working stuff out : Part I

Consider this an introduction -- one whose necessity may only become apparent upon the appearance of its subsequent parts. Although I have no intentions of establishing an ‘historical chronology’ – or even an historical context per se -- in any form, I include this introduction merely to establish a point of reference concerning my present academic preoccupations in order to contextualize this series.

(Parts of this entry were originally prepared for a position paper on the intersections of feminism and colonialism in a class whose purpose it is to interrogate the project of history and dismantle the progress narrative of women’s liberation.)

The discourse of difference propelled by liberalism, having been conceived of pejoratively, necessitates the intervention of the unfamiliar. Due to the liberal framing and defining of the Human in limited and exclusionary terms, in order for humanity to be restored, as liberalism would have it, to uncivilized societies, a dignified and universalized notion of civilization must not only be established concretely, but be upheld as the standard of human legitimacy.

As Uday Singh Mehta relates in “Progress, Civilization, and Consent,” liberal advocate, John Stewart Mill, contrives his arguments for a progression of civilization around precise definitions of legitimate humanity, civilized social order, and, most prominently, historical progress and ascent. Likewise, as Mehta articulates, Mill’s position concerning the “equality” of women with men draws upon these same requirements of, and anxieties surrounding, progress. What liberalism’s notions of difference and progress imply for Wendy Brown in her essay, “Liberalism’s Family Values,” is hierarchical governance – wherein a singular conception of human acceptability is established and whereby all difference is measured. Failed conformity, then, to liberalism’s prescribed legitimacy not only renders the unfamiliar different, but decidedly inferior.

In his essay, “Progress, Civilization, and Consent,” Mehta establishes that the terms liberalism prescribes for proper or legitimate society are not only used to justify, but also serve to impel colonialist mentalities. For, by the terms of liberalism, the duty of the civilized is to bring to the uncivilized civilization:

Those reasons and the practices that followed from them make it clear that the commitment to democracy and pluralism were, at best, only provisional motives that allowed – indeed required – enormous temporizing in the face of the ‘backward’ and the unfamiliar. (77)

With progress as its pretext, liberalism could, thereby, proceed to grace improper civilizations with a promise for an enlightened future. Liberalism allowed Britain to expand its empire through a guise of betterment – liberals had an obligation to save the souls, as it were, of the damned (and progressively damning):

I have said in the introduction that the posture of liberal thought toward the world is judgmental. It is a corollary, if not a concrete implication, of this idea that it is also an evangelical posture in which the burning spirit has been that of politics and the eschatology that of progress. (79)

The reformation of the world through this lens of salvation quantifies a liberal progression toward universal equality – for, were all civilizations made the same, all may be equal. The conflation of equality with sameness works to justify intervention and reformation, compelling liberalism’s quest for political domination, while at the same time relying upon the very existence of difference to establish a model for sameness.

The standard by which a univocal sameness is measured requires a prototype. The liberal scale of progress and legitimacy are not only applied to unfamiliar societies, but to women within European society as well – wherein the same principles justifying colonialist efforts are, furthermore, transferred to advocate for women’s emancipation. Just as the civilized must rescue the uncivilized from their deficiencies, so men must rescue women from their subordination. (Similarly, Gayatri Spivak characterizes the colonialist legacy as “White men saving brown women from brown men.”) Though, the processes through which such progressive endeavors are implemented are slightly more ambiguous for Mill than Mehta might suggest. In his Considerations of Representative Government , Mill professes that European notions of proper civilization cannot simply be brought to a given people and forced upon them – particularities must be known of the subjected, knowledge of the Other. As Mill points out, the Hindu people may be resistant to Europe’s policies, its educational and religious principles, all of which must be taken into consideration. In order for progress to truly be beneficial, it cannot be obtained through force:

Such is one of the modes in which the opinion of the dominant country tends to act more injuriously than beneficially on the conduct of its deputed governors. In other respects, its interference is likely to be oftenest exercised where it will be most pertinaciously demanded, and that is, on behalf of some interest of the English settlers. (413)

Mill subsequently maintains that though a dominating country may indeed hold absolute power over a subjected country, this power is not without responsibility and should not be taken for granted. The responsibility of the power-holder, it would follow, is a responsibility to recognize the potential for future sameness in the Other, which amounts, eventually, to social and political progress.

In a similar vein, Mill addresses the subornation of women to men in “The Subjection of Women.” Framing matrimonial kinships between men and women as a variation of the master-slave dichotomy, Mill asserts that though men certainly exercise absolute control over their wives, there is a subtle nuance differentiating wife from slave: consent (202). Mill, however, is not satisfied with this reasoning or justification – proclaiming, instead, that women’s “natural” inclination to submit to men is, in fact, only understood as natural because common; education having proven this formerly presupposed female nature crudely insufficient. His admittance as to the impact of social conditioning in relation to sexual difference augments his claim that were women granted equality with men, social progress would surely follow:

The second benefit to be expected from giving to women the free use of their faculties, by leaving them the free choice of their employments, and opening to them the same field of occupation and the same prizes and encouragements as to other human beings, would be that of doubling the mass of mental faculties available for the higher service of humanity. (232)

The argument Mill instills to support women’s equality with men is sameness: since women possess the same potential as men, equality must follow. Just as Mill insists that India’s deficiencies owed to lack of enlightenment, so, too, women’s subordination is articulated as merely a curable shortcoming, one which may be corrected through educational means. Liberalism’s consistent reliance upon sameness propels the quest toward progress – progress within Europe and beyond Europe. By rendering all people inherently “the same,” liberalism’s progressive agenda, in turn, marks difference as less than adequate, inferior or backward – a hindrance to progress – thus requiring the assistance of the more fully Human – that which has been created to supply and propel the measure of legitimacy.

As Wendy Brown contributes to the discourse of liberal humanism in “Liberalism’s Family Values,” conflating equality with sameness is inherently problematic in that a model of sameness relies upon difference – is recognized as sameness only through recognition of difference. Since Mill’s argument is not different though equal but equal because the same, it would proceed that if equality necessarily requires sameness that gender difference necessarily requires inequality:

gender in liberalism consistently emerges as a problem of difference, or simply as difference: there is human equality on the one hand, and gender difference on the other. (153)

Reliance upon a univocal understanding of human acceptability, then, necessitates inequality and the domination of one over another since the “human” prototype is understood as an exemplar of existence; all differentiation from that model is, by default, rendered inferior.

Were equality to be determined by measures of sameness, then, feminist discourse faces troubling impediments. For feminism to adhere to the concept of equality predicated upon sameness precludes the possibility of conceiving of a positivity of difference, a feminist, and political, necessity:

Equality as sameness is a gendered formulation of equality, because it secures gender privilege through naming women as different and men as the neutral standard of the same. (153)

In the same way as men become the prototype for human hegemony, so follows whiteness and heterosexuality as subsequent measures of sameness, and thus equality. A singular measure of human acceptability requires deviation from that standard, however, in order to sustain hierarchical constructs that, if not for difference, could not maintain any coherence.

Since reliance upon “universal human sameness,” as Brown asserts, denies the differences measured against the very notion of “sameness,” all feminist efforts predicated upon women’s equality with men necessarily adopt a masculinist conception of human legitimacy. A feminist adherence to such standards works within the framework of oppressive constructs that expel women from intelligible legitimacy, foreclosing subversion, and thus, human possibilities, reinforcing the delimitations of the human:

If difference (gender) is the conceptual opposite of universal human sameness (liberal humanism), then gender difference – that is, female sexual difference – is the conceptual opposite of the liberal human being, and equality as sameness is the conceptual opposite of gender as difference. (153)

As Brown articulates, the recognition of gender difference negates the possibility of equality.

The very existence of difference serves to delineate the standard for sameness. Conceiving of individuals and societies in relation to a model of legitimate humanity does not, as liberalism seems to imply, create a possibility for equality through sameness, but rather expel that which is read as “different” from the borders of acceptability: what is understood as civilized depends upon a confounding demarcation in order to be recognized as such, which necessarily separates legible humanity from the illegible. Liberalism’s reformative, emancipatory, or messianic efforts only purport to unify – instead they merely create tensions and anxieties over the sustainability of European male superiority.

Such anxieties, moreover, unveil themselves in numerous disciplinary discourses, which ultimately barricade, or obscure, ethical progress in lieu of advancing social progress. Several examples of these problematic frameworks will be addressed and discussed in the subsequent series.

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Uday Singh Mehta, "Progress, Civilization, and Consent" from Liberalism and Empire

Wendy Brown, "Liberalism’s family values" from States of Injury

Gayatri Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" from The post-colonial studies reader

John Stewart Mill, selections from Considerations on Representative Government