From: mgflax@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Marshall G. Flax)
Subject: Re: Hate Speech Okay, says the Supreme Court
Organization: Princeton University
Distribution: usa
Date: Tue, 21 Jul 1992 16:25:35 GMT

In article <1992Jul18.215536.17874@Princeton.EDU> (Ed Nilges) writes:
>In article <1992Jul18.175235.26198@Princeton.EDU> (Marshall G. Flax) writes:
>>
>>Critical legal studies seems to have an interest in "justice" at the
>>expense of even truth.  Critical legal studies relies on the objective
>>existence of groups (e.g. "nations", "classes", "genders") for its
>>analysis, but it fatally neglects to criticize those very concepts as
>>tools of oppression themselves.  Put another way, has MacKinnon answered
>>Wittgenstein?

>MacKinnon herself is too engaged in day-to-day struggles to answer
>Wittgenstein, but the more theoretical legal critics are directly
>inspired by French theory.

Since when was Wittgenstein a *french* theorist???

>Many French theorists (Montefiore 1983)
>acknowledge a debt to the analytic school of which Wittgenstein was more
>or less a part, a debt which is repaid by AngloAmerican analytic types
>by incomprehension and mockery.

Irrelevant; I was asking how the essentialistic MacKinnon addresses W's
questions, not how "AngloAmerican analytic types" did or did not address them.

>There is a lot of work on your question of "the existence of groups" as
>tools of oppression themselves and the relation of feminism and critical
>theory to Wittgenstein.  See, for example, Staten 1984, Lyotard 1984.

Yet none of your postings to date even acknowledge that the basis of
your criticism (i.e. the oppression of the black *group* by the white
*group*) is on extremely shaky ontological ground.

>One of the reasons for deconstruction and its "funny language" is
>probably a wish to AVOID more traditional modes of speech which reified
>(made a thing out of) abstractions like "nation" and "gender".

Too bad it hasn't made more of an impact upon you; it seems that you
have gone beyond reifying race and gender to deifying them.

>The
>theoreticians and the "legal critics" cannot win on the terms set by
>their opponents.

Yup.  Because grouping people into arbitrary categories is fascistic.

>If they use the older and simpler language (which
>Wittgenstein himself pointed out tended to deceive us into thinking that
>abstractions had concrete reality), then they get nuked as Nazi Space
>Monsters from the Planet Zork (aieee!) who are so recherche as to talk
>of the Palestinian nation and the female gender.

You just zoned out for a moment.  *What* did you mean to say here?

>If they use the
>technical lingo, mysteriously referring to "genealogy" rather than
>history a la Foucault, or writing "under erasure" a la Derrida, they are
>nuked as "confusing".

Because they don't care to explain themselves clearly in terms of the
world as we experience it.

>To me, however, as long as you can maintain a clear idea of what sort of
>thing a "nation" or a "gender" is, eg., a highly conditioned, historical
>way of summing-up countless microstatements about one's mates and
>sisters, then it's all right to talk about a "nation" or "gender" just
>as it's all right to drive your car without knowing about what's going
>on under the hood.

It's not that simple.  Or perhaps a better example would be driving one's
car without first bothering to open one's eyes.

>We allow technology to conceal; why must politics be
>subject to higher standards of transparency?

Because you place politics on a higher plane and use it to *judge*
everything else: technology, literature, social policy, individual beliefs.

>Max Horkheimer ("On the Problem of Truth", first printed 1935)
>recommended a dialectial logic purged of its Hegelian idealism as a way
>out of the dilemma you pose: between the relativism of saying there are
>no "real" groups, no "real" genders, and the dogmatism of making
>hyper-real groups and genders into rock-hard and unyielding features of
>the eternal landscape.  That is, the seemingly liberatory relativism of
>disclaimimg any interest in the existence of collectives turns readily
>enough into a politics which renders me powerless to effect change, for
>if I am terminally unique (a common enough bourgeois illusion) then all
>I can do is to take myself to the marketplace and hope for the best.

Survey says BZZZZZ!  You claim a termininally unique individual in the
marketplace is powerless.  Justify this emotional assertion, please, or
retract it.

>The sad results of this after 12 years of the dominance of such
>thinking should be plain here in America!

Yup, computer prices for the masses have become affordable, for instance.

>[Wholly irrelevant digression into light sabres and furry ewoks elided]

>If she were, however, she would not be married to a man (which she is.)

Nope -- she [MacKinnon] could just have him under control.

>And I think we need to look past what seems to be an initial rejection
>of our attempts as white straight males to express solidarity.

I reject solidarity with you for very good reasons it seems to me.

>For
>example, in soc.women, Christine Faltz recently characterized what I had
>to say as liberal posturing.

She actually characterized it as far more pathologic, but readers are
free to go back and read for themselves.

>Instead of interpreting her mild rejection
>as a message saying that I should not express solidarity, I merely
>ascribed her reaction to the fact that real exercise of freedom of
>speech is never cost-free.

In other words, you chose to be a martyr rather than actually consider
what she wrote.

>I'm "another man against violence against
>women" not because I desire the admiration of Christine Faltz but
>because I happen to believe that violence against women is wrong.

1. Why do you desire her admiration more than mine, for instance?

2. Clearly you also object to violence against men, so your decision
to place your bumper sticker is not merely determined by your objection
to violence against women but also from some other consideration as well.

3. I certainly believe you don't want Christine's approval, since you
certainly do not appear to repsect her.  Whether you placed the
bumper sticker for the approval of other women has not been addressed.

>What's missing is the old liberal acknowledgement of a common humanity.
>That's Fascistic.

I'm sure she would respond that some humanity is more common than others.

>In a dialectical and historically conditioned mode of thinking, the
>thought that  "I am a Palestinian" could in specific times and places be
>liberating and at other times and places be enslavement.

True.  But you consistently use class terms as a slave.

>Wittgenstein's
>"language games" were liberating in the 1930s, a time when Fascism was
>insisting on revealed Truth.  But in a community which has been itself
>debased, to say that truth must be conditioned on the needs of that
>debased community is enslavement.

We weren't debased 60 years ago?

>And is it non-Wittgensteinian to say that my community is debased?

No. It's clear your community is debased.

>Only if no LARGER community exists whose
>demands are being flouted by my immediate community.  For example, I
>don't criticize my country's environmental policies based on some
>special extra-historical insight; I just point to our shameful conduct
>at the recent Rio de Janiero conference to show how we flout the demands
>of the larger world community.  And if the entire world is convinced of
>something that I am convinced is wrong, I can often point to a community
>extended backwards in time, eg., to history.

Sorry, you got Wittgenstein wrong.  He wasn't in favor of a global 
"community standards" law (a la obscenity) but something far more
profound, like perhaps actually reflecting on the mental structures in
which we imprison ourselves.

marshall
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