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.

Where Accusations Go

What do we talk about when we talk about sexual violence? Often it's the sex, and it's the not violence. Often we talk about how normative ways we talk about it are or aren't changing, but the violent character of accusations, something that would seem to be their most salient characteristic, is often distorted into absence. How does this happen practically?

This week the CBC, Canada's national broadcaster, fired Jian Ghomeshi, a host of Q, a popular program. According to the Toronto Star, the CBC received information that Ghomeshi had violently sexually assaulted at least three women, and there is word of more accusations to follow. Though Ghomeshi is using legalistic language to defend himself and suing the CBC for $50 million for defamation, he is attracting more attention for framing the encounters with these women as exciting kinky sex that multiple partners suddenly regretted and now seek to do him wrong. 

Describing these encounters, he has said "Let me be the first to say that my tastes in the bedroom may not be palatable to some folks. They may be strange, enticing, weird, normal, or outright offensive to others. But that is my private life. And no one, and certainly no employer, should have dominion over what people do consensually in their private life." The questions are here now about taste, offense, privacy and work.

What the Ghomeshi case reminds me of is Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the French politician accused of sexual assault in New York in 2011. American authorities dismissed his accuser's account because of some inconsistencies. Nevertheless, it doesn't register the seriousness of accusations that much of the discussion in American media like The New York Times was about how differently French people feel about a public leader's private life. Things are different over there, we hear: people have "arrangements"; a man's business is respected, and media consumers don't go for cheap thrills or middle-class judgments.

What? Whether or not France is still like its midcentury movies Americans so admire, what about an alleged violent crime is Strauss-Kahn's personal business? How is the question of whether his wife or partner had an understanding with him about sex outside the relationship at all relevant? Maybe the American media are more interested than others in the sex lives leaders want private; I don't know. But the accusation had nothing to do with an affair. 

Whether Jian Ghomeshi will face authorities is unclear, and so is the question of whether he will be seen as a man brought down by scandal or someone who did violence to women. But when sex is involved, a social standard of proof is put against women whom men have harmed that is little present elsewhere: who's to say it's not just a matter of taste? Of course, there are other issues to discuss here: about deep ambivalence about violence in porn and media, about how race and immigration frame sexual violence, about privilege. But for Americans and Canadians, people believed to be prudishly reticent in talking about sex, we seem to prefer that topic to violence and violation.

Rock and Plastic

Academic arguments that have a lot of parts can be difficult to use. A lot of wise source use involves taking things apart, enlarging and expanding parts and setting aside what isn't right for the purposes you have. So, how do you do this responsibly, both being faithful to the original terms of whosever work while not committing to what in it might be wrong, misunderstood or just distracting?

Robert Neville calls this the difference between piquant and bland interpretation, which is a great metaphor. Here, though, I want to talk about taking some thing out and and reworking it responsibly, treating an original consistent work of someone else with what I might call a sense of plastic art and doing so responsibly. One particularly famous case of this might illustrate things better.

Edward Said changed everything. And when someone changes everything, he changes it for everyone, forming the discourse, and not everyone takes him in the most productive directions.

That opening passage of Orientalism linked scholarship and culture in the politics of Western empires as a concrete formation, effectively as a monolith. Since reading it, departments and people calling themselves Orientalist have gotten fewer and fewer, but people want a crack at the monolith. Bernard Lewis couldn't do it, but scholars since then have tried to rethink the connections of knowledge and power.

After all, politicians make wars, not scholars. The 19th-century imperialists, like the leaders of our time, tended to be philistines. Might Said have committed the very banal mistake of scholars in assuming they are much more consequential to the broader world than they are?

In The Invention of World Religions, Tomoko Masuzawa quotes a letter from Max Müller. The godfather of religious studies is shocked to learn that during the debates about the future of Ireland, British prime minister William Gladstone was reading Jacoillot's Le Bible dans l'Inde. That bestseller put the origins of Christianity in a covert Aryan Buddhist mission to the ancient Mediterranean. Needless to say, it was universally rejected by scholars but left a mark on the chattering classes who took their own interests in scholarship that had little to do with consensus within university walls.

Just a funny story of course, but it points to a real divide. In our own time, wouldn't we say that the success of postcolonial and critical theory in the curriculum and the policing of overt Islamophobia in scholarly publishing has done nothing to change Western actions in and attitudes toward the Islamic world? So, was Said pushing a claim too hard, without enough of that "nuance" we keep hearing about?

At different times, Said insisted that scholars really did set up the intellectual conditions for global hegemony. I'm not proposing a pious overlooking of parts of his thesis that might need to be considered other ways. But a more plastic, mutable reading can be more flexible if it takes what Said says within his frameworks and working spaces. For me, sometimes Said needs to be read as more plastic than he would have wanted to be.

When he describes that what Orientalists brought into the world was new kinds of knowledge: how non-Western peoples can be known more fully than they could know themselves: that is a trenchant cut into epistemologies of modern power. Like the classical anthropologists, Orientalists were more likely than we remember to be sympathetic to the peoples they studied, but the point isn't really what they said or how they said it. So to conclude the example, the Orientalists set out an inequality of knowledge that it took Said to memorably call out.

What I'm calling plastic, pliable reading doesn't sound acutely insightful; it isn't new, but it's something I try to remind myself about constructions: that constructions aren't the opposites of truths; they are appreciated for what they are made out of and for and how they might be otherwise.