Sexual Harassment as/and Invention
| Revision History | ||
|---|---|---|
| • Fall/Winter 1995-6 | Newspaper: Funded by Syracuse University students. | |
| The Alternative Orange: Vol. 5, No. 1 (pp. 21-30). | ||
| • September 1, 2003 | Webpage:  . | |
| DocBook XML (DocBk XML V3.1.7) from original. | ||
Note: Text in red comes from http://www.geocities.com/redtheory/AO/.
To the Marxist Collective at Syracuse University | ||
| --Solidarity, Critique | ||
One
In the “post-al” knowledge and culture industry explaining cultural practices in terms of a systemic analysis of difference has been rendered highly problematic and even totalitarian. This is owing to the dominance of discourses from post-structuralism to post-Marxism which, following the logic that the signifier always stands in a relation of excess to the signified, have replaced material reality with textuality and represented the theoretical explanation of objective reality as impossible. The contemporary U.S. academy has put into motion a massive machinery of diversion which appeals to the logic of supplementarity in order to conceal material exploitation by deconstructing the difference between “exploiter” and “exploited." This logic has been enabled by post-al theorists such as Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe who claim that: “'Society' is not a valid object of discourse. There is no single underlying principle fixing—and hence constituting—the whole field of differences” (Hegemony 111). In short, there is no objective ground upon which to stand in order to determine the historical validity of one kind of knowledge or political practice over another. Further, since all reality is really a differential “text” subject to the laws of excess, arguing for the possibility of historical knowledge of objective reality is itself understood as a reification that blocks the “subversive” play of difference in meaning; “inasmuch as the field of 'society in general' has disappeared as a valid framework of political analysis, there has also disappeared the possibility of establishing a general theory of politics on the basis of... categories which fix in a permanent manner the meaning of certain contents as differences which can be located within a relational complex” (Hegemony 180).
In such a political climate the social, rather than being an arena of decisive and conclusive political contestation, is understood as a continuum (with no origin and no end) of multiple alternative and playful possibilities. Far from producing a “radical” trend in left practices, this political climate has made it virtually impossible to conclude and decide on a plan of collective action—other than the “plan” to remain politically undecided, self-reflexive and “open." As a result, the collective intervention into and social transformation of the material conditions of exploitation and oppression has been given up in favor of the more “spontaneous," “overdeterminate," and more “playful” political practice of producing “subversive pleasures” within existing social arrangements. Since post-al politics forecloses the possibility of producing historical knowledges of the objective structures of global capitalism, its explanation of the “autonomy” of social struggles (which denies that it is a theory of autonomy) is largely articulated at the level of the effects of these structures in the identities produced from them. In short, the presupposed “autonomy” of social struggles gets articulated as “competing," yet “intersecting” identities so that, as post-al feminist and queer theorist Judith Butler claims: “to prescribe an exclusive identification for a multiply constituted subject, as every subject is, is to enforce a reduction and a paralysis... at the expense of race or sexuality or class or geopolitical positioning/displacement” (116). However, if we cannot account for the structures that give rise to the seemingly disconnected issues of class, gender, sexuality, etc., and can only understand these structures in terms of their identity effects; and further, if these identity effects themselves cannot be systematically prioritized, then we can only understand the operations of social oppression on the most particular, local level: a “case-by-case” basis.
Meanwhile capital is systematically exploiting the majority of people on the planet; it is systematically (re)producing and making use of social differences such as race, gender, and sexuality to assist in masking and maintaining this exploitation. Capital is systematically producing flexible subjects who will think in terms of fulfilling individual desires, who will adjust to the changes capital has made in the name of fulfilling these desires; flexible subjects who, because of their inability to think and act in systemic and collective terms, will be more easily, among other things, inculcated into part-time, contingent labor forces that help capital re-privatize historical and material gains made by workers in previous moments of struggle.
This post-al diversion away from explaining the systematicity of exploitation and oppression in other words is a legitimation of the current backlash by capital against all marginalized groups, waged in order to increase its rate of profit in a time of economic crisis. The effectiveness of this backlash is in capital's “divide and conquer” tactic of individualizing various social struggles, representing them as autonomous from each other. If instances of social oppression can only be understood on a “case by case” basis--on the terms of local strategies, not collective principles—then the “resolution” to such issues can only be determined by what is most pragmatically “effective." However, what is most “effective” without a systemic analysis of social oppression is really a cover for what is most “convenient" for those who are already relatively privileged within existing social arrangements. Such a logic leads to a form of petit-bourgeois reformism in which what puts the least pressure on “the center” is “what works." This form of petit-bourgeois pragmatism—to act on what is convenient—is legitimated in the post-al academy through a pedagogy of pleasure that promotes the “self-evidency” of desire through a whole range of pedagogical practices aimed at producing self-serving subjects who will uncritically accept and maintain existing social arrangements in the name of “the pursuit of the ethics of the care of the self” (as Foucault calls it). As part of this ensemble of pedagogical practices, seemingly “different” and “opposed” theories help legitimate desire as an autonomous social practice.
In this text I will investigate the ways in which both traditional “Creative Writing” pedagogy and ludic postmodern feminist pedagogy both renaturalize desire through the notion of “invention"—a technology of subjectivity that produces “transsocial” subjects who act on their “own” dehistoricized desire in the name of “intuition” or “discursive repetition." Through a systemic analysis of the seemingly “disparate” and “unrelated” issues of gender, class, sexuality, invention, creativity, performance and desire, I will demonstrate how the ensemble of discourses in the pedagogy of pleasure promote the progressive, “creative," subject as the entrepreneur of desire who knows no limit to making profit out of personal pleasure, and unleashes this desire on women, the proletariat and others in order to maintain the regime of profit.
In order to do this I will undertake a “reading” of a concrete instance of sexual harassment, its conditions of possibility, and the consequences that are engendered from it: my formal grievance against a Syracuse University Creative Writing faculty member for sexual harassment. But first, it is necessary to point out that I bring this incident and corresponding events up NOT to write an article in the spirit of “intimate critique” or “confession," a reformist social practice in which the purpose of “critique” is to elaborate on the experiences of the victims of social oppression by reading these experiences through the “tropes” of race, gender, sexuality, and class. Such a practice is reformist because it reduces social oppression to its effects in experience, and refrains from investigating the objective conditions of existence which produce these various forms of social oppression and make them available to “experience." In doing so “intimate critique” dematerializes various forms of social oppression (consequently reunderstanding them as tropes of self-writing). This ends up acknowledging the existence of these forms of oppression without providing the means to critique and intervene in their material causes.
If it is to be fully understood, the problem of sexual harassment cannot be reduced to my “personal” experience of it, nor can it be reduced to experience itself. Sexual harassment is a social issue that is part of a much broader system of economic exploitation and its corresponding forms of social and political oppression. Sexual harassment is a manifestation of a larger conflict and struggle between various social groups and classes over right, access to, ownership of and control over natural and cultural resources, powers and capacities. It therefore cannot be understood adequately on the “personalizing" terms of individual experience. Instead it must be read symptomatically, as an articulation of the social relations of production. With this in mind, I bring this issue up to produce knowledges of sexual harassment on the materialist grounds of a Marxist public critique, a revolutionary social practice in which the purpose of critique is to uncover the relations of production which produce and maintain various forms of social oppression (such as sexual harassment), through an intervention into the dominant discourses and practices that legitimate these relations. The purpose of uncovering these relations themselves is to critique them and enable the collective transformation of them in order to produce a new society free from exploitation and oppression.
