Materialist Analysis? [Archive]

Armchair War Criminal

22nd June 2011, 07:03

A materialist analysis looks at what people's goals are and what means they have to achieve those goals. Idealist analysis looks at concepts as independently existing entities, rather than as tools used by individuals and groups. (Oftentimes, "materialist" is used in a more narrow sense, in that the goals are limited to the pursuit of material comfort and security, and the means to non-discursive actions. In this narrow reading there's little materialist analysis to be made of political correctness, et al., so the rest applies to the broad reading.)

A materialist reading of political correctness would start from the observation that certain discursive acts serve to limit social spaces - or to put it less pretentiously, if me and my buddies throw around "fаggot" as an epithet at the local knitting circle, gay folks won't be likely to feel comfortable there, for entirely sensible reasons. Because materialist analysis always takes it as a default (if disprovable) assumption that people's actions tend to be sensible given their goals, we also want to look at why they do this - for instance, perhaps people employ racist, sexist, and so on language to help shore up their relative position and monopolize valuable social spaces, or perhaps this way of speaking has simply become a shibboleth, serving to accentuate loyalty to an existing way of doing things, and thus signalling alliance between members. (None of this needs to be plotted out consciously, of course; oftentimes our interests guide our behavior simply by inspiring our conscious minds to neglect certain matters.) "Political correctness," then, is an attempt to make these exclusionary acts themselves discouraged, so that the social space is relatively more open. A materialist analysis would then look at who supports political correctness, who complains about it, who risks backlash by reminding their friends: "hey, Jim, could you not say 'fаggot' all the time? Thanks." A materialist analysis would be especially interested in examining which members of currently privileged groups (i.e., not targets of the kind of language political correctness is employed to reduce) adopted politically correct attitudes and which didn't; and would then move on to trying to form a coherent account of what goals people further by being bigoted or politically correct (or even by being one or the other in different situations, perhaps the most common option!)

An idealist analysis consists of questions like: is political correctness compatible with freedom of speech? How come black people can say "the n-word" and I can't? Isn't it unjust to criticize people for saying things when they meant no harm? Isn't it hypocritical to set up a "women's only space" and to attack men for excluding women from traditionally male spaces? And so on. Idealist analyses are 1) concerned with distinguishing between good and bad, rather than is and isn't, and 2) concerned with the abstract interrelationship between ideas, using certain ideas as the benchmarks of good and bad, rather than specific contexts in the real world.

"Natural rights" is actually a really great example, if you don't mind reading a few books: the contrast between Hobbes, a materialist, and Locke, an idealist, is quite sharp! (Of course Hobbes in Leviathan, like Marx in Capital, is examining something quite abstract, and it's a bit hard for me to state the difference very elegantly. Another reason for you to engage with the texts themselves!) Later materialists tend to avoid terms like "natural rights," because they've acquired so much additional baggage from idealists.