Verbatim Mac

AT: Perm

Our materialist framing is critical to understanding power

Ebert 93 (Teresa, Professor of Humanities at the College of Arts and Sciences at the University at Albany who specializes in Critical and Cultural Theory, Feminist Critique, Marxist Theory and Globalization Theory, “Ludic Feminism, the Body, Performance, and Labor: Bringing ‘Materialism’ Back into Feminist Cultural Studies” https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/1354189.pdf)//meb

Following Foucault, Butler absorbs the social into a set of discursive practices, the most fundamental being "compulsory heterosexuality and phallogocentrism ... understood as regimes of power/discourse" (xi) regulating the production of gender and sexuality. In other words, Butler takes the discursive practice of "compulsory heterosexuality" as the basis for explaining the gen- eration and production of gender and sexuality, but in doing so she occludes the socioeconomic relations of gender and sexual exploitation. She is unable to account for why heterosexuality is compulsory and instead takes it as a given. She thus diverts atten- tion from the political economy to rhetoric and ends up replacing explanation with description. A materialist social analytic, on the other hand, explains the compulsory nature of heterosexuality by situating it within the historical relations of (gender) differences within a system of exploitation-patriarchy-as a necessary means of the system. In other words, compulsory heterosexuality is a necessary means by which patriarchy naturalizes gender divisions of social relations, particularly labor, but to replace patriarchy with compulsory heterosexuality, as Butler, Wittig, and a number of other feminists do, is a reductive move, isolating heterosexu- ality as a closed system cut off from socioeconomic relations and erasing patriarchy as a regime of exploitation: in short, it cuts off gender and sexuality from labor. By confining her critique to the discursive regime of compulsory heterosexuality, Butler is never able to move beyond an immanent critique-constrained by its rhetorical boundaries-to relate it to the underlying social forces. She thus substitutes ludic agency-a form of semiotic activism that in fact reifies the dominant power structure-for transformative critique and intervention in the social system itself. Part of the reason is, of course, Butler's participation in the ludic rejection of "totalizing gestures" and her concern to prevent the reduction or "colonizing" of "differences that might otherwise call [the] total- izing concept into question." For "feminist critique," according to Butler, "ought to explore the totalizing claims of a masculinist signifying economy" and even feminism itself (13). In the name of a seemingly inclusive complexity of local, specific differences, Butler, in a common ludic move, excludes the connections of local signifying practices/performances, and their discursive regulatory frames, to global socioeconomic relations. Butler thus puts forth not only an anticonceptual notion of the body-"bodies are so many 'styles of the flesh"' (139)-but of gender as well: she asks us to "consider gender, for instance, as a corporeal style, an 'act"' (139), in short, a signifying or discursive performance inscribed on the surface of the body. This notion of gender, as a corporeal or textual "style," marks ludic feminism, which, in effect, abandons the category of gender (as a materialist and historical construct, emphasizing the way the socioeconomic totality produces gender subjects) in favor of sexuality, as the effects of the a-regular excess of performance and desire. The history of feminism is, in a sense, the history of conceptual con- testations over fundamental struggle concepts, like gender, and the way such contests articulate, in the realm of theory, the socio- economic contestations over the distribution of economic re- sources and cultural power in society. But this history is radically different from the prevailing "ludic" history of feminism, Gallop's Around 1981, which constructs this history in terms of a closed system of textualities as manifested in different anthologies of feminist writings in literary theory and criticism. Gallop acknowl- edges quite specifically that in writing this history her "project is a struggle ... over whose version of history is going to be told to the next generation.... I am clearly trying to write that history ... to undo ... the effect of books like Sexual/Textual Politics ...." (Gallop, Hirsch, and Miller 362). Butler herself argues that "the very different ways in which the category of sex is understood depend[s] on how the field of power is articulated" (Gender Trouble 18). However, she articulates power in terms of a generalized, ahistorical, a-causal Foucauldian notion that "encompasses," as she says, "both the juridical (pro- hibitive and regulatory) and the productive (inadvertently gener- ative) functions of differential relations" (29). In short, power is understood in largely rhetorical terms as regulatory or rule gov- erning, and as such it is not simply restrictive, but, like a grammar, also generative: its "productions," according to Butler, "inadvert- ently mobilize possibilities of 'subjects' that do not merely exceed the bounds of cultural intelligibility, but effectively expand the boundaries of what is, in fact, culturally intelligible" (29). In short, power, for Butler, is a regulatory system that produces excesses that subvert its own rules. Thus a discursive-power regime like compulsory heterosexuality generates "rules governing significa- tion [that] not only restrict, but enable the assertion of alternative domains of cultural intelligibility, i.e., new possibilities for gender that contest the rigid codes of hierarchical binarisms. . . . The injunction to be a given gender produces necessary failures, a va- riety of incoherent configurations that in their multiplicity exceed and defy the injunction by which they are generated" (145). Gen- der, for Butler, is thus a ludic play of differance; it is unstable, continually deferring and differing from itself: "gender," Butler writes, "is a complexity whose totality is permanently deferred" (16). It simultaneously constructs and undoes itself through an indeterminate series of repetitive acts or performances that ex- ceed and subvert the regulatory power of compulsory heterosex- uality. Such an understanding of the political construction of gen- der is, I think, seriously misleading and disenabling for a socially transformative feminism. Indeed, gender is not naturally fixed or secure, as psychoanalysis has shown, but neither is it simply dis- cursive or performative. Nor can it be so easily disrupted or ex- ceeded as Butler argues. Gender is a historical and ideological effect of a socioeconomic regime of exploitation, namely patriar- chy, and in particular the sexual division of labor. Thus, it cannot be effectively transformed through an indefinite series of indi- vidual acts ("performances") of parodic repetition. To disrupt, undo, or exceed the gender binary requires a collective social struggle not only on the level of ideological constructions but, more importantly, against the systematic socioeconomic relations requiring and maintaining the specific forms of gender and sex- ual difference. This also means that rewriting-reducing-the notion of power to a rhetorical practice that is little more than a grammar does not take us very far in our struggles.18 Such a ludic notion of power-developed in the name of the concrete, local, specific-turns out to be an abstract, generalized, isolated concept of power cut off from the economic realities of daily life, espe- cially the labor of women. Contrary to Foucault and Butler, power is not some kind of a-causal, contingent, and free-floating series of rules and injunctions generating its own demise. Rather, power, from a materialist or resistance postmodern frame, is al- ways situated in relation to social conflicts over regimes of exploi- tation. While power can be harnessed for opposition and revolu- tion, it is not automatically generated but must be struggled for since power by and large operates on behalf of the dominant interests. One of the primary functions, then, of a transformative feminist cultural critique is to expose the hidden operation of power, the underlying global connections that relate the dispar- ate, diffuse instances of power to systematic practices of exploi- tation according to socially and economically produced differ- ences of gender, sexuality, race, and class.

Perm fails

Ebert 95 (Teresa, Professor of Humanities at the College of Arts and Sciences at the University at Albany who specializes in Critical and Cultural Theory, Feminist Critique, Marxist Theory and Globalization Theory, “(Untimely) Critiques for a Red Feminism” from Post-Ality, Marxism and Postmodernism, edited by Mas’ud Zavarzadeh, Teresa Ebert and Donald Morton, https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/ebert.htm)//meb

In its engagement with "materialism" ludic postmodern feminism has reached a political crisis. But it attempts to represent and deal with this crisis as an exclusively epistemological question — as if epistemology itself is not partisan. We, therefore, need to examine some of the reasons why "materialism" — after the serious epistemological and political challenges from poststructuralism, postmarxism, post-Heisenbergian physics and New Historicism — continues to remain a fundamental issue in feminism and how ludic feminism (as the avant-garde of discursivist social theory) has theorised materialism in the post-al moment. It is important to point out that the "ludic" is not a rigidly defined category but a widely shared social 'logic" that is articulated in a number of diverse and even conflicting ways by various ludic theorists and feminists. The crux of all ludic postmodern and feminist theories, however, is the rewriting of the social as largely discursive (thus marked by the traits of linguistic difference), local, contingent, asystematic and indeterminate. In many cases, this move is accompanied by a rearticulation of power as diffuse, a — causal and aleatory — most notably as articulated by Michel Foucault and elaborated by a number of feminists, especially Judith Butler. Social systems (totalities) become, for ludic postmodernists, merely discredited metanarratives rather than social "realities" to be contested. According to ludic logic (which is itself a metanarrative that forgets its own meta-narrativity), not only history but also the social are seen in semiotic terms: as "writing," as traces of textuality (Jacques Derrida), as "given by the universe of the phrase" (Jean-Francois Lyotard), and as a regime or genealogy of discursive practices and power-knowledge relations (Michel Foucault), as the "risk" of reappropriating through the materiality of literature what is lost in conceptuality (Jean-Luc Nancy, The Experience of Freedom). In all these cases the fundamental nature of the social is without centre or determination: for Derrida this is expressed as the absence of any grounding ("transcendental") signified, such as "revolution," resulting from the play of differance; for Lyotard it is articulated in terms of the "differend," while for Foucault, it is accounted for by the a-causal, aleatory nature of power. Nancy, in his The Inoperative Community, of course, posits the social as a community without a collectivity (of production). The political consequences of this idealist move — in which, as Derrida says, everything became discourse" (Writing and Difference 280) — are clearly articulated by the post-Marxist political theorist, Ernesto Laclau, who develops a ludic social theory "identifying the social with an infinite play of differences" ("Transformations" 39). Following Derrida, he argues that "to conceive of social relations as articulations of differences is to conceive them as signifying relations." Thus, not only is the social "de-centred," according to Laclau, but social relations, like all 'signifying systems," are "ultimately arbitrary" and as a result "'society' . . . is an impossible object" ("Transformations," 40-41). By reducing the social to "signifying relations," that is, to a discursive or semiotic process, Laclau renders social relations "ultimately arbitrary" (like any sign). This means that social relations cannot be subjected to such determining relations as exploitation since they are "arbitrary,' and if social relations are not exploitative (determined), they no longer require emancipation. In other words, Laclau and other ludic theorists, from Derrida to Drucilla Cornell, Foucault to Judith Butler, are not only rewriting the basic "struggle concepts" necessary for social change (e.g., "society," "surplus labour," "history," 'class." "exploitation," "use-value," and "emancipation") as a series of tropic Metanarratives, but they are also turning the realities that these concepts explain into "arbitrary," indeterminate, "signifying relations." Ludic theorists, in short, are troping the social. in so doing, they de-materialise various social "realities," cutting them off from the material relations of production, and turn them into a superstructural matrix of discursive processes and a semiotic, textual play of differance.

Ludic politics necessarily separates theory from practice, means the alt is always already severance

Ebert 96 (Teresa, Professor of Humanities at the College of Arts and Sciences at the University at Albany who specializes in Critical and Cultural Theory, Feminist Critique, Marxist Theory and Globalization Theory, “Towards A Red Feminism” https://www.solidarity-us.org/node/2309)//meb

Postmodern theory, especially poststructuralism, has had considerable influence on feminist thinking and praxis--producing what I call a "ludic feminism." Ludic feminism is founded on a series of, by now, common postmodern assumptions that rewrite difference as a proliferating play of significations, give priority to the local, the autonomous and the "bodily," and privilege desire as a liberatory agency and consumption as the arena of social change. Some of its main forms range from Drucilla Cornell's Derridean feminism and Judith Butler's "performativity" theory to "ludic socialist feminism," as in Donna Haraway's work, and the new "transnational feminism" (e.g. see Grewal and Kaplan; for a fuller elaboration of this issue, see my Ludic Feminism and After: Postmodernism, Desire and Labor in Late Capitalism). Another fundamental assumption of ludic feminism is that "theory" (as the knowledge of historical social totality) is totalitarian and repressive of difference, and thus that theory and praxis are two autonomous entities. Such a localist ludic politics displaces revolutionary praxis aimed at emancipation from the exploitation of labor and need. Do I seem to exaggerate? Let me remind you of two prominent feminist declarations discrediting emancipation. Judith Butler, perhaps the most influential ludic feminist theorist, declares the "unrealizability of `emancipation'" because poststructuralism has shown its foundations to be "contradictory and untenable" ("Poststructuralism" 8). Again, in a quite different but related vein, Vandana Shiva and Maria Mies, in their theory of Ecofeminism, reject the "Enlightenment emancipation-logic" and argue that the "'subject's emancipation from the `realm of ecessity'"--a fundamental principle of historical materialism--is itself an oppressive patriarchal, Eurocentric notion (7). This abandonment of emancipation has part of its roots in the ludic philosophical operations, which reify the local and the valorization of difference, diversity and autonomy. At the core of this ludic localism is the separation of theory and practice. For Marxism, theory is an integral and inseparable part of praxis: praxis is the truth of theory and theory is the very frame of knowing produced by praxis and at the same time guiding it. To separate them, Marx had thought, was an idealist fallacy. But feminism and poststructuralism have problematized the relation between theory and practice, arguing that practice is local, specific, non-generalizable and autonomous. To determine practice by theory is to unleash violence against the specificity and difference of practice--theory, in short, is seen as reductive of the diversity of the local, the particular. In her book The Wake of Deconstruction, Barbara Johnson sums up the classic poststructuralist position that "Theoretical statements, whether about decisions or about undecidability, are all equally detached from any particular intervention" (84). Thus in the name of "theory," theory is "detached" from practice. Ludic feminist theory becomes an "anti-theory" theory that celebrates the local, the specific, the particular in all their differences. The detachment of theory from practice is based on the difference not only of theory from practice but (as the logic of Derridean "difference" makes clear) the difference of theory from itself--that is, theory is seen as self-divided by the differences of language and signification constructing its concepts (Derrida, 3-27). This proliferation of differences has lead to Lyotard's well-known ludic left slogan, "Let us wage war on totality." (82) Theory, as an explanatory practice, as the systematic and interconnected understanding of social practices has thus largely been abandoned in favor of "thick description" (Geertz, 5), as local, nongeneralizing description of the specific and particular. The social totality becomes unknowable--or as post-Marxist Ernesto Laclau declares, "'society'. . . is an impossible object" ("Transformations" 40-41). In short, ludic theory can no longer provide knowledge of totality--especially the totality of capitalism--because it posits the social as divided by proliferating series of incommensurate, autonomous differences that Lyotard calls "language games." Lyotard further develops this idea through his concept of the differend: the radical irreducible point of differences among events and phrases rendering them--and rendering truth and justice--incommensurable. The war on totality, the detachment of theory and practice is especially disenabling for feminist struggles against global capitalism. Let me demonstrate this by examining very briefly some of the assumptions in Mies and Shiva's Ecofeminism, which has become a very influential text among activist feminists who formally reject ludic feminism but embrace all its concepts and practices through an experiential and localist argument. Ludic and activist feminists, in other words, are becoming the same in their anti-emancipatory views and acts.

Their individual performance fractures knowledge of reality in the face of oppression, reducing politics to rhetoric and history to textuality. The perm literally cannot function because their aff changes the way we view historical reality and socially constructed categories

Ebert 93 (Teresa, Professor of Humanities at the College of Arts and Sciences at the University at Albany who specializes in Critical and Cultural Theory, Feminist Critique, Marxist Theory and Globalization Theory, “Ludic Feminism, the Body, Performance, and Labor: Bringing ‘Materialism’ Back into Feminist Cultural Studies” https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/1354189.pdf)//meb

Ludic postmodernists address reality as a theater of "simu- lation," marked by the free-floating play (hence the term ludic) of disembodied signifiers and the heterogeneity of differences as in the works of Derrida, Jardine, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Suleiman, and Butler. For instance, for Butler gender is a simulation-what she calls "performance": it is, in other words, the effect of per- formative acts of the subject and not the outcome of some pregiven interior essence. This sexual indeterminism is what also marks the writings of Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests; Teresa de Lauretis, "Film and the Visible" (How Do I Look? Queer Film and Video); and Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking. Gender and sexuality in the writings of all these theorists are effects of the circulation of discourses and not part of the operation of socioeconomic ar- rangements. In fact the very term "gender"-which has been an important enabling concept for politically radical feminism is displaced by the new emphasis on "sexuality," which is seen as a ludic excess of gender. "Gender," in other words, is considered a regulatory mechanism that can best be overthrown not by collective social practices but by excessive individual perfor- mances that fracture its rules and set the subject free in its libid- inal quest. Ludic postmodernism is best conceptualized as a crisis of representation, a crisis in which texts constituted by difference can no longer provide reliable knowledge of the real because meaning itself is self-divided and undecidable: the access of the signifier to the signified is delayed and deferred, divided by a difference within. This movement of differance deprives politics of its groundedness in such categories of seeming presence and identity as gender, race, class, nationality: for as one of the con- tributors to Cultural Studies argues, following Laclau and Mouffe, "[I]ndeterminacy and ambivalence ... inhabit the construction of every social identity" (Mercer 426). Differance dismantles the no- tion of politics itself as "outside" representation, as a "referent" for action. Politics, for ludic postmodernists, is instead a textual practice (such as parody, pastiche, fragmentation, and so on) that has no reliable reference "outside" itself: like texts, as Paul de Man argues (Allegories of Reading), its only meaning is that it has no meaning outside its processes of signification. Politics, in this sense then, is a process without a product; it is a mode of semiotic activism. Politics as semiotic activism obscures prevailing mean- ings: it disrupts the oppressive totality of what Lyotard calls "cul- tural policy" (Postmodern Condition 76) through play, gaming, ex- perimentation in writing, and transgressive readings (Barthes's "writerly" text) that subvert the "rules" of grand narratives and prevent the easy circulation of meaning in culture. Thus, radical politics for ludic postmodernists problematizes signifying prac- tices and established meanings, demonstrating that in every entity there is a surplus of meaning, an excess, a difference preventing that category from being a reliable ground for reality in general and politics in particular. Such a subversive politics of significa- tion is seen as a liberating gesture, deconstructing the totalities- that is, the grand narratives-organizing reality. Ludic postmod- ernism substitutes a politics of differences within signification for the politics of differences between identities such as race, class, and gender. "Identity," for ludic postmodernism, is nothing but a metanarrative inherited from the Enlightenment. I want to stress that the postmodern problematization of signifying practices is a necessary move in that it denaturalizes dominant meanings and opens up a space for the disarticulation of established signifiers constituting identities. The problem is that ludic critics do so in a way that isolates signifying practices from the historically specific social relations producing them. Lu- dic postmodernism is, in effect, a cognitivism and an immanent critique that reduces politics to rhetoric and history to textuality. It removes the ground from under both the revolutionary and the reactionary and in the name of a multiplicity of differences effec- tively conceals radical difference. Ludic politics is, in the last in- stance, a Socratic, dialogic, discursive apparatus that does not so much transform practices as merely problematize their continu- ation. In feminism this postmodern rewriting of difference has meant a shift away from differences between genders to a concern with the differences within the category of women along the various trajectories of race, class, and sexuality, as in the work, for instance, of de Lauretis, Joan Scott, and Elizabeth Meese. For others, such as Jardine and Shoshana Felman, it has meant the erasure of woman as historical subject and her construction as a subject of desire: a signifying excess. As a result, feminism risks losing sight of women as collective subjects systemati- cally exploited in patriarchy according to their gender and is in danger of textualizing and thus losing its transformative politics. Feminism, I argue, needs to rewrite the postmodern dif- ference within-differance-not as a ludic difference but as a historical, political difference, a materialized, resisting differance. But this is not a call to return to the essentializing difference between identities as in a logocentric humanism. Rather it proposes that we need to realize the historicity of identities, particularly of gender sexuality and race, and their relations to labor processes.

In localizing the subject, the aff’s analysis of oppression is ahistorical and functionally incompatible with the alt—they mask reform as change, so the alt alone is uniquely key to solve

Ebert 5 (Teresa, Professor of Humanities at the College of Arts and Sciences at the University at Albany who specializes in Critical and Cultural Theory, Feminist Critique, Marxist Theory and Globalization Theory, “Rematerializing Feminism” http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/40404228.pdf)//meb

The role of transformative cultural studies, what I have called "Red Cultural Studies" (see Ebert, 1996; 2001; 2003) is to provide sustained, concrete theoretical analysis of the workings of the rela- tionship between the social relations and the forces of production (in this case, between the actual practices and ideology of the health care industry and its socioeconomic and technological capabilities) in order to produce an integrated theoretical consciousness in people so they can fully grasp the contradictions by which they live: the con- tradictions, for example, that while health care is potentially avail- able to all in the United States, most people have limited or no access to it. Red Cultural Studies will explain why, and in explaining why, argues, in this case, for example, for the right to a healthy body and decent health care as a fundamental right of citizenship and, through such an argument, turns the citizen into an active agent of history (by further transforming theoretical consciousness into class consciousness), one who works towards different social arrangements - different from the existing social conditions. On Mobilizing Counterhegemonic Agency Any mobilization of counterhegemonic agency requires that one first theorize "agency" itself. I think there is a tendency in contempo- rary cultural theory to theorize agency in a rather idealist frame that, in a curious way, is then located in the specificity of situational ac- tions. In other words, contemporary cultural theory argues that all effective actions have a strong local dimension - at times it even claims that this locality is a form of materiality. However, while local- izing the subject, it theorizes the subject in an ahistorical - what I call idealist - fashion. It somehow thinks that the subject, by the sheer power of its spontaneous experience, can undertake "human praxis." In fact, the basis of coalition is this idealist, but localized, subject: a subject that can enter into negotiation (discursive practice) with other subjects and in a collaborative mode bring about change. Change here is always a code word for reform. This notion of agency - local, discursive, coalitionist - is broadly supported by identity politics. Let me say what I have said in a different way: contemporary cultural theory avoids the question of class - which is the only site of historical agency. It does so by first representing class as a dated view and then proposing, as an updated position, the subject of coa- lition located in identity politics. We thus end up with a series of sub- jects: a feminist subject, an African American, a Latino, and a Queer subject. These fragmented subjects - celebrated in Deleuze and Guattari and their followers as nomadic subjects - are all, in my view, masquerading as subjects of agency. I believe that a productive no- tion of agency has to be highly critique-al of poststructuralist theo- ries of agency which, in the final analysis, substitute life-style practices (informed by identity politics) for class and re-cognize this class-as- life-style as the main axis of human praxis. Obviously at this point I will be critiqued for misrecognizing poststructuralist theory or will be considered to be indifferent to the plight of the marginalized or unaware that class is not the only site of historical agency - that gender, sexuality, race are equally important. I am not in any way rejecting sexuality, gender or race as sites of struggle, but I do not regard them to be autonomous spaces. Sexuality becomes a marker of social difference only in a class society. Race is the historical site of racism under capitalism where the cheap labor of the slave, the colonized and the ethnically/ racially different im- migrant is the mainstay of the rate of profit. In other words, although race, gender and sexuality are indeed spaces of historical agency and sites of social struggle, they become so because of the divisions of labor and property relations (class). Therefore, in a world penetrated by capital the only historical agent is the other of capital - the wage-laborer. Any counterhegemonic agency or human praxis that does not center it- self along this contradiction and this class antagonism will produce masquerades of historical agency that might make the upper-middle- class intellectual feel empowered and enabled but will leave the existing social practices intact. To be very clear, the route to social transformation does not pass through coalition - it is firmly centered in revolution.