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(continuing a discussion transplanted from this salon's previous incarnation on yahoo groups)
Jeff-
To answer your question: no, I don't think of feminism as
a "withering away" stage towards a good society. I simply don't essentially define political movements in terms of their acheivements of a certain kind of society at all. I'm not interested in counterweights because the issue for me is not primarily establishing what society as a whole or balance is going to look like. The problem is all this talk of 'reigning ideologies'm 'ideal societies', etc, etc. Don't you see something implicitly authoritarian and well... statist... in squishing politics into the attainment of a civic ideal?
I think the problem is that libertarians have a very peculiar
understanding of politics- whereby one's political identification
must set up some kind of primary rule or focus one desires to see in social life. Therefore, to be a feminist to libertarians means wanting to see the triumph of some particular female "ism" in political life.
To myself, feminism is a *movement*- a set of focuses, concerns, actions, and worldviews which defines what a certain kind of people care about seeing and advancing in society. Specifically, it means a movement to overcome the oppression of women. I think libertarians have a hard time grapsing that people can and usually do unite around
movements that embody concerns important to them rather than a vision of ultimate political good. I think this causes libertarians to misunderstand not just feminists but environmentalists, conservatives, and others whose politics are just not politically incarnated the ways that the various forms of liberalism and socialism are. Feminism is a movment opposing *particular* percieved structural evils. It is not a political goal calling for a new structure.
Foucault once said that modern political theory has yet "to cut off the king's head." What he meant was that we are still captured into thinking of "politics" as an activity concerned with the decrees and actions of an imagined central sovreign. Even a movement like libertarianism which thinks it opposed central power still thinks in terms of the issue of central power, spends almost all of its political effort over what that central power is to (not) do, and counts all political movements in terms of who is to hold central power
and what they are to (not) do with it. Thus libertarianism flubs
repeatedly in even understanfng political movements like feminism which are irreversably *local*. Libertarians want to know what "feminisms" program is towards acheiving a "feminist society" with a "feminist state". But while it's true that feminists have both rightly and wrongly (to my view) involved themselves in the state as one arena of power, this is just not what the essence of the movement is about. Being 'pro-woman' isn't being 'anti-male' unless you start with a totalist theory of politics. That requires starting with the notion that politics involves a zero-sum establishing of
primacy in the first place. It's an illustration of the totally
different way of thinking involves that one feminist I heard recently was saying that men "need a movement" for their own liberation the way men do. This makes total sense to me (I'm ambivalent on whether I would agree-- I'd need more details). The point is that oddly while libertarians claim to be antistatist they have such a state- centered theory of politics.
I am not a feminist because I think that women's concerns are more important than mens'. but because womens' concerns are more important to me. This isn't because of any exact correspondance between politics and group membership- but because of the values that happen
to touch *my* life (I stay away from transgender politics because I don't like transgender culture, for instance).
Fighting specifically the oppression of women happens to matter to me enough to stand up and be counted. Fighting the oppression of men does not (and I do think patriarchy oppresses men). It's really no more complicated an issue that in the realm of formal rather than cultural poltiics, I find certain issues (such as sex worker rights, drug decriminalization, and right to bear arms) meaningful, while
other issues (such aa most economic issues) are impossible to connect to. And when I say *happens* to, I don't mean the choice is arbitary but that it is the result of concrete and contingent circumstances. Calling feminism bigoted makes sense only in the context where politics requires a prior repudiation of contingent circumstances and thus contingent political action is misunderstood by "raising" it to
the level of a universal program.
I think libertarianism has an implicit notion that it is the duty of
people to connect with the political Good precisely as universal
human beings in which I am at the extreme opposition end of the spectrum. I feel politics is real and honest when people connect with concerns to which they really form attachments in their lives, and to which such universal principles (which are universal, we should remember, *only* in the sense that they are commonly abstracted from *particular* individual experience) may aid as guides to comprehension and understanding, but they are not the primary and
immediate units of political action. Libertarianism klunks as a
political practice precisely because it claims to embody no one's experience and as a result embodies the experience of the kind of people who generally become libertarians.
Feminism begins not in abstract theory but in shared experience which takes on the tone of a certain imperative under the colour of a certain political-intellectual climate. I gathr that libertarianism once really did (in the 70s) galvanize as a movement with an implicit tone and vision of life such that it provides a common vision and feeling which people could really be attached to (the recent L. Niel Smith comic posted to this forum illustrated it beautifully)... but
this is less true now, or if it is truw I don't like the tone of much of the libertarian world. Maybe that phrase would help explain the misunderstandings: to me 'libertarian world' does not mean "a world where all the rules are libertarian" but "the kind of common world libertarians share in terms of their passions, commitments, visions, and attractions".
To sum up: you're trying to look at feminism as: When Feminists Make the Rules. I suggest that libertarians are themselves captives of authority, misunderstanding others because they concieve of the whole show as about "who (doesn't) make the rules". To me, realizing that collective action begins in shared experience and common meanings and only partially and secondarily involves a set of rules to fight for is the beginning of a truly *cultural* politics.
Pleas to libertarians: learn from a feminist slogan and stop aping your enemies the state: "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." (Audre Lorde) - you flatter your enemy to cast all of political life as a battle over its purposes. Most real political activity has always occurred beneath the state's feet and behind the state's back, with the confused and clueless authorities reacting blindly, angrily, or terrifyingly to the forces which really turn the system. Libertarianism has already succeeded eithout realizing it
where it least expects it: by creating an *internal* culture
motivated by a different theory and practice of society, which
attracts and motivates a certain kind of people to form a different political world. In the long run, this is what moves history and nations, and builds up or drags down the state's world. Feminism understands this. Conservatism understands this. Libertarians usually don't.
Metaphysical background issues:
You have to understand: to me an ideal is only concievable as
something irreducibly particular. I think the notion of 'the ideal
society' runs into all the same problems as trying to picture
a 'universal work of art'- and understanding what all art has in
common or what makes art possible doesn't change the fact that the vivid reality of art which has metaphysical primacy is irreducibly plural. I'm a humanist, but perhaps we have forgotten that to the original humanists, humanity was not just a universality but a particularity, a glory in specificably and definably particular human things (and even then, my sense is that 'humanist' is actually if you look closely enough a symbiosis of realted ideals rather than a true ideal).
I don't suppose it would help if I said that conception to me is a particular mode of perception- in other words, that I strongly
believe that ideas are if we pay attention *sensed* by a somewhat different but equally intentional method as what we ordinarily call 'sensation'. I got this from Kant and Husserl (and Sartre and Hegel), but the upshot is that I think we deal with "ideas" in a manner which is justa special case of dealing with perceptual objects, which is why I handle these concepts (see above) differently than somebody else. Thus, I look at 'the ideal society' and my first question is 'what does it look like?' And I don't think this is an unserious question as, for all their universal pretensions, I think everyone knows that Marxism, libertarianism, Christianity, etc. have a particular manner in which they look and smell like (or rather,
each of these names captures a family resemblance of closely related mental images with broadly similar attrivutes).
This isn't to deny abstract thought- on the contrary- I consider the setting of abstract relations a clearly wonderful and valuable method to deal with conceptual objects and at a certain point it occurred to me there's no reason one can't deal with other perceptual objects the same way as well. In my view the realization- a la Husserl- that inner sensory objects are in the same relation of intentionality to
consciousness as outer sensory objects leads not only to the
philosophical awareness of the possibility to apprehending ideas in a concrete way as to the praxical awareness that one can apprehend existents in an ideational way.
OK, enough... does anyone else think I am making sense here? I confess I'm suffering from a lack of sleep after not entirely feeling myself last night.
But it really is the same issue to me as "why I am a feminist".
Lady Aster
)(*)(
Jeff-
To answer your question: no, I don't think of feminism as
a "withering away" stage towards a good society. I simply don't essentially define political movements in terms of their acheivements of a certain kind of society at all. I'm not interested in counterweights because the issue for me is not primarily establishing what society as a whole or balance is going to look like. The problem is all this talk of 'reigning ideologies'm 'ideal societies', etc, etc. Don't you see something implicitly authoritarian and well... statist... in squishing politics into the attainment of a civic ideal?
I think the problem is that libertarians have a very peculiar
understanding of politics- whereby one's political identification
must set up some kind of primary rule or focus one desires to see in social life. Therefore, to be a feminist to libertarians means wanting to see the triumph of some particular female "ism" in political life.
To myself, feminism is a *movement*- a set of focuses, concerns, actions, and worldviews which defines what a certain kind of people care about seeing and advancing in society. Specifically, it means a movement to overcome the oppression of women. I think libertarians have a hard time grapsing that people can and usually do unite around
movements that embody concerns important to them rather than a vision of ultimate political good. I think this causes libertarians to misunderstand not just feminists but environmentalists, conservatives, and others whose politics are just not politically incarnated the ways that the various forms of liberalism and socialism are. Feminism is a movment opposing *particular* percieved structural evils. It is not a political goal calling for a new structure.
Foucault once said that modern political theory has yet "to cut off the king's head." What he meant was that we are still captured into thinking of "politics" as an activity concerned with the decrees and actions of an imagined central sovreign. Even a movement like libertarianism which thinks it opposed central power still thinks in terms of the issue of central power, spends almost all of its political effort over what that central power is to (not) do, and counts all political movements in terms of who is to hold central power
and what they are to (not) do with it. Thus libertarianism flubs
repeatedly in even understanfng political movements like feminism which are irreversably *local*. Libertarians want to know what "feminisms" program is towards acheiving a "feminist society" with a "feminist state". But while it's true that feminists have both rightly and wrongly (to my view) involved themselves in the state as one arena of power, this is just not what the essence of the movement is about. Being 'pro-woman' isn't being 'anti-male' unless you start with a totalist theory of politics. That requires starting with the notion that politics involves a zero-sum establishing of
primacy in the first place. It's an illustration of the totally
different way of thinking involves that one feminist I heard recently was saying that men "need a movement" for their own liberation the way men do. This makes total sense to me (I'm ambivalent on whether I would agree-- I'd need more details). The point is that oddly while libertarians claim to be antistatist they have such a state- centered theory of politics.
I am not a feminist because I think that women's concerns are more important than mens'. but because womens' concerns are more important to me. This isn't because of any exact correspondance between politics and group membership- but because of the values that happen
to touch *my* life (I stay away from transgender politics because I don't like transgender culture, for instance).
Fighting specifically the oppression of women happens to matter to me enough to stand up and be counted. Fighting the oppression of men does not (and I do think patriarchy oppresses men). It's really no more complicated an issue that in the realm of formal rather than cultural poltiics, I find certain issues (such as sex worker rights, drug decriminalization, and right to bear arms) meaningful, while
other issues (such aa most economic issues) are impossible to connect to. And when I say *happens* to, I don't mean the choice is arbitary but that it is the result of concrete and contingent circumstances. Calling feminism bigoted makes sense only in the context where politics requires a prior repudiation of contingent circumstances and thus contingent political action is misunderstood by "raising" it to
the level of a universal program.
I think libertarianism has an implicit notion that it is the duty of
people to connect with the political Good precisely as universal
human beings in which I am at the extreme opposition end of the spectrum. I feel politics is real and honest when people connect with concerns to which they really form attachments in their lives, and to which such universal principles (which are universal, we should remember, *only* in the sense that they are commonly abstracted from *particular* individual experience) may aid as guides to comprehension and understanding, but they are not the primary and
immediate units of political action. Libertarianism klunks as a
political practice precisely because it claims to embody no one's experience and as a result embodies the experience of the kind of people who generally become libertarians.
Feminism begins not in abstract theory but in shared experience which takes on the tone of a certain imperative under the colour of a certain political-intellectual climate. I gathr that libertarianism once really did (in the 70s) galvanize as a movement with an implicit tone and vision of life such that it provides a common vision and feeling which people could really be attached to (the recent L. Niel Smith comic posted to this forum illustrated it beautifully)... but
this is less true now, or if it is truw I don't like the tone of much of the libertarian world. Maybe that phrase would help explain the misunderstandings: to me 'libertarian world' does not mean "a world where all the rules are libertarian" but "the kind of common world libertarians share in terms of their passions, commitments, visions, and attractions".
To sum up: you're trying to look at feminism as: When Feminists Make the Rules. I suggest that libertarians are themselves captives of authority, misunderstanding others because they concieve of the whole show as about "who (doesn't) make the rules". To me, realizing that collective action begins in shared experience and common meanings and only partially and secondarily involves a set of rules to fight for is the beginning of a truly *cultural* politics.
Pleas to libertarians: learn from a feminist slogan and stop aping your enemies the state: "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." (Audre Lorde) - you flatter your enemy to cast all of political life as a battle over its purposes. Most real political activity has always occurred beneath the state's feet and behind the state's back, with the confused and clueless authorities reacting blindly, angrily, or terrifyingly to the forces which really turn the system. Libertarianism has already succeeded eithout realizing it
where it least expects it: by creating an *internal* culture
motivated by a different theory and practice of society, which
attracts and motivates a certain kind of people to form a different political world. In the long run, this is what moves history and nations, and builds up or drags down the state's world. Feminism understands this. Conservatism understands this. Libertarians usually don't.
Metaphysical background issues:
You have to understand: to me an ideal is only concievable as
something irreducibly particular. I think the notion of 'the ideal
society' runs into all the same problems as trying to picture
a 'universal work of art'- and understanding what all art has in
common or what makes art possible doesn't change the fact that the vivid reality of art which has metaphysical primacy is irreducibly plural. I'm a humanist, but perhaps we have forgotten that to the original humanists, humanity was not just a universality but a particularity, a glory in specificably and definably particular human things (and even then, my sense is that 'humanist' is actually if you look closely enough a symbiosis of realted ideals rather than a true ideal).
I don't suppose it would help if I said that conception to me is a particular mode of perception- in other words, that I strongly
believe that ideas are if we pay attention *sensed* by a somewhat different but equally intentional method as what we ordinarily call 'sensation'. I got this from Kant and Husserl (and Sartre and Hegel), but the upshot is that I think we deal with "ideas" in a manner which is justa special case of dealing with perceptual objects, which is why I handle these concepts (see above) differently than somebody else. Thus, I look at 'the ideal society' and my first question is 'what does it look like?' And I don't think this is an unserious question as, for all their universal pretensions, I think everyone knows that Marxism, libertarianism, Christianity, etc. have a particular manner in which they look and smell like (or rather,
each of these names captures a family resemblance of closely related mental images with broadly similar attrivutes).
This isn't to deny abstract thought- on the contrary- I consider the setting of abstract relations a clearly wonderful and valuable method to deal with conceptual objects and at a certain point it occurred to me there's no reason one can't deal with other perceptual objects the same way as well. In my view the realization- a la Husserl- that inner sensory objects are in the same relation of intentionality to
consciousness as outer sensory objects leads not only to the
philosophical awareness of the possibility to apprehending ideas in a concrete way as to the praxical awareness that one can apprehend existents in an ideational way.
OK, enough... does anyone else think I am making sense here? I confess I'm suffering from a lack of sleep after not entirely feeling myself last night.
But it really is the same issue to me as "why I am a feminist".
Lady Aster
)(*)(
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