Terrell F Carver

Kinship Trouble: Antigone's Claim and the Politics of Heteronormativity

Heteronormativity has recently emerged as a fully shaped and well theorized concept in numerous fields, and it proves central to sexual politics and the politics of sexuality. In Antigones Claim (2000), Judith Butler explores the heteronormativity of kinship as structured by the state, and she links this language of kinship to the incest taboo. This article focuses on Butlers politicization of kinship structures in her reading of the figure of Antigone. Because she sees the incest taboo as a social force that maintains heteronormativity by producing a particular configuration of the family, Butler advances the critique of heteronormativity. She does this through both her introduction and explication of the concept of (un)intelligibility and her explicit attention to the “incest born” person. The unintelligibility of the incest-born demands a thoroughgoing reconsideration of the liberal framework of tolerance: The unintelligible cannot be tolerated because they have not even been granted access to the category of the human. By asking us to reconsider kinship outside the defining and dominant terms of heteronormativity and the incest taboo, Butler promotes a distinct conception of politics. She thereby makes a noteworthy contribution to the political project of undoing gender hierarchy.

Gender/Feminism/IR

Gender is not going to be “an explanatory framework” (Carpenter 2002:154). Rather, it is going to figure into the explanatory frameworks that people already have, and into the ones that international relations (IR) theorists think that they should have. Gender is not either explanandum (the thing to be explained) or explanans (whatever does the explaining). It could be either or both, on its own or in conjunction with other factors. Clearly some researchers are going to need persuading that gender matters at all in what they study. Typically gender is going to be in both explanandum and explanans, rather as cause and effect are linked, and, indeed, that linkage is likely to play a part in what convinces us that the explanation is a good one. For example, voting Republican or Conservative (an effect) is probably going to have something to do with having Republican or Conservative values or beliefs (a cause), but of course it could also be explanatorily linked with income and wealth as well as with parental voting (Republican or Conservative), with geographical residence (where there are lots of Republicans or Conservatives), and so on. Gender can function within a framework, but it is not the framework itself. Putting gender into the explanandum or explanans, or having it figure in some different way in both, may be said “to gender” a study and “to gender” an explanatory framework. The above is intended to explain some shorthand usage and to help clarify situations in which researchers talk past one another (Carver forthcoming). It does not, of course, describe the only situation in which researchers talk past one another. Consider another. For some researchers the fact-value dichotomy is central and a cornerstone of science and objectivity whereas for others the dichotomy is not only nonexistent but an illusion with …

Personal and Political

In early 1845 Engels was 24 and apparently a young man with the world before him. As it happens, however, the pattern for his life over the next fifty years was largely in place. He could not have been aware of this, and indeed his experiences and career did not follow an inevitable course. But in retrospect it is remarkable how clearly his life and thought were prefigured in the events so far considered.

Marx, Engels and Scholarship

Marx’s relation to Anti-Diihring has become an issue, because Engels brought it up after Marx’s death in 1883. He did so to persuade us that what he had written was, in part, an accurate reproduction of Marx’s views, and, for the rest, a body of thought compatible with Marx’s work. Engels claimed in 1885 that he had read his work to Marx and that it was issued with his ‘knowledge’. Moreover he implied that he was fulfilling his part in an agreed division of labour in producing texts that were interchangeable with Marx’s on some subjects and supplementary to his work on others. The issue of Engels’s veracity and intellectual honesty arises when commentators, such as Gordon Welty, attempt to persuade us that Marx’s work is, in part, coincident with Engels’s dialectical laws of nature, history and ‘thought’, and, for the rest, compatible with this ‘world outlook’. Engels’s claims about Marx’s ‘knowledge’ of Anti-Duhring and about a division of labour re-emerge in Welty’s article.2 What is missing from Welty’s account is any direct textual evidence from Marx that he agreed with Engels’s ambitiously comprehensive laws, his deterministic materialism and his teleological dialectics. What we have instead is a rehearsal of the question in Engels’s curiously diffident terms: ‘. . . it was self-understood between us that this exposition of mine should not be issued without his knowledge’.3 Why was there no bold claim by Engels of agreement between the two while Marx was alive? Why did Marx never identify himself with Engels’s dialectical views as they appear in the first edition of Anti-Duhring? Even after Marx was dead, why did Engels appeal to mere ‘knowledge’ of the text? Why is it only in the second (1885) Preface to Anti-Duhring that we are told of their partnership and division of labour and given a characterization of Engels’s dialectics that differs significantly from the less ambitious statements made in the text of the first edition? Only after Marx’s death did Engels write:

The Politics of Ideologie-Kritik: Socialism in the Age of Neo/Post-Marxism

In significant ways globalization theory derives from and is dependent on ideas originating with Marx, Engels, and Marxism. However, there are important puzzles within the Marxist heritage that need resolving, before current assessments of the global economic situation post-2007 can proceed. This is because these puzzles—about the nature of critique, the appropriate understanding of ideology, and the political power of neo/post Marxism—are part of the situation itself. Only after this clarification do Neo-Marxism and Post-Marxism make contrasting, but consistent sense. In a new era of global depression, credit crunch, and overt class struggle the multi-polar realities of the G20 nations now openly challenge the traditional dichotomies that divided democratic from one-party states, “free market” from planned (socialist) economies, and developed from developing (capitalist) economies. Globalization theory will thus require revision, and international political economy will necessarily rely on Ideologie-Kritik.

The World Turned Inside Out

Paul Amar’s (2011) article has the whiff of street politics on every page. This whiff is not something that many readers of this journal will be all that familiar with, whatever the local setting. Moreover, the whole enterprise of academically trained specialists writing up research findings and theoretical debates is itself removed from the batons, tear gas, shouting and blood through which politics is pursued. As has so recently been demonstrated, a world of high politics and securitized summits is easily and profoundly shaken by what ordinary people do in urban spaces, not least when they immolate themselves in public view and/or gather in gigantic crowds in televisual squares. Facebook, twitter and mobile communication devices do not erase this – they amplify it. This is not to criticize academic pursuits (obviously a self-contradictory move) but rather to expose the commonplace trope that we write analytically, working from accepted categories, and then knowledge flies off into some outer space of objectivity and critique. In reality we know that it is mostly academic people like ourselves who read this discourse, and then often tend to view the world through it – rather to the point that that academic world becomes ‘the world’. Among other things, Amar’s article turns this comfortable world inside out. It is really not that ‘we’ in the Global North (otherwise known as rich countries) should ‘open ourselves’ graciously to the Global South (a supposed area of economic and cultural ‘otherness’ to ‘us’), or indeed to the multifarious voices in urban spaces around the corner, but rather that these locations are self-consciously – at last – intruding on ‘our’ comfortable assumptions and practices. Moreover, Amar’s article exposes the way that our flirtation with politics-as-it-is-done relies on commonplace presumptions that the police and ‘the law’ will be fair, even-handed, under firm control and ‘on our side’. Many academics far braver than I have found out – the hard way – that this is not the case. One of the striking things about the rolling events of Tahrir Square – and one of the burdens of Cynthia Enloe’s excellent comments in this forum – is that the policing situation almost anywhere is far from simple, but rather complicatedly connected with military, private security

Materializing the Metaphors of Global Cities: Singapore and Silicon Valley

In this article I focus methodologically on the productive power of catachresis, the forcing of language into unexpected comparisons and similes, neologisms and imagery, through which material geographies of meaning are produced as forms of power. I argue that in the 2003 ‘Report of the Remaking Singapore Committee’ and similar documents discourses of planning and development are a practical form of science fiction. Singapore is imagined there as a ‘cyber-sexy-city’ through an articulation of metaphors centring on ‘Silicon Valley’. These discourses adjust social policies, representational practices, and spatial environments to encourage and defend the ‘right kind’ of varied and in particular non-heteronormative sexualities that the ‘creativity’ involved in ‘soft capitalism’ is thought to require. This is surprising, given the Singaporean states long-term political investment in ‘traditional family values’. En este artículo me enfoco metodológicamente en el poder productivo de la catacresis, la coerción del lenguaje dentro de comparaciones y símiles inesperados, neologismos e imágenes, por las que las geografías materiales del significado se producen como formas de poder. Mantengo que en el 2003, ‘El reporte del comité para la recreación de Singapur’ y los documentos de planteamientos similares sobre la planeación y el desarrollo, son una forma práctica de la ciencia ficción. Singapur se imagina allí como una ‘ciudad ciber-sexy’ a través de una articulación de metáforas que se centran en ‘Silicon Valley’. Estos planteamientos se ajustan a las políticas sociales, las prácticas representacionales y los medio ambientes espaciales, para motivar y defender la ‘buena índole’ de sexualidades variadas y particularmente no heteronormativas, que hace pensar en la ‘creatividad’ implicada en un ‘capitalismo suave,’ como algo necesario. Esto es sorprendente, dada la inversión política a largo plazo en ‘los valores tradicionales de familia’ del estado de Singapur.

Liberalism, reason(ableness) and the politicization of truth: Marx’s critique and the ironies of Marxism

Liberals and Marxists alike have had a stake in making Marx non‐liberal in theory and anti‐liberal in practice. My re‐reading of his work and life emphasizes the considerable overlaps and continuity between his views and activities and the liberalism of his day and ours. Marx’s critique of liberalism thus becomes subtler and less easily dismissed by liberals, who would do well to confront the violence and class struggle inherent in the success of the liberal project, rather than to erase this in favour of an idealized doctrine and sanitized history. I identify an irony in that Marx politicized reason and reasonableness long before anti‐foundational ‘post‐Marxists’ developed their ‘political’ critique of traditional Marxist conceptions of truth and science.

Hegel and Marx: Reflections on the Narrative

Hegel and Marx did not just happen. Nor are they like Gilbert and Sullivan, Beaumont and Fletcher, or even Marx and Engels. They never met and they never corresponded (Hegel died when Marx was 13). Marx referred many times in his voluminous works to Hegel, but then he also referred to an enormous number of writers — an almost unbelievable number. If there were a citation count, it is possible that Hegel would win, at least amongst philosophers, though this would hardly do more than start a discussion on why this is important and what it is supposed to mean. If Marx is to be linked up (or married off?) philosophically, there are alternative candidates — Aristotle is one.1 But then it seems to me that Marx constantly draws on the early nineteenth-century remnants of medieval and early-modern ‘school philosophy’, deploying distinctions such as essence-appearance, motion-stasis, potential-actual, quantity- quality, and no doubt many others, without citing any particular author or source. I will be exploring these issues and others, in both philosophy and politics, as my aim is to stand back from the Hegel-Marx pairing as it has been transmitted to us, and to try to get it into a new perspective. I shall be arguing the following, hoping to clarify with complexity:

Shakespeare’s Coriolanus (1608) and Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852): The Constitutional is the Personal

ABSTRACT Marx didn’t refer to Coriolanus, and Shakespeare didn’t write political tracts. However, that “Roman” play and Marx’s pamphlet The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) share a surprising similarity. They both present politics as performative, invoking tropes and costumes as essential to history-making offstage and hors de texte, and both meditate on dictator-leaders whose conduct is puzzling. What generates the puzzle is the interaction between personal ambition and transgressive behaviour on the one hand and the political order through which republican institutions operate on the other. This essay demonstrates that in both Shakespeare and Marx the tensions between the personal and the constitutional recur in political struggles that are highly salient today.