Response to Mark on D-W

This is in response to Mark's post about Dyer-Witheford yesterday. Since it's already off the front page I'm not posting this as a comment.

I think this basically makes sense, but only in an idealized situation can the common denominator of class-based oppression become the grounds for solidarity. By “idealized” I mean in the absence of an ideology that effectively reverses the situation of oppression as D-W outlines it. If contingent forms of oppression are exactly those investments that do the work of covering over class-based oppression, does it not follow that they must be addressed prior to any formation of solidarity based on class-based oppression? Let me try out an argument that opposes part of what D-W is saying:

Doesn’t the concept of “ideology” necessarily suggest that the subject in some way misrecognizes the real conditions of its social existence? Unless we are going to do away with the idea of ideology altogether, then we must ask what is being misrecognized and how. In D-W’s model of oppression, it seems we are dealing with a definition of ideology of the “false-consciousness” type, where the real conditions of the social (class-based oppression) can be recognized through a procedure of locating a grounds for solidarity. From the perspective of this model, however, “contingent” modes of oppression (ethnicity, gender, etc.) are precisely those forms of social relations that support misrecognition. Contingent oppression, in other words, is the vehicle through which class-based oppression is covered over, representing the operation whereby structural oppression at the level of class is misrecognized as merely contingent and contingent oppression at the level of individual difference is misrecognized as primary and universal. In this way, contingent oppression is necessary (and thus not contingent at all) to the continuance and reproduction of class-based oppression. The dis-articulation of so-called contingent oppression from class is, in short, ideology itself. There is a strange reversal where what is universal, because it is universal, comes to appear as merely contingent or common to all and thus not really a form of oppression, and what is specific, because it is specific, operating on the basis of particular differences, comes to appear as the really oppressive and discriminatory mechanism that prevents society.

What we have in D-W is a reproduction of the base-superstructure model, where class-based oppression determines the character of contingent oppressions (this is why, in fact, they are contingent and subject to change. If the base no longer requires them, as D-W says, then they can be done away with). What is presupposed in this model is the relatively fixed identity of the subject. However, it has been increasingly recognized that this fixity is a fiction, that, as Laclau says, the subject is “nothing but the unstable articulation of constantly changing positionalities.” Having recognized this, the theoretical basis for “misrecognition” as it is applied in the theory of false consciousness disintegrates. Rather than the either/or situation presented in the previous paragraph, where class-oppression and contingent oppression, depending on how one (mis)recognizes them, assume a primary position, with Laclau we have a both/and. The proposition is that no form of oppression can assume a primary position with respect to the others because hegemony is stitched together on the fly: all hegemonic regimes are non-total, opportunistic, and contingent. To make this a bit more concrete, we could say that more recent theories of ideology suggest that it is the drive to posit stability itself that is ideological—discursive operations that postulate a “subject of class oppression” prior to any “contingent oppression” are themselves ideological because they represent a “will to totality” in which the fundamental antagonism of society is denied, or, is itself cast as “contingent,” resolvable. Laclau explains: “The ideological [does] not consist of the misrecognition of a positive essence, but exactly the opposite: it consists of the non-recognition of the precarious character of any positivity, or the impossibility of any ultimate suture.”

D-W’s distinguishing between contingent and non-contingent forms of oppression attempts to resolve the essential impossibility of society by offering a model in which society is represented as a totality and the subject is represented as stable. To put it another way: class-based oppression cannot materialize as the grounds for solidarity across contingently oppressed groups because it would require taking up a fixed position relative to class, which is impossible without dropping the antagonisms of individual difference, which necessitates working through contingent oppressions prior to the formation of a class alliance. Because class-oppression is only made possible by a number of stitched together contingent oppressions that support the stability of a hegemonic regime, the appropriate object of critique are the sustaining mechanisms as a whole.

Social formations are organized around fundamental antagonisms. These antagonisms are denied through a hegemony that sustains itself through ideological misrecognitions. These misrecognitions are reproduced through a fabric stitched together from a number of oppressive strategies based on difference. The anti-ideological aim should thus be to fully assume the impossibility of “closure” and try to discern how social formations are knit together in specific ways that sustain oppression. We are not dealing with an “arborial” structure where the root is the material base, but rather with a “rhizomatic” structure—a network, a matrix, whatever—in which all configurations of oppression are contingent because it is antagonism (incompleteness) itself that is primary, not capital. This is why, for Laclau, ideology consists in not recognizing that discourses which posit the social as a totality are attempting to suture the subject into a space that stabilizes it for the purposes of extracting surplus.