A Symposium
Snitow, Ann
The tone of the symposium question is forlorn, and its terms hint at trauma and disappointment. In about equal parts, I identify with this voice, and I don't. As a cultural group, we U.S....
...Farewell to (some of) that past— without regret...
...My undergraduates find this expansion of conceptual boundaries much less alarming than many of my graduate school colleagues do...
...now the very concept "periphery" is challenged everywhere...
...What seems to me insane about your lovely sane voice is that it talks reason, inexorably and imperturbably, in booby-hatch...
...leftists (Old and New now shoveled together by recent events) may not recover spiritually or intellectually from 1989...
...Stone: "You are, of course, one of the clearest voices of sanity—i.e...
...Children of the cold war, we are not likely to be elected to the future...
...Certainly, to give the example I know best, the women's movement arose in large part because left women were angry with the sexism of left men, men who are mourning now for some of the very traditions that silently excluded women...
...Our utopianism took root in other soil...
...In the worst case scenario, as the symposium question puts it, socialism will be a pallid "social democratic reformism .. . urging only that things be made a little more democratic...
...Socialist ideas are perennials and will survive this current winter...
...Socialists used to treat these themes as the periphery...
...The next generation seems to assume a wide range of experience as relevant for politics: birth, babyhood, sexuality, media, housework (including dirt and garbage more generally), sibling rivalry, madness and paranoia, irrational rage, fear, mortality, quests for meaning from religion to any number of sublunary ideologies, the psychopathology of 14 • DISSENT The Left After Forty Years everyday life, and that fragile yet welldefended achievement, adult identity, including but by no means limited to class, race, gender, and sexual orientation...
...But need we all identify as the subjects of this elegy...
...Among the sources of war, she identified gender asymmetries, fear, rage, confusion, and childishness...
...would be, instead, for a wild in-rush of new material, for a politics elastic enough, say, to move from private to public, from body to nation...
...of impassioned humane reasonableness —that we have...
...Dinnerstein urged that we consider the flesh and the unconscious...
...Terrifying as these under-theorized matters remain, the left I want will think about them, centrally, without apology...
...My "radical hope" (can one get away now with rhetoric so drenched with romance...
...Sad...
...But what will the spring look like...
...Many (indeed most) of us have been complaining about the limits and distortions of traditional left undertakings for years...
...In 1970, the great feminist psychologist Dorothy Dinnerstein wrote a letter to I.F...
Vol. 41 • January 1994 • No. 1
