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In Theory (Part 2)

October 21, 2007

Here at long last is the TK promised ten days ago. I just went back to "In Theory (Part 1)" to see if I could climb back on the same train. Probably not, but I think I'm back on the same track. Susanna's eponymous biographer was speculating about why she (Susanna for sure, and maybe the biographer too) started arguing so strenuously with Ti-Grace Atkinson's discourse on the importance of theory.

Fortunately I was encountering at the same time both the women's liberation movement and compelling evidence of why it was necessary -- in those days, sexism could parade utterly naked up and down the street, and nowhere was it taken more for granted than among the somberly dressed Jesuits (whom I, of course, quickly learned to call "Jebbies"). Without that powerful countervailing force, my longing for ritual, belonging, and authority might have led me into Catholicism or Orthodox Judaism or further into Islam -- or, even more likely, one of their secular counterparts.

In the three or four years before I heard Ti-Grace speak, those "secular counterparts" had already made an impression. At Georgetown and especially in the wider antiwar movement, ideologies abounded. Libertarians and Young Americans for Freedom had literature tables in the Walsh building lobby right next to those of the Student Mobilization Committee (to End the War in Vietnam, aka the SMC), the Vietnam Moratorium Committee, and other left-leaning groups. During slack times, we'd harangue each other, but we'd also look after each other's goods when someone needed a bathroom or snack break. In the wider world, the SMC was an ideological battleground -- various coalitions of "independent radicals" were forever trying to wrest control from the Socialist Workers Party and its junior associate, the Young Socialist Alliance (SWP and YSA, respectively, collectively known as "the Trots," after Trotsky, whom they strongly preferred to Stalin).

Up close and personal the Trots were as respectable as the Democrats. The looney tunes were the splinter groups that rarely helped organize anything but thrived on disrupting actions organized by others. They'd march in quoting, and often dressed like, Chairman Mao, or chanting stuff like "Kim, Kim, Kim Il Sung, revolution by the young." ROTC on the Bizarro World probably looks something like the Spartacist League and Progressive Labor circa 1970, but parody wasn't part of the program and a sense of humor was invariably lacking. In those days I was a marshal (a designation that morphed into "peacekeeper" as the 1970s wore on) at demonstrations large and small, and at most of them the arrival of the looney left raised the general tension level more than anything the cops ever did. The ones to watch out for were those who believed that getting beat up by cops, or watching people get beat up by cops, had a radicalizing effect. Since they were already radicalized, they didn't need to get beat up, so they'd try to provoke the cops into beating someone else up. The marshals generally served as a buffer between the demonstrators and the police and so were at fairly high risk to get our heads cracked if the cops lost their temper.

But I digress. The looney left provided an ongoing lesson in what can happen when ideology becames a barrier against reality, but it wasn't them I was arguing with. Both at Georgetown and at Penn, the leftists I hung out with were downright reasonable. I agreed with them on most political particulars and worked with them on various projects, but hung back from joining any of their groups. Naturally this was taken, more or less jocularly, as a sign of liberal and/or bourgeois tendencies, which in part it probably was, though in those days I never ever would have admitted it out loud. My general aloofness was also a factor, and so -- in spades -- was my developing feminism. My leftist friends, nearly all of whom were male, were of course trying to incorporate women's liberation into their Marxist, semi-Marxist, or Marxist-influenced theories, but I already had a strong inkling that women's liberation couldn't be contained in theories that were developed by men and based primarily on male experience.

That's where I was when I heard Ti-Grace Atkinson speak about the importance of theory -- or so my biographer surmises. I could see the drawbacks of the various political theories I was familiar with. I was being tempted in an anti-theory direction: Oh, stuff all your theories! Theories tell you what to think and what to do. Who needs that? We're individuals! But PDQ that came up against the goose-down fluffiness of my upbringing, where nothing seemed to matter very much and, though I knew damn well that something was expected, I had no idea what it was. Ti-Grace said theory was important. Deep down I think I knew she was right, but once I admitted as much I'd be up against "OK, theory is important -- what's yours?" 

Right. I'd already had dismal luck trying to buy one off the rack; when I found something that almost fit, I'd start tinkering with it and pretty soon it would be both unrecognizable and unwearable. In retrospect, this isn't hard to understand: Women's liberation meant building theory from the ground up -- paying close attention to the strengths and weaknesses of other theories, to be sure, but always using women's experience as the touchstone. Because no other political theory had ever even attempted such a thing, and while we're at it, we aren't just talking about political theory, we're talking about something that encompasses the personal as well as the political, and not only that, it has to speak both from and to women of all different circumstances. Daunting, yes? Yeah -- until it dawns on you that this means that there isn't and never will be any unified all-encompassing feminist theory, nothing that can be tagged with the name of one person. (Even the strands and streams of feminist theory are rarely identified by a single name.)

Feminist theory is, pretty much by definition, an unfolding act of mass improvisation -- which may not sound much like "theory" as it's usually defined, but it is. In fact, most theories and religions -- the ones that survive and grow, at any rate -- are acts of improvisation, no matter how strenuously they claim to have sprung from the Bible or the Qur'an or the brains of Marx, Freud, or Milton Friedman. The neat thing about feminism is that we not only admit it, we're proud of it. So proud we call it a theory.

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