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Theres a term I heard for some of this stuff recently. Epistemological privelege. The idea that particular identities posess a priveleged insight into their own oppression and nobody without that identity could possibly understand them and therefore should not comment. Its kind of bunkum but it also has some elements of truth to it. In my view part of this turn in left politics comes from the lessening influence of marxism and post-marxism on the left. Not necessarily big M marxism and all its baggage of economism and party rara trotskyism and stuff, but the general underlying mechanic of viewing oppression as being a social system thats amenable to analysis as a system. In this thinking personal experience not only isn't that useful, its anecdote, and anecdote isn't data. The actual type of analysis isn't really the important part here. You could view it from a strictly marxist view of class relationships to capital, or you could look at it from the perspective of foucaultian analysis of power and discourse, or feminist analysis of patriachy, and so on. All of these analyse their subjects sociologically rather than psychologically, as interactions between groups rather than as individuals. Unfortunately with a lot of activists now learning their politics from tumblr outrage blogs and loving facebook memes, that central insight just isn't being transmitted and its like all that hard earned wisdom from a couple of centuries of activist and progressive theory and praxis is just being ignored. I mean gently caress. Foucault would have vomited blood at the practice on tumblr blogs of enumerating lists of priveleges and disadvantages. He'd be shouting "THIS IS NOT WHAT I MEANT!!!!!!" when he basically bootstrapped modern queer theory and laid the framework the third wave feminists built their house upon. With that said, those that DO get it make the reverse mistake of assuming everyone who isn't an activist gets this. When a white dude complains about racism after being badmouthed by some black dude, the WRONG approach is to tell him theres no such thing as racism against white people, even if its true from a sociological perspective. That statement assumes he understands the theory of racism as a system, when he's just talking about racism as an event, and whilst wise activists discount the personal for the social, it behooves one not to silence individual experience either (which might sometimes confound our theories from time to time), simply because its spoken in non compliant common tounge. In short. Activism has lost its smarts, and as a result is getting angry at all the wrong things.
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Dec 3, 2014 19:19
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| # ¿ May 12, 2024 09:30 |
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Main Paineframe posted:Activism leaving the halls of political philosophy and being taken up by the common people is a good thing, though. You shouldn't need to know who Foucault was or what queer theory is in order to push for equality for gay people, and I'd argue that elitism like that is far more appropriate for the "circular firing squad" than popular sentiments traveling across widely-used social communication platforms without philosophical essays attached. Your missing my point. The historical hallmark of leftist thinking is the consideration of opression towards groups rather than just individuals and how the power dynamics build into a broad system that reinforces the power of the elites (be they rich/men/government/whatever). This doesn't mean people have to finish a PhD in post-structural colonial theory. Revolutions have happened around the world amongst groups of people with barely the education to write their own name, but still understanding that they, as a group are getting hosed. I'm saying that people , by trying to centralize privelege theory without realising that it talks about *classes* of people rather than just individuals , it turns from a powerful analytical shorthand into generating the whole mess of victim/opressor subjectivities that are plaguing the tumblr left right now. And thats no good. Yes it sucks someone has to put up with the trauma of being an opressed ware-otter with transjapanese headmates. But nothing gets solved until we ask the bigger picture of why power attaches so firmly to these delineations and what its affect on society as a whole is, or at least the group of people who collectively suffer as ware-otters, I guess?
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Dec 4, 2014 21:47
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