Tackling the Crisis: A Review of Philip Mirowski’s Never Let a Serious Crisis Go To Waste

Making sense of the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath is a daunting task. While there have been a number of popular press attempts like Michael Lewis’ The Big Short or the documentary Inside Job, the latter of which took painstaking details to paint a picture of the connections and players involved in the crisis, Philip Mirowski asks in his recent book Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown why the aftermath of the 2008 crisis did not spur some broad based legitimation crisis in the dominant channels and organs of the world’s economic and intellectual elite. Mirowski’s answer is well reasoned but also somewhat depressing: economic intellectuals take for granted the scientific elements of economic theory, and, reading deductively, understand the crisis as expressing not some retroactive judgment of economics as a discipline but instead as expressing a sort of intrinsic unpredictability with which those interested in markets and economics will just have to live.

The book proceeds to make four arguments that are of vital interest to rhetoricians and those studying the intersection between argumentation and social theory. 1) Demands for “consensus” reinforce orthodoxy within economic thought, 2) Economics departments and economics faculty suffer from a feedback loop problem wherein the economic incentives from coming to conclusions that will sound good to private sector employers in the financial sector pollute academic conclusions, 3) “Everyday neoliberalism” is sustained through quotidian vectors of representations and encounter that naturalize economic decisions as proceeding from some godlike mantra as opposed to effects of human action, and 4) Public interventions by public intellectuals in the area of economics like Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman were counterproductive insofar as they reproduced the notion that there were a limited number of “sides” to the debate over the crash while also suggesting a minor economic corrective rather than a wholesale philosophical corrective was needed to explain not only the crash but also the failure of those who helped cause it to reflect on their role.

I was very taken by Mirowski’s argument regarding “everyday neoliberalism,” because while it is, in some ways painfully obvious, he does lay out some compelling evidence worthy of consideration. For example, phenomena like the Freakonomics series, which tries to explain almost every sector of society in economic terms, induce a certain kind of talking about the economy as something natural. Or, as a friend and I routinely discuss, the rise of advanced statistics movements in sports, emblematized by Moneyball, brings left-progressives over to the side of the market with sexy talk of “market inefficiencies” and opposition to troglodyte scouts and coaches who just can’t understand the links between economics and progress. Another good example Mirowski cites, and one worthy of further study by rhetoricians, is the utter invisibility of any class outside the “middle class” in the vocabularies of news media, pundits, and politicians. Again, another rather obvious point, but stunningly demonstrative: could you go through the roster of leading politicians in the two major American political parties right now and find a dozen references to “the poor” or “impoverished” in their speeches and prepared materials? One wonders if this signals a deep, deep internalization of the market mantra: don’t mention the poor because those who are impoverished are so as a matter of their nature as opposed to their will?

The book’s argument with respect to the drive for consensus as a factor evading substantive engagement with the poverties of economic theory is also powerful. Mirowski is not only a professor of economics but also of the history of philosophy. Hence it comes as little surprise that he makes a claim about the relationship of how knowledge is presumed to work within expert spheres. Specifically, he argues that there is a tendency to assume that “expertism” implies “consensus.” Thus where there is absence of consensus, we do not have expertism as such but instead failed knowledge production wherein all claims are suspect. Reading from the famous Frank Luntz global warming memo which suggested that a consensus on climate science would force legislative action on global warming, Mirowski suggests that this thinking has proven especially pernicious in the case of economics, because while public intellectuals like Paul Krugman lob bombs at central members of what Mirowski calls the “Neoliberal Thought Collective” the work this does is often to assure the public that there is no economic consensus while the existence of a thing called “the market” (in the public view, I mean: Mirowski is very clear that for mainstream neoliberal economists “the market” does not exist, but is something which makes its own way in the world independent of economists) continues unabated. Thus the market continues to do its work even as what “economists” think comes to be represented as presumptively uncertain. If the central task for those concerned with the sustainability of the global system and especially those concerned with the massive inequalities and injustices that exist in the world is to challenge the mantra that “what markets say is reality” then minor repairs and rescue operations only emphasize that while markets do know, humans, even experts, cannot.

If I had to say a couple things critical of the book, they would be that Mirowski insufficiently theorizes the history of “expertism” as a concept in American public life and also that he struggles to locate the argument of the later Michel Foucault found in The Birth of Biopolitics, which Mirowski cites extensively. Regarding expertism, Mirowski assumes that the distance between the deliberating public and the realm of experts is one made by the confusion and misinformation circulated in public disputes about the economy. This is, as far as it goes, correct. But Mirowski could do more to highlight how politicians and pundits navigate the constitutive distance between “economics” and something like a fluid conception of “the public” (thought of as a discursive figure as opposed to a demographic) by pointing to how the existence of things as they are ratifies them retroactively as expressions of a general economic will. That is, simply by being, things are as “the market” says they are, which bakes in a certain level of presumption about the status quo. Mirowski seems, in many parts of the book, to understand this, which makes it all the more puzzling that he insists on reading the Foucault of The Birth of Biopolitics as descriptive rather than prescriptive: he insists that “Foucault…declines to allow that agents are somehow bamboozled by power/knowledge, since the market is posited to exist in a privileged epistemological space with special position in the regime of truth.” (p. 100). In fact, the Foucault of these later lectures provides one of the best possible answers to the classical dispute about false consciousness that has dogged progressives, because he argues that the market comes to function as if it were the only site of knowledge to explain the characteristics of a vast set of “non-economic” sectors i.e. cultural, familial, etc. Nothing in Foucault says it has to be this way, only that it is.

Overall, this book was very helpful for pushing one to think about the aftermath of the political crisis. It’s also very accessible: Mirowski has taken pains to write in a manner accessible to more than just theory-minded academics.  And for the more academically inclined he makes a host of interesting points, like his ability to connect the influence of Carl Schmitt to the Chicago School of economics. I would recommend it to anyone interested in neoliberalism, the 2008 financial crisis, social theory, or the rhetoric of science/rhetoric of inquiry.

Joe the Plumber and the Politics of Referents

Our graduate seminar had a lengthy discussion about agency, and the possibility of taking action in a world where agency is found in chains of iterations rather than human actors.

To wit: the critique of the Butlerian/deconstructive positions holds something like--your view of subjectivity denies the possibility of interventions into the world because while on one hand it eviscerates reference (this evidences all kinds of practical problems) it also elevates these references (names) into a higher order of existence (this would be the nominalist position, that things are their names) by establishing that their naming functions as a kind of overdetermination. Presumably the result would be debilitating for scholars interested in fighting violence and oppression because without being able to refer to categories around which meaningful resistances might be articulated (race, class, gender, national origin, etc.) critical rhetoricians would be locked into pursuing something like a politics of unintelligibility. Or, if recourse to such categories is allowable, it would only be by means of contradiction (i.e. the invocation of these categories is not neutral, they are historically developed, and so how can we ensure that our use is not just another pernicious effect of a chain of iterations?)

A response, following what is here (allowing some Butler and Foucault as well) might hold something like: the recuperative argument is undone by installing initially and taking for granted the demand that words mean something more than "just their name". That is, to yearn for a concept or set of notions under which one might organize some kind of resistance (to say nothing of the rather large debate about whether agency is about making change, and what counts as change in a world where subjects are constantly being remade rather than shuffled around on a chess board) presumes in advance that said concept is meaningful/necessary to produce change. Of course, it is the desire to have some kind of stable footing in a dynamic world that operates as the cause (and I don't mean cause in a strict case/effect model, I mean something more like De Man argues here when he notes that what distinguishes the cause and effect is nothing more than the naturalization of metaphor, a naturalization whose repetition consistently a certain kind of ordering whose rightness can be verified by no external authority) of that very anxiety in the first place--what is displaced is that understanding that the anxiety stems from the absence of a founding point for the reading. Instead, this anxiety of no origins is replaced with an anxiety that stems from the moves away from metaphorized/naturalized understandings whose extensive repetitions secure (to use a bit of debate jargon) the status quo.

If this seems theoretically dense and annoying (guess who's been studying for comps!), an example: if we say that agency is in a chain of iterations, rather than in people, a good democrat might complain that this forecloses the ability of humans to attempt to mobilize causes for justice around the image of "the people", because that understanding will always be purely discursive rather than grounded in some actually existing democratic coalition. My counter would be: the understanding that agency stems from chains of iterations rather than agents themselves is the key condition for mobilizing something like "the people" in a way that is not historically determined. After all, it is the materially grounded understanding of "the people" (the loss of which is anxiety generating for those interested in recuperating a doer behind the deed) that seduces us with its claim to intelligibility, but it is the claim to intelligibility that tautologically prohibits us from questioning necessity of the term itself (because its relevance is naturalized rather than being subjected to critique). For example, the failure of "Joe the Plumber" as a conservative enthymeme in the 2008 campaign was a result of the fact that his deployment assumed a logic of external reference. The McCain campaign assumed that a certain kind of Americanness was available through JTP, and didn't hestitate to push him for a couple weeks. The problem was that the selection of JTP as a campaign avatar was guided by the belief he could function as a synecdoche, but instead he had a life of his own, becoming a kind of allegory for Americanness. He had back taxes, no plumbing license, and whenever he talked his political opinions never seemed quite up to snuff. Confronted with the possibility that JTP showed a kind of absence at the heart of politics, subjects simply began to identify against him--rather that confronting the split between "the people" and politics, he simply represented neither category properly. If politics worked with referents, as my fellow compatriots hold, JTP's failure would have sparked some sort of rethinking. Instead, he was always "in and for himself".

Here we see that the problem is not a slide to "pure nominalism"--the function of langauge to cut us off from external reference, and then its ability to seal us from encountering that fact by having already installed itself as a natural rather than a contingent truth ensures that we are already on a nominalist plane whether we like it or not. Trying to rescue some kind of agency from this fact lies in letting it be an assumption that drives our theorizing--and its meaning as an assumption is evacuated if we alter or forswear it by insisting that things are otherwise, as the call to recuperate agency does.

Tea Party as Symptom

Basic, boring Foucault: language is necessary to express points of view, and indeed, its something like the condition of the possibility of points of view existing. Within our political milieu, there are certain discourses that are accessible to us and others that are not. Somewhat tautologically, those that have force or effect are those which are capable of operating differentially within what Foucault in the Archaeology of Knowledge a "discursive formation"--a cluster or cloud of notions, discourses, rhetorics, all of which only meaning in relation to the other. The upshot is: for a discourse to be intelligible it has to "make sense" in a particular discursive formation.

One quick historical example-in a powerful essay on the potential of civic resistance, Ken Cmiel points to the way in which members of the civil rights movement in the 1960's swung public sentiment in their direction by behaving in overwhelmingly civilized ways despite the abject violence directed at them by racist authorities and citizens. The result was a humanizing effect that enabled something like identification between the American public and these victims. To borrow from Kenneth Burke: its quite possible that these scenes transformed the African American victims of violence, previously dehumanized through rhetorical and social techniques into something fundamentally "Other", into fellow citizens by something like a "perspective by incongruity" in which the incompatability of competing frames (traditional notions of race vs. traditional civic belonging) is pointed to and eventually one is discarded in favor of the other. We might say that in this moment, African Americans became intelligible as "civic" actors--that is capable, of asserting themselves and behaving as someone who had the full understanding of what it meant to be a member of a polity was. This occurred in contradistinction to acts of violence on the behalf of police and racist authorities, which also simultaneously demonstrated that mere formal characteristics of citizenship (full access, total officialy recognition) were also not necessary OR sufficient conditions for a person being a citizen; after all, their actions had to be read as indexes of personal/individual/geographical biases rather than an entire national malaise for the frame "America" to persist undisrupted.

Why do I bring this up? In the 1960's the civil rights movement utilized the available means of persuasion within a political system to point to the ways that such a system operated with some measure of arbitrariness. Because the exposure of said arbitariness would threaten the coherence of the system as a whole, the system moved to address these concerns. The point is that the existing "discursive formation" provided the tools/mechanisms for this demand to be produced. When we turn to the Tea Party, I think we are seeing a symptom of a peculiar structural particularity: the tools available within our political system today for the Tea Partiers to produce arguments seem much less rich and ample than those provided to the social movements of the 1960's. Take one of the major arguments the Tea Partiers push on a regular basis--that the president and Congress are a bunch of socialists. Jonah Goldberg pushed this argument pretty hard in a recent Commentary piece titled "What Sort of Socialist is Barack Obama?" He and the rest of the righties aren't wrong that the government is displaying socialistic tendencies--but this is only because they broadened the meaning of the word socialism so far that it ceases to possess any meaningful utility for social critics, referring as it does to basically anything that the government might do that gets in the way of anything approaching a free market. However, rejecting something "because the government is doing it" isn't much of an answer to an awful lot of policy proposals. And it's not particularly persuasive either given that history still has a force--no matter how hard Rush Limbaugh tries we can't just forget about FDR and the New Deal.

It seems like the reductio about any governmental action turning into tyranny, fascism, etc. has been too played out. But the argument is hysterically repeated ad nauseam, in the faint hope that it will somehow make more sense. During the Cold War you at least had an existential threat to connect the fear of socialism too--the elements in the government behaving somewhat "socialist" could at least be linked to an alien force locked in cold combat with the United States. Today, however, its difficult to draw a link between Al Qaeda forces and the "socialist" elements of the Obama administration. So instead of being a socialism that successfully threatens the fiber of America (connecting healthcare policy to an enemy is easier, when you, know that enemy still exists and still seems politically viable) it instead seems like a nettlesome poke from some angry children. So I guess today I'm optimistic--it seems like the available resources in our "discursive formation" don't provide the conservatives with very many intelligible/persuasive arguments. There will need to be a shift that acknowledges that the Cold War is over, to allow for arguments to coalesce broader arguments now that the clarion call of "Terror! Freedom! Liberty!" is becoming less effective.

Is Performativity the Feminine Not-All?

This is the question I have come to while thinking about a historicized critique of the phallus in work which uses Lacan. Initially, I was hoping to make a Butlerian critique of the concept, styled like what we debate folks would call a "language PIC", as Isaac West and Regnier properly identified the project.

This seems to have fallen by the wayside as I place more and more scrutiny on the clash between Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity and Joan Copjec's logic of the feminine not-all. Essentially, to be able to run the critique of the phallus, I would have to make use of the diachronically existing reserves that could render the phallus sensible as the very object I would critique of standing in for--the penis. After all, the goal of the critique would be to say "if you don't gain anything from calling it a phallus, why do that?". You could simply instead make reference to the point of impossibility that makes subjectivity possible--wholeness is not had so that partiality can be, and that partiality exists in relation to totality to explain why subjects move towards a perceived wholeness, although that is a fiction.

At any rate, after pushing Jason Regnier and Meryl on this question, and rereading Joan Copjec's chapter "Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason" in Read My Desire, I struggle to believe that I can make this historicized argument without repudiating Copjec's account of feminine sexuality. In order to conclude that there is something objectionable about the term phallus, I have to confer upon the term a certain historicized meaning which implicates me in already understanding sexual difference in a recognizable way, and particularly, as somehow reconstructing a binary of some sort which makes phallus recognizable as a term that has a gendered effect.

Ergo, I am thinking instead of pursuing the following question: is performativity for Butler the same thing as sexual difference in Copjec? After all, Butler's argument is simply that the always evident and prevalent performances of gender demonstrate that there is no such natural thing as woman or man, gay or lesbian, trans or straight. Each performance is evidence that there is no totality to which gender terms actually point. Similarly, Copjec's argument is that the feminine is evidence of the not-all of being, that totality is itself impossible- the difference between the masculine and the feminine is that the masculine claims to be complete. I think one could argue that this is consistent with Butler's position. The feminine, which is positively valenced for Copjec, is good because it provides a space of contingency outside of signification, crucial as an escape hatch to the discursive prison of say Foucault. This is why Copjec is running a critique of Butler--the feminine provides a hope for something beyond the mere existence of discursive survival. But I think one can read Butler as more than a mere survivalist- that gender performances which attempt "passing" are negatively valenced for Butler, who points to examples of what happens when someone "can not pass" as evidence of their failing to live up to some totality to which they are articulated. In the sort of best possible world for Butler, gender performances have denaturalized essences to the point that the recognition of difference is impossible. Crucially important to this argument is that we may not be where difference is meaningless; instead, difference is all there is, a series of performances that exist as singularities, not particularities articulated to a totality.

Chapter Two of Society Must be Defended

I just think this is a good quote:

"Third, methodological precaution: Do not regard power as a phenomenon of mass and homogeneous domination--the domination of one individual over others, of one group over others, or of one class over others; keep it clearly in mind that unless we are looking at it from a great height and from a very great distance, power is not something that is divided between those who have it and hold it exclusively, and those who do not have it and are subject to it. Power must, I think, be analyzed as something that circulates, or rather as something that functions only when it is part of a chain It is never localized here or there, it is never in the hands of some, and it is never appropriated in the way that wealth of a commodity can be appropriated. Power functions. Power is exercised through networks, and individuals do not simply circulate in those networks; they are in a position to both submit to and exercise this power. They are never the inert or consenting targets of power; they are always its relays. In other words, power passes through individuals. It is not applied to them." (29)

Thus Foucault urges us not to conceive of the individual as some autonomous atomized figure, but to instead discuss this individual as an effect of power, constituted by and it and simultaneously the vessel for its exercise. The position of a "great height" from which one could conceivably see power is presumably fictive (Indeed, this links up most directly with the Deleuze and Guattari I've been reading lately, in which seeing networks of power would be possible only from a peak or mountain that thought itself capable of looking down on a plateau).

Part Two of the HOS: The Repressive Hypothesis

In the past "one did not speak of sex" and this effect was produced through a prudish series of mutually referential prohibitions. Or at least, this is the conventional account of things according to Foucault. For him it seems the real key is that speaking of sex became somehow a novel and transgressively valenced move. To whisper in the corners about sex could be taken as a form of noble resistance, or at least something which disclosed a particular character of the soul: "Discourse, therefore, had to trace the meeting line of the body and the soul, following all its meanderings: beneath the surfance of the sins, it would lay bare the unbroken nervure of the flesh" (20). I really like his prose here--confession is a spelling out of the excess of desire, but very rarely turns into a discussion of the spilling out of this excess on bodily acts.

Endless and extensive discourses manufacturing of "the interplay of innumerable pleasures, sensations, and thoughts which, through the body and the soul, had some affinity with sex." (20). One can see the workings of the argument here--as a greater and greater number of acts and thoughts became linked to "sex" and this linkage was performed in language, it becomes possible to think of sex as a thing, and not think of each discrete and variable act or thought as something unto itself.

The concern with discussing sex moved into the public under the guise of population discussion Monitoring birth rates, death rates, marital statuses etc. were objects of interest, and as a result sex could be directly articulated to the national interest of a population. Because I am reading this for a Queer Rhetorics class, it seems silly for me to not note that this provides one explanation for homophobia in its early forms- "perverse" sex not aimed at procreation was a direct threat to the health of the nation, because it would not be sex that would increase the size of the population, and thus not make the "body politic" stronger. Certainly this is not limited to what we would call "same-sex" acts: the interesting kernel at the heart of these prohibitions is that way in which it also delimits opportunities for physical activity in the marital bedroom in relation to acts intended for procreation.

I also want to quote at length from Foucault on silence:

"Silence itself--the things one declines to say, or is forbidden to name, the discretion that is required between different speakers--is less the absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary, than an element that functions alongside the things said, with them in relation to them within over-all strategies. There is no binary division to be made between what one says and what one does not say; we must try to determine the different ways of not saying such things, how those who can and those who cannot speak of them are distributed, which type of discourse is authorized, or which form of discretion is required in either case. There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses. " (27)

Central to understanding this passage is importing Foucault's notion of power as productive, not destructive, as outlined in Discipline and Punish. One would mix this critique thoroughly with his criticism of the repressive hypothesis. Traditional notion of silence: it is demanding and waiting to be filled with something, with something that has been neutralized and driven out of its proper space. Critique of this notion: it assumes that there is something which belongs in that natural space, and moreover, assumes some uniform "thing" existed to be driven from that space, as opposed to opening up to the possibility that that very "thing" was created via discourse. "Visibility is a trap" says the Foucault of the prisoners, and here that is clear: sex, made into an object which circulates and both enforces itself and is enforced upon, is controlled owing to the very visibility of it as a sensible notion.

There is another curious moment, where Foucault posits a structural answer to the "Why" question: that sex is an object of manipulation to serve economic and conservative social interests? He says he does not know, but he does know that if this is the case, production, not repression, is the means.

"Modern society is perverse, not in spite of its puritanism or as if from a backlash provoked by its hypocrisy; it is in actual fact, and directly, perverse." (47). "Aberrant" sexual behaviors are not the result of the failed universalization of a program of Puritan regulation, nor from the repression and reemergence of drives and desires. Rather, the behaviors are produced from the discursive regulation and constitution of a notion of "sex". They are products of "the encroachment of a type of power on bodies and their pleasures" (48). They are not "results" but rather, they just are.

Once More Into the HOS Vol. 1 Breach, Dear Friends!

We're reading this for my queer rhetorics class. I'm going to post various and sundry meandering thoughts about this text as I read it today.

Part One: We "Other Victorians"

Text begins with section dedicated to outlining a taken for granted understanding of sexuality as a thing which has been represeed by modern developments. An understanding of sexuality as an object of manipulation and operation, and prohibition is contrasted with repression. Prohibition serves to stop actions from taking place, while repression indicates that there are a series of charges and obsessions which are simply redirected. And about this Foucault asks:

"Could things have been otherwise? We are informed that if repression has indeed been the fundamental link between power, knowledge, and sexuality since the classical age, it stands to reason that we will not be able to free ourselves from it except at a considerable cost: nothing less than a transgression of laws, a lifting of prohibitions, an irruption of speech, a reinstating of pleasure with reality, and a whole new economy in the mechanisms of power will be required. For the least glimmer of truth is conditioned by politics. Hence, one cannot hope to obtain the desired results simply from a medical practice, nor from a theoretical discourse, however rigorously pursued" (5).

This to me reads as a mortar lobbed at those reading the fallout of a post-68 politics as a call to arms for a more universal and powerful rebellion against instituted powers. The result of a repressive thesis is an understanding of the source of repression must have been appropriately strong to suppress something inimical about human being, and, moreover, that the proper solution is to enable conditions for this human spirit of some sort to rise up in all its glory and power.

And this repressive hypothesis has the effect of turning an ordinary and everyday behavior into something transgressive--if power has operated by repressing sexuality, merely talking about sexuality is enough to constitute a trangression of sorts. Thus all the criticism of psychoanalysis--a means of "transgressively" disclosing the secrets that speak a deep and infinite validation of the existence of some notion of sexuality within, repressed and quashed by a nasty apparatus. This hushed speaking of sex hints at a future utopia wherein "liberation and manifold pleasures" will be free for all. What seems important throughout is that sexuality is a sort of object which much be liberated from the chains in which it is embedded. As this is the sedimented common sense of the matter, Foucault argues, his whole book might read as somewhat mad.

Foucault is out to trace the history of how we have come to believe in this repression. Why has sex been made into a sin? And what of repression, if its explanatory power is of such magnitude that it becomes an all encompassing tautology we are incapable of opposing on the basis of fact and argument?

Thus three meta doubts about repression: Is this repression a historically established fact? Is power always repressive, or at least primarily repressive? And finally, is critical analysis of repression itself a break or a continuation of the set of power relations that enabled repression's supposed effects to continue to reproduce themselves? And by connection, Foucault plans to investigate the ways in which sex comes to be an object which is said to have forces exerted upon it, even as it as a notion colonizes the individual in an internalized and controlling fashion, mutually constituting itself through a series of discourses and practices marked and mapped by discourse.

He is not out to say that the history of prohibition does not contain truths--rather, we should not take that one story as the only and proper one, for granted. Historical facts will be used to reduce the monolithic force of the repressive hypothesis.

More later.

Foucault on the "Eye of Power" in the Power/Knowledge Reader

I've been reading DeCerteau with great interest, and its easy to see how much of his work on tactics/strategy is drawn directly from Foucault, while building on what Foucault has to say. In this short excerpt from the interviews, Foucault further expands upon what he thinks of Bentham's panopticon, using the notion as a metaphor to launch a few well placed lobs against those who would be obsessed with class struggle:

"Struggle is the word used most often...are to be analyzed as episodes in a war?...the affirmation of a struggle can't be the beginning and end of all explanations in the analysis of power relations"

The point here seems to be that a struggle presumes two already fixed or monolithic forces already existing around which and through which resistances are organized and play. So when Foucault says the "good old logic of contradiction is no longer sufficient" to unravel actual processes, the argument seems to be that juxtaposition and division on the basis of separation helps to constitute existing social processes and structures, not bring them into a levelling light that exposes their "true character". In searching for the "right" struggle and alignment, analysis which presumes that there is a struggle in the first place is a lens which means one focuses on the supposed structures involved in the struggle and not their formulation.