DOCSLIB.ORG

Gender Without Identities

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Gender Without Identities plain also something EA has become famous for: re- commending many people to take high-earning jobs in business or fnance and give away much of their Gender without earnings to charity. The consequences of the career- consequentialism of EA are more startlingly visible identities still at a revealing moment in Singer’s book when Judith Roof, What Gender Is, What Gender Does (Min- he writes that ‘on a plausible reading of the relevant neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016). 280 facts, at least some of the guards at Auschwitz were pp., £78.00 hb., £21.99 pb., 978 0 81669 857 8 hb., not acting wrongly’, for nastier people still would 978 0 81669 858 5 pb. have taken their places, if they hadn’t nobly stepped In queer theorist Annamarie Jagose’s book, Orgas- forward to kill Jews ‘humanely’. We see at a moment mology (2012), she argues that orgasm has been an like this the depths to which the logic of the lesser overlooked aspect of queer critique. Part of a larger evil – the logic of consequentialism, the logic of EA – recent interrogation of queer theory’s relationship will take one. It seems a long journey from the uto- to normativity, Jagose suggests that orgasm, often pian aspirations of EA to an apologia for serving as a seemingly normative aim of sex, has, for the most a Nazi guard at Auschwitz. But, for one who accepts part, escaped the purview of queer thought. In turn- the logic of EA, it is apparently no distance at all. ing to orgasm, Jagose also attempts to turn queerly It is admirable to be willing to break social norms to the stuff of sex without turning it into metaphors to improve the lot of other beings, and encouraging for queer kinship or sociality. Sticking with the ma- that signifcant numbers of people are willing to give terial and literal orgasm, Jagose, in a challenging selfessly and systematically to others far away, and methodological move, insists that sexuality studies that they care enough to work to check that their has diffculty thinking about sex outside of identity. money is used effectively. And for comparing the There is a similar challenge in Judith Roof’s recent effectiveness of a few commensurable charities, EA rethinking of gender. In What Gender Is, What Gender is, as I have said, of use. Yet there needs to be far Does, Roof suggests that gender is too tightly bound more thinking here on the relationship between ef- to identity – it is too often imagined as something fective altruism and effective democracy. Rich people that one can fashion, claim, or ‘be’. She asks in- can choose what they give to. Bill and Melinda Gates stead after what gender might be without subjectiv- are not technology-neutral: their charitable work fo- ity, offering readings of popular culture (television, cuses on techno-fxes and ignores anthropogenic cli- flm, celebrity) that decentre gender as a process of mate change. Indeed, its only major climate-change subjectifcation. She reads gender not through sub- dimension, worryingly, is Gates’s interest in buying jectivity but through a variety of other concepts, in- up geo-engineering patents. I am not encouraged by cluding the taxonomical, the ethical, the narratolo- MacAskill’s warm words for those looking into this. gical, the temporal and the non-human. In this way, At the very least, it is alarming that MacAskill seems Roof aims to rearticulate gender away from ‘mas- almost to pass over what is by far the most vital ele- culinity and femininity’, insisting on the non-binary, ment of the climate issue – namely, cutting down on processual nature of gender. Genderings, for Roof, our GHG-pollution of the atmosphere – in favour of are ‘infnite and perpetually changing’; not tied to carbon offsets on the one hand and reckless techno- ‘any original theme or desire in subjects’, nor in any philiac enthusiasm for geo-engineering on the other. way stable. Doing good better? I think that philosophy can help When Judith Butler published Gender Trouble: us do much better than this. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity in 1990, it was, as goes without saying, a game changer. It both Rupert Read challenged the foundations of a feminism that seem- ingly required ‘woman’ as its political referent and helped to inaugurate the feld of queer theory. In RADICAL PHILOSOPHY 2.01 109 Butler’s conception, gender is a stylised repetition of performativity’s production of gender as binary. For acts, acts which both give the illusion of an internal Roof, the conceptual problem with performativity is truth and produce the subject as legible. Butler’s that it appears to be secondary to a subject’s ‘primary thinking intervened in theories of subjectivity by in- sexuation’; it is locked then within binary categor- sisting that the subject comes into being through ies, even if these categories appear to be ‘wieldable’. gender, even as she suggested that there is no sub- For Roof, Butler’s theory of performativity too heav- ject that ‘does’ gender; the doing is what produces ily tethers gender to binary sex, even as she aims to the subject. It remains by far the most infuential separate them as critical objects; gender remains, in and most often cited text when it comes to theorising some sense, ‘masculinity and femininity’, even as it gender. Moreover, its ideas have crossed over from becomes loosened from ‘men and women’. the academy into a more popular vernacular – most What feels unsatisfying in What Gender Is, What recently, Sasha Velour, the Season Nine winner of Ru- Gender Does is the way genders become at times un- Paul’s Drag Race, quoted Butler’s ideas on the show. tethered in Roof’s work – a crude reading would sum- The degree to which Butler’s theory of performativ- marise the book by saying that Roof multiplies the ity has dominated the feld of gender studies could meaning of gender without an anchor or any polit- hardly be overstated. ical stakes. The bold warning at the end of the It is precisely in opposition to this dominance book’s introduction seems to bear signs of this anxi- that Roof positions her work. As she asks in her in- ety: ‘MOST IMPORTANT, THIS IS NOT SIMPLY AN troduction, what happens when performativity has EXTENDED LIST OF CATEGORIES,NOR IS IT AN EX- become not ‘a’ way to think about gender, but ‘the’ PANDED TAXONOMY.’ Yet, Roof’s theorisation lacks way? In this, Roof seems less concerned with But- the anchor that heteronormativity provides for But- ler’s concept of gender performativity itself and more ler’s theories of performativity. In my understand- with its legacies, or with the various ways that her ing of Butler, heteronormativity is central to her ana- complex theory has been translated and taken up by lysis of gender – this is partly why her theory has others (particularly, it seems, non-academics). Part been so infuential for queer thinking. Her analysis of Roof’s concern is about the way in which per- is careful to connect gender with desire and sexu- formativity seems to bestow agency upon subjects ality, where heteronormativity is the driving factor – the crude interpretation of Butler that imagines behind the cultural demands for binary gender iden- gender’s performativity means anyone can choose tity. For Butler, this is what gender does: binary their gender at will. This, of course, has been some- gender produces the seeming naturalness and inevit- thing that Butler has, again and again, clarifed, most ability of heterosexuality (or, heteronormativity re- notably in Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Lim- quires the production of binary gender). It is also its of Sex (1993). However, Roof suggests that per- this point that both makes genders something other formativity has so attached us to gender as an iden- than free-foating possibilities and connects gender tity that we cannot see the way it exceeds this logic to subjectifcation, producing heterosexual identity of ‘being’ or ‘having’. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and as the only recognisable subjectivity. In Roof’s in- Félix Guattari, as well as Lacanian psychoanalysis, sistence that gender is neither identity nor binary, Roof suggests that a more systems-inspired model what is lost is the critique of heteronormativity that better gets at what gender is, or, better gets at gender has been so generative from Butler’s account. What outside of identity. She suggests that gender is a‘ma- do we get instead? In some sense, what we get is a chinic process that perpetually reorganizes multiple thorough account of gender as non-binary. In this, sets of regimes and operations that link the psychic Roof’s repeated insistence that gender is a machinic and the social.’ Along with her suggestion that the process that is neither binary nor essential seems to legacies of performativity have resulted in gender come out of, and sit within, a contemporary main- being anchored to identity, her more machinic ac- streaming of non-binary identity. As ‘man’ and ‘wo- count of gender is meant to counter what she reads as man’ are increasingly displaced, rejected and forced 110 RADICAL PHILOSOPHY 2.01 open by queer, intersex and trans activists and the- istence by simply appearing to fy in the face of the orists alike, it is as crucial a moment as any to keep surface signifers by which they believe such struc- thinking through what gender might be outside of tures persist.’ Here, fnally, are the stakes for Roof: ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’. Indeed, as I write this, ‘Gender is a lure’, a lure away from the problem of the singer/songwriter Pink has just given a speech at sexual difference.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Althusser After Althusser
    REVIEWS Althusser after Althusser Louis Althusser, Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978–1987, ed. François Matheron and Olivier Corpet, trans. and introduced by G.M. Goshgarian, Verso, London and New York, 2006. 300 pp. £50.00 hb., £16.99 pb., 1 84467 069 4 hb., 1 84467 553 X pb. ʻI am looking, in the history of philosophy, for the Althusser most dramatically addresses the question elements that will enable us to account for what Marx of non-publication in reminding us of Marxʼs refusal thought and the form in which he thought itʼ, writes to publish the theoretically invaluable ʻCritique of Althusser in ʻPhilosophy and Marxismʼ. The statement the Gotha Programmeʼ at a crucial moment in the arguably describes his project as a whole, from For historical institution of Marxism. Meekly resisting his Marx onwards, in which he tracks down the ways in own status as a ʻMarxistʼ (when he could rather have which Marx avoids epistemological capture by Hege- deployed the ʻtheoretical-personage effectʼ emerg- lianism and political economy and breaks away into a ing around him), Marx, paradoxically for a critic of new science of history. But here it also refers specifi- political idealism, refused to intervene theoretically in cally to a more positive turn in his endeavours: the party political practice: the founding of the German articulation of a possible ʻmaterialism of the encounterʼ Social Democratic Party on completely misguided or ʻaleatory materialismʼ. ʻPhilosophy and Marxismʼ, a ʻcommunistʼ grounds. Maybe these texts by Althusser long interview, originally published in Mexico in 1988 – together with their associated correspondence – will (interestingly, aimed ʻexclusivelyʼ at a Latin American prove to be politically and theoretically invaluable in audience of students and political activists), is the most the future too.
    [Show full text]
  • Socialism, Feminism and Men
    Socialism, Feminism and Men Peter Middleton Feminism has been both welcomed and resisted by socialist they return to either a divided socialism pretending to an men in the past twenty years. As a critique of exploitation and imaginary unity, or an uneasy masquerade as feminists. Nei­ inequality, feminism has been easily recognisable to social­ ther is tenable. Men can and should support feminism, but ism. Women can be added on to its emancipatory project as they cannot be its subjects, representatives or policy makers. another oppressed class to be liberated. In practice this has How can we speak of a socialist politics in which gender often meant that feminist politics and socialist politics have was recognised to be involved with its every aspect, that managed an uneasy co-operation, a co-ordination that breaks would make it possible for men to take active roles, and that down when specific issues highlight the consequences in would remain socialist and pro-feminist? That, I want to priorities and strategies of their seemingly incompatible fun­ suggest, is one of the most pressing demands on the socialist damental analyses of contemporary society. Feminism has agenda, and one of the hardest to respond to in both theory and been resisted when these fundamental differences have be­ practice.2 In the remainder of this article I will discuss two come central to political strategy. The respective emphases on areas of especial conceptual difficulty: the questions of op­ the primacy of patriarchy or the relations of production have pression and of sexual difference. The confusion these have created a split between feminists and socialists.
    [Show full text]
  • E. P. Thompson, 1924-1993
    NEWS E. P. Thompson, 1924-1993 The great bustard has winged off, removing as he went one of the prime attractions of these shores, and one of the few remaining reasons for still proclaiming intellectual allegiance to them. Thompson liked to present himself as an earth-bound English creature incapable of much soaring. But he had enough of the lark in him to have died singing, as Blake is said to have done; and who knows but that he did in his own fashion, for he was of that spirit. Thompson's trust in 'experience' shared common roots with Blake's 'Auguries of Innocence'. He knew what the poet meant when he warned that 'He who shall teach the Child to Doubt, The rotting Grave shall neer get out' , and he has escaped that rot, and will live with us now as one of the most inspirational voices of English culture. Thompson has been rightly acclaimed the great­ est English historian of the post-war period, and his stature as a peace activist aptly compared to that of Bertrand Russell. But as a polemicist and radical visionary, he may be ranked in a canon which transcends our own century. Thompson was not simply a rill, to invoke Coleridge' s metaphor, flowing with a perforation in the tanks ofBlake, and Morris, Swift and Cobbett. He was himself a fountain comparable to theirs. But perhaps the watery image is not the most appropriate. In many respects he was more like a power house; and although illness had already reduced some of the force before he died, now that he has been finally extinguished, one feels the cut in energy The other great family influence was exerted posthumously by his all the more acutely.
    [Show full text]
  • The Revival of Hegelian Marxism on Martin Hägglund’S This Life Nathan Brown
    The revival of Hegelian Marxism On Martin Hägglund’s This Life Nathan Brown When a notable philosopher, having established a reputa- been able to carry out this project with such accessible tion for rigorous argumentation and scholarship, directs clarity is so unusual as to be disorienting. a major new book toward a popular audience, a certain Hägglund’s book unfolds in two parts: the first ar- skepticism may be forgiven among those familiar with ticulating a concept of ‘secular faith’ as a condition of the earlier work. However welcome an accessible style intelligibility for any form of care; the second articulat- may be, popular address too often gives way to the pop- ing a concept of ‘spiritual freedom’ that demands for its ularisation of philosophical concepts and problems with actualisation the overcoming of capitalism and the de- results that are seldom adequate to the complexity of termination of value in terms of socially available free their history and significance. The general reader re- time. The critique of religion in the first half of the ceives a bowdlerisation of conceptual difficulties, while book will be broadly familiar to readers of Hägglund’s the price of public reception is inconsequence at the level Radical Atheism (2008): across three chapters engaging of philosophical intervention, and the demands of legib- most substantially with C.S. Lewis, Charles Taylor, Sören ility offer an excuse for setting aside abstruse debates Kierkegaard, Saint Augustine and Karl Ove Knausgaard, and technical details. Hägglund argues that the religious orientation of desire Martin Hägglund’s third book, This Life: Secular toward eternal life – in itself incompatible with care for Faith and Spiritual Freedom, may be met with varieties of this life – in fact obscures an implicit commitment to such skepticism among seasoned readers of Marx, Hegel, a secular form of faith grounding any and all commit- Heidegger – and of the traditions from which their work ments to the projects of finite existence.
    [Show full text]
  • Gender As Performance an Interview with Judith Butler
    Gender as Performance An Interview with Judith Butler ludithButlerteaches in the Rhetoric Department at the University When the book came out, the Second Annual Conference of of California, Berkeley. Her first book, Subjects of Desire: Lesbian and Gay Studies was taking place in the USA, and it got Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France ( J 987) traced taken up in a way that I could never have anticipated. I remember the dialectic ofpro- and anti-Hegelian currents in French theory sitting next to someone at a dinner party, and he said that he was across the writings ofa wide range ofthinkers. She is best known, working on queer theory. And I said: What's queer theory? He however, for her second book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the looked at me like I was crazy, because he evidently thought that Subversion ofIdentity ( J 990), which has proved as influential as I was a part of this thing called queer theory. But all I knew was it is controversial in its analysis of ' sex', 'gender' and 'sexuality' that Teresa de Lauretis had published an issue of the journal as forms of enforced cultural performance. In particular, it has Differences called 'Queer Theory' . I thought it was something she been read by many as standing at theforefront of the new 'queer had put together. It certainly never occurred to me that I was a part theory' - a tendency within gay and lesbian studies which of queer theory. foregrounds same-sex desire without specifying the sex of the I have some problems here, because I think there's some anti­ partners, in the hope of escaping the theoretical constraints of feminism in queer theory.
    [Show full text]
  • Pandemic Suspension Alexei Penzin
    Pandemic suspension Alexei Penzin The Lisbon earthquake of November 1755 was the most Negative Dialectics (1966), presenting it as a ‘visible dis- devastating natural disaster of the eighteenth century, aster of the first nature’ that ‘sufficed to cure Voltaire and probably the first disaster on such a scale in modern- of the theodicy of Leibniz’.6 Although Adorno purports ity. It was an event that profoundly disturbed many En- to echo Voltaire, his argument that the disaster was ‘in- lightenment philosophers.1 Kant wrote three scientific significant in comparison with the second, social one studies that attempted to explain it from the standpoint [Auschwitz], which defies human imagination as it dis- of natural history, and some commentators have hypo- tils a real hell from human evil’, rather intensifies and thesised that its reverberations can be detected in his modernises Rousseau’s argument that ‘the sufferings famous elaboration of the aesthetic category of sub- nature imposes on us are less cruel than those we add on lime.2 Besides writing a poem about the earthquake, ourselves’.7 Voltaire employed it in his famous Candide as an example These examples demonstrate how the philosophers of a horrific and meaningless natural disaster that dis- of the Enlightenment applied their ‘signature’ ideas and proved Leibniz’s optimistic theodicy of ‘pre-established concepts to the Lisbon earthquake. They also indicate harmony’, for the obvious reason that it would be im- how philosophers ‘capitalise’ on events with this order possible to incorporate into even the most sophisticated of notoriety in their drive to symbolic ‘primitive accumu- plot of divine providence.3 Rousseau wrote a letter to lation’.
    [Show full text]
  • Radical Philosophy Review
    RPR Volume 10 • Number 1 • 2007 Radical Philosophy Review Journal of the Radical Philosophy Association Radical Philosophy Review (ISSN 1388-4441) is published biannually by the Radical Philosophy Association (RPA) in cooperation with the Philosophy Radical Philosophy Review Documentation Center. An individual subscription to this peer-reviewed journal includes membership in the RPA. More information about the Association is available online at www.radicalphilosophy.org. Volume 10 • Number 1 • 2007 • Subscription rates are $69 for Institutions and $42 for Individuals. Please add $8 shipping to all addresses outside the U.S. • Single/back issues are available to Institutions for $35 and to Individuals for $21. • VISA, MasterCard, and Discover cards accepted. Editors’ Introduction Membership & Subscriptions Eduardo Mendieta & Jeffrey Paris ——— iii All correspondence regarding subscriptions, renewals, memberships, and address changes should be addressed to: Philosophy Documentation Center Articles P.O. Box 7147, Charlottesville, Virginia 22906-7147 Tel. 800-444-2419 (US & Canada); 434-220-3300 • Living Labor in Marx ——— 1 Fax: 434-220-3301; E-mail: [email protected]; Mario Sáenz Web: www.pdcnet.org • Feminist Dialectics and ——— 33 Marxist Theory Radical Philosophy Review accepts unsolicited articles of no more than 10,000 Kathryn Russell words, review essays of no more than 5,000 words, and book reviews of no more than 2,000 words. Authors interested in writing review essays and book reviews are • Listening to Zapatismo: ——— 55 encouraged to contact the Managing Editor for copies of recently published books. A Reflection on Spiritual DeRacination Editorial & Submissions Patricia Huntington All editorial correspondence should be addressed to: Jeffrey Paris Reviews Managing Editor, RPR Department of Philosophy • Reclaiming Identity, by ——— 79 University of San Francisco Paula M.
    [Show full text]
  • Rp17 Reviews.Pdf
    1972 l&nin. London, Ncw Left Books Mamilieim, K. 19721c\E'ol(lgy :l~ London, Routledge & Kegan Paul AltJlUsser, L. 1969 For Marx, London, Penguin; 1974 Elements Marx, K. 1968 'Theses on Feuerbach' in Selected Works London, Lawrence d'autocritig~, Paris, HacheUe and Wishart; 1973 Grundrisse London, Pcnguin Arato, A. 1972a 'Lukacs' Theory of Reification', Telos 11, pp25-66; Merleau-Ponly, M. 1962 The Phenomenology of Perception, London, 1972b Notes on 'History and Class Consciousness', Philosophical Forum Routledge & Kegan Paul; 1974a Adyentures of thc Dialectic, London, Vol. JII, pp386-400 Heinemann; 1974b The PI"OSe of the World, London, Heinemann Colletti, L. 1973 Marxism and Hegel London, New Left Books Paci, E. 1972 The Function of the Sciences and the Meaning of Man, Fecnberg, A. 1971 'Heificationand the Antimonies of Socialist Thought' Evanston, Northwestern Univcrsity Press Telos Phillips, D. 1974 'Epistemology and the sociology of knowledge', Theory and l- ~Vol.l Glucksmann, A. 1972 'A Ventriloquist Structuralism', New Left Review Piccone, P. 1972 'Dialcctic and Materialism in Lukacs', ~ 11, ppl05-33 72, pp68-92 - Ranciere, J. 1972 'Althusser and Ideology', Radical Philosophy 7 Goldrnann, L. 1971 Reflections of 'History and Class Consciousness' in Revai, J. 1972 Review of Georg Lukacs' 'History and Class ConSCiousness', Mes7.'Uos (ed. ) AspE'cts of Histo!'y and Class Consciousness London, Merlin Theoretical Practice No. 1 Hindess, B. 1972 'The "Phenomenological" Sociology of AUred Schutz', Sartre, J":P. 1949 The Psychology of the Imagination London, Rider; E£Q.!]pmy and Society Vol.l ppl-27; 1973a 'Transcendentalism and History', 1957 Being and NOUJinilllg§ji, London, Methuen; 1960 Critique de la Raison E.£Quomy and SO("i('ty Vol.
    [Show full text]
  • Final, Culp, Escape
    Escape Dissertation Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Andrew Curtis Culp Graduate Program in Comparative Studies The Ohio State University 2013 Dissertation Committee: Eugene W. Holland, Advisor Philip Armstrong Mathew Coleman Copyright by Andrew Curtis Culp 2013 Abstract This work reimagines autonomy in the age of spatial enclosure. Rather than proposing a new version of the escapist running to the hills, “Escape” aligns the desire for disappearance, invisibility, and evasion with the contemporary politics of refusal, which poses no demands, resists representation, and refuses participation in already-existing politics. Such escape promises to break life out of a stifling perpetual present. The argument brings together culture, crisis, and conflict to outline the political potential of escape. It begins by reintroducing culture to theories of state power by highlighting complementary mixtures of authoritarian and liberal rule. The result is a typology of states that embody various aspects of conquest and contract: the Archaic State, the Priestly State, the Modern State, and the Social State. The argument then looks to the present, a time when the state exists in a permanent crisis provoked by global capitalist forces. Politics today is controlled by the incorporeal power of Empire and its lived reality, the Metropolis, which emerged as embodiments of this crisis and continue to further deepen exploitation and alienation through the dual power of Biopower and the Spectacle. Completing the argument, two examples are presented as crucial sites of political conflict. Negative affects and the urban guerrilla dramatize the conflicts over life and strategy that characterize daily existence in the Metropolis.
    [Show full text]
  • Cultural Studies and Philosophy: an Intervention
    Cultural Studies and Philosophy: An Intervention Douglas Kellner (http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/kellner.html) Since cultural studies has become a global popular in the past two decades, philosophy has been an unthematized and often suppressed dimension of the enterprise. While many trained in philosophy, such as myself, have engaged in the practice of cultural studies, few have reflected on the philosophical dimension and the role of philosophy within the project. The lack of reflection and debate over the function of philosophy within cultural studies and general suppression of such concerns have rendered cultural studies vulnerable to problematic philosophical positions and/or have vitiated the enterprise due to inadequately developed philosophical dimensions. Accordingly, in this entry I will argue for three specific roles for philosophy in: 1) reflecting on the method, assumptions and metatheory of cultural studies; in articulating 2) the normative standpoint of critique and 3) in developing the moral and aesthetic dimension which are currently, in my opinion, not adequately at work in the dominant versions of cultural studies now circulating. Yet I do not want to exaggerate the importance of philosophy and my argument will be that cultural studies today should pursue its transdisciplinary project by combining philosophy, political economy, social theory, cultural critique, and a multiplicity of critical theories in the effort to develop a cultural studies adequate to the challenges of the present age. Conceptualizing Cultural Studies Cultural studies has today become a contested terrain with a variety of competing versions. In this fragmented and conflicted field, it is useful to sort out competing models and notions of cultural studies, to delineate their presuppositions, and to appraise the strengths and limitations of competing models.
    [Show full text]
  • On the Value of Social Reproduction Informal Labour, the Majority World and the Need for Inclusive Theories and Politics Alessandra Mezzadri
    Dossier: Social reproduction theory On the value of social reproduction Informal labour, the majority world and the need for inclusive theories and politics Alessandra Mezzadri Radical feminist analyses have always placed consider- beit not only), developing regions; that is, in the ‘majority able emphasis on the crucial role played by social re- world’. Specifically, this analysis argues that reproductive production for the development of capitalism. Early realms and activities contribute to processes of value- social reproduction analyses – primarily premised on generation through three channels: first, by directly re- housework but also more broadly concerned with wage- inforcing patterns of labour control, expanding rates of lessness – developed a robust critique of Marxian views exploitation; second, by absorbing the systematic exter- that identified processes of value-generation only with nalisation of reproductive costs by capital, working as a the productive sphere, and de facto deployed ‘productive’ de-facto subsidy to capital; and, third, through processes and ‘paid’ labour as synonyms.1 Some more recent ap- of formal subsumption of labour that remain endemic proaches, by contrast, propose social reproduction as a across the majority world. I conclude that the exclusion ‘theory’ (SRT), and deploy the concept in order to focus on of informal and informalised labour from debates on the how labour is regenerated daily and inter-generationally relation between social reproduction and value creation through private and public institutions in contemporary will inevitably lead to problematic – in fact, dualist – contexts.2 This second set of studies seem concerned understandings of capitalist development. I discuss by with analysing the circuits of care that reproduce the way of conclusion the political relevance of stressing the worker as connected yet distinct to those of capital and value-producing nature of wagelessness for a politics value-generation.
    [Show full text]
  • Philosophizing the Everyday the Philosophy of Praxis and the Fate of Cultural Studies
    Philosophizing the everyday The philosophy of praxis and the fate of cultural studies John Roberts The following presents a genealogy and critique of studies for which the ʻeverydayʼ (der Alltag) origi- the concept of the ʻeverydayʼ, looking at the philo- nates in Lukácsʼs and Heideggerʼs early writing as a sophical, political and cultural conflicts and contexts term of derogation, and is transformed, in Lefebvre, which radically transformed its contents after the Barthes and the Situationist International into a term Russian Revolution from a term synonymous with identifiable with the demands of cultural and social the ʻdailyʼ and ʻcontingentʼ to one identifiable with transformation is partial, not to say misleading. The the vicissitudes of cultural and social transformation shifts in cultural and critical usage of the term are far and democratization. It aims to bring into focus the more complex and open to dispute than this familiar revolutionary prehistory of the ʻeverydayʼ, at a time version of events would suggest. when this prehistory has been all but forgotten, and After the Russian Revolution, Lukácsʼs early the concept has been largely disconnected from ques- existential marriage between ʻeveryday lifeʼ (Alltag tions of social agency. As such it concentrates on the lebens) and ʻinauthenticʼ experience, with all its two major cultural-national formations which gave affectations of late Romantic ennui, was subject to a ideological shape and direction to the emergence of massive cultural and political haemorrhaging.2 Indeed the concept before its assimilation into cultural studies it was the impact of the Russian Revolution that pro- proper in the 1970s: the German–Soviet debates in pelled Lukács to question (if not wholly reject) his Marxist philosophy and culture from 1910 to 1939, and earlier writing and embrace the critical immanence the postwar reconstruction of the concept in the new of ʻeveryday lifeʼ.
    [Show full text]