I find certain utterances of appeals to anti-essentialism off-putting. More to the point, I find certain utterances of the charge of essentialism off-putting. In particular I dislike those which imply - or assert plainly but without argument (or argue speciously) - a political valence to anti-essentialism and to essentialism. Now, I don’t dispute that there can be such a political valence. There certainly can, and some are quite important. What I dispute is that there is such a valence in all contexts. I further dispute some implications that, if there is such a political valence, this valence trumps other political valences to whatever is criticized as essentialist. I do not dispute that the (anti-)essentialist political valence is sometimes the most important, but I dispute that it is always most important. These views are rarely articulated straight-forwardly. If they were I think they would be less widespread. I think they’re tied to a certain culture which involves presumptions or intutions which are less attractive if plainly stated.
I’m thinking here of two experiences I had. One was a conversation in which someone critized the Women’s Strike for Peace for implying (or perhaps explicitly stating) a strong connection betweem womanhood and motherhood - and for insufficiently problematizing both terms - in their invocation of motherhood against nuclear proliferation and in their conflict with the US government’s House Unamerican Affairs Committee. This charge against WSP is perhaps true and warranted. But it seems to me be of almost negligible importance. WSP pursued a tremendously worthwhile cause - with impressive success - in a novel way which stood in opposition to prevailing norms including but not limited to gender. In the court of feminist politics (or any other politics that are worthwhile, for that matter), WSP in my view committed at worst a ticketable offense, so to speak. The other was a talk I attended a few years ago where someone spoke about Agamben, immigration, and camps. (In my view they misread Agambem as well as making other mistakes, that’s neither here nor there, though.) In the talk they made some remark about people lacking freedom of movement and people in camps lacking agency. I pointed out that they were confusing formal/legal freedom with agency. People without the legal right to cross borders still exercise the power to cross borders. Likewise people in camps can exercise at least some agency - supporting each other, trying to break out, attacking abusive guards, whatever. This is not to minimize the horror of camps of any sort, but simply to say that there are actually existing phenomena which can’t be explained if people in camps are viewed as having - in all cases - literally no agency. In the course of making these points (which are more neatly made upon reconstruction here) I made some assertion like “I think it’s reasonable to assume that when put in conditions where their lives are threatened many people will try to get out of those situations.” In response I - or my assertion - was called an essentialist and the speaker added something to the effect that “It may sound conservative but it’s not essentialist,” with the implication that conservative anti-essentialism is still less conservative than an essentialist position.
Two things make this galling to me. First, just in terms of the argument, it doesn’t make sense. As I understand it, the criticism of something as essentialist is … umm… essentially an appeal to context. An essentialist has taken something which is context dependent and treated it as context-independent. In that sense, criticizing as essentialist is a good deflationist move. Still, it is not the case that an appeal to context has the same political valence in all contexts. The political importance of contextualizing is precisely a contextual matter. That is, anti-essentialism is not an essentially good thing, politically. Second, most of the time I’ve encountered this type of utterance it’s made with a sort of lefter-than-thou sentiment. I find that especially annoying when it functions to imply that someone’s academic work for which they are rewarded financially and otherwise is in some way a particularly important piece of political material. This sort of utterance is not always made in that way, of course. One other way it’s made is in a sort of politically naive but sincere way. In that type of instance I’m more sympathetic but I still find that it’s often accompanied by a sort of “I’m very smart” posture, an implied claim (or perlocutionary act!) to special knowledge. (I have the exact same reaction to talk about the problems with binary distinctions, another pet peeve. Binary distinction as opposed to what - nonbinary indistinction? binary indistinction? quaternary distinctions? why such a neat binarization of bad-binaries and good-nonbinaries? surely this too is an opposition in need of deconstruction…?)
I very much agree with all this. Along with essentialism, I’d add certain versions of naturalism, realism, appeals to representation, truth, objectivity, and so on. Rorty used a telling phrase when he described himself as being on the ‘epistemological left’, which I think is further evidence that people often align philosophical appeals to sociality with leftist appeals to sociality. In some sense I can understand why people are wary of falsely naturalising certain matters — how certain appeals to essence or objectivity, and so on, can end up reifying contingent matters of fact in a conservative way. But, of course, to suppose there is some general (’essential’ — one might say!) link between reactionary positions and these sorts of concepts is dangerously lazy thinking if the association is not backed up by further argument. That is, why should *all* essentialism be false reification?
In my own case, I see no contradiction between my Marxism and my supicion of constructivism, pragmatism, etc. At the very least, I am certainly not willing to foreclose the possibility of appeals to essence simply based on the observation that such appeals have been mishandled by conservatives. As you say, each case needs to be handled on its merits, providing that that there is no convincing general argument aligning essentialism and conservatism, which I don’t think there is.
Comment by Tom (Grundlegung) — February 19, 2008 @ 12:52 pm
The other thing that’s odd about these sorts of things, is that the purported political valence of essentialism/anti-essentialism has changed over time (in some senses, a shift of this sort is playing out at the moment, in various critiques of “postmodernism” as reassertions of materialism of varying degrees of sophistication). My position has always been that these things should be severed from any notion that there is an automatic political valence, that reflex assertions of either sort of position one-sidedly tend to be dogmatic, and that whether this question is relevant largely depends on the specific problem being addressed… In my own work, the thing that comes up fairly often is trying to get across that, even when I am making some sort of historicising move, this actually isn’t by itself sufficient to undermine claims about essence… So I often make gestures that would be considered “anti-essentialising” while remaining agnostic about the issue of “essence”. And I’ll also talk about “social essences” - things that are constituted, where it nevertheless makes sense to discuss them in terms of “essences”… I generally find that muddier (but not, I think, less clear
) terms are useful for the problems I work on… There’s also a “normal science” issue where it’s simply okay not to problematise something, because the work - political or intellectual - is taking place within a shared space that can be taken for granted, at least for that moment…
Comment by N Pepperell — February 19, 2008 @ 6:02 pm
Nate, I like your rant against the naive equation of “essentialism” with conservatism. All progressive political groups perform some kind of “strategic essentialism” (e.g., marxists struggle against “capital,” queer activists against “heteronormativity,” anti-racists against “the system of white supremacy,” feminists against “patriarchy,” environmentalists against the destruction of “the environment,” etc.). I think that it’s actually pretty easy to clear up the confusion over anti-essentialism vs. essentialism in relation to these political struggles. You simply need to make a distinction between two steps: 1) analysis of the problem, 2) political action to fight the problem. In your analysis, you need to take an anti-essentialist approach (i.e., destabilizing identities, distinctions, and hierarchies that are taken as natural). Then, you want to base your political action on that analysis, but in order for your analysis to provide clear guidance for this action, the destabilizing descriptions have to stop somewhere, presenting a stabilized, temporarily essentialized piece of knowledge (a “panoramic” view of the world, smoothing over the gaps - cf. Latour’s _Reassembling the Social_). In your work on “militant research,” the distinction between these two phases becomes more difficult to grapple with. Yet, I think that grappling with that question of when we should be anti-essentializing theorists and when essentializing political activists is precisely what truly effective progressive actors need to recognize and figure out how to theorize better (… of course that’s what critical theory has been all about since Marx - grappling with the gap between radical theory and practice - I think that Latour’s actor-network-theory provides the best extant approach to such a critical theory, but is still too heavy on the theory side).
Comment by Eli — February 19, 2008 @ 8:14 pm
hey y’all,
Thanks for the comments. Tom, “epistemological left” is my new favorite phrase. It’s a shame Rorty said it in a non-ironic way. I’ve actually got anti-realist and constructivist intuitions, though not as strong as I used to. I just don’t think that that’s a radical thing. I’d say the exact same about religion. I’m a devout atheist (though thankfully I’ve grown up enough to stop being an asshole about it), but I don’t think atheism has a positive political content in all contexts. (Certainly responding with atheism to revolutionary actors who understand and express themselves in a religious idiom would be a mistake - like say you had a time machine and went back to hang out with Gerard Winstanley or Thomas Muntzer and company - though in the long term after the political victory it is worth discussing those matters.)
Eli, I’m not sure about the anti-essentialist/essentialist moments as built in to movements. I’m sympathetic but the framework doesn’t speak to me, probably because I’ve just been reading a book about maternalist feminism which manages to be sympathetic without losing nuance. Some people might claim knowledge of an essence - the essential link between women and motherhood - and argue that society used to recognize it and then ceased doing so, their demand would be for something they see as a restoration of that recognition. Described in these terms a movement like this would make me quite nervous, but if their interpretation of “restoration of that recognition” is end nuclear proliferation or institute free 24 hour universal day care then I can’t get motivated to disagree too strongly despite my disagreements and unease at the more theoretical level.
Re: when to theorize, that’s a really good and hard question. For me, theory stuff is a hobby. I like it. Actually, I love it, as much as I get snarky about it (that’s why I get snarky, cuz I love philosophy). I’m pretty committed to a metatheoretical pluralism/pluralism of vocabularies, so people can theorize in a variety of terms and manners with decent success. I actually think that successful movements require theory (understood here as something like “sophisticated thought and reflection”), one of my essentialist claims, such that if a successful movement can be found in history then the movement must have had theory even if we have no existing record thereof. That’s an entirely retroactive view, though, and I’m not sure it offer much for making movements and organizations in the present. With that, in my union work, I always start with the set of techniques taught in our organizer training program, using questions to get people telling stories, because of the value of their experiential content. All of that involves a theory of sorts, but I don’t know that it’s the same as “doing theory” in the way which my love of philosophy does. Hope this makes sense, I can’t do any better. I’m off to bed.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — February 19, 2008 @ 11:00 pm
I like Naomi Schor’s take on this, in a piece called ‘This Essentialism is not One,’ in the book “Bad Objects.” She’s responding to the demonisation of Irigaray, which basically said ‘oh noes! she talked about the body! that’s so essentialist!’ Which personally I think misrecognises (or as Grosz put it ‘wilfully misreads’) Irigaray’s work which refuses to hand over the body into the hands of essentialism…
Whilst I have lots of sympathy with strategic essentialism, and tend in lots of ways to agree with you, Nate, about the usefulness of particular invocations of essentialism, I still have a queasy response to it. I kinda hope this isn’t just the dumb reactionary ‘you so conservative!’ call you’re writing about. My issue is that the effect of the appeal to motherhood, say, in the case you sketch above, isn’t simply limited to this particular case. That is, without taking a stand on the question of whether or not it ought to be done this way, I think it’s important to recognise that we reinscribe motherhood in particular ways in and through such a political claim. And in building upon a particular ‘version’ of womanhood as valuable and as having political significance, they also reiterate that version, not just neutrally, but as *politically significant*. That is, the claim worked, and because the claim worked, it reiterated that essential claims about motherhood are and should be politically significant. In some sense, then, this can however unintentionally counter or make quite difficult other political claims, or make them more difficult (say claims that aim to extend parenthood outside traditional roles—mat leave, maybe? or same-sex parents’ adoption rights? or whatever…) In other words, what might be most politically effective may also close down the possibilities for renegotiating the political significance of essentialism.
Actually, in the end, my concern isn’t so much these specific examples. My concern is more that strategic essentialism, in building on the peculiar signficance of essentialism in a political sphere, reiterates a particular *style* of thought. Sometimes I worry that accepting the terms by which certain things can be made politically significant, too much ground is ceded: the possibilities of challenging identity-based politics, say… Again, I’m not saying it shouldn’t be done - many many great things have been achieved through this method and yay for that - but that we also need to think about what we’re reproducing when we do, and in that respect, think about those whose lives such a political strategy cannot help but exclude (or rather, whose exclusion gets reiterated through such political action). The answer is certainly not to not take up political action, and so I totally agree about the irritating deployment of such claims to demonise particular political moves; and really, as Schor points out, definitions in the current context are *always* essentialist. Essentialism isn’t really *avoidable*, but that’s part of the point, I suppose: I just wonder whether we close off possibilities for renegotiating the political significance of *essentialist claims* in making them the grounds for political action (although again, I’m not sure this renegotiation could take place through political action as such, and certainly shouldn’t be hijacking other political goals)… Oh, and binary distinctions? I just want to sit them down with some Derrida and say, ‘Now just *really* read it.’ So many of these kinds of reactive critical claims assume that there is an *outside* we can reach, when Derrida’s pretty clear that there’s an inside that keeps troubling, but no outside which might allow ‘neutral, non-binary talk’. In other words, whatever you say, and even if you say nothing, binaries are required in order to get it said. That’s signification, baby…
And now I think I’ve said the same thing about 6 different ways… ;-P Goddamn.
Comment by WildlyParenthetical — February 19, 2008 @ 11:11 pm
Hmmm…. You know, I can identify precisely what might be read as essentialist in the first example you give, but not exactly what might be accused of essentialism in the second example. Maybe the problem is not anti-essentialism per se, but the posturing of it, where it’s used as a kind of catch-all, thus negating the requirement for an actual political engagement with the question? You don’t have to be an essentialist to claim that people in the camps have some autonomy, or that they initiate actions themselves; there’s no assumption of an essential ‘humanist’ tendency to resistance there, it’s quite factual. Yes, people in camps have mobilised. Significantly. You can give examples.
The first example, though, is less clearly a posturing, because what’s at stake is a particular form of essentialism, namely biological essentialism. And who’s to know what the micropolitics of the WSP were, in terms of what strategies might have been occluded, given the emphasis on being not only feminine, but also respectable? Who knows what women were prevented from participating, on the basis that they didn’t fit the image of respectable housewives coming out to strike? This is the problem with restoration politics — re-establishing the nostalgic fantasy of a lost past (whether it’s the connection between womanhood and ‘natural’ maternal feelings, or something else) always involves erasing whatever doesn’t fit with the fantasy. That erasure can happen invisibly, but it takes place at a material level, not just a theoretical one.
It feels to me as if you have a problem with a particular kind of response which doesn’t take into account the political stake, or the context — not ‘anti-essentialism’ itself.
Comment by az — February 20, 2008 @ 12:17 am
hey Wildly, Az,
Thanks for these. I have to teach in a moment and need to go prepare, real quick - Wildly, I’m actually very nervous about all this stuff. I have anti-essentialist intuitions, particularly when it comes to gender and sex. (I’m way less nervous with, say, an essentialist claim like “people are basically good, inherently” though I don’t know that I agree with that claim.) But it seems to me that there’s a difference between “I am nervous about these essentialist claims” or “it bears investigating whether these essentialist claims had negative effects” and “these essentialist claims, by virtue of their essentialism, must have had negative effects.” It’s the latter that I object to. Like you said Az, my objection is not to anti-essentialism per se (but neither is my objection to essentialism per se, politically speaking).
As for Women’s Strike for Peace, while I’ve only read an article and a bit from a couple web sites about them, I think they were a wholly positive phenomenon. I think their invocation of private motherhood was rhetorical and I’m not sure how sincere it was - they invoked it in via public mass gatherings of women and posed a serious challenge to US state policy around nukes and around anti-radicalism - but even if it was sincere, I’m not particularly troubled by it. I would be troubled by that type of ideology in other contexts. As an argument against nuclear testing. As an argument for labor market segmentation, not fine. Etc… Gotta run.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — February 20, 2008 @ 10:40 am
Hey Nate,
I think I’m in line with az on this. My initial expsoure to anti-essentialist arguments came not in a classroom but in campus-based struggles around queerness and feminism in the early 90’s. At the time, an older version of feminism derived from the 70’s and 80’s womens’ movement was being challenged by the then-emerging pro-queer/pro-sex tendency within feminism (which has since completely vanquished the old guard). In that context, there was a lot of political meaning to questions about the supposedly “nurturing” “essence” of women, and challenges to that analysis were proclaimed to be challenges from the left. (There’s a certain irony here, in that pro-queer feminism has shown itself to be at least as amenable to recuperation by capital as the previous womens’ movement.) For those of us (myself included, in a supporting role) who were active in those struggles, the fact that we were borrowing ideas from a range of theoretical traditions wasn’t particularly important, and outside of a classroom I never experienced the sort of knee-jerk anti-essentialism you are suspicious of.
At the same time, one of the only things I ever found to be useful in Habermas was his analysis of the “performative contradiction.” You provide a great example here, noting that self-proclaimed anti-essentialists are engaged in essentializing the categories themselves (and their political valences, in your phrase). That said, I think this is a problem largely, though probably not exclusively, limited to the academy.
Solidarity,
Mike
PS. I’ll get on that meme as soon as I get home from work. I don’t think anyone wants to know what’s on page 123 of the training manual for “The Financial Edge,” and that’s the only book-length item on my desk…
Comment by MIke — February 20, 2008 @ 1:24 pm
hi Mike,
Nice to hear from you. I think the spirit of the tag game requires you (let the spirit move you, brother!) to post those lines from the Financial Edge. You could _also_ post lines from the first book on hand at your computer at home…
re: anti-essentialism and campus feminism and queer activism, that’s where I came into this stuff too, that and Stoltenberg’s Refusing to be a Man book. In that context, attacking a claim like “men have a drive to rape, so don’t attack men for their biology” or “homosexuality is unnatural” is wicked important. By the same token, though, we could look to some instances of political lesbianism from the 70s as an example of essentialism that had a political function - either of the “everyone is *really* homosexual (or bisexual, for that matter)” variety or of the “lesbianism is an inherently political act” variety. Both claims had a value in their context, whether or not they’re true, and really in some particular moment if someone finds a counterclaim which is also essentialist more powerful than an anti-essentialist claim (say, “no, men are not biologically driven to rape, men are *actually* biologically driven to be caring, it’s only our messed up society’s social conditioning that makes men commit rape”) then I don’t have a problem with that, even if they’re wrong. I’m probly just repeating myself here. I think Az put it really well, my objection is to posturing about (anti)essentialism, not about the ideas themselves (I’m pretty convinced of antiessentialist claims though less concerned about them than I used to be) - my object is about certain utterances invoking ideas more than the ideas themselves, if you’ll pardon the turn of phrase. (No heaven of forms implied.)
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — February 20, 2008 @ 1:45 pm
i hear you loud and clear man. when i saw “essentialism” i thought of all those “theoretical” gestures to doctrinize what is at stake. y’re right, its all about strategy. leave the metaphysics to the metaphysicians.
Comment by tzuchien — February 21, 2008 @ 12:42 am
I enjoyed Eli’s comments on this most- the need in conducting analysis and theorizing we need to differentiate and pull apart things as much as possible, but at often at the point where we take political action it requires us certain amount of essentialism (perhaps) and lumping together (workers vs. bosses being an easy example). And Nate your take on WSP, that perhaps they could be essentializing aspects of gender/motherhood, but this is far outweighed by the challenges they pose is, I think, the healthy way to approach this dynamic. I think the problem is when folks are not committed to taking political action or a larger project of social transformation and use excuses like these to take the easy route and justify non-participation or support, rather than taking the more complicated and difficult route of engagement. (I think I’m beating the same horse as during our Zizek discussion here). If folks have seen it, I take inspiration for this discussion in the famous Chomsky v. Foucault debate (link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXBfOxfmSDw): we have to be committed to taking those hard steps despite the risks, because to not is far worse….. btw, another good example of this fallacious abuse of ‘anti-essentialism’ was a few years back, Anarchy magazine (shudder) ran an article, clearly in response to APOC, though not mentioning it by name, which argued that people of color organizing on the basis of race amounted to and reinforced essentialism. Go figure.
Comment by Adam W. — February 21, 2008 @ 10:30 pm
More evidence, from Robert Brandom’s ‘Responses’ to the issue of ‘Pragmatics & Cognition’ devoted to his work:
“Richard Rorty originated the now-traditional division of Sellarsians into a right and left wing. In this botanization, right-wing Sellarsians are most impressed with Sellars’s scientific realism, taking their cue from his slogan that ’science is the measure of all things, of those that are, that they are, and of those that are not, that they are not’. Left-wing Sellarsians are those who take Sellars’s greatest philosophical insights to be the critiques of semantic atomism and (so) epistemological foundationalism at the core of his masterwork ‘Empiricism and the philosophy of mind’. (Rorty incidentally expressed the hope that these two schools of thought could work out their differences more irenically than did the right- and left-wing Hegelians, who settled theirs at a strenuous, extended conference otherwise known as the battle of Stalingrad.)”
Comment by Tom (Grundlegung) — February 23, 2008 @ 5:01 pm
just to keep it real. It sounded like calling out that group of mothers was pretty wack shit, clear infultration by pomo le partei douche political faction leaders. But I personally really identify with critiques of essentialism (though the word is lame, why not just call it overly narrow gender categories). I think what those ideas get across is the way intra-gender oppression works, how essentializing gender forces otherwise distinct people into positions they don’t want to be in, and that in fact gender has innumerable classes within it. As a male who isn’t all roid’ raged out, and has never really felt comfortable or connected with brosephs, that all resonates with me, and I think has a useful in understanding group dynamics, leadership development, etc., with mass movements. Likewise I think it illuminates the narrowness of ideas like if a woman ruled, it’d be a more peaceful world.
So on a practical basis (and not some wack pomo ideology), i’d say give it a second chance. Nice Guy Faction contra Le Partei Douche!
Comment by todd — February 28, 2008 @ 8:57 pm
hey Todd,
We’re totally on the same page. Essentialism re: gender and sex is simply false - a mistake between biological/necessary and social/contingent facts - and is often highly pernicious ideology. But again, the political problem with any given essentialism, if there is one, is contextual. The problem with essentialism about gender is not that it’s conceptually wrong, it’s the political problems with it. And it’s only a political problem when it’s a political problem, pardon the circularity. It strikes me as facile to say “if X is essentialism then X has a pernicious political effect.” This sort of claim is sometimes made along the lines of “well, they’re reinforcing negative cultural norms…”, a claim which may well be true but is always treated (when uttered) as proven, rather than as a matter of inquiry into actual effects. That’s what I most object to. I’ve got no problems at all with an axiom like “if X is essentialism then treat X with great suspicion and look hard for pernicious effects, ulterior motives, etc”; that’s pretty close to where my own impulses are at. That’s not quite anti-essentialism, though, at least narrowly defined - it’s suspicion of essentialism. that doesn’t involve a positive claim to the existence of pernicious effects but rather looks to see if there are some.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — February 28, 2008 @ 11:27 pm