Page 168 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

162 CULTURAL STUDIES

mechanisms of power (which are disarticulat[ed]…from a direct correlation with
the class system’ (p. 161), i.e., the ‘body’. This move, despite claims that it removes
the privileges of the academic investigator which depend upon a ‘distanced’
discourse, in fact reinforces that privilege because the positing of the appropriation
of ‘cultural capital’ (in the form of transforming and complicating the ‘signs’ of
oppression (p. 157) as a mode of resistance privileges the accumulation practiced
by those with access to the most valuable ‘signs’ (like advanced theory)—just as
the valorization of the proliferation of small businesses in order to argue for the
democratic effects of the market actually privileges the multinational corporations
which accumulate most effectively on the ‘free market’.
In Lerner’s case, we can see an interesting analysis of the specific oppression
of Jews in terms of their class position within Gentile society as a kind of
‘middleman’ caste (pp. 13–14), which is privileged in relation to the masses but
at the same time extremely vulnerable insofar as the ruling class uses their
ambiguous and dependent position to direct the resentment of the oppressed at
Jews rather than itself. However, this analysis serves no real purpose in Lerner’s
understanding of the politics of Jewish identity. For example, if we were to follow
through on Lerner’s analysis, we would have to arrive at the conclusion that Jews
as a ‘people-class’ (Leon, 1970) or ‘caste’, could be expected, in general, to be
located somewhere near the progressive end of middle-class liberal movements,
with an overriding interest in social stability and the blunting of social antagonisms.
Lerner, however, only uses this (class) analysis to ‘prove’ that Jews are oppressed,
even if it doesn’t always appear to be the case, and that they are therefore deserving
objects of progressive politics (pp. vi–vii). In seeking out the content of a
specifically Jewish politics, meanwhile, Lerner abandons this theoretical terrain
altogether and asserts that the Jewish religion itself has an essentially and
transhistorically revolutionary content (pp. 3–6), no matter how much it has at
times been concealed or distorted by the realities of Jewish life.
In other words, the articulation of economics and culture once argued for by
cultural studies (for example, in the work of Stuart Hall in the 1970s) has become
a disarticulation of the two through the claim that while oppression is
determined structurally, resistance can only be understood in a ‘bottom-up’
manner, through the self-definition and self-identification of oppressed groups. In
this way the autonomy of culture grounds the negotiations between different
identities (which are represented by those in possession of the means of cultural
authority, those who represent the group within the dominant institutions), and
these negotiations become the main register of political discourse. Lerner’s
discourse reflects and capitalizes on this shift and therefore aggravates its
contradictions and exposes its limits. To take one particularly telling example,
Lerner argues for ‘left-wing’ Jewish self-defense organizations as a counter to
‘black antisemitism’ (pp. 127–8): however, regardless of the left-wing ‘intentions’
of such organizations, what Lerner is unable to recognize is that due to the structural
relations between blacks and Jews, such organizations cannot be anything other