Skunkcabbage responded to my last post by saying:

“From the position of understanding the world by way of scarcity, which is of course to understand the world by way of property, I wonder if the liberal male doles out pieces of his ‘privilege’ in order to feel like he’s staving off or controlling the irrationality of a system that he knows (more or less consciously) can strip him of his ‘privilege’ during a crisis. In this light it’s not unlike a primitive sacrifice to appease the capitalist weather-gods. Irrational as all hell, but satisfying as false consciousness of control of an inexorably crisis-prone system. Is this sympathetic to what you mean by the epistemological disadvantage?”

Hmmm. Let me try to think that through a bit:

I’ll start by thinking a bit about your placement of the word ‘privilege’ in scare quotes. Yes, it is true that capitalism produces an unstable environment for all persons, and it is also true that some responses to occupying a privileged position in a capitalist framework– seeing either one’s philanthropic tendencies or one’s accumulation of capital as evidence one’s own merit– can be understood as efforts to stave off one’s barely-submerged knowledge of that material instability. On the other hand, it is also materially true that the liberal masculine subject has more privilege, in the world, than many other kinds of persons do. Being at the mercy of the fluctuations of capital, as we all are, is not the same as not having privilege. The liberal masculine subject is a privileged subject, when considered in relation to other subjects.

On the other hand, there is no rational reason, within the logic of capital, why one particular group should have the privilege, other than the fact that one group does have to have the privilege, for capitalist exploitation to work, and men of a certain class are the group that already had the privilege. Thus, the particular allocation of privilege to a particular kind of subject is residual: something “effectively formed in the past, but … still active in the cultural process,” since it’s been “incorporated” so that “the effective dominant culture” will “make sense,” as Raymond Williams suggests.

From that perspective, although I wouldn’t exactly say that the liberal masculine subject is “staving off or controlling the irrationality of a system that he knows (more or less consciously) can strip him of his ‘privilege’ during a crisis,” I might alter your statement slightly and suggest that he could be “staving off or controlling the irrationality of a system that he knows (more or less consciously)” has allocated this privilege to him only arbitrarily, “staving off” the knowledge that there is no “rational” reason, in terms of the logic of capital, why the position of privilege shouldn’t go to someone else. There are a million other kinds of cultural reasons why it can’t, of course, but capitalism doesn’t care who’s in the role of exploiter, as long as someone is.

I do like the way you pick up on (and turn upside down) my discussion of texts that represent as “primitive” the “ungrateful” (or, not grateful in the appropriately mirroring way) recipient of philanthropic impulses. When you say the liberal masculine subject might be making “a primitive sacrifice to appease the capitalist weather-gods,” it reminds me a bit of Stallybrass’s argument about Marx’s reversal of the colonial concept of “fetishism” (in “Marx’s Coat,” Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces). I guess I’m using that observation as a transition, because I’m going to turn now toward the way that nature, rationality, weather gods, and irrationality– in short, women and the “primitive”– show up in Dialectic of Enlightenment, and try to address your thoughts from that direction. Um. As far as transitions go, that one’s pretty clumsy, don’t you think?

Actually, I’m going to address Dialectic of Enlightenment in my next post. This one’s already getting longish, and I’m beginning to get peckish. Thanks for your thoughtful question on my last post.