(Post)Liberalism, Sensationalism, and the Social Production of Difference

This article will be a critique of “Race, Gender and Liberal Fallacies,” an article written by sociologist Orlando Patterson for the “Op-Ed” page of the New York Times (October 20, 1991) and reprinted in The Black Scholar (Vol 22:1-2:77-79) in its special issue on the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings.

Critique is a mode of engaging social texts and practices, the purpose of which is to reveal and explain the operations of the dominant culture and ideology in social phenomena. A critique is interested in showing how the dominant ideology produces the kinds of narratives and arguments required for the production of subjectivities which support existing social relations: it does this primarily by showing how texts representing the dominant ideology attempt to manage the crises, contradictions and contestations that perpetually erupt in the midst of social life. Such “eruptions,” that is, signify the opposition between a society’s self-representations (say, as “democratic”) and its real social relations (for example, structured in terms of exploitative class relations). The function of the dominant ideology, then, is to rearticulate that self-representation in order to account for contradictory instances (by reducing such instances to the status of a “misunderstanding,” a “contingency,” or a “deviation” from dominant values — or even, if “correctly” understood, as the realization of those values). The function of critique, then, is to make use of such attempts to exacerbate the underlying contradictions which the dominant ideology seeks to conceal, and to show how these contradictions are fundamental and constitutive rather than “accidental.” In this way, critique can produce a space for different modes of “reading” texts of culture, and therefore different subjectivities, different ways for subjects to practice their relations to their social conditions of existence.

The second round of the Clarence Thomas hearings was precisely such an “instance.” The first round of hearings was directed at containing the problems raised by the patently reactionary and opportunistic character of the nomination of Clarence Thomas. The grounds and reasons for this nomination, if inquired into “too closely,” would not only reveal the cynicism of the Bush administration’s use of race as a diversionary and divisive tactic, but would (more importantly) undermine dominant notions of the separation of the legal process from “politics,” and hence the legitimation of the legal and political systems themselves. Indeed, both the Bush administration and the Democratic dominated judiciary committee piously declared that the only issues of concern in the confirmation hearings were to be those regarding Thomas’s “qualifications” as a jurist. No questions of his political views or his understanding of actual cases or issues were to be allowed, since this would be tantamount to establishing a “litmus test” for court appointees, hence “politicizing” the process.

In fact, Thomas was well on his way to being confirmed by a comfortable “bi-partisan” margin until Professor Anita Hill brought forward allegations against Judge Thomas for sexually harassing her when both were working within the Department of Education and EEOC. The crisis in understanding that ensued depended upon the combination of the following elements within the process itself: the casual and dismissive way in which these allegations were at first received; the suddenly obvious gender composition of the judiciary committee, and indeed the Senate and Congress as a whole; the scandalous, witch-hunting manner in which Republicans on the committee treated Hill; and the inability of the committee as a whole to either avoid addressing the allegations or to change its own practices so as to determine in some accountable way their proper place in relation to the overall question of Thomas’s confirmation. More broadly, though, the causes of the “crisis” lay in the displacement of the notions of legal neutrality and bi-partisan consensus which the hearings had sought to relegitimate: this displacement was a result of the — for the moment — glaring inability of the institutions which support such notions to account for their own complicity in and sanctioning of the perpetuation of racial and sexual domination. That is, the means of “protecting” the “process” came into visible contradiction with the putative purpose of the process itself: ensuring the “fair” and “equal” treatment of individuals by political and legal institutions.

Of all the readings of these events which were rushed into the media in the aftermath, none could demonstrate a greater anxiety to repair the “cracks” in the system than Orlando Patterson’s “Race, Gender and Liberal Fallacies.” For Patterson,

Clarence Thomas’s second round of confirmation hearings was one of the finest moments in the modern history of America’s democratic culture, a riveting, civic drama that fully engaged the electorate in an exposure and examination of its most basic fears and contradictions concerning class, race, sex and gender.

But even as it urged us to question some of our basic values and position[sic], it reconfirmed the strength and suppleness of our system of governance. (The Black Scholar, p. 77).

Interestingly, in his enthusiasm over the “confirmation” and “reconfirmation” process as an exemplary moment in the history of democracy, Patterson does not refer to the actual purpose of the hearings — to determine whether Judge Thomas would enter the Supreme Court. One would assume, that is, that in a “democratic culture” such a decision would involve debates and discussions over the criteria for making such a decision, and in turn over the social functions of the Supreme Court and judicial processes, their current status following the “Reagan revolution,” and so on. In other words, one would assume that the larger purpose of these hearings are to guarantee the accountability of the public officials in question as well as to educate the public about the mechanisms of this accountability — and, of course, one would then have a right to expect commentators on the process who celebrate its contribution to “democracy” to clarify these questions.

For Patterson, though, the value of the hearings was in the cathartic spectacle that they were transformed into. “Democracy” for Patterson, like for the “Oprah” and “Phil” shows, amounts to providing the “public” with a stirring dramatization of the “fears and contradictions” (the “experience”) of the “people.” Furthermore, for Patterson (as for Aristotle) the function of “catharsis” is the “purging” of the destructive aspects of subjectivity: in this case, the “serious misperceptions of what is really going on in our society, and the lamentable failure in our threadbare, predominantly liberal discourse on it.”(p. 77)

According to Patterson, then, there is a contradiction between the “strength” and “suppleness” of American democracy and the dominant liberal (and as we will see in a moment, liberal feminist in particular) discourse on that democracy. Patterson claims that the Thomas hearings revealed this contradiction, and have therefore taken the country closer to its resolution:

Thanks to this drama, we have entered an important new phase in the nation’s discourse on gender relations, and it goes well beyond the enhanced realization by men that the complaints of women must be taken seriously. Implicit in these hearings was an overdue questioning of the legalistic, neo-Puritan and elitist model of gender relations promoted by the dominant school of American feminists. (p. 77)

Liberal discourses, and especially liberal feminist discourses, according to Patterson, lag behind our social realities; however, the power of those who produce these discourses enables them to impose them upon these realities with injurious results. Let us take a look at how Patterson characterizes the first set of such “realities” (we will return to the other one later on):

We must face certain stark sociological realities: in our increasingly female, work- centered world, most of our relationships, including intimate ones, are initiated in the workplace; gender relations, especially new ones, are complex and invariably ambiguous; in our heterogeneous society, the perception of what constitutes proper and effective male-female relations varies across gender, class, ethnicity and region; and in keeping with our egalitarian ideals, we take pride in the fact that the WASP boss may legitimately desire or want to marry his or her Puerto Rican aide or chauffeur. (p. 78)

Patterson contrasts the “complexity,” ambiguity,” and “heterogeneity” of gender relations to the “legalism,” “neo- Puritanism,” “elitism,” and, in general, the rigid “formalism” of liberal feminists. Patterson “discreetly” declines to examine this “heterogeneity” more closely, but we can see from his Cinderella-like example that it presupposes, at least, racial and class inequality.

The categories of “ambiguity” and “complexity” are applied by Patterson to Thomas himself: “One revealing feature of these hearings is the startling realization that Judge Clarence Thomas might well have said what Prof. Anita Hill alleges and yet be the extraordinarily sensitive man his persuasive female defenders claimed.”(p. 78) Also, even though “Clarence Thomas emerged in the hearings as one of those rare men who, with one or two exceptions, has achieved both: in general, he rigorously enforced the formal rules of gender relations, and he had an admirable set of intimate, nonerotic relations with his female associates. . . .Yet, tragically, there is his alleged failing with Professor Hill.” (p. 78) “American feminists have no way of explaining this,” according to Patterson, because of their excessive formalism, which leads them to apply the same standards to all sexual and gender relations, regardless of the context or qualifying circumstances. However, according to Patterson, this leaves American feminists in an unresolved dilemma:

They have correctly demanded a rigorously enforced protocol of gender relations in the workplace. But they have also demanded that same intimate bonding that men of power traditionally share, the exclusion from which has kept them below the glass ceiling. There is a serious lacuna in the discourse, for we have failed to ask one fundamental question: how is nonerotic intimacy between men and women possible? (p. 78)

Patterson offers an explanation of the “complexity” of Thomas’s behavior in terms of the heterogeneity of the “mainstream” (“white upper middle class”) environment in which Thomas and Hill were working, to the “Southern working class” (“especially black”) psycho-cultural context which produced both Thomas and Hill. In other words, Thomas’s “misjudgment” was to have introduced into the professional, elite, formalist world of “work” the “Rabelsian humor” and “down home style of courting” proper to a different sub-cultural environment.

It is this reading of the heterogeneity between the “formalistic” work environment and the “down home” (informal) environment which yet impinges upon “work,” that enables Patterson to accuse Hill of “disingenuity” and “unfairness” in raising the allegations. That is, he accuses her of applying the rules appropriate for the “formalistic” environment to a mode of behavior which if taken in its broader context (which Patterson believes Hill “well understood”) would carry only “minor sanctions” and not the “professional extinction” it causes in the “formalistic” situation. To use the Lyotardian language which informs dominant discourses on “culture” in the academy, there is an “incommensurability” between the “language games” which are connected by this “event”: Hill is, in that case, being “unjust” by applying the rules of one of those games to the other, to which it is really inapplicable. Furthermore, Patterson hypothesizes that Thomas may have “imported” the “informal” style of “courting” into the “formal” work situation precisely in order to “affirm their common origins,” as a way of creating the kind of intimate space which the contemporary work environment has made so problematic.

However, problems start to arise in Patterson’s argument if we ask why the “mainstream,” “neo-Puritan” “cultural arena” where feminists apparently have such power is so “overheated,” and situates Thomas’s behavior so differently than the “subcultural” context where, for Patterson, it originates. Let us remind ourselves of two problems raised by Patterson’s text: one, of the possibility of nonerotic intimate relations between the sexes; two, of the fact that work is increasingly the place where erotic forms of intimacy are likely to be initiated. The new “social realities,” as we saw, according to Patterson make both of these problematic issues. However, despite the important connections between them, what we must realize now is that this happens for very different reasons in each case.

The problem of nonerotic intimacy arises from the erotic “charge” that presumably pervades all male-female relations, according to the logic of Patterson’s argument. The problem of erotic intimacy at work, meanwhile, follows from the “overheating” of the work environment with women’s claim to equal rights, which would, in that case, be incompatible with pervasive sexuality, or “eroticism.” That is, the existence of these “problems” presupposes that eroticism must be excluded in the interests of equality; however, this would also mean that the pervasive eroticism of sex-integrated environments is a result of the gender inequality which constitutes these environments. This in turn raises further questions about the nature of this “eroticism” for which Patterson wishes to find a protected space within the “formalistic” and “overheated” public sphere.

It is, in fact, the new “social realities” that Patterson describes which, by removing women from their domestic isolation and enslavement by individual men, has enabled them collectively to problematize “public” situations, to raise the question of equality where it would not “ordinarily” be located. In this connection it is important to note that the entire category of “sexual harassment” was invisible to the law until the late 1970s, since the reduction of women to their sexuality at the workplace was assumed to be a part of the “natural” sexual relations between men and women, and therefore not an issue in which the law had any interest. In this case, though, Patterson’s defense of the subcultural “private” context as against the claims of the “formalistic” “public” sphere is a defense of the rearticulation of “private” patriarchal domination on the “new” terms set by the predominance of that public sphere. As Patterson states in his conclusion,

Finally, the hearings have also highlighted the need to go beyond mere legalistic protocol in gender relations at the workplace. If women are to break through the glass ceiling, they must escape the trap of neo-Puritan feminism with its reactionary sacralization of women’s bodies, and along with men, develop at the workplace something that america still conspicuously lacks: a civilized culture of intimate social intercourse between men and women that recognizes, and contains, the frailties of male and female passions. It’s not going to be easy, but these extraordinary hearings have pushed us in the right direction (p. 79).

What is euphemistically termed here the “frailties” of “passion” is actually what Patterson considers the “inevitability” of eroticism in sex-integrated areas and the apparently inherently problematical status of nonerotic intimacy. The problem with Patterson’s seemingly moderate and enlightened plea is that it is impossible to enforce in consistent ways regulations against sexual harassment and other forms of discrimination while also “recognizing” the “rights” of “passion” since within the context of gender inequality the two are identical. In other words, what Patterson fails to understand is that “nonerotic intimacy” (or, rather, solidarity and cooperation—since what is at stake is not “personal relations” but equality and accountability) between men and women is not merely a problem which can be solved by individual men and women in ad hoc, “informal” ways, but one of the most crucial problems connected to the question of the democratization of existing social institutions. That is, only by making gender relations in the workplace and elsewhere much more “formalistic,” in the sense of being understood as constituted by unequal power relations, and therefore a site of contestation and demands for accountability, can gender equality and therefore “nonerotic intimacy” be made possible.

Patterson cannot see this because, despite his own criticisms of “liberalism,” his own discourse is simply a rearticulation of the liberal distinction between the “private” and the “public.” This distinction is central to liberal thought and practice because liberalism is predicated upon the “equality” of “free” and “rational” individuals, which in practice has meant the owners of private property, those who control the most significant portions of the total social wealth and are therefore “free” to determine its uses in “rational” ways (that is, in ways that connect the uses of wealth to “predictable” outcomes—the creation of more wealth for those who own it). The equality of all individuals before the law, then, has also in practice meant the use of the law to protect this control, which has also meant the control of women (“wives,” “daughters,” objects of desire) by men (“husbands,” “fathers,” desiring subjects). The “social realities” Patterson invokes have made this type of private control increasingly obsolete; this is why sexuality has increasingly become the domain in which gender inequality has been reconstituted (rape, pornography, sexual harassment and assault) and contested. By abstracting sexuality from male domination, then, Patterson contributes to this reconstruction by legitimating the introduction of the “private” (subcultural, informal) into the “public” (where inequality can be contested systematically), by giving it a “privileged” place within the public sphere where male domination can be reconstituted.

Patterson, then, is not so much concerned with the faults of “liberalism” as with those modes of liberalism which, however problematically, actually try to take the category of “equality” seriously, to give it some social, economic and political content. The kind of liberalism that Patterson supports is, as I will show, one in which “equality” is a matter of “representation,” not substance. First, though, it is necessary to point to an anomaly in Patterson’s account of Thomas’s “down home style of courting” (p. 79). Despite Patterson’s claims, there seemed to be little in Hill’s account of Thomas’s remarks to her that could be traced back to the “Southern working class” environment where Patterson wishes to situate them. To the contrary, Thomas’s “style” seems to have been almost completely lifted from pornographic texts which are in fact far closer to the “mainstream” than to the Southern “subculture” Patterson refers to, and which Thomas apparently consumed (“privately”) as a law student at Yale.

Pornography, I would argue, is less the “script” according to which male domination operates than the concentration and representation of the “erotic” as a mode of domination. That is, pornography abstracts the domination which is central to heterosexuality as presently constituted from the other elements which tend to “complicate” it in everyday heterosexual activity (like “romance”). The function of pornography, then, would be to reproduce the kinds of male-fantasized scenarios and categories required for the more “complex” modes of heterosexuality (where domination is less explicit) to proceed “normally.” This is why pornography tends to make use of, to heighten and “purify” the kind of master- slave structure which is also reproduced within the “traditional” private realm valorized by liberal theory and practice. Pornography, then, would be the sensationalization, the representation in the form of a fabricated “immediacy” of the eroticization of domination, especially in a world where the struggles of women have required that eroticism as domination be increasingly “mediated.” It is this that makes pornography a bastion of male domination which, like racist caricatures and “extremist” white supremacist representations and practices, is not an “exception” to everyday normalcy, but rather one of the modes in which the enabling conditions of that “normalcy” can be reproduced and disavowed at the same time. It is not a coincidence, then, that pornographic texts, like Patterson’s own, reserve their most violent representations for the kind of “liberated” “elitist” liberal feminist that Patterson also caricatures in his text. (For a discussion of this aspect of pornography, see Laura Kipnis’s “(Male) Desire and (Female) Disgust: Reading Hustler,” in Cultural Studies, edited by Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler. Routledge, 1992, p. 373-391. I would also urge the reader to inquire into some of the black feminist critiques of the Thomas hearings, such as those by Joy James, Barbara Smith and others, which are also included in the same issue of The Black Scholar as reprinted Patterson’s article. This is important in order to understand better what is at stake in Patterson’s claim that “most of Hill’s supporters seem to be middle-class white women”(p. 79))

Patterson goes on to argue that not only is the general American public in advance of liberal commentators (and by implication closer to the new “realities”) with regard to questions of gender and sexuality, they are also “way ahead. . .with respect to race relations.” “The sociological truths are that America, while still flawed in its race relations and its stubborn refusal to institute a rational, universal welfare system, is now the least racist white-majority society in the world; has a better record of legal protection of minorities than any other society, white or black; offers more opportunities to a greater number of black persons than any other society, including all those of Africa; and has gone through a dramatic change in its attitude toward miscegenation over the past 25 years.”(p. 79) Patterson later argues that American culture “will never be the same again” because of “what all African-Americans won from their [i.e., Hill’s and Thomas’s] pain.” What they have won, according to Patterson, from “this ritual of inclusion, is the public cultural affirmation of what had already been politically achieved: unambiguous inclusion; unquestioned belonging. The culture of slavery is dead.” (p. 79)

In other words, just as the hearings dramatized the complex dynamics of sexual relations in America, enabling us to “purge” some of the liberal (feminist) illusions which are so out of touch with “reality,” the same has taken place with regard to illusions about race — especially those which would suggest that racial conflicts are “getting worse.” The result of this purgatorial experience will be to leave “us” (although why the realistic American public would require this is unclear) with a more clear-sighted appraisal achieved by blacks in American society (which has somehow gone unnoticed).

However, it is necessary to look more closely at how Patterson “proves” these “sociological truths.” He compares the condition of American blacks to the condition of minorities in other societies (especially “white majority” ones), and to the condition of blacks in Africa. However, he evades the only legitimate measure of black equality in the U.S.: that is, their economic, political, social and cultural position relative to white americans. Patterson avoids this comparison for very good reasons, since it would hardly support the “truths” which he wants to present as “obvious,” and so he hopes that American blacks will be consoled with the reminder that they do not live in Australia, or suffer from the famine in Somalia.

Patterson further argues that “Increased reports of racial and gender conflicts are actually indicative of things getting better, not worse, as commentators seem to think, since they reflect the greatly increased number of contacts between blacks and whites, and males and females, in competitive, high- powered situations as the number of Thomases and the many capable, strong-willed women we saw during the hearing rapidly increase.”(p. 79) This is a very important point, because it returns us to the question of the new “social realities” that Patterson mentioned earlier. It is true that the development of the American capitalist economy has destroyed previous modes of racial oppression (I dealt with the question of changes in gender oppression earlier), especially that mode which relegated blacks to highly exploited positions in the rural areas of the South in particular (i.e., sharecropping) and separated them economically and culturally from whites (although we should also keep in mind that this segregation was one of the sources of the “subculture” that Patterson also celebrates). However, the fact that blacks are increasingly more likely to be found alongside of whites in the workplace, in universities, and elsewhere, says absolutely nothing by itself. What is important is whether blacks have equal access to positions of power and authority in these institutions: while the increased conflicts that Patterson adduces as evidence of positive change does “indicate” that blacks are “in” these “situations,” they also indicate that the resistance to their attaining equality within them is rapidly escalating, and taking on more menacing forms (nor is Patterson interested in asking what impact the arrival of Thomas to the Supreme Court will have on all this). In “classical” liberal theory and practice, the “private” oppressions and struggles of women, slaves and disenfranchised blacks were excluded from consideration as bourgeois citizens employed the public sphere in order to make decisions relevant to maintaining the conditions of exploitation on which they collectively depended. In this case, the bourgeois citizen represented himself along with his property (including the labor of his subordinates and dependents); he represented himself, and could be represented by others, as a property owner. With the eclipse of the classical division into private and public spheres in response to the collectivization and socialization of the productive forces under late capitalism, this relatively “coherent” mode of representation is no longer an aid in ensuring capitalist domination. The coherence of this mode of representation lies in the unquestioned existence of separate representative institutions (“government”) which did not infringe upon the private institutions of “civil society” (business, family, etc.). The only question raised in such representative institutions was which bloc of private interests would control those institutions in the name of all private interests: this question, as long as class domination went unchallenged, could be framed as the “rational” determination of the “common interest” of “society.”

The situation is radically different today. The “classical” private modes of domination have been eroded by the increasingly “public” character of “business,” gender and race relations, among other practices: the more farsighted and “sophisticated” apologists of the current social order (like Patterson) recognize, further, that right wing hysterics about the “family” notwithstanding, this is an irreversible process. The categories of “women” and “black” no longer simply reflect the imposition of an inferior status upon “non-citizens”; they also represent collective demands upon all social institutions which are “public” in the sense that they are involved in determining social and cultural priorities which have a direct impact on the life chances of all individuals, and especially those who have yet to attain “equality.” This kind of “representation” cannot presuppose the separations of the classical liberal problematic: between “economics” and “politics”; between “public” and “private.” Rather, the pursuit of these demands that social institutions meet the needs of all people requires the struggle to transform all institutions so that they will be publicly accountable and therefore democratically and collectively managed. This, in fact, is the only serious meaning that can be given to the term “equality” under existing social conditions.

In order to remake itself in the interest of contesting this mode of representation, in order, that is, to evacuate the potentially subversive liberal category of “equality” and the forces it is still capable of mobilizing, the enlarged dominant public sphere has devised a mode of representation capable of containing these struggles. The categories supporting this mode of representation are those of “consensus” and the “sensational.” The construction of “consensus” entails the “discovery” of “commonalities” which erase the “differences” between people: the question for subjects in their capacity as “citizens” can therefore become “am I like X,” or “am I included,” rather than “are institutions accountable to collective needs and interests?” “Consensus” is stabilizing because it depends upon having one’s experience “reflected” in dominant discourses and institutions, and not upon one’s actual effectiveness as a citizen. Thus, cultural institutions can be managed in the interest of the ruling class as long as all groups and individuals “see themselves” in the proclaimed goals of those institutions. The “sensationalistic” dimension of the production of consensus, meanwhile, is required for the following purposes: first, in order to represent inequalities as mere “differences” (“multiculturalism”); second, to accentuate and isolate those “differences” which threaten the formation of “stability,” in order to exclude or marginalize them; third, to produce a range of pluralistic differences which are the condition of possibility of “finding” “similarities” in order to produce “identifications” that can “include” and “transcend” differences.

So, Patterson is extremely impressed by the fact that the Thomas hearings demonstrated that all blacks are not “superstar athletes, news anchors, politicians…” or “underclass cocaine junkies and criminals,” as one would apparently have gathered from the “press and television.” Even more, the public (and especially the white public), contrary to “liberal expectations,” was indifferent to the “racial aspect of the proceedings” and “identified their own interests and deepest anxieties with the two African American antagonists.” That is, as I argued at the beginning, the “democratic” value of the hearings for Patterson is in their “spec(tac)ular” or sensationalistic (for Patterson: “ritualistic”) function: blacks can “see themselves” as “included” (as “like whites”) while whites “identified” with the antagonists (they can “see themselves” as “like blacks”). Thus, the immense “diversity” of American society, with all its “subcultures” is matched by the diversity within those subcultures, which makes them all, in the end, “commensurate.”

Thus, the public sphere, rather than being transformed into an arena of collective decision making and accountability, becomes a giant screen on which the “anxieties” regarding changes in “social realities” can be displayed and “dramatized.” “Democracy,” on this account, is ensured as long as everyone’s anxiety is given “equal time” and everyone is provided with the resources needed to see social realities and their own social identity as “stable.” (So, in the recent Presidential campaign, Clinton’s superiority to Bush was articulated in terms of his ability to “represent” the “anxieties” experienced by “average Americans”). The “rituals of inclusion” that Patterson supports produce idealized “composites” which have purged the differences which have been sensationalized for the purpose of producing the abstract “unity” of the “people.”

Furthermore, the specific character of the identification celebrated by Patterson universalizes the “personal experiences” of the upper (and upwardly mobile) middle class as the “equivalent” against which all identities and experiences can be measured. Thus, whites can identify with blacks “like” Hill and Thomas (not, of course, with the “Hill” who has been disingenuous and unfair and has been used by liberal feminists, but with the “Hill” who has “made it”), and blacks can identify with other blacks who have made it in the “high powered” white world — and, by extension, with whites. The “sublimation” (transcendence/preservation) of the “working class,” “informal” “subculture” with the ascension to the “formal” professional middle class “mainstream” in this case produces a narrative “telos” which excludes the exploitation of the working class as a site of “identification.” As in prime time soap operas like “Beverly Hills 90210” or “Knots Landing” the representation of the experiences of those whose “passions” can be abstracted from the demands of immediate survival, resisting exploitation, or engaging in collective struggles enables the sensationalization of the effects of inequality: so, sexual harassment can become a question of the conflict between “passions” and office “protocols” and “romances” across class lines rather than of the super-exploitation of working women.

The dominant order has an interest in preserving the categories of the “private,” the “personal” and the “intimate” as those qualities required to “humanize” those institutions based upon collective organization, large scale “mobilizations,” or “publicly” determined criteria. This is because the “formalistic” approach increasingly prevalent at such sites are in effect provisional compromises between their hierarchical structure and the demands of those denied equality within them — and, as I suggested before, the structure of such institutions provides new types of resources with which to advance these demands. For example, the sensationalistically produced terror of “political correctness” with its “Stalinist” “speech codes” is a result not of a principled defense of “freedom of expression” or “academic freedom,” but of the attention that the politicization of the educational process directs at the reproduction of domination through “casual” remarks, modes of behavior, the enjoyment of “private” pleasures, and so on. Those who benefit from such privileged areas of “freedom” often recognize more acutely than campus activists themselves that the consequence of this kind of sustained interrogation of the “private” would be the thoroughgoing transformation of the institution itself (and not simply a “safer campus”).

At the same time, of course, the dominant order can easily use “formalism” for its own ends, to abstract the “neutral” criteria for their priorities from broader social struggles and needs. However, this needs to be exposed as another type of application of the logic of the “private”: that is, the “right” of the “university,” the “business,” etc., to set its own priorities according to considerations of “research” standards or “profit.” The recognition that every form of social cooperation is “public,” that is, employs social resources for some social end, also entails a critique of this articulation of the “private.” This is because it is interested in the social accountability of institutions, not in their circularly defined accountability to “their own” standards. Critical contributions to those “counter-public” spaces contesting the rearticulations of private domination within the public sphere must therefore develop “readings” and critiques of the political function of the “private,” the “personal,” the “intimate,” the “experiential,” and so on: the evasion and suppression of the possibility of theoretically determined and publicly accountable modes of regulating the uses of social “powers.”

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