Direct Action as Ethnographic Method: In Response to John Clarke’s Researching for Resistance.

Prepared by Richard Birch
Political Sociology SOCI 4137
For Professor Kinsman
November 27, 2006

In the context of sociology for revolution today and sociology for changing the world, it is important to note that these are not merely ways of describing a form of sociology, or a way of ‘doing’ sociology. In addition to these as well as other things, they also suggest methodology. They also inform us of praxis, bringing together a critical theory used to explore the social relations of power, and the actions people can employ to deal with these relations and their oppressive characteristics. The ‘doings’ of people create knowledge out of the reflexivity of their actions and practises, as well as the ‘doings’ of those who take power-over. Meanings behind practices are important as they bind people to their ‘doings’. For example, my work (for my identification as a student) is that of the ‘work’ of a student, and this is meaningful in my existence in labour and in a capitalist social through my own specific historicity which has lead me to returning to school; a historicity that explicates a struggle in capitalism, in global processes of oppression, and in hegemonic practices of identification. The meaning is specific to identification, for my identification before returning to school, as one without post-secondary education, and the forms of struggle I dealt with as such, relates predominantly to the meanings that have been constructed since adopting academia. To unpack this further, my historicity writes a narrative of my past existence as one who struggled in social relations. This is meaningful presently (not simply historically) because, since returning to post-secondary


What do I mean by a live social knowing? This is a knowing of social relations that brings an understanding to the researcher what his or her positionality is in ruling relations of power. Positionality is another term I seem to throw around a great deal, but I do so for I find the word to be useful in discussing the politics of identity. Direct action as ethnography is a method that is contingent on a reflexive relationship between texts – live and non-living; people and the accounts of people. But are these not the same thing in research? People are more than their own accounts in the social, and their accounts are more than what we address their accountability to be about. I suppose in some way, my research in S/M culture can be said to be a form of direct action, though it is not politically activist in nature. Though, the quality of assuming a role of textuality is important to recognize. I am supportive of the culture I wish to take a role in so I can explore its social organizations. But I question at what level does my understanding of the social theory, the critical questions that I wish to place in the foreground in my research, influences my ability to create textual accounts of my own reflexively? Meaning, does my already presumed understanding of the

education, I now have a live social knowing of my past and present struggle. This is also a live social knowing of how my struggle indicates my positionality in ruling relations, and that my returning to post secondary education as means to alter my positionality in struggle, is also given a means to do so in ruling relations on power. Education provides a live social knowing of agency, but agency and the presupposition to having agency is only positioned on the basis of what we believe agency is in the social, an agency thwarted through a collectively organized understanding of oppression. Direct action as a form of social research works on a reflexive understanding of how people are actively engaged in the continuous formation and permeation of ruling relations of power, as well as an understanding that the meanings attached to identifications in power relations are organized reflexively through a live social knowing of the struggles of those who wish to return to a state of power-to-do, and it is in this reflexive activity of ‘doing’ and ‘knowing’ creates knowledge. The book Sociology for Changing the World suggests several methods of examining social relations and organization. One that is very interesting to this researcher is the research method of direct actions as described by John Clarke in Researching for Resistance: OCAP, Housing Struggles and Activist Research. Clarke provides an analysis of this form of research through an elaboration of the struggle of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) in the light of the “social cleansing” and urban gentrification that goes on in the city of Toronto. This article maps out the activity of ‘housing takeovers’ as a

operations of capital create a disruption in my ability to engage in discourse with the research? Can I truly be dialectal if I am engaging with the problematic? Does my live social knowing indicate my understanding of how my identifications have been cultivated for me through the processes that keep me in shackles, or is a live social knowing a formation of theoretical conceptualizations that have been placed in the foreground of what I believe to be engaging with in reflexive discursive interactions? In other words, is having a live social knowing a reified state of identification? If I am aware of the social relations of power in my own discourse, and I as such – and within internalities of operationalization – further exemplifying my own thing-ified state? Again, the ever-permeating horrors of neoliberalism. A live knowing is an unclean understanding. Urban social cleansing as experienced by the social activists of OCAP have a reflexive social knowing, creating knowledge about and for the forces that act

method of resistance to the upmarket urban redevelopment, and the social cleaning of low-income and homeless populations (Clarke, 2006). He brings forward three distinct components of resistance as a model for direct action research.

First direct action can be deemed to be research when the doings of those affected by social issues such as the homeless and the poor can begin to make their own solutions. They begin to construct a reality and beyond “the realm of proposals and demands” and start to create their own reflexive knowledge of their plight and of the dynamics at play in their oppression. In the case of the taking over of housing property in urban centres, people create a presence, a positionality of opposition to the global and regional processes that have identified them as homeless and as subordinate. They begin to construct an alternate definitive from their own and collective insubordination to capitalism. What may also begin to take shape is the indication of how people who engage in direct action as a form of resistance to hegemony and oppression, are active components in ruling relations themselves. “the form of ‘squatters’ rights’” become apparent (119). Direct action against policy creates new policy. Direct action as creational to policy, constructs knowledge about the ‘people’ and their ‘doings’ in resistance. This also produces knowledge of ruling relations in terms of its weaknesses and its potential to be breached is apparent.

Second, defiance creates knowledge. It creates knowledge about the processes that

jurisprudiciously in gentrification. But I question that it is the poor and the homeless who are solely affected from social cleansing. The direct action of OCAP protesters signifies not only the knowledge and the doings of these people, but it also forms knowledge about those who are supposed to benefit from gentrification activities, those who comprise the targeted upmarket redevelopment is supposed to be for. When those engaged in direct action ethnographical research confront power relations that intend to keep them away from property they could otherwise occupy without disruption, they signify those who are already poised to take further power-over those who protest and engage with power relations. A critical live knowing of the social relations will focus not on the fragmentation on these two components or actors on social relations, but on the interconnectedness between these two positionalities. If I were to map this social relation of struggle, I could arguably place similar directionalities of relational discourse between the middle and upper classes in the urban landscape with the municipal and corporate

construct the pyramidal structures of power that aid capital in subordinating social minorities such as the poor. When people defy the actions that are set up to negate social safety nets by taking action directly within the social-space they claim, they move in a “healthy direction” as Clarke puts it. Any direction that is subversive to power-over – using power-to-do, done with the intention of freeing those under the control of those who have taken ‘power-over’ is a healthy one, for it does not merely set a group collectively against that which attempts to control it’s identity as poor, as weak, and as subordinate – but it also begins to create a knowledge about the group as something significantly other than the ‘other’ hegemony identifies it as. This knowledge is not simply akin to the accounts and experiences of those whose direct actions(s) have constructed it, but it is also a ‘social knowing’, a live knowing, and a knowing that only struggle and resistance can truly bring to a collective.

Third, direct action can stand in “the path of the processes” of domination. In the case of the homeless in Toronto, direct action stands in the way of gentrification and the social cleansing of low-income communities. In this way, it is a method of research, for it can place the actor (social minority) and the researcher (one who gives accountability to the social minority) in the very place of conflict, the positionality in the social relations where the forces that take ‘power-over’ can be the most vulnerable. If direct action as method can attempt to research how the “line of fault” (Kinsman, 2006: 140) may shed light on where the connections between state

bureaucracies, in the same way and with the same directionalities I would with the homeless. In other words, the live social knowing of the homeless and the hegemonic identifications of those who are not in protest with ruling relations of power – exist as two sides of the same coin; as two points in the social time-space existing in one singularity. In the readings of research as disruption I find I am most personally interested in the concepts of breaching experiments. I have been aware since second year method classes that inn order to examine organizational dynamics, one has to be either willing to dive in and rip apart what is drawing a conceptual idea of what the social is, or more importantly, one may have to go into the most troubling corners of the social after throwing out any ideas that there are any “structures” or “dynamics” holding it together at all. So, in light of this, who are the socially cleansed? Who are to be the socially cleansed? Who exists with a live social knowing of this dynamic of social cleaning, or social hegemonic - homogenization? Is it the poor and homeless who fight for the

relations and social movements are experiments as existing, it can possibly help in discovering along which points in these connections breach experiments can be made. Direct action as a method of research disclosing how social relations are organized, demonstrates how social minority groups are oppressed in these formations or relations, and how it is possible for them to be “no longer on the receiving end” of domination (Clarke, 2006: 120). Engaging in direct action as method can be engaging in a form of research that is not merely compassionate and understanding to the resistance of social minorities, but it can take on a role in the struggle of resistance. For example, ethnographic research in the form of direct action is akin to experimental sociological methodologies of exploration. A direct action researcher is best effective as disruptive when his or her methods are also disruptive for it creates schisms in what we understand to be social realities. It is often a point of interest for me that what we may conceive in social theory to be a social reality, is that which we never give meaning to at all. In other words, meanings go mostly unnoticed in the everyday social. This may be one of the reasons why the concepts of ‘subjectivity’ and ‘reflexivity’ are problematic, for they are at times the intangibles in ethnomethodology. It can be quite challenging to make sense of everyday social meanings when they are of the subjective and reflexive nature for it is through objectification we place value and measurability to in a very positivist capitalist world. This is an integral contribution to social research by post-structuralism, that it sheds light discursively in

agency to have a choice in urban housing, or the ‘haves’ population who are socially constructed to have only one choice as per the doctrine of capital? Direct action as a form of ethnography may be a useful method through its exploration of this have / have-not, wealthy / poor, dominant / subordinate power relation, for it elaborates not strictly on these two identifications as differentials, but how they are discursively and reflexively engaged dialogically in the construction of their relational classifications. In other words, and again as stated many times before, identifications (Dominant subordinate) signify each other’s positionality as distinct / non-distinct social realities. This is praxis. The practices of a direct action researcher informed by Marx or Foucault or Holloway or Butler or Mills or Habermas or Marcuse…all who have found the identifications structured in pyramidal formations of hierarchical power problematic in social realities. The dialectics of the

that which would otherwise by missed in an otherwise global preoccupation with empiricism that capitalism has.

I am particularly interested in certain experimental forms of sociological method, such as visual sociology. Documenting social movements and struggles in unorthodox ways is also interesting for it automatically posits the researcher into then schisms inside power relations, much like a documentary filmmaker can. Place a social researcher into a crowd of protesters who have organized to challenge municipal regulation of housing and property zoning with a pen and paper, he or she will have a different impact that a researcher actively engaging in the protest with a video camera and sound engineer – arguably, a much smaller impact than the latter. A video-ethnographer does three things simultaneously. One, he or she records the event as data and as textual to the people who have organized it. Two, he or she records their own phenomenological account both visually and autographically while engaged in the event. Three, the presence of the camera and other such recording devices provide the subsequent existence of the active creation of social knowledge, where the live social knowing of the protesters being captured in camera shape the resulting live social knowledge of the person holding the camera, and vice-versa. Plus, what of those who experience the footage of such videographic-sociology? The events of the protesters and the knowledge created in their struggle and formation of revolution – attracts the gaze of the spectator, thus reflexively

comments of dialect by these thinkers is interesting, for they signify the notion of de-politicising experience of reflexive positionality in research. Yet, how can identities really be de-politicized? The very nature of identifications is to stabilize a political mechanization of the interconnections between identities. In other words, identities as per the meanings ascribed through social relations, are interconnected through their connected spaces, and it is these spaces that help to politicise identifications, as opposed to valuing people. People are organized through their political organization and identities. Direct action and activism can arguably be best attributed to the negation of this organization. If we can participate with ruling relations inside the schism, inside the breaches in the relations of power, the fabric of the social, then knowledge is created. Yet, as Holloway posits, there is no outside the social. The struggles of the homeless is not a struggle from the outside-in. These are not people who are struggling to move from an outside standpoint into an internal social reality of non-homelessness and non-poverty.

incorporating these third-party spectators as textual, as accountable, as components of research. The spectator becomes part of the protest, the textual meanings of struggle, for they can adopt the gaze of the researcher through the lens of the camera. This is one way direct action as research is reflexively integral to the construction of a live social knowing. This is praxis at a disruptive level.

Social cleansing goes on around us. What is also interesting to note is that it is not simply the ‘cleanings’ perceived to remove the existence of social minorities from the view of those whose commercial interests require a gentrified and homogenized social landscape. It can be argued that also those who are not subject to the social cleansing and gentrification in a specific urban environment or region, the ones who are intended on taking over positionality through the acquisition of commercial and residential property otherwise taken over by ‘urban squatters’ – are also socially cleansed. This is akin to the argument in gender and queer studies that it is not in actuality heterosexuality and heteronormativity that is constructed through the mechanization of human identity and capitalism. The identification of social majority is what is at risk of being subverted in direct action as ethnographic method. As Clarke puts it in his description of the role of social majority in the social cleanings of the city: “The urban yuppies’ choices as consumers are not by any means irrelevant to the process of gentrification, just as the political clout they exercise are clear and important factors in the drive to remove low-income

These are people who have an active engagement with their struggle in the form of direct action, which creates an agenda for social research through its reflexive discursive means.
Does this produce and maintain already existing forms social knowledge? My dialogical is intentionally repetitive. My dialogical text is meant to be repetitive as it explicates and symbolizes the character of this form of social knowing – for it exemplifies the objectification of the homeless and the conventional research that has separated the live social knowing the homeless has of their broader class struggles. The inside-social relations argument is important to constantly refer to, to destabilize on a recursive capacity – for the alternate and ever-existing ‘other’ of the re-stabilized – is the politicization of identifications through hegemony. Counter-power – again, a production of the practices of relations and struggles, signifies the inside/outside engagement with the live social knowing. Just as the counter-argument to the social cleansing of social-minorities would be to reject this

populations. Fundamentally, however, the developers, builders and financiers and their quest for profit are at the heart of the matter” (Clarke, 2006: 122). Big capital and the intentions of profitability of the actions that oppress people – maintain social cleansing in both sides clear and strong: one side (the poor, the social minority) being cleansed or cleared away from sight in order to protect the image of the other side of capital, the side that is socially hegemonic. In other words, the communities who take direct action in order to create knowledge about themselves and their positionality in social relations, are also connected to those that direct action is designed to oppose: the profiteers, the consumers whose buying power is this ‘imposed’ on them, as their role in the social is to create knowledge parallel to the acquisition of commercial power and capital.

It is implied in Clarke’s paper that it is the poor who are being driven through the colonization of the urban centres and downtown sectors of the city. The city, however, is also an engine of the overall process of social constructivism, and not just of the construction of the identifications of the poor. Direct action as ethnographic method can allow the researcher to engage in a social knowing that all parties in social relations are subject to the processes of global capitalism and profiteering. Identifications of ‘poor’ and homeless’ and ‘destitute’ are in some ways on the same level of analysis as ‘rich’ and ‘yuppie’ and ‘developer’, for all identifications actively engage in knowledge production. For the ‘poor’ and ‘homeless’ and the

through a critical, live social knowing that those who are not subject to the social cleansing and gentrification in a specific urban environment or region, the ones who are intended on taking over positionality through the acquisition of commercial and residential property otherwise taken over by ‘urban squatters’ – are also socially cleansed. Direct action helps to explore this relationship between those who struggle against power-over identifications, and those who struggle to maintained their power-over those who would otherwise have power-to-do, beyond the abstractness of merely stating the divide between these forms of identifications. It can do this, for it disrupts the notion of the divide, crumbling down a divide that is recursively and reflexively stabilized and re-stabilized over and over again.
Where is the line of fault in this paper? This is important to understand. How has this writing – my writing been organized? How has my positionality in the context of social cleansing flavoured this dialogic? I ask this as if

‘destitute’, as researchers we utilize direct action as ethnographic method to uncover ways to derail the plans that are designed to drive out the homeless, and to have a social knowing of resistance to such plans beyond the theoretical understanding of the subjective meanings of possible resistance. Direct action in the form of protests and the taking over of social spaces is useful as a breach experiment that may illuminate how class politics connect with the broader neoliberal agendas of capital and social engineering. Direct confrontation of the processes that develop identifications of social minorities such as ‘poor’ and outside the interests of capital is a method of discovering the relations that socially organize relations as per the agendas of capital. It thus, cultivates a broader social relational formation of knowledge and hegemonic epistemology. Confrontation produces knowledge of the forces that require profitability of these places, whether physical spaces or social spaces, and how social movements can arm themselves with the knowledge of direct social action, which breaches and challenges social power and power perspectives.

the dialogic is all there is here. The line of fault lies in what this repetitive argument eclipses. What is clear here, is that I have been writing mainly in the theoretical, in an attempt to conceptualize praxis. Direct action as ethnography as method exemplifies praxis. It signifies the importance of re-connecting the researcher and the theoretical understandings and locations from which the he or she starts from and engages in real practices of political and social activism in order to create knowledge important for the people the research is intended to help.

References:
Clarke, J. (2006). Researching For Resistance: OCAP, Housing Struggles and Activist Research. In Frampton, C., Kinsman, G., Thompson, AK., & Tilleczek, K. (Ed.). Sociology for Changing the World. (pp. 119-132). Black Point, NS: Fernwood.

Kinsman, G. (2006). Mapping Social Relations of Struggle: Activism, Ethnography, Social Organization. In Frampton, C., Kinsman, G., Thompson, AK., & Tilleczek, K. (Ed.). Sociology for Changing the World. (pp. 119-132). Black Point, NS: Fernwood.

An Exploration of Feminine Identifications in Charles Dickens’ Hard Times as Relational to the Shock City

Prepared by Richard Birch
The City in History HIST 3036
For Professor Webb
December 08, 2006

Monique Wittig once wrote that “The category of sex is the political category that founds society as heterosexual” (as cited in Butler, p. 3). This materialist feminist ideology towards sexuality as hegemonically and culturally produced in regards to sexual-political identifications is also hinged tightly to the notion of gender as something quite relative to the same modalities of rationale. Gender as political identity, also is produced reflexively through similar epistemological and ontological formations of social relations. For something as culturally and socially constructed as gender, it is theorized to be performative in the sense as gender is a performance of textualities and meanings, it is contingent on a language, fully or adequately representing a political identification within social relations of power. Whether such social relations are of power, collapsed onto successive binaries of oppression (man / woman; male / female; rich / poor; Dominant / submissive), or whether such binomial determinations set up rationales of different, more abstract patterns (supportive / subversive) to hegemonic social preoccupations of gender, it clearly is still a matter of texts – or to deconstruct and go within further, texts of ontological concerns. In other words, gender as a social construct has a trans-textual historicity. Gender as a problematic is signified by the engines of morality, communicative rationality, cultural determinism, as well as other facticities associated with the shock city of Charles Dickens’ Hard Times. Equally so, the shock city as a problematic, is an engine of repressive ideals of gender. To examine this more closely as an historical text, it would serve to focus on the shock city as repressive of engendered femininity as they play out as social scripts and constructs, as well as to examine this as signifying of constructed femininity in the primary female characters, Louisa Gradgrind, Sissy Jupe, and Rachael. These characters signify the identity “woman” as that of the industrialized woman, the mechanical woman, the über-Victorian-femme through the lens of capitalist communicative rationality.
As Dickens constructed the image of the shock city as a metaphorical contextuality of the mechanization of humanity, he also fetishized the constructivist identification of femininity. In some ways, the shock city is feminine as per hegemonic variables. It is alluring, dangerous, constructive as productive / reproductive, and above all – culturally cultivated. To argue the shock city as culturally cultivated is to say that the city has a dialectical purpose in the historicity of the social. It is an engine of social formation and production, creating economies and political reflexivity, such as the shock city as a formation of the industrialization of human capacity in capitalism. The shock city, as all of this, is also produced through the reflexivity of human capacity-to-do. This capacity or power-to-do, is signified in the text through the feminine characters. It can be said that it is through woman that the arrangement of the city as repressive, as a means to control a population set on conflict and the transactional paradigms of labour, are historically portrayed. The city is not essentialist in origin. There is no orientalism in the conceptual shock city. It is only through the conceptualization of capitalism, that it process further identifications of engendered reflexive ideologies of femininity and oppression; the city constructs the alienated and repressive orientations of people through their social doings. The city is not innate – it is made through the doings of historical meanings and subjectivities. To borrow from Julia Kristeva’s rational of the feminine – the city as well as female characterizations in historical Urbania, cannot be deemed to actually exist. The shock city is not comprised of its buildings, factories, banks, poorhouses, prisons, or institutions. It is a compositional matrix of reflexive doings of class-ified people forced to empower their capacity-to-do / power-to-do, and sell it to survive. Women cannot be said to exist either in the shock city as per Dickens’ text. In the book, the female characterizations deploy a sex, through a set of performative communicative rational establishments, and thus, in the Foucaultian sense, deploy a rationale for repression.

Civilization is repressive. The city in Hard Times indicates an urban existence quality regulated by work, the uncreative, labourious modality of commodification. Femininity is both indicative and subversive of this existence, both textually as well as historically. Frankfurt social theorist Herbert Marcuse described a platform (an anti-structure as it were in the dialectical sense) of this phenomenon of repression in two ways: as surplus-repression and as a performance principle. Surplus-repression is distinct from basic human repression through a modification of instinct necessary for the perpetuation of a civilized humanity. In other words, social relations negate the capacity for the performative explorative possibilities of engendered subjectivity of creation, as well as gender expressivity, through the modifications of these capacities into reified objectifications. This is then explicated through a performance principle: the prevailing historical shape of a reality principle, which posits that struggle in the social, in capitalism, and in the global processes that construct social marginalization, occurs in a world not set up for the fulfilment of human needs without constant restraint and denial (Marcuse, 1962: p.33). “For the duration of work, which occupies practically the entire existence of the mature individual, pleasure is “suspended” and pain prevails” (33). That is the plight of the shock city – it is the plight of technocapitalism as well. It can also be argued to be the plight of the feminine, as a political identification of the female body politic in early nineteenth century England as indicated in the text. Louisa Gradgrind (-Bounderby) feminises the shock city as she represents the city as repressive to the human condition. The experience of living in the industrial city, repressive, patriarchal, and essentialist, is textually explored through Louisa. Instead of directly stating the organization, decomposition, and recomposition of work-into-labour in the text, Dickens demonstrates this via Louisa more prevalently than with any other character. She is the embodiment of labour-organization through power-over social relations as she is herself decomposed down to a unitary personification of fact and ideals and efficiency. Her capacity for connectivity and creativity is removed from her as the capacity to work is fragmented and destroyed in the city. People do not work in the shock city – they labour. Louisa is not a woman in the text – she is feminine. She is a constructed Victorian über-femme, the embodiment of the precious decay towards a thing-ified human sense of womanly alienation. She is alienated from her womanhood – her femininity through her über-femininity in social relations of power negotiated through her father, her brother, her husband, and ultimately through the ruling relations regulating a shock industrial city. Louisa signifies much of what the poor and impoverished signify as historical: the Marxist theory of the destruction of society, becoming strangely enough its own reproduction (Holloway, 2005: 136).
Class, like people, like money, like state, like gender – must be understood as process. Dickens elaborates on the recursive notion of the shock city as an engine of the ever-renewable regeneration of class and human class-ification. The constitution of class can be seen as the separation of object and subject. The shock city is the definitive social construct of the snatching up of the human subject, the repeated violent fragmentation of the doings of people (social relations) from the object-creation in the social (Louisa). This object-creation is rather a conflict, as well as a signifier of the subordination of social practice – the fetishization of social relations (Holloway, 143). Class struggle occurs not merely inside the constituted formations of capitalist determinism, but rather the constitution of these formations is class struggle. This is grounded in the text when Louisa confronts her father about her childhood development, not into that of a woman of society, but as an automaton of social conformity – unfeeling and unattainable. She is constructed into the Victorian parameters of femininity, a capacity of feminine as “never a mark of the subject; the feminine [as not] an “attribute” of gender” (Butler, 37). Louisa is not a woman existing in Victorian England, but is a feminine object-construct, indicative of women and of class relations in the shock city of early industrialization (not strictly so), signifying the lack of gender, of womanhood, signified by the Symbolic (a set of regulating rules ontologically formulated through language dictated through social texts in ruling relations that create sexual difference). In a form of revolution, she does confront her father:

How could you give me life, and take from me all the inappreciable things that raise it from the state of conscious death? Where are the graces of my soul? Where are the sentiments of my heart? What have you done, O father, what have you done, with the garden that should have bloomed once, in this great wilderness here? (Dickens, p. 236)

Dickens has clearly attuned to the power of language to explicate the subordination of the reified self, the exclusion of subjectivity indicative in industrialization and the mechanization of humanity. It is a materialist positionality. This is an argument of the compulsory proliferation of patriarchal pleasure principles and engendered repression. In this quote, as the first subversively-womanly moment in the book, suggests a specific form of identification-diffusion, counterstrategic to the reproduction of the ‘other’ in patriarchal social relations of power (Butler, p. 41). This is the moment in the text where we hear a revolutionary scream. The scream – from Louisa, but also from the poor, the impoverished, the oppressed, the reified, the commodified, and subjectively repressed. In many ways, the most wealthy of the female characters in Hard Times, primarily serves to act as a metaphor for the working class as well as other socially marginalized groups in industrialization.

On such a paradigm, capital as a logic of domination is not left unchallenged. The philosophical epitomization of antagonistic relations between object and subject (patriarchy; capitalism; ruling relations; textual dictators; Gradgrind > Louisa; über-Victorian-femme; subversive female), also has the capacity to retain its image and reproduction (Marcuse, p. 101). To exist in the shock city as working class, as female, as subjective to pyramidal structures of power is of the restless labour of the transcending subject, terminating in the unity of subject-object. Meaning, to exist in marginalization as poor and impoverished, or as the über-Victorian-femme characterized by Louisa, is the “being-in-and-for-itself”, or existing in its own fulfillment as a reified object. That is Louisa’s realization when she breaks down to her father; that is the scream of those who struggle; that is the moment in a social time-space historicity when struggle becomes apparent and conscious. Louisa is, in this sense, more metaphorically indicative of the capacity to take power-to-do from a power-over social relational matrix. Dickens’ perspective on the industrial city is dialectically charged in the capacity of power-to-do. Post-Hegelian views of the city is exhaustingly built on a Logos of domination, whereas the city, the social, and social relations of power are regulated by social texts such as gender subjectivities and objectifications. The city for Dickens is declared through this reality principle. The breakdown of the über-Victorian-femme is a literary, phenomenological account of the very progress of civilization – the performance principle of gender and of a power-to-do social identity. His text declares a recognition of those who struggle in a constructed city that has attained a level of productivity in which the social demands upon instinctual energy and creative work is spent in alienating labour and people, from their own ‘doings’ and subjectivities (p. 117). Gender, as freedom, is taboo in Victorian Europe. Dickens utilizes this as taboo-power to show the historicity of this as also indicative of class struggle. Gender is saturated with power.
When we examine how Dickens criticises this power relation as social relation, more clearly with Louisa’s relationship with her father and her husband Josiah Bounderby, he does contextualize a sexual discontinuity to hegemonic principles of identification. He does so through his breaking down and the deconstruction of the über-Victorian-femme personified in Louisa, and collapsing this grounded concept into Sissy Jupe. Sissy is the collapsed form of Louisa – meaning, she is recursively reflexive with the ruling relations of her sexual-social regime. Sissy is, for Dickens, the textual opponent to the processes of oppression and social repression he criticizes. Louisa and Sissy open up a discursive signification of “sex” as subversive; Louisa through her breakdown, and Sissy through her heroic actions. Again in the Foucaultian sense, gender is coexistent with power. The über-Victorian-femme, as subordinate and as repressive, indicates the refusal of Dickens to romanticize this culturally determined text. It is, alternatively, deterministically historical. Industrialization essential-izes constructs of marginalization, and the shock city is a generator of such essentialism. It relies on the marginalization of identity, and through its fragmentational nature, provides the basis for surplus labour – a surplus population of struggle (Butler, p. 121). Dickens made use, acting as a literary historian, of the ability to invert the representations of the relationships of power, causing subversive bodily acts or identification and reflexivity to emerge in gender constructs. To return to Wittig, one is not born a woman, nor a man, nor with gender – but one is born inside the struggle of capitalism and industrialization. The category of woman is not essentialist. It is a gendered category of feminine texts that serve the capacity to permeate and reproduce the essentialist notions of the industrial city: fully politically invested, naturalized but not naturally feminine. It is natural to struggle. It is not natural to struggle in industrialized modes of production. Liberalism is culturally determined. Neo-liberalism is social imposed.

Dickens in his text, as his post-Hegelian criticism of the gendered über-Victorian-femme, can be argued to be a call for the reorganization of the description of identifications in power relations. To be ascribed ‘female’ is a discursive categorization of ‘sex’, much like ‘worker’ is a discursive categorization of ‘class’. These are abstractions, which Dickens was clearly aware of in his writing. Louisa actively reclaims a power-to-do (for a moment) and Sissy Jupe embodies this throughout. Dickens posits both an epistemological and ontological shift in thinking about social relations. The shock city is not only an engine of capitalist repression, but it is also a representation of the reflexivity of social doings. Linguistic categories forwarded through ruling relations have shaped social realities in industrialization in “violent” ways. The social fiction of the über-Victorian-femme is created by Dickens, as it has been by social relations of power historically – to appear to be a true reality against the ontological field of unity that could otherwise usurp and rise against those relations that create the social fiction. Hard Times as a body of work that establishes a critique on the industrialization of society and does so with the utilization of a critique on gender political identifications. This also serves to be a feminist text through an elaboration and comparative critique of gender and class subjectivities in the shock city. It is Sissy who facilitates the escape of Thomas Gradgrind at the end of the story. It is Rachael who embodies the salvation of the working class through her relationship to Stephen. In this relationship Rachael is that which attempts to safeguard Stephen from his own oppression which eventually destroys him; she is the light in his struggle, the meaning behind his identification; his textuality; as he states,

“Thou changest me from bad to good. Thou mak’st me humbly wishfo’ to be more like thee, and fearfo’ to lose thee when this life is ower, and a’ muddle cleared awa’. Thou’rt an Angel; it may be, thou hast saved y soul alive!” (Dickens, p. 99)

Lastly, it is Louisa who embodies the breakdown of social relations of power in capital and the capacity for class identifications to recognize their plight as oppressed, and to challenge that oppression. The female characters are representational of the division of being in struggle.

Femininity in Hard Times serves to act as a construct of identity, as the point of epistemic departure from which theory and praxis emerge, and subversion and political identify is shaped (Butler, p. 164; Marcuse, 1962). There is a political shape to the women of this book as it relates to the industrial city. Their identity is shaped by the city, but not as something outside the city, but reflexively determined through their own struggle as a ‘class’ onto themselves in this historical period. Forces of subversive thought and reflexivity, as multi-dimensional texts both literary and historically (always conflated) are specifically that which history both eradicates and preserves through historical events, or the inscription of objectivity. As Michel Foucault wrote, the body, the person is not “sufficiently stable to serve as the basis for self-recognition or for understanding other men” (as cited in Butler from Foucault’s History of Sexuality; p. 165). This does signify the constancy of culturally ascribed objectifications of the ‘body’ and a unitary component in capital, in labour, and in reification. Though in view of this, Dickens provides a social agency to the discussed female characters, as primarily represented by Louisa as transitional from the über-Victorian-femme to a subversive self-awareness in reification, for the subject of woman and class is understood through a political critique to possess some form of vested agency within its socially constructed existence.

References:
Butler, J. (1999). Gender Trouble. New York, NY: Routledge.

Dickens, C. (1854/2001). Hard Times. Toronto, ON: Random House.

Holloway, J. (2005) Change the world without Taking Power: The meaning of revolution today. Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press

Marcuse. H. (1962/1955). Eros and Civilization. New York, NY: Random House.

Reconstructing Energetika Deleted

Reconstructing Energetika was offically deleted today. I found the experiment had run it's course, and the rants no longer served my research or whatever it was I was trying to do there. This blog will stay online for the time being as a home for academic discourse on the social and identity politics.

I will maintain a place of subjectivity and reflexivity online at the following site:

www.myspace.com/energetika

Feel free to post comments.

Enjoy.

Richard