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Created: May 9, 2003
Latest Update: May 9, 2003
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

Patricia Williams: Alchemy of Race

Site Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individual Authors, May 2003.
"Fair use" encouraged.

This essay is based on The Power of Rights A review by Wendy Brown of The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor. Patricia J. Williams. Harvard University Press, $10.95. Review in Boston Review.

The Idea of Alchemy

Wendy Brown starts of in the first paragraph offering us a taste of the index. And the taste is delightful:

"dancing, Dartmouth College, death, death rate -- black, Deep Throat, default judgements, discourse, disenfranchisement, disutility of rights, dogs, dreams, Dred Scott."

What an intermix of topics. She's all over the place. And immediately my mind began to pair off "dancing . . . with Deep Throat" or Dartmouth College welcomes Dred Scott" This could become a parlor game. And maybe that's because race permeates our structural context at every turn. Wendy calls this "her abiding commitment to making visible lives and experiences erased by abstract legal language," her willingsness to pull material from everywhere and grasp the interdependence of it all - that's .one perspective of the alchemy. That's like discovering that many bits of experience can be turned into gold when they are properly gathered and pieced together. "As a meditation on the searing injuries of racism, on hidden histories in the entrails of legal cases, or on the bankrupt character of contemporary American political life, the effect of Williams's alchemy is powerful beyond measure."

Rights and Privacy

Wendy Brown quotes Patricia Williams on privacy: ""The tyranny of what we call the private," she argues, risks reducing us to "the life crushing disenfranchisement of an entirely owned world where permission must be sought to walk on the face of the earth" (43)." That phrase, "an entirely owned world," struck me profoundly. This is what we've been arguing about for so long. That when the world was divided up, by those who conquered it, by those who deigned to take it or to give it away (Israel, Palestine, Iran, Iraq, Turkey) wheter it was theirs or not, by those who got there first, some of us were left out.

Third world countries could take back their land, even take the properties and structures built upon it by first world coporations. But they could not continue the production, for the corporations had failed to develop the country logistically for its own growth, and had built interdependent relations and structures (markets) only with the controlling first world colonizer. (United Fruit). The US never interfered with the sovereignty of any South or Central American countries by the use of its overwhelming military force. It just used that force to protect what it called "legitmate" US interests abroad. So we respected the sovereignty, while still using the military to protect US private rights. (Harvest of Empire by Juan Gonzalez.)

Wendy Brown goes on in the rights and privacy section to point out the continuing contradictions one encounters when rights legislation becomes the norm. Legislation that was created to aid one or more minority groups is then used to defend parallel rights for the majority group, ignoring the very phantasamagoric practices that had led to the earlier historical imbalances and injustices. Laissez-faire markets become issues of the privacy of the individual. And obligations to the safety nets that protect communities from wholesale disaster are forgotten while privacy and individual profit are pursued.

Rights, Desires, and Public Exposure

To the complex issue of rights and the privileges that underpin them, thus supporting class, gender, and race dilemmas, Wendy Brown then adds Patricia Williams' focus on public exposure. We have often spoken of the "gaze," and the supervised society that Foucult examined for alternative ways of reacting to the constraints placed upon as by a carceral society. Williams, too, focusses on the "gaze." "Perhaps it is this historically produced desire-- for the right to expose oneself without injury, and for the right to hide without recrimination-- that undergirds a certain desire for rights, those implements which promise to guard exposed subjects and legitimize hiding. But rights could only fulfill this promise if they could make visible the effects of complexly internalized histories of violation and degradation. This visibility is precisely what they thwart in figuring desire as something natural, intrinsic, and unhistorical. . . . What if the desire for withdrawal into the buffered and enclosed space of liberal personhood marked by rights is symptom, and what if treating the symptom covers over its generative source? What if, as Marx put it, the "right of the circumscribed individual, withdrawn into himself" responds to the socially produced condition of exposure or hiding, unbearable vulnerability or invisibility, humiliation or death, by codifying that condition as natural and installing it in the law?"

There are no easy answers to the complexity of the right that protects me as I flaunt my visibility, that is the same right that lets me take a quiet back seat from which my exclusion goes unnoticed. I do not know if Wendy Brown's fears of the cost of a "right" to safe public exposure" is worth the "unbearable visibility" of being exposed against one's will. As Wendy Brown comments, such consideration would extend to the issue of homosexuality as well. The "right" to live freely and safely out from the closet is often paired with the gaze of those who are empowered by the "unbearable visibility" of that public exposure, that now seems "codif[ied] as natural." There are no answers. But awareness, listening in good faith to the Other, the attempt at illocutionary discourse may make the gaze of either more bearable, and may free the self from internalizing the call of the gaze.

Rights and Realism

"How could extending "to all of society's objects and untouchables the rights of privacy, integrity and self-assertion" contest the steady commodification of the earth and of public life that Williams decries? Might words be more mutable, more subject to alchemical fire, than the political histories which generate rights and the political economies in which they operate? . . . . For the very gesture which draws a circle around the individual and grants her sovereign selfhood, also turns back upon the individual all responsibility for her failures, her poverty, her madness." "Ay, there's the rub." (Hamlet, To be or not to be speech) If the individual is protected by rights, then she also is responsible, freeing the community from the safety nets that soften the vagaries of the real world. That takes us back to the binary split of individual vs. structural context. And the binary split gives two extremes, neither of which seems to satisfy our need to live in peace on this earth. Somewhere between libertarians and communitarians there must be an understanding of responsible shared governance.

" . . . if rights are all that separate Williams from her bought-and-sold, raped-and-abused great-great grandmother, they were also the device for demeaning Clarence Thomas's now infamous sister, the device which permitted him and a good many others to insist that if he could become a Supreme Court Justice, then so could she, and only her laziness, her lack of moral fiber or industriousness, or her corruption by "welfare culture" account for the difference." Wendy Brown ascribes this tension between the concrete facticity of rights and the ephemeral nature of how the are experienced and understood. "[T]he promise of rights may be as elusive, as otherworldly, as unattainable, as that of any other political myth."

Discussion Questions

1. How does Wendy Brown describe Patricia Williams' alchemy? What does she see that makes it look like alchemy?

   Consider that alchemy usually consists of the turning of base metal (metal of little or no value) into gold (of great value). What's the base metal in this instance. Do you think it could be the everyday experiences of those whose lives seem not to count for much, to be dull boring, and/or oppressed or discriminated against?

   And what could be the gold of the end result? Could it be the beauty of the new narratives that arise out of experiences finally allowed to give voice to the attendant feelings? Could it be the finding of voice with which to shout down the silence of exclusion and indifference?

2. I liked the phrase: "And here we might recall that alchemy is more than "little bits of law and pieces of everyday life fly[ing] out of [one's] mouth in weird combinations." It's very nearly poetry. What does it mean to you?

   I think for me I see Patricia Williams chewing up and spitting out the words and practices that dress the law up in middle class cloaks that speak of everyone's inclusion. But maybe as she flings out these ironic bits of untruth (untruth because we are not inclusive - we exclude at every level of the tournament game of success), we have to recall that alchemy was often a scammer's trade, with the gold they claimed to have forged as false and base as the original metal.

   To me, that means there are no easy answers that can undo magically the harm we've done one to the other. To me, that means that the gold lies in the sincerity of hearing the Other, of illocutionary efforts to understand the Other, at which point no chemical change need be wrought. We only need to see one another as we really are, not coated in gold and perfection.

   But Wendy Brown has more to say -- she wonders if the base metal of alchemy is akin, in fact, to the words of law and race. Do we not run the danger of wishing so ardently for that from which we have been excluded, that we reify it, giving it power way beyond its due? Think of the empowering of Saddam Hussein by turning the entire political might of the US against a man, a single man. Richard Koenigberg likens this to the power of myth overtaking facticity. " In the end, then, Williams's dazzling critique of late 20th century cultural and political life in the United States may be severely compromised, even made incoherent, by her refusal to subject rights and their relationship to the inequalities and corruptions of capitalism, to her scorching gaze." What do you suppose she means by that?

   To me, Wendy Brown is reminding us that refication of anything, including "rights," is likely to prevent our seeing it effectively within the framework of its cultural context. Reification lends its own mystery of power, so that we can go on fighting for "rights," while failing to notice the underlying social, economic, and political assumptions that give rise to the very existence of "rights" in the first place.

3. Juan Gonzalez speaks in Harvest of Empire of the contradiction in the US position that we do not abuse our military might with our neighbors to the South and the actual incidents that have occurred with military intervention. How do rights and privacy help explain this miscommunication?

   Consider that the US position has to do with military intervention with the sovereignty of another nation-state. But when US citizens "buy" and/or "own" through some other means property within some other sovereignty the US has intervened "solely for the protection of US property interests."

   Consider that it is generally the prerogative of the sovereign nation-state to protect property interests. But if nation-states want investment in a globalized market, then the protection and security of those property interests becomes a complex issue. Follow the money, kids. The contradiction comes in when the very "rights" that "sovereignty" is supposed to protect are jeopardized by conflicting "rights" that are protecting the private property investment rights that support the sovereign government.

   Consider that these are pretty basic issues to which no one really has the answers in today's world.

4. What does Wendy Brown mean by: "Then the most vexing paradox of the struggle for equality and emancipation might be this: the only thing the disenfranchised need as badly as rights is absolute clearsightedness about power, a clearsightedness that rights discourse invariably inhibits"?

   First, let me assure that I do not speak for Wendy Brown. All I can do is tell you what this says to me. We're all pretty much agreed in the world today that we don't want to be dominated, exploited, enslaved, voiceless. We want equality and emancipation. We want agency with the right to make real decisions within the constraints of our structural context, where those constraints are not arbitrarily placed by other dominant humans, who gain from the privilege of that domination.

   Beyond that, the world gets far more confusing. I tend to mix up the facticity of my everyday lived experiences, like the need to pay the rent, buy food, pay for transportation, protect my source of income. Those facts become larger and more real than pretty much everything in my psychological life space until they are under my control. When I see "rights" in that sense, I get caught up in the facticity. In that I didn't get to get the job I wanted because I couldn't go to the right school because I wasn't the right gender, or the right color, or the right class. So what I mean by "rights" is my right to have an equal opportunity in all that infrastructure. But as soon as I start to think about the issue in terms of "my rights," then there are billions of others protecting "their rights," and pretty much none of us stop to look at the fact that we're trapped in facticity and not looking at the issues broadly enough in terms of power and the complexity of interrelationships within the structural context that keeps changing over time and over space. Once we start to look at "rights" in terms of the global structural context over time and over space, we discover that the facticity of quotidien life interrupts us.

   Phillip Berryman says this of the problem of bringing social justice and religion to the masses. If we focus on religion as a transcendantal experience and try to reach the masses who need the religious faith we seek to bring, then the clerical administration component of the middle and ruling class fails to see the significance of what we're doing with the masses and closes off support in favor of the middle class and clerics. Liberation theology sought to make a stand on social justice. But only the most committed and better educated were available to work at this. The Pentecostals sought to bring the poor close to Jesus, and reached large numbers, larger numbers that the liberation theologists. But then there was an almost total loss of focus on the social justice and improving standards of living. Berryman wrote Religion in the MegaCity to explore this. And at times, he questions even himself. I think this whole discussion of rights theory might help us understand.

   Berryman gave six months or so to interviewing both clerics and parishioners in Brazil and Venezuela. He spent a few days in each church he visited. He met and talked to people. But throughout most of the text (I haven't finished it yet) I felt a vague dissatisfaction that he wasn't able to go deeply enough into what concerned him. He sought, as I understand it, a better means of theology for bringing social justice and religious support to the poor and disenfranchised. Yet there seemed to be no time at which the poor, the administrative clerics, the theologians and religious present weren't talking past each other. There needed to be lots more time for illocutionary understanding. Not for just a quick sketch of who each person was, but for empathetic understandings of the Other, and I don't think that could happen unless the Other also opened in good faith to him, which often didn't happen. What was going on reminded me of the annual university review of what we've accomplishd this year. Each department or church or whatever trots out its accomplishments that it thinks the Other is looking for. I don't think that's going to produce illocutionary understanding. I'm not sure I know what will. But I suspect it will be something more like our discussions on Dear Habermas, where we look at both sides together, over time, and over space, until we gain some empathy for one another. I think that because I think we're trying to get to the clearsightedness that Wendy Brown talks of, and I think that clearsighedness is the key to understanding that there is no metanarrative, that we cannot ever "know," but that we can continue to learn and to support one another.