where next for 'sisterhood'?

Alison Wolf's article in this month's Prospect magazine entitled 'The End of Sisterhood' has received a fair bit of attention (well a double pager in The Observer, anyway) which amongst other things gives this quality mag some much needed exposure.

The article has spawned a massive surge of responses in The Observer's blog section, all of which I haven't had time to read (although it's great that this issue excites such interest).

While I thought it was a great piece, primarily because I felt it brought attention to the gradual erosion of shared values that a free market encourages, my girlfriend was less positive. She felt that it was a rather sly stab at feminism that offered no alternative or solution to the contradiction facing 21st century women.

The response by 'Arianna' that "what feminism is failing in today is the fact that it fails to engage women from all straits of society"is a very good point and this is what I took out of Wolf's article: that a movement that could potentially unite half the world under a set of shared values has been undermined by those who have benefitted from the equality it fought for in the first place.

This is not a new story. I'm reading Citizenship, Identity and Social History (edited by Chrles Tilly) in which the first essay studies the changing language of citizenship used by 19th century silk weavers. Marc Steinberg explains how with the breakdown of reforms that upheld the rights of the silk weavers of Spitalfields the language the workers adopted was that of 'possessive individualism' whose inalienable rights were the same as those espoused by the free marketeers who wished to take them away. In doing so women and families were excluded from the conversation as they had no official presence in such a system. The outcome of this was a class movemnet that could oppose legislation that could impact negatively on the employment opportunities of its members but at the cost of re-casting women as irrational and slovenly.

Movements by their very nature seem to rest on contradictions because they are often forced to adopt a language (or discourse if you like) of the hegemony they struggle against - likewise equality for women.

The solution is not feminism's alone however, as many of the blog responses argue, altruism and civil society should be a goal for all and men and the institutions they embody need to acknowledge this as much as women do.

The Ideology Phoenix

This month the POWER Commission released their inquiry into the state of democracy in the UK. It's a very interesting document and very readable. Their conclusion is that far from being politically apathetic the people of Britain are just as interested and involved as ever, the problem is that the two party system is failing them because it's based on an outdated class/ideology system.

What they propose in its stead is an atomization of the political process, whereby the power of the Executive is decreased and the balance of power is re-established at a much more local level.
I don't disagree with the method of re-balancing power, but I do feel that it does nothing to compensate for effect this will have on individualisation. For example how will this dovetail with the growth of citizenship and national identity the government plan to bring in?

I'm very much of the view that ideology needs to be re-born not abandoned. And I'm not alone. In Terror & Liberalism (a book I thoroughly recommend) Paul Berman makes the same point as does this discussion of Geoff Mulgan's new organisation Involve. The problem with ideology is not that it doesn't exist, rather that it has lost its coherency and its mass appeal, there is no set of guidelines or objectives under which people of all interests can collect. This was always the strength of a secular ideology and the weakness of the cultural relativism that emerged in the 70s and 80s.

In my opinion the POWER inquiry is glossing over the real issue here. Certainly reduce the power the government has to bypass contested legislation and increase the role that the public play in this context, but this needs to be combined with a set of positive values taught to everybody regardless of their particular interest or social background.

Insoluble solutions

I've just read (perhaps 'skimmed' is a better word) Chris Huhne's attack on the attitudes of Labour and the Conservatives toward civil liberties.

I share alot of his opnions and disagree with a few, but I am left thinking to myself, as with so much of what falls from the mouths of the Lib Dems, 'so, what are you going to do about it?' (I don't think decentralisation is actually a real solution and certainly doesn't seem to be the 'democratic' solution judging by the response of the people).

The first question to ask is: 'why are these reforms in the law being drafted in?' Terrorist threat, anti-social behaviour you would reply. But, without coming across all 'Adam Curtis', these threats are enthusuastically exaggerated out of all proportion by certain factions of the media. Now, I'm not saying these problems don't exist, but to turn them into issues of national security to sell more copies of your god-forsaken rag isn't help us solve these problems.

Because, consequently, the Government feel the need to bring in some heavy handed policy to demonstrate to the electorate that they have their safety and security in hand as this article demonstrates nicely.

Somehow, and I don't really understand just how, the media get away with the 'we're just reporting the facts' poker face, while our poor beleagured politicians not only get it right in the face, but have to clear up their diuretic propaganda. Okay, maybe I'm being too nice about our politicians, but if it came to trusting one of them over, say the editor of the Daily Mail, well I think the answer to that one's fairly obvious isn't it.

If Chris Huhne had begun his paper with an attack on the agitators I would have immediatley had a lot more respect for him and his party, instead we get the same old bickering politics that always leaves liberals looking worse off than they should. To the casual reader (skimmer) it reads as though the civil liberties of the 'possibly guilty' are more important than the 'definitely innocent', that intolerance is something minorities only suffer and never propogate.

He's right that a diverse society is better, but his rather outdated discourse on the issue doesn't help support his case. The first solution is to ensure that the most popular media outlets in the UK take responsibility for the results of the journalism and attempt to deal with the isues in a way that doesn't create alarm and knee-jerk reaction, then we'll get to see how the politicians really deal with it.

The problem of course is the big issue at the moment 'freedom of speech', but that's an issue for another day.

Alternative Moi Reborn

Hmm, i just noticed the last post here was August. I didn't realise it was so long ago.

I think the subject matter may have been a little narrow for a protracted blogging feature.

But I think the underlying issue is one that has more breath in it - that is the state of contemporary liberalism.

Given that David Cameron has been painted as 'liberal' if not 'a liberal' and the Lib Dems haven't been liberal enough with the truth about the sexuality of some of their senior MPs (like anyone with a brain really cares) I think the issue is in need of some serious thought....

...lets just see if I can get round to writing something in the next week or two

Rebels with Causes?

This is what Eric Hobsbawm has to say on the phenomenon of youth culture and the subcultures it spawned:

"What is even more significant is that this rejection was not in the name of some pattern of ordering society, though the new libertarianism was given ideological justification by those who felt it needed such labels, but in the name of the unlimited autonomy of individual desire. It assumed a world of self-regarding individualism pushed to its limits. Paradoxically the rebels against the conventions and restrictions shared the assumptions on which mass consumer society was built, or at least the psychological motivations which those who sold consumers goods and services found most effective in selling them" (pg 334 The Age of Extremes)

I'm glad someone else feels that way, even if you could argue that Eric is an old git, the fact is that he's an intelligent, observant old git. I'm still of the mind that alternative culture is equivalent to 'opt-out' culture in many ways, that is a culture that refuses to acknowledge its responsibility to society. And regardless of what we might think, everybody has a responsibility to society.

That isn't to say that 'alternative' cultures don't have anything going for them, celebrating artistic freedom isn't bad, even if the results all too frequently are, but the state of being liberated has to have limits. Maybe young contemporary artists could think about filling the gap that has been left by the cessation of the creation of public monuments and memorials rather than focusing on out-dated 'taboos' such as sexual promiscuity which is neither particularly subversive nor socially useful. Neither do I think that individuals within these groups are completely sealed from the outside world, I'm sure most voted in the last general election, it's more to do with the lack of public acknowledgement that politics matters.

Our 'alternative'cultures still live under the monolithic shadow of the emergence of youth culture. Yes, it was an unprecedented event and yes it meant we have access to an unimaginable volume of media, in terms of music, film, books, websites etc. but when are we going to get over it. Flaunting social convention stops appearing like political action when we live in a society that, apart from Daily Mail readers, which is admittedly a little too large a percentage for my liking, doesn't look twice. Just because you can do it doesn't mean you should.

The murder of that poor bloke on the number 43 bus, made me think alot. I couldn't belive that passengers let it happen and when he was lying there bleeding, that only one woman stopped to help. Now I'm not saying that this is the fault of the alternative, what I am saying is that this is the result of a society that values the choice to opt in or out of society.

Unscene

Although I was only at the Wired Women festival for about an hour and a half on Saturday, I was surprised how distant I felt from it all. Although not everybody there was a heart on their sleeve lesbian, there was a definite 'scene' thing going on that the isolated clusters gathered round picnic tables couldn't quite conceal. It's an old cliche, but it's true that even people who feel that they are different from everybody else seek like-minded people, even if they don't actually communicate with them.

My classic illustrative anecdote for this was from the Slimelight 'goth' club at Electrowerks, where a lone middle aged tranny could be seen wandering around it's scummy halls, past the cyber goths with their glowsticks and EBM, down through the old skool Siouxsie Sioux look-alikes past the assorted goth/metal groups who clog up the corridors and back up to the cyber goths. He never spoke a word to anybody and I never saw him with a drink, but he seemed happy to be somewhere he felt comfortable, where a middle aged man can wear a figure hugging, thigh length leather dress and black stilettoes and barely stand out from the fauna.

I didn't feel like part of the scene there either, actually I felt like I stood out more than the tranny, which I probably did.

I don't think alternative cultures should be little more than safe houses for outsiders, I think they should encourage people to question everything, even the scene they are a part of. Within these cultures a hierarchy is inevitably formed and the same inequalities are reinforced, except they are hidden away from public view and obscured by a veneer of liberalness.

That sounds quite bitter and harsh, doesn't it. I'm not quite sure why being different is even that important. Here's one suggestion though.

According to cognitive scientists, that the human brain is unique because of it's 'plasticity' - basically the reason we as a species have been so successful at survival is because of our inherent adaptability to our environment. What this also means is that technically speaking every human being is unique, because there are simply so many possible variations of connections that can be made between the billions of neurons that make up our brains.

Now there are two explanations of how this occured (actually there are probably loads but I'm just going to mention two) and I'm going to simplify them awfully. One suggests that language preceded this ability, and was probably conducive to the evolution of a brain capable of creating the unique, another theory has it that we were already capable of incredibly imaginative mental feats and that this gave us the capacity to speak. Now obviously both were implicit in early human socialising, but theory 1 puts sociability at the heart of the imagination, as speech could only be developed in a highly dynamic social milieu and theory 2 puts less emphasis on the social side, suggesting that huamn imagination is not wholly reliant on social interaction.

If theory 2 is right, then that would suggest that social pressure could unduly restrict imagination and creativity, because although the human brain is capable of making meaning out of the most obscure sets of words, not every individual would create the same meaning, hence it could be argued that social groups require a fixed set of prompts in order that everybody understands everybody else and cohesiveness is maintained.

So what is the answer? ... I don't know, in fact it may be that the Slimlight Tranny has it right, and that if you can find somewhere were you feel comfortable doing the things you want to do then that's all you need, but he still seemed a lonely soul and whether sociability came 1st or 2nd it is here to stay and an element of sociability should be the freedom to discuss ideas that differ from the norm.

questions worth asking

This book sounds very interesting, if a little pessimistic. But it's attack on alternative forms of consumption is quite refreshing. Again this is a book I will have to read (like the DIY culture one), but I think the question of whether any of the ethical/radical/alternative forms of consumption have any validity or are simply forms of social distinction is interesting. On the one hand it seems to posit capitalism as a complete and bounded system and assumes that truly ethical behaviour is antithetical to any status seeking motivations.

This second point is rather stupid, as their book itself could be construed as a piece of status-seeking 'we're better than you' type hype and secondly we'd have to dispense with the great ethically minded heroes of the past as attention seeking hypocrites - goodbye Jesus, Martin Luther, Martin Luther King & co, they were clearly no better than the latest batch of Big Brother contestants.

The first point is slightly harder to discredit, capitalism seems to be everywhere, although it does depend what is meant by capitalism in this case. Selling things doesn't equal capitalist behvaiour per se. Human beings have probably always sold things, commodities are nothing new. Plus while economic institutions may apply free market rules literally (although G8 might change that a little, it appears to be an exception rather than a rule and comes with lots of rather dodgy caveats apparently) most businesses that participate in capitalism are less strict in their adherence (see profits being 'invested' in shareholders offshore accounts rather than business improvements).

What it does bring into question is: precisely what are alternative consumer practices doing to actually make the world a better place, and more pertinently to this blog does buying some obscure new wave album from the late 70s qualify for truly alternative behaviour or just a classic example of social distinction?