How Might Allies Help?

In the last post, I tried to think through the idea of being an ally. I understood it as basically about the question of confronting suffering that is not one's own or of one's own. I tried to think about how this problematic concept fits in our social historical location and the contemporary theory that has grown up to describe it.

This time I want to think about privilege and precarity beyond the descriptive. I'm not going to offer the definitive solution-scheme- I can sense your disappointment, I know. I'm going to try to offer some variously-related topics and treatments that might point to other possibilities of mutuality amid the differences we know.

The first thought I have is that there are some very deep resonances of the ally-problem in postcolonial thought. Dipesh Chakrabarty describes the failure of organized labor in Bengal before the end of British raj in terms of a basic problem. Labor organizers were middle-class nationalists who spoke the language of historical consciousness. They preached Marx to the streets and tried to study how people they wanted to excite responded to and resisted the pressures of the colonial order.

What they found of course was religion. Traditional worship and practice vitalized in generative and heterodox ways did not conform to resisting the occupation in the ways desired. But, the nationalists did not want to consign people's lives to the classical Marxist category of false consciousness. They had read British socialists like E.P. Thomson who looked at Methodist devotion among the English working class but could not find an easy equivalent of the workers' diaries of the 19th century among farmers in India. There wasn't literature, and so not history, how the intellectuals of that time were looking for it.

All of this lies at the roots of Chakrabarty's own intellectual tradition, that of Ranajit Guha, Partha Chatterjee and Gayarti Spivak. The memorable jumping-off point that tradition leaves us is of course subaltern studies. But what would Spivak's essay that tries to come to terms with the problem of voicelessness have to do with being an ally to people here now for whom basic modern institutions like health care and education are not working?

The discourse changed in South Asia after the disappointments of the postcolonial age. Independence didn't transform society even as intellectual life was transformed. The Hindu right has challenged the Congress-elite's political dynasty claiming to speak directly to working people's aspirations to see their country kept their way. 

The general reaction, like Obama's bitter gun-clingers, has been for cultivated people to want nothing to do with the violence-infused chauvinism that targets women and Muslims and earns the polite consternation of foreigners.

It's in this situation that Spivak wrote "Moving Devi", where she does not try to distance herself, as the direction of her Marxist and deconstructionist work might suggest. She rather describes sacred sites of Bombay, then renamed Mumbai, that are hers, that inscribe her situation as a high-caste Hindu, an identity bound up in the politics of the colonial era.

So, what does Spivak's idea of inscription do for the allies today? She is accounting for the distance that colonial-era nationalists felt from dispossessed workers of their time and the intellectuals of the contemporary diaspora and those with different designs for globalizing India. And is not contemporary Western liberalism, in which the ally is a conceptual formation, characterized by similar kinds of difference? 

I don't know of a way endemic to liberal traditions that quite addresses what inscription addresses. Of course, there is much if not most of the left in the West that repudiates the liberal tradition outright if not always because of the problems described. But to repudiate the problems of the discourse of freedom has nothing to do with saying one has never benefitted from it or that its nearest counter-discourses are not built on a world shaped by it. 

A concept allies could realize that could correlate to the idea of inscription would only do half the work of course. What kind of discourse is open to listening, if nothing else, to different kinds of experience? Spivak has no such optimism for those Indian traditions that she understands constitute her position. In our scene, I would generalize to say that no American Christian tradition that is vital and growing- that is traditionalist Roman Catholicism and charismatic conservative Protestantism, has sustained intellectual or spiritual interest in an analog to the idea of historical inscription or recognition of others in conditions of historical subordination. Optimism about possibilities for that kind of recognition of others based only on the grand old Rawls-Nussbaum American liberalism would be naïve. 

Productive allies would have to address themselves, whether in terms of religion or not, in common ways of understanding the  conditions that inscribe those we want to find ourselves allied to.

Do Allies Help?

In this post, I try to think through some of the problems of contemporary progressive discourse and its use of the term "ally". In it, I won't be recommending anything other than the prescriptions for considered action from Mia McKenzie's Black Girl Dangerous. Nor am I saying I can address Suey Park's concerns and interrogations. If I tried doing that, it would miss much of the point. And if, as the latter claims, there simply isn't any more use in the term "ally" or the people who claim it are doing more harm than good, this is also a decision I don't claim to make. I do not believe, however, that voiding the category would solve the problems introduced by contrasts and complications in contemporary discourses, as I will argue.

But I won't be writing to offer prescriptions on some of the most discussed questions of that discourse. Can men be feminists? Is affirmative action too suited to existing structures that prevent recognition of and engagement with other ways of knowledge and life? Just the two writers I mention have a host of discussions on present questions like these, and they link to people with locations appropriate to reasonings about these questions. 

My reason to talk about this involves the most important question on campus about the real world: how should we respond to precarity when it isn't us? This is not to say that a great many students and scholars here and everywhere don't have truths and stories about danger and dispossession that need hearing. It is just to say that in the contemporary world if someone benefits from a university education, there will be a situation of suffering present to him different from ones she knows.

In historical terms we might ask why this question is coming up now. Of course, the big modern revolutions like France, Russia, China, Ghana and South Africa did not have use of this idea. There is something parallel to the ally in the Leninist-Orwellian formula of revolutions: a middle class that overthrows the existing order through a complex encounter with the dispossessed. But that's hardly an inspiring parallel, and what's to distinguish it from reactionary modernization in Japan, Germany, Spain, Korea and Taiwan?

To the situation around me, at a research university in the US in the 21st century, all that seems a little removed anyway. What most of us are talking about are a half-centuries changes in the dominant culture, our discussions tend to conform to lineaments of the hopes and follies of the '60s. And by the '60s, I don't mean Che Guevara and Malcolm X, '60s that remained mostly theoretical in discourse and memory for the majority, but I'm referring generally to that bourgeois revolution that took place in America and France in the two and a half decades after the war.

There was Sartre and Simone, Brown vs Board of Ed, the Civil Rights Act, Godard, Medicaid, Algeria and Vietnam and Paris in the spring of '68. After Nixon's election, by and large, progressive things stopped happening. There are plenty of reasons for this: the normalizing of a long-present break between the left in the West and the USSR and China coming to distrust of all power-motivated responses to inequality accompanied by a retrenching and rejuvenation of market-financial networks worldwide. These are familiar etiologies.

What I want to highlight here is the difficulty of even conceiving of a politics involved in seeing and hearing people in a new species of jeopardy. That became described as precarity, most memorably theorized by Pierre Bourdieu. It is the grime and danger for people vulnerable to the 20th-century liberal values of mobility and the in-between.

A new kind of theory developed out of and the beyond the left to try to recognize whom and what modernization obscures. Foucault's prison project to publicize inmates simply speaking without interruption or editing was a performative action of what theory has tried to become. It is the world in which this kind of theory is situated that came up with a term like "ally" because the term has at its core difference and a kind of distance from those affected. It involves letting strangers be strangers, as a friend has memorably put it. 

In this, just listening with thought and with openness to transformation would be allegiance in a meaningful sense of the word. This wouldn't co-opt or obscure women, the dispossessed, people of color, those who feel or are labelled sexual different, those whose practices are not protected as religion in the familiar and dominant sense. But, it might not distinguishable from doing nothing at all. I think there are historical realities shaping the problems of the ally-discourse, even if we say we can abandon it altogether, which I'm not. I want to offer next, in no ordered and hard-prescriptive way, other possibilities that history might afford.