Page 167 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

REVIEWS 161

Michael Lerner, who has recently published The Socialism of Fools: Anti-Semitism
on the Left is an exemplary representative of these tendencies. Lerner is the founder
and editor of Tikkun, a progressive Jewish journal, and is now in the process of
writing a book together with Cornel West on black-Jewish relations. Lerner’s
notion of the ‘politics of meaning’ was recently employed within the mainstream
by Hillary Clinton as part of the Clinton administration’s own attempt to mark out
a space ‘beyond’ obsolete antagonisms. Lerner, like postmodern cultural criticism
in general, argues for the autonomy of a ‘politics of meaning’ (struggles to reclaim
subjectivity within the cultural realm) which can be carried out separate from labor
relations, and are even seen as a precondition for struggles against exploitation.
The contradictions of a ‘politics of meaning’ based upon identity can be seen in
the way in which Lerner deploys Jewish identity as a means of demanding its
inclusion within postmodern civil society. For example, Lerner argues that only
‘self-affirming Jews’ have a right to deploy their Jewishness as a site of critique;
while ‘self-hating Jews’ only have the same rights of critique (of Israel, in
particular) as everyone else: such anti-Zionist critiques can only be made by Jews
as ‘citizens’ (see pp.101–3). However, this reproduction of the split of the Jew into
‘Jew’ and ‘citizen’ is extremely problematic because it compels Lerner to
distinguish between ‘authentic’ Jews who can be relied upon to fight consistently
for emancipation and ‘unauthentic’ ones who must, according to the logic of his
argument, be inherently untrustworthy (since they deny the need for their own
emancipation). In this way, Lerner’s argument provides the grounds for policing,
within the left, those revolutionary, secular, anti-Zionist Jews who are not quite
Jews, not quite citizens, and necessarily only superficially committed to the causes
they espouse. In other words, the politics of inclusion Lerner wishes to support is
dependent upon some very specific exclusions: in particular, those Jews who, like
Marx and Spinoza, take a critique of Judaism as a privileged site for advancing a
revolutionary critique of capitalist civil society. This contradiction in Lerner’s
understanding of Jewish identity follows from his assumptions regarding the
articulation of ‘culture’ (identity) with ‘economics’ (class), which are the same
assumptions now predominant within postmodern cultural studies.
That is, postmodern cultural studies, as for example, in the work of John Fiske
(1992) ‘recognizes’ the fact of economic inequality and oppression: Fiske argues
that the ‘materiality of popular culture is directly related to the economic materi
ality of the conditions of oppression’ (pp. 154–5). However, at the same time Fiske
valorizes what he calls a ‘bottom-up’ (pp. 161) theory of subjectivity which enables
an accounting of the ‘popular differences’ which ‘the people bring to the social
order’ (p. 161). That is, oppression can be understood as a ‘top-down’ process
organized along lines of economic class, while resistance should be seen as a
‘bottom-up’ process (experiential) articulated by ‘the people’. Insofar as economic
oppression is systemic (it can be ‘traced back to the complex elaborations of late
capitalist society’ (p. 161) it requires a theoretical analysis; meanwhile,
experiential resistance negates the possibility of ‘distance’ (theory) and demands
a Foucauldian analysis of the specificities and immediacies of the disruptions of