[E]ach student's feelings are considered both unique and equal to everyone else's--to question or challenge them is seen as an unleashing of violence, as a direct attack on the student herself. The nurturing pedagogical situation provides no way to understand critically, evaluate, or explain how one student's emotions and desires may be oppressive of other students--no way to understand how seemingly unique feelings participate in and reproduce unequal and unjust social relations. At best it can describe how the student 'feels' about any suffering she may have experienced, but it is unable to explain the way the student's pleasures, desires, and suffering are constructed out of the existing socioeconomic power relations. Such knowledge requires critique, and critique is largely dismissed as 'attack' in nurturing pedagogy and as oppressive in erotic pedagogy; it is, in short, considered antithetical to pleasure and even to feminism itself.
Any discussion of class divisions along a binary line is perhaps the most difficult part of talking about class in the U.S. today because it brings to the surface the dirty secret of the every day, one that everyone knows but no one likes to acknowledge: that is, divisions, distinctions, and discrimination. Talking about class is facing the fact that class societies, such as this one, which make a huge point of representing themselves as democratic, are democratic in name only. Democracy, first and foremost, is not about freedom of speech, equality before the law and human rights but about freedom from necessity - when all people's needs are met and no one is left alone to fight for subsistence. [...]
Writing about class is unlike writing about any other cultural and social issue because it involves the writing itself: writing about class is itself a class practice. This is another way of saying that writing about class is always an intervention. He who says he is on no one's side is almost always on the side of class in dominance, as he is who takes sides opportunistically.
Teresa L Ebert and Mas’ud Zavarzadeh, Class in Culture, xiv-xv
WHAT IS “RED Love”—and more specifically, what is a socialist, or more complexly, a communist theory of love and sexuality? As a way of working toward an answer, I want to reread...
WHAT IS “RED Love”—and more specifically, what is a socialist, or more complexly, a communist theory of love and sexuality?
As a way of working toward an answer, I want to reread the Russian revolutionary Alexandra Kollontai’s ideas about love and sexuality. How we reread Kollontai today raises questions not only about the revolutionary value of her work but also about the historicity of our own reading. To avoid subsuming her revolutionary insights, we need to read dialectically between the current historical situation as well as the one out of which she wrote—turning our critique-al attention to both our own limits and to those in which Kollontai worked.
The first problem is the way knowledge about Kollontai has been erased from the cultural memory. Aside from a brief revival of interest in the seventies and early eighties, Kollontai is largely forgotten among feminists and socialists alike.
As a Marxist revolutionary and Bolshevik, Kollontai struggled for the economic, social and sexual emancipation of women in Europe and Russia during the first decades of the century. She played a leading role in the revolutionary struggles of the time and was considered, along with Trotsky and Lunacharsky, to be among the most dynamic speakers for the Russian Revolution (Kollontai, 108).
She was also a key participant in the formation of the early Soviet state, becoming the first to head the Department of Social Welfare in the new Soviet Union and later the head of the Women’s Department. Kollontai summed up her own life by saying that “women and their fate occupied me all my life and concern for their lot brought me to socialism” (30).
Kollontai was deeply committed to the class struggle and convinced that the emancipation of women required not only the end of capitalism but also a concerted effort to transform personal relations along with the struggle for social change. As part of this effort, she worked especially hard to make socialism responsive to the needs of women and children and to create a new communist sexual morality for a workers’ state
Thus she pioneered in the development of social welfare and collective child care; in the reform of marriage and property laws; in freeing women from the isolated drudgery of the home and to be participants in the collectivization of domestic work; and in articulating a new theory of sexuality for a collective society.
But Kollontai was also a prominent critic of the bureaucratization and dominant economic policies of the early Soviet state. This led, especially under Stalin, to her being largely discredited and her ideas suppressed as she was, in effect, exiled to a series of diplomatic posts from which she was not allowed to return until the last years of her life. (For a good introduction to Kollontai’s life and writings, see Kollontai, Alexandra Kollontai: Selected Writings, ed. Alix Holt.)
But this is all largely forgotten. If Kollontai is remembered at all, it is likely to be a misrecognition of her as a proponent of the “glass of water theory” of sexuality, which was commonly seen as a defense of promiscuity and “free love”—the idea that sex should be as accessible and easily satisfied as quenching one’s thirst by drinking a glass of water.
In fact, however, Kollontai not only did not originate the “glass of water theory,” her anti-bourgeois theories developed a much more complex view that understood sexuality as both a social and historical relation (see Kollontai 13, Clements 231). Nonetheless, charges of sexual extremism, including the “glass of water theory,” have been widely attributed to Kollontai—both in the West and in the Soviet Union—as a way of ideologically distorting and undermining her transformative understanding of human interpersonal relations and social change
[I]deolgy is the means by which social differences are signified and maintained or contested. Ideology responds to the contradictory social reality that is the outcome of the divisions of labor, which restrict access to social and economic resources through class. Material contradictions produced in the economic practices of capitalism (such as the divisions of labor, unequal economic access) are 'solved' ideologically in the cultural imaginary by naturalizing social differences. After innumerable contesting theories, from those of Marx's contemporaries to those of our own (Bell, Zizek, Fukuyama, Butler), Marx's classic theory of ideology still offers the most dynamic understanding. Ideology, Marx argues, id the discourse of the cultural imaginary (philosophical, aesthetic, legal, political, and religious texts and practices) through which people 'become conscious' of the material contradictions of social light and 'fight it out.'
The pedagogy of affect piles up details and warns students against attempting to relate them structurally because any structural analysis will be a causal explanation, and all causal explanations, students are told, are reductive. Teaching thus becomes a pursuit of floating details—a version of games in popular culture. Students seem to know but have no knowledge. This is exactly the kind of education capital requires for its new workforce: workers who are educated but nonthinking; skilled at detailed jobs but unable to grasp the totality of the system—energetic localists, ignorant globalists. This pedagogy provides instruction not in knowledge but in savviness—a knowing that knows what it knows is an illusion but is undeluded about that illusion; it integrates the illusion, thereby making itself immune to critique. Savviness is enlightened false consciousness: a consciousness that knows it is false, but its “falseness is already reflexively buffered.”
Ebert, Teresa, & Zavarzadeh, M. (2008). Class in culture. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Press., 107-108
The market value of academic stars depends on how subtly they resignify specific "problems" like race, sexuality, or nationality and complicate them in order to cleanse capitalism of its violent history of homophobia, sexism, racism, nationalism. Consequently, they affirm capitalism's global legitimacy. West has been one of the most subtle readers in the culture industry. Like such other subtle readers as Stanley Fish, Judith Butler, Fredric Jameson, Stephen Greenblatt and Ernesto Laclau—who have used discourses of sexuality, law, culture, history and hegemony to "solve" in the cultural superstructure the contradictions of capitalism that cannot be solved in its material (labor) relations—West has redescribed race in such a way as to displace racism as exploitation (which is constitutive of capitalism) and substitute for it the representation of racism as oppression (which is part of the cultural politics of capitalism). In doing so, he has translated class struggle into cultural resistance.
Mas’ud Zavarzadeh, “Spiritualizing Race: Sketches on the Values Politics of Cornel West”
Derrida's formally subtle, erudite, and at times (when he is not in a conceptual free fall as, for example, in his Specters of Marx) rigorous arguments in the end are mostly ecstatic repetitions of the banalities of capital's cultural imaginary which is structured by in-between-ness and hybridity. His textualizing of class is not limited to the thematics of his writings. Like all formalists, most of his influence on contemporary cultural critique derives from his style of writing. His style is marked by a high-writing that weaves a self-reflexive humor into itself, frames its often dangling assertions in an elegant and verbally entertaining aleatory structure, and is itself a class practice. Like Joyce whom he admires, his is a style that teaches social disengagement through a self-reflexive engagement with writing: it shifts attention away from the 'why' (the dialectics) of writing to the 'how' (the representation technologies of writing. It involves the reader in the poetics of texuality rather than the economics of what makes such a poetics possible and necessary at certain historical moments. It is, however, a sign of the stubborn facts of history that in order to make his aesthetics credible, his writing are a mimesis of all the signs of textual activism: Politics of Friendship, Of Hospitality, Philosophy in a Time of Terror, and, of course, Specters of Marx. His texts remain mostly supple semiotic structures whose signifiers are always in search of signifieds - a search, we might add, that Derrida has already declared to be spectral. His activism is aimed not so much at changing reality bu tat blurring its boundaries with the virtual and thus again raising the epistemological questions about the spectral, thereby shifting the debate from the real to its textual virtuality - its missing presence. The elegance of his writings conceals the way they are bearers of particular class interests; it has impressed many cultural writers and even more academics and thus influenced social and cultural analysis. [Derrida's] writings ...are exemplary of the most learned and complex writerly strategies used to obscure class. Reading Derrida carefully for understanding the blissful ecstasies by which contemporary cultural theorists have so aggressively attacked class and declared its death. Derrida is too subtle to do that himself, but his writings have taught others how to do the dirty work for capital.
Teresa L. Ebert and Mas’ud Zavarzadeh, Class in Culture, xiii
[Binaries] are reproductions at the superstructural level of the fundamental binary of two antagonistic classes that are the outcome of capitalism's relations of production. To erase binaries, like many other hermeneutic moves of postmodern theory, looks progressive and inclusive. However, in actuality, it is an act of complicity because it obscures the founding binaries of class societies. By insisting on the difference between the ludic and resistance, then, I am insisting on bringing to the fore the binaries that are now routinely covered up in the name of a progressive politics. Binaries will lose their historical existence not through reading protocols but by abolishing class. Thus the role of a revolutionary theory is to bring the binaries to the fore and, in doing so, to pressure the contradictions and fissures that bourgeois theory covers up whether in the name of the sublime, experience, or differance.
