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!

“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.)”

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…

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

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.

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.