example is David Roediger, "'Labor in White Skin": Race and Working-class
History," in *Reshaping the US Left: Popular Struggles in the 1880s*, ed.
Mike Davis and Michael Sprinker, Verso, London, 1988, pp. 287-308.
Roediger apparently believes that distinguishing analytically between
*race* and *class* necessarily implies "privileging" one over the other
(to use his slang). And, in defending the identification of racism as a
"tragic flaw" that helps to explain American history, rather than as a
part of the history that needs explaining, he confuses a rhetorical device
with a historical explanation.
13. Alden T. Vaughan, "The Origins Debate: Slavery and Racism in
Seventeenth-Century Virginia," *Virginia Magazine of History and
Biography* 97, July 1989, is a good example of the use as explanation of
the very facts needing to be explained. The argument ends in explicit
tautology: "It may be more useful to see Anglo-American racism as a
necessary precondition for a system of slavery based on ancestry and
pigmentation." That is, Anglo-American racism is a necessary precondition
for Anglo-American racism. The argument ends as well in unseemly
agnosticism about the possibility of rational explanation: "[R]acism was
one cause of a particular type of slavery, though it may be better to
avoid the term *cause*, for causation itself is a shaky concept in complex
situations." The quoted sentences appear on p. 353.}
*****
