AMST 3252W Midterm #2  

On Politics and Burdens of Representation  

 

“You can’t know how in this pale life of mine I am all the time seeing the bright pictures of that other that I once thought I was glad to be free of….” (Clare Kendry in Passing, 1929)[1]   “….given the subjectivizing conditions of identity production in a late modern liberal, capitalist, and disciplinary-bureaucratic social order, how can reiteration of these conditions be averted in identity's purportedly emancipatory project? What kind of political recognition can identity-based claims seek - and what kind can they be counted on to want - that will not resubordinate the subject itself historically subjugated through identity categories such as ‘race’ or ‘sex,’ especially when these categories operate within discourses of liberal essentialism and disciplinary normalization?” (Wendy Brown, 1993).[2]

 

Today’s discourse within the cultural left over representation and possibilities

of political engagement share certain similarities with the discourses of the

early 20th century cultural and political formations, as two quotes above

illustrate.  One of the defining characteristics of the early 20th century is the

pace of technological changes that had enormous influence in terms of

industrial production and organization, as well as the emergence and

dissemination of commodities and practices of popular culture. Moreover, it

is also a time when academic knowledge production becomes intensely

intertwined with the state and private philanthropy reform efforts in order to

contain subjects perceived as side-products of rapid social and economic

changes, including their racial, gendered, classed, and sexual

nonnormativities. This paper will argue that not only canonical sociology and

literature, as well as popular culture generally, are actively working to

establish various normativities, but the tradition of liberalism more broadly

and politics of representation in particular are central to the hegemonic

consolidation of white heteronormative middle-class expressions as the only

available model for social existence.         

The theorizing which takes single axis of identity or oppression (e.g. gender

or race) as its only framework of analysis inevitably produces knowledge that

is limited and inattentive to social realities where multiplicity of categories,

identities, and power relations operate simultaneously in production of

subjectivities. In Aberrations in Black, Ferguson demonstrates how racialized

and classed subjectivities are always gendered and sexualized in particular

ways in order to produce differences which then serve as a basis for

economic and political exclusions.  For example, Ferguson argues that

canonical literature and sociology facilitate the pathologization and

suppression of nonheteronormative gender and sexual heterogeneity within

the black communities.  While within the literature there appears some

limited space for negotiation and interpretation, canonical sociology under

the disguise of scientific rationalization and liberal reformism is able to treat

nonnormativities as mere pathologies in need of transformation or,

preferably, erasure.  According to Ferguson’s readings of canonical sociology

and literature, the only avenue for the racialized subjects provided by the

liberal state is assimilation to the white bourgeois middle-class

normativities.  While the process itself does not guarantee racial

transgression and assimilation it does offer certain benefits and privileges.

Ferguson argues that not only the white power elites had a stake in enforced

normativity, especially in policing and disciplining gender and sexual

transgressions, but also black middle-class, as well as black nationalists that

were able to envision freedom only through normative heteropatriarchal

lenses of the dominant culture. Larsen’s Passing is instructive not only by

elaborating on complexities of race, as well as gender and sexuality, but also

on emerging class division within the black communities. Brian, who is a

successful doctor, expresses his middle-class attitudes:

 

“’Uplifting the brother’s no easy job. I’m as busy as a cat with fleas, myself.’ And over his

face there came a shadow. ‘Lord! how I hate sick people, and their stupid, meddling families,

and smelly, dirty rooms, and climbing filthy steps in dark hallways’”[3]

 

Larsen’s book itself is more nuanced than this example of stark class

differences might suggest.  The book is not a mere representation of

emerging black middle-class and its relation to the lower-class blacks or

white society, but in many ways also a commentary on the inherent

contradictions and trappings of normativities which constitute and

distinguish the middle-class from its others.  Blackmore, for example, argues

that in Passing middle-class respectability and repression disguises various

characters’ longings “for a less hierarchical socio-sexual system which will

allow them to express same-sex desire.”[4]  Middle-class respectability is

expressed through a combination of racialized, classed, gendered, and

sexualized values which form an ideological unity which is supposed to signal

“progress” and “universality.” According to Ferguson “within the context of

colonialism and legalized segregation, the corporealization of black bodies as

physicalities divested of self-generating rationality imagined physical labor

as the only real resource that the racialized black subject could offer.”[5] 

Changes in economic production and certain, although limited, political shifts

allowed for the emergence of black middle-class. However, that emergence

was facilitated by and was facilitating class, gender, and sexual

normativities.  The link of citizenship to gender and sexual normativity has

been established and imposed on black population since the abolition of

slavery.[6]  The requirements for and exclusions from citizenship, however,

are always exclusionary exercises of the state power, as well as embodied

within the tradition of western liberalism.

            Ferguson tends to argue that black nonheteronormativities provide

with rationales for exclusions from liberal polity, but in fact liberalism more

broadly as a political philosophy is only able to function through difference.

However, liberalism is operationalized not merely through difference - be it

race, class, gender ,or sexuality - but also through particular qualities, such

as individualism and self-sufficiency. Moreover, liberalism accumulates its

ideological currency by claiming “history” as an objective process of

“progress” where western liberalism and economic system of capitalism are

portrayed as being in advanced stages of historical development.[7] So while

Ferguson, for example, points out that “liberalism not only condoned

exclusions within the borders of the democratic capitalist state, but required

those exclusions,” his critiques of liberalism, for the most part, remain more

implicit than explicit.  The identification of western liberalism and its

civilizational discourse[8] as foundational could clarify much of Ferguson’s

argument, which often appears to be attributing repression to epistemic

violence, political exclusions, morality, needs of capital or material

inequalities. As important and co-constitutive those aspects are to in order to

understand politics of exclusion they often seem to be disconnected and

groundless and obscure the role of liberalism in American political and social

system.

            For example, while Ferguson resists normalizing and disciplining

attempts of sociologists to regulate black nonheteronormativities, he points

out that those nonheteronormativities are produced by the material

conditions which make their emergence possible or necessary, such as

various models of nonnormative families.  However, the argument becomes

unclear whether the problem is with liberal reformers’ inability to see under

what circumstances the production of identities, which they identify as

“pathological,” occurred or whether the problem is with sociologists’

essentializing tendencies which makes raced, classed, gendered, and

sexualized subjects responsible for their own disadvantaged position

because of “failures” in normativity. In either case, Ferguson does not have

much to suggest in terms of how to move beyond this analytical mode.  As

valuable as this genealogical approach is for its focus on intersectionality’s

role in formation of subjectivity, his engagement with liberalism as

organizing principle of western political thought and practice proves to be

insufficient.  If liberalism operates through its narrative of progress those

who refuse to engage in self-discipline, reason, and rationality, among

variety of other normative requirements, will always be subjects of discipline,

control, and exclusions. Such is the logic of liberalism’s “social contract.”

Ferguson’s denouncement of state and capital’s regulations, as well as

sociological and literary representations of nonheteronormative black

subjectivities while valuable in itself does not have much to offer in terms of

articulating politics that would allow the break with the liberalism’s logic.  In

fact, there is little discussion of what would nonheteronormative unregulated

subjectivity’s notion of political would entail.  Rationalization, regulation,

surveillance, and so on are all important features of the modern capitalist

liberal society and while there are possibilities of engaging or disengaging

with it, there should be no reason to believe that mere deconstruction of

liberalism’s logics should automatically translate to freedom for non-

normative subjects from liberalism regulative grip.

Canonical sociology and literature, clearly, are not exclusive sites of

regulation and normativity. Hall, for example, states that “capital had a stake

in the culture of the popular classes because the constitution of a whole new

social order around capital required a more or less continuous, if

intermittent, process of re-education, in the broadest sense.”[9]  Popular

culture, thus, becomes a site of struggle filled with normative as well as

transgressive ideas and practices. For Horkheimer and Adorno, however,

popular culture, as fueled by the culture industry, is homogenizing and

standardizing in order to facilitate and expand the needs of the bourgeois

elites. Mass culture becomes one of the technologies of domination not only

by depoliticizing “masses” but by acquiring “control of the individual

consciousness” and in particular by erasing “a distinction between the logic

of the work and that of the social system.”[10] Horkheimer and Adorno tie

culture industry to the shifting power relations, which could be described

shift from sovereign power to hegemony, in which culture plays significant

role. Even dissent – or rather a “well-planned originality” - becomes

institutionalized and fuels marketability of inherently the same forms and

ideas.[11]  However, there are multiple problems with Horkheimer and

Adorno’s arguments.  For one, it inevitably reproduce the discourse in which

earlier forms of non-mass (thus elite) art forms and culture are constantly

juxtaposed to the contemporary popular culture as inherently corrupting,

dehumanizing, and meaningless.  Pleasure as an organizing principle of

popular culture is seen as disengagement and helplessness from the real

world - “the liberation which amusement promises is freedom from thought

and from negation.”[12]  Overall, the text seems to be over-generalizing for

its lack of interest in individual agency, inability to recognize social

difference, equation of popular culture with fascism and mass control, and

evokes leftist elitist disappointment with the “masses.”  However, it is also

valuable for engaging economic rationales of mass culture with political and

psychological aspects and effects the pop culture has in constructing

hegemony.

             For Stuart Hall, on the contrary, popular culture is neither merely

depoliticizing space of cultural commodities circulation and consumption nor

a romanticized alternative to the elite culture. Rather it is always historically

specific battleground of various cultural and political forces.  For Hall “there

is no whole, authentic, autonomous ‘popular culture’ which lies outside the

field of force of the relations of cultural power and domination.”[13] Popular

culture could be defined by its contradictions much more than by its unitary

logic and direction as argued by Horkheimer and Adorno. Popular culture and

its various forms do not stagnate or carry fixed meanings within but are

constantly changing and are historically specific.[14]  “Cultural struggle, of

course, takes many forms: incorporation, distortion, resistance, negotiation,

recuperation.”[15]  Hall’s attention to popular culture and cultural struggle

more broadly, points out to the need of engaging with the concept beyond

the mere dismissal or valorization, since “it is partly where hegemony arises,

and where it is secured.”[16]

However, this brings us back to questions of representation and politics in

the modern, liberal, capitalist society.  Popular culture, which for theorists

such as Hall, Williams, Horkheimer and Adorno, are largely about class

struggle, is also a site of struggle for emerging racial, gendered, and sexual

subjectivities and their representations. Since the political field in liberal

democracies is defined by, what Papadopoulos et al calls, “double-R

axiom”[17] – in reference to rights and representation regime -, popular

culture becomes one of the major fields where struggle over the “double-R

axiom” occurs.  However, according to Papadopoulos et al, the political

struggle was much more significant over rights not representation. 

“Representation was principally conceived as the ways in which different

social classes are interpellated by state apparatuses and are codified in the

cultural imaginary.”[18]  However, as earlier part of the 20th century

demonstrates, aesthetic representation within the pop culture as well as

canonical literature and sociological knowledge production emerges as

increasingly essential sites of ideological struggle. Popular culture facilitates

visibility and political representation but at the same time makes various

subjects visible to power and creates new exclusionary mechanisms and new

boundaries.  “Representation is nothing more than a means to render the

forces partaking in a social conflict visible to the gaze of power. Moreover,

power relations operate by making social actors representable within a

regime.”[19] Thus emerges one of the central contradictions of liberalism –

representation is necessary for political rights and recognition, but the

recognition comes at the expense of visibility which translates into regulation

and control.

However, this is the dilemma that is haunting much of the social theory and

various movements in general, but where above mentioned theorists do not

have much to suggest. Ferguson, for example, does not call for mere rights

and recognition for nonheteronormative subjects, but he is critical of

representations and their implicit or explicit investments in normalization

and regulation.  However, he fails to articulate the problem of representation

itself. For example, he mentions that it would be wrong “to assume that

Myrdal was an objective observer because of his Swedish nationality”[20]

since he based his research following larger Eurocentric trajectory of

enlightenment which is intertwined with discourses of racial superiority. 

However, there are several shortcomings implied in this statement. First, by

suggesting that objective observation and thus representation is an option,

Ferguson implies that the problem is not with the political system which

relies on representation but with its lack of scientific vigor or political

commitments, thus, inevitably, reproduces the discourse of rationalization

and scientific objectivity on which western liberalism relies upon. Secondly,

Ferguson fails to explicate further on what are broader implication that

Swedish scientist was recruited to do a report on American race relations.

First, it does not ask how it reflects on canonical sociology which Ferguson

thoroughly critiques and its ability to produce knowledge about

nonheteronormative black subjectivities.   Myrdal’s mode of inquiry

resembles that of disciplinary anthropology and reproduces the disciplinary

divisions that defined anthropology as study of “other” and sociology as the

study of “self.” If so, does it challenge Ferguson’s assessment just to what

extent the canonical sociology was able to establish and legitimate itself in

the study of its national others, if its sociologists could not be trusted in their

ability to produce “valuable” knowledge?

The questions of representation are complex and numerous. Genealogies of

knowledge formation and representation can help to articulate politics that

go beyond dominant state-centered theories, but also have to try to break

away with its own discursive limits. Non-representational politics and

practices can provide with alternatives, however, they might also fall into a

depoliticizing mode, for example, “when recognition of difference stands in

for redistribution of resources and reallocation of positions, muting the

imperative to refigure radical alternative sensibility.”[21]  While there is no

need to negate theorizing and place it in another discrete category of life

disconnected from everything else, it nevertheless requires critical

engagement with the apparently “radical” work of thinking/writing itself.  The

critiques that stem from the designated spaces of academy can only engage

with its subjects of study through representation despite the trajectory of the

critics’ political leanings. The questions of what kind of politics are possible

and desirable, as important as they are, are increasingly submerged in the

structural restraints of academic production which operates through

taxonomies of value and progress and inherently loses interest in what kind

of alternatives already exist and the subjectivities outside the field of

representation.  “In insisting that there is no outside of representation what

we are left with is a rather world weary discourse that insists on the

necessity for the imposition of ‘state-like’ violence and exclusion.”[22]

[1] Nella Larsen, Passing  (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 11.

[2] Wendy Brown, “Wounded Attachments,” Political Theory, 21:3 (1993), 390.

[3] Larsen, 57.

[4] David L. Blackmore, "’That Unreasonable Restless Feeling’: The Homosexual Subtexts of Nella Larsen's Passing,” African American Review, 26: 3,(1992), 475.

[5] Roderick A. Ferguson,  Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 96.

[6] Ibid, 86.

[7] Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 77-114.

[8] “It is not really Western civilization tout court but the identification of modernity and, in particular, liberalism with the West – indeed, the identification of liberalism as the telos of the West – that provides the basis for Western civilizational supremacy.” Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 184. [9] Stuart Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing ‘the Popular,’” People’s History and Socialist Theory, ed. Raphael Samuel (New York: Routledge, 1981), 227. 

[10] Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum: 1976), 121.

[11] Ibid, 132.

[12] Ibid, 144.

[13] Hall, 232.

[14] Ibid, 235.

[15] Ibid, 236.

[16] Ibid, 239.

[17] Dimitris Papadopoulos, Niamh Stephenson, and Vassilis Tsiano. Escape routes: Control and subversion in the 21st century (Ann Arbor: Pluto Press: 2008), 7.

[18] For Papadopoulos et al, struggle over representation defines emergence of neoliberalism and cultural left and academic preoccupation since the late 1970s. At the same time it is a time of emergence and politicization of various identities and decline of centrality of class as the only category to facilitate radical social change. Ibid, 17.

[19] Ibid, 56.

[20] Ferguson, 97. (italics mine).

[21] Papadopoulos et al drawing on Ranciere (1998), 71.

[22] Andrew Robinson and Simon Tormey, “Beyond Representation? A Rejoinder,” Parliamentary Affairs, 60:1, (2007), 128.