AMST 3252W

Midterm #2

On Politics and Burdens of Representation

“You can’t know how in this pale life of mine I am all the time seeing the bright
pictures of that other that I once thought I was glad to be free of….” (Clare Kendry in
Passing, 1929)[1]

“….given the subjectivizing conditions of identity production in a late modern liberal,

capitalist, and disciplinary-bureaucratic social order, how can reiteration of these
conditions be averted in identity's purportedly emancipatory project? What kind of
political recognition can identity-based claims seek - and what kind can they be
counted on to want - that will not resubordinate the subject itself historically
subjugated through identity categories such as ‘race’ or ‘sex,’ especially when these
categories operate within discourses of liberal essentialism and disciplinary
normalization?” (Wendy Brown, 1993).[2]

Today’s discourse within the cultural left over representation and possibilities
of political engagement share certain similarities with the discourses of the
early 20th century cultural and political formations, as two quotes above
illustrate. One of the defining characteristics of the early 20th century is the
pace of technological changes that had enormous influence in terms of
industrial production and organization, as well as the emergence and
dissemination of commodities and practices of popular culture. Moreover, it
is also a time when academic knowledge production becomes intensely
intertwined with the state and private philanthropy reform efforts in order to
contain subjects perceived as side-products of rapid social and economic
changes, including their racial, gendered, classed, and sexual
nonnormativities. This paper will argue that not only canonical sociology and
literature, as well as popular culture generally, are actively working to
establish various normativities, but the tradition of liberalism more broadly
and politics of representation in particular are central to the hegemonic
consolidation of white heteronormative middle-class expressions as the only
available model for social existence.

The theorizing which takes single axis of identity or oppression (e.g. gender
or race) as its only framework of analysis inevitably produces knowledge
that is limited and inattentive to social realities where multiplicity of
categories, identities, and power relations operate simultaneously in
production of subjectivities. In Aberrations in Black, Ferguson demonstrates
how racialized and classed subjectivities are always gendered and sexualized
in particular ways in order to produce differences which then serve as a
basis for economic and political exclusions. For example, Ferguson argues
that canonical literature and sociology facilitate the pathologization and
suppression of nonheteronormative gender and sexual heterogeneity within
the black communities. While within the literature there appears some
limited space for negotiation and interpretation, canonical sociology under
the disguise of scientific rationalization and liberal reformism is able to treat
nonnormativities as mere pathologies in need of transformation or,
preferably, erasure. According to Ferguson’s readings of canonical sociology
and literature, the only avenue for the racialized subjects provided by the
liberal state is assimilation to the white bourgeois middle-class
normativities. While the process itself does not guarantee racial
transgression and assimilation it does offer certain benefits and privileges.
Ferguson argues that not only the white power elites had a stake in enforced
normativity, especially in policing and disciplining gender and sexual
transgressions, but also black middle-class, as well as black nationalists that
were able to envision freedom only through normative heteropatriarchal
lenses of the dominant culture. Larsen’s Passing is instructive not only by
elaborating on complexities of race, as well as gender and sexuality, but also
on emerging class division within the black communities. Brian, who is a
successful doctor, expresses his middle-class attitudes:
“’Uplifting the brother’s no easy job. I’m as busy as a cat with fleas, myself.’ And over his
face there came a shadow. ‘Lord! how I hate sick people, and their stupid, meddling

families, and smelly, dirty rooms, and climbing filthy steps in dark hallways’”[3]

Larsen’s book itself is more nuanced than this example of stark class
differences might suggest. The book is not a mere representation of
emerging black middle-class and its relation to the lower-class blacks or
white society, but in many ways also a commentary on the inherent
contradictions and trappings of normativities which constitute and
distinguish the middle-class from its others. Blackmore, for example, argues
that in Passing middle-class respectability and repression disguises various
characters’ longings “for a less hierarchical socio-sexual system which will
allow them to express same-sex desire.”[4] Middle-class respectability is
expressed through a combination of racialized, classed, gendered, and
sexualized values which form an ideological unity which is supposed to signal
“progress” and “universality.” According to Ferguson “within the context of
colonialism and legalized segregation, the corporealization of black bodies as
physicalities divested of self-generating rationality imagined physical labor
as the only real resource that the racialized black subject could offer.”[5]
Changes in economic production and certain, although limited, political shifts
allowed for the emergence of black middle-class. However, that emergence
was facilitated by and was facilitating class, gender, and sexual
normativities. The link of citizenship to gender and sexual normativity has
been established and imposed on black population since the abolition of
slavery.[6] The requirements for and exclusions from citizenship, however,
are always exclusionary exercises of the state power, as well as embodied
within the tradition of western liberalism.
 Ferguson tends to argue that black nonheteronormativities provide
with rationales for exclusions from liberal polity, but in fact liberalism more
broadly as a political philosophy is only able to function through difference.
However, liberalism is operationalized not merely through difference - be it
race, class, gender ,or sexuality - but also through particular qualities, such
as individualism and self-sufficiency. Moreover, liberalism accumulates its
ideological currency by claiming “history” as an objective process of
“progress” where western liberalism and economic system of capitalism are
portrayed as being in advanced stages of historical development.[7] So
while Ferguson, for example, points out that “liberalism not only condoned
exclusions within the borders of the democratic capitalist state, but required
those exclusions,” his critiques of liberalism, for the most part, remain more
implicit than explicit. The identification of western liberalism and its
civilizational discourse[8] as foundational could clarify much of Ferguson’s
argument, which often appears to be attributing repression to epistemic
violence, political exclusions, morality, needs of capital or material
inequalities. As important and co-constitutive those aspects are to in order
to understand politics of exclusion they often seem to be disconnected and
groundless and obscure the role of liberalism in American political and social
system.

For example, while Ferguson resists normalizing and disciplining

attempts of sociologists to regulate black nonheteronormativities, he points
out that those nonheteronormativities are produced by the material
conditions which make their emergence possible or necessary, such as
various models of nonnormative families. However, the argument becomes
unclear whether the problem is with liberal reformers’ inability to see under
what circumstances the production of identities, which they identify as
“pathological,” occurred or whether the problem is with sociologists’
essentializing tendencies which makes raced, classed, gendered, and
sexualized subjects responsible for their own disadvantaged position because
of “failures” in normativity. In either case, Ferguson does not have much to
suggest in terms of how to move beyond this analytical mode. As valuable
as this genealogical approach is for its focus on intersectionality’s role in
formation of subjectivity, his engagement with liberalism as organizing
principle of western political thought and practice proves to be insufficient.
If liberalism operates through its narrative of progress those who refuse to
engage in self-discipline, reason, and rationality, among variety of other
normative requirements, will always be subjects of discipline, control, and
exclusions. Such is the logic of liberalism’s “social contract.” Ferguson’s
denouncement of state and capital’s regulations, as well as sociological and
literary representations of nonheteronormative black subjectivities while
valuable in itself does not have much to offer in terms of articulating politics
that would allow the break with the liberalism’s logic. In fact, there is little
discussion of what would nonheteronormative unregulated subjectivity’s
notion of political would entail. Rationalization, regulation, surveillance, and
so on are all important features of the modern capitalist liberal society and
while there are possibilities of engaging or disengaging with it, there should
be no reason to believe that mere deconstruction of liberalism’s logics should
automatically translate to freedom for non-normative subjects from
liberalism regulative grip.

Canonical sociology and literature, clearly, are not exclusive sites of

regulation and normativity. Hall, for example, states that “capital had a
stake in the culture of the popular classes because the constitution of a
whole new social order around capital required a more or less continuous, if
intermittent, process of re-education, in the broadest sense.”[9] Popular
culture, thus, becomes a site of struggle filled with normative as well as
transgressive ideas and practices. For Horkheimer and Adorno, however,
popular culture, as fueled by the culture industry, is homogenizing and
standardizing in order to facilitate and expand the needs of the bourgeois
elites. Mass culture becomes one of the technologies of domination not only
by depoliticizing “masses” but by acquiring “control of the individual
consciousness” and in particular by erasing “a distinction between the logic
of the work and that of the social system.”[10] Horkheimer and Adorno tie
culture industry to the shifting power relations, which could be described
shift from sovereign power to hegemony, in which culture plays significant
role. Even dissent – or rather a “well-planned originality” - becomes
institutionalized and fuels marketability of inherently the same forms and
ideas.[11] However, there are multiple problems with Horkheimer and
Adorno’s arguments. For one, it inevitably reproduce the discourse in which
earlier forms of non-mass (thus elite) art forms and culture are constantly
juxtaposed to the contemporary popular culture as inherently corrupting,
dehumanizing, and meaningless. Pleasure as an organizing principle of
popular culture is seen as disengagement and helplessness from the real
world - “the liberation which amusement promises is freedom from thought
and from negation.”[12] Overall, the text seems to be over-generalizing for
its lack of interest in individual agency, inability to recognize social
difference, equation of popular culture with fascism and mass control, and
evokes leftist elitist disappointment with the “masses.” However, it is also
valuable for engaging economic rationales of mass culture with political and
psychological aspects and effects the pop culture has in constructing
hegemony.

For Stuart Hall, on the contrary, popular culture is neither merely

depoliticizing space of cultural commodities circulation and consumption nor
a romanticized alternative to the elite culture. Rather it is always historically
specific battleground of various cultural and political forces. For Hall “there
is no whole, authentic, autonomous ‘popular culture’ which lies outside the
field of force of the relations of cultural power and domination.”[13] Popular
culture could be defined by its contradictions much more than by its unitary
logic and direction as argued by Horkheimer and Adorno. Popular culture and
its various forms do not stagnate or carry fixed meanings within but are
constantly changing and are historically specific.[14] “Cultural struggle, of
course, takes many forms: incorporation, distortion, resistance, negotiation,
recuperation.”[15] Hall’s attention to popular culture and cultural struggle
more broadly, points out to the need of engaging with the concept beyond
the mere dismissal or valorization, since “it is partly where hegemony arises,
and where it is secured.”[16]

However, this brings us back to questions of representation and politics in

the modern, liberal, capitalist society. Popular culture, which for theorists
such as Hall, Williams, Horkheimer and Adorno, are largely about class
struggle, is also a site of struggle for emerging racial, gendered, and sexual
subjectivities and their representations. Since the political field in liberal
democracies is defined by, what Papadopoulos et al calls, “double-R
axiom”[17] – in reference to rights and representation regime -, popular
culture becomes one of the major fields where struggle over the “double-R
axiom” occurs. However, according to Papadopoulos et al, the political
struggle was much more significant over rights not representation.
“Representation was principally conceived as the ways in which different
social classes are interpellated by state apparatuses and are codified in the
cultural imaginary.”[18] However, as earlier part of the 20th century
demonstrates, aesthetic representation within the pop culture as well as
canonical literature and sociological knowledge production emerges as
increasingly essential sites of ideological struggle. Popular culture facilitates
visibility and political representation but at the same time makes various
subjects visible to power and creates new exclusionary mechanisms and new
boundaries. “Representation is nothing more than a means to render the
forces partaking in a social conflict visible to the gaze of power. Moreover,
power relations operate by making social actors representable within a
regime.”[19] Thus emerges one of the central contradictions of liberalism –
representation is necessary for political rights and recognition, but the
recognition comes at the expense of visibility which translates into regulation
and control.

However, this is the dilemma that is haunting much of the social theory and
various movements in general, but where above mentioned theorists do not
have much to suggest. Ferguson, for example, does not call for mere rights
and recognition for nonheteronormative subjects, but he is critical of
representations and their implicit or explicit investments in normalization
and regulation. However, he fails to articulate the problem of representation
itself. For example, he mentions that it would be wrong “to assume that
Myrdal was an objective observer because of his Swedish nationality”[20]
since he based his research following larger Eurocentric trajectory of
enlightenment which is intertwined with discourses of racial superiority.
However, there are several shortcomings implied in this statement. First, by
suggesting that objective observation and thus representation is an option,
Ferguson implies that the problem is not with the political system which
relies on representation but with its lack of scientific vigor or political
commitments, thus, inevitably, reproduces the discourse of rationalization
and scientific objectivity on which western liberalism relies upon. Secondly,
Ferguson fails to explicate further on what are broader implication that
Swedish scientist was recruited to do a report on American race relations.
First, it does not ask how it reflects on canonical sociology which Ferguson
thoroughly critiques and its ability to produce knowledge about
nonheteronormative black subjectivities. Myrdal’s mode of inquiry
resembles that of disciplinary anthropology and reproduces the disciplinary
divisions that defined anthropology as study of “other” and sociology as the
study of “self.” If so, does it challenge Ferguson’s assessment just to what
extent the canonical sociology was able to establish and legitimate itself in
the study of its national others, if its sociologists could not be trusted in their
ability to produce “valuable” knowledge?

The questions of representation are complex and numerous. Genealogies of

knowledge formation and representation can help to articulate politics that
go beyond dominant state-centered theories, but also have to try to break
away with its own discursive limits. Non-representational politics and
practices can provide with alternatives, however, they might also fall into a
depoliticizing mode, for example, “when recognition of difference stands in
for redistribution of resources and reallocation of positions, muting the
imperative to refigure radical alternative sensibility.”[21] While there is no
need to negate theorizing and place it in another discrete category of life
disconnected from everything else, it nevertheless requires critical
engagement with the apparently “radical” work of thinking/writing itself.
The critiques that stem from the designated spaces of academy can only
engage with its subjects of study through representation despite the
trajectory of the critics’ political leanings. The questions of what kind of
politics are possible and desirable, as important as they are, are increasingly
submerged in the structural restraints of academic production which
operates through taxonomies of value and progress and inherently loses
interest in what kind of alternatives already exist and the subjectivities
outside the field of representation. “In insisting that there is no outside of
representation what we are left with is a rather world weary discourse that
insists on the necessity for the imposition of ‘state-like’ violence and
exclusion.”[22]

[1] Nella Larsen, Passing (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 11.

[2] Wendy Brown, “Wounded Attachments,” Political Theory, 21:3 (1993), 390.

[3] Larsen, 57.

[4] David L. Blackmore, "’That Unreasonable Restless Feeling’: The Homosexual Subtexts of
Nella Larsen's Passing,” African American Review, 26: 3,(1992), 475.

[5] Roderick A. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 96.

[6] Ibid, 86.

[7] Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal
Thought, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 77-114.

[8] “It is not really Western civilization tout court but the identification of modernity and, in
particular, liberalism with the West – indeed, the identification of liberalism as the telos of
the West – that provides the basis for Western civilizational supremacy.” Wendy Brown,
Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire, (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2008), 184.
[9] Stuart Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing ‘the Popular,’” People’s History and Socialist
Theory, ed. Raphael Samuel (New York: Routledge, 1981), 227.

[10] Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York:
Continuum: 1976), 121.

[11] Ibid, 132.

[12] Ibid, 144.

[13] Hall, 232.

[14] Ibid, 235.

[15] Ibid, 236.

[16] Ibid, 239.

[17] Dimitris Papadopoulos, Niamh Stephenson, and Vassilis Tsiano. Escape routes: Control
and subversion in the 21st century (Ann Arbor: Pluto Press: 2008), 7.

[18] For Papadopoulos et al, struggle over representation defines emergence of

neoliberalism and cultural left and academic preoccupation since the late 1970s. At the
same time it is a time of emergence and politicization of various identities and decline of
centrality of class as the only category to facilitate radical social change. Ibid, 17.

[19] Ibid, 56.

[20] Ferguson, 97. (italics mine).

[21] Papadopoulos et al drawing on Ranciere (1998), 71.

[22] Andrew Robinson and Simon Tormey, “Beyond Representation? A Rejoinder,”

Parliamentary Affairs, 60:1, (2007), 128.