Category Archives: Women’s history

Books History Women's history

Notes from Women on the Margins: Three 17th-century Lives by Natalie Zemon Davis

Jewish merchant woman in Hamburg, Glikl Bas Judah Leib
p. 19 Glikl began to write the book of her life “with an aching heart” after the death of her husnand Haim “to help against the melancholy thoughts which came … during many sleepless nights.”… Hers is the first autobiography from a Jewish woman that we know of … But Glikl never described herself as doing something odd or new, and, indeed, recent scholarship is showing that autobiographies – full or in fragment – were composed by early modern Jews more often than has previously been believed.”

p. 20 Jewish life history was fostered expecially by the centuries-old “ethical will”, an exposition of moral lessons and personal wisdom passed on to one’s children along with instructions for one’s burial and the disposal of ones goods.”

p. 21 “For the Christians, the major model was still Augustine’s confession with a definitive conversion. We see it in the widely read Latin autobiography of Anna Maria van Schurman, Eukleria, published in 1673 in Altona… tells how Schurman renounced worldly fame and the scholarship in languages and secualr literature that she had begun in her native Utrechy and how she embraced a life of humility and religious fellowship with the Labadist sectaries, just then inhabiting Altona. (They were changing their money with the Jews; Glikl and Anna Maria may have passed each other on the street.) A variation on the model is the Leben of the Pietist visionary Johanna Eleonora von Merlau Peterson, published in 1719 when she was 75… describes not a single conversion experience but rather a set of tests, all of which she passed with God’s help”.

Marie Guyart, Marie de l’Incarnation
p. 64 “one of the two women who hounded the first Ursuline convent and school for girls in North America p. 65 “femme forte, a classical and biblical image used by both the literary feminists of 17th-century France, and by the religious, “a femme forte such as Solomon depicted,” her Ursuline sisters said of her after she died.”

p. 65 “born in 1599 in Tours … came from a modest family … father was at best only a ‘merchant baker,’ and it was a step up when he arranged to marry one daughter to a schoolteacher, another to a busy wagoner, and Marie to a silkmaker – a member of the city’s most important industry. … as a teenager she had thought wistfully of the local Benedictine nunnery of Beaumont, where one of her mother’s distant kin was abbess. In fact, that ancient and noble convent would have been unlikely to receive a baker’s daugher as a novice, even if her parents had agreed to a religious vocation”.

p. 128 “As women in Europe, like Maries, expanded their religious voice … so it may be that women in the American woodlands were expanding their voice in religious culture while the men were expanding their political oratory. Conceivably, the role of Amerindian women in dream analysis and soothsaying was not a timeless one, but a response to political changes that began in the 15th-century and were intensified by the arrival of Europeans. Then the women converts that people MArie’s letters, the Hospital records, and the Jesuit Relations – women praying, preaching and teaching – would be an energetic Christian variant on a process also at work in the religion of the okis and the Manitou.

Maria Sibylla Merian

p. 154 “Merian’s … subject was a set of events ,,, and to represent them properly meant crossing the line between orders and putting the plant and animal kingdoms in the same picture. Yet even while lacking the logic of classiciation, her sequence was not “tumultuous”. Emerging, from the sensibility of two artists, Merian and her publisher-husband Graff, the books moved the reader’s eye through the transformations by a visually striking and pleasurable path. The “method” of the Raupen – highly particular pictures and accounts strung together by an aesthetic link – had scientific importance quite apart from the new species contained on its pages. It made the little-studied process of metamorphosis easy to visualize and remember, and insisted on nature’s connections, a long-term contribution. It also fractured older classification systems by its particularism and surprising mixtures, and so cleared the ground for those like Swammerdam who were proposing a replacement.”

p. 155 “Merian was a pioneer, crossing boundaries of education and gender to aquire learning on insects and nurturing daughters as she observed, painted and wrote. Her focus on breeding, habitat and metamorphosis fits nicely with the domestic practice of a 17th-century mother and housewife. We have here not a female mind uneasy with amnalysis or timelessly connected to the organic … but a woman perched for scientific enterpirse on a creative margin – for her a buzzing ecosystem – between domestic workshop and learned academy.”

p. 186 In the Metamorphosis, the Amerindian women themselves identify the abortifacient to Maria Sibylla Meriam: the peacock flower, whose seeds can also speed delivery. Here is a public sharing of the ‘secrets of women’ reported with some symoathy by a Eruopean in whose world abortions were illegal and sinful… (Merian may well have spaced her own children, born in 1668 and 1678, by some form of birth control such as coitus interruptus, but probably not by anortion.) As for her statement that the African slave women did not have children, it is hyperbole, buty it lends support to those historians who explain the low fertility among the slaces as being, in at least small party, a matter of the women’s choice.”

p. 198 “She is 62 years old, but still very lively … and hardworking, a very courteous woman.” Thus Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach, a learned young scholar from Merian’s birthplace, recorded in his notes in 1711 after visiting the artist-naturalist and buying her books and watercolors. She was now one of the international figures of Amsterdam, a person one had to meet, the way one had to attend Frederick Ruysch’s anatomy lectures, see Nicolas Witsen’s collection, and view the great maps in the Town Hall.”

Books Environmental politics Feminism History Science Women's history

Notes from Meeting with Moths

p. 34-6 “The Six-spot Burnet is Britain’s most widespread burnet moth … Their bodies are packed with poisons that deter even the hungriest of predators. These poisons are accumulated by the caterpillars… munch on leaves of trefoils, they not only get the essential nutrients for growing, they also swallow the chemicals, in this case cyanides, which the plant produces to protect itself. The caterpillars themselves have evolved ways to deal with the plant’s poisons… cunningly store the dangerous chemicals in small pounches just under the skin. This prevents the toxins from interfering with their own body functioning and also allows them to be exuded through the skin as foul-tasting droplets for any predator follish enough to investigate too closely… As adults, females use cyanides as part of their alluring perfume to help attract males, and mating males transfer varying amounts to the female in little packages with their sperm. A toxic male is the most attractive and desirable.”

p. 54 “In 29021, Butterfly Conservation estimated that the work undertaken by volunteers to protect both butterflies and moths, would cost £18 million if valued commercially.”

p. 76 Family of micromoths known as Tineidae. … most feed on organic waste… recycling nutrients back into the environment. Some… specialise in digesting the protein found in animal hair, skin, feathers, claws and horns. As they nibble, they slowly do their bit to break the tough material down … Two species have become rather well know… The Webbing Clothes Moth and the Case-making Clothes Moth are problem pests worldwide… in the dark corners of warm houses they will happily breed all year round…. each female will lay about 50 tiny eggs on suitable substrates, which in turn hatch into the fabric-destroying caterpillers.”

p. 86 Herald (Scoliopteryn libatrix) emerging … “a race against time for the moth, for if the wings are not given the space they need, they might dry in a stunted or twisted position and effective flight is never realised”

p. 88 Maria Sibylla Merian, born in Frankfut in 1647 to a family of artists and printmakers … in 1679 she published her first book on caterpillars… showing the real-life relationship between insects and plants was groundbreaking. The concept of ecology, the interactions between animals, plants and the environment now so fundamental to our understanding of the natural world, was barely considered at the time.”

p. 90 “the book for which she would later receive most acclaium. Metamorphosis Insectorum was publsihed in 1705 with 60 large copper-plate engravings illustrating the stages of development of many different insects arranged around the plants she had found them on…. Her work was circulated, discussed and admired by the scientific elite of the Royal Society of London. Tsar Peter the Great acquired a large collection of her work. Later George III bought a first edition of her Surinam book for the Royal Collection. Carl Linnaeus used her illustrations to help him describe species of plants and animals. At least nine animals now bear her name. Sadly, after her death some of her findings were disputed. Inaccurate copies of her books had been made and when these errors were spotted her work became widely criticised. Genuine observations such as a large spider capturing a bird were dismissed as fanciful female imagination. Only 150 years later, when the explorer Henry Bates proved her bird-eating spider was accurate, was the record finally set straight; but her books and their legacy were soon forgotten.”

p. 101 In most moth species it is the female that releases a sex pheronome, a behaviour referred to as ‘calling’, when she is ready to mate… Males are usually better endowed than females in the antennal department… a greater surface area and therefore more space for special scent receptors.”

p. 102 “There are reports of some species attracting a suitor from over 10 km away”

p. 113 “The very first moths, flying around 200 million years ago, had chewing moutparts and probably fed on fern spores and pollen from primitive conifers in their prehistoric swampland homes. To keep hydrated they might have sipped on dew .. and it is thought this gradiually led to the development of more specialised sucking moutnparts to better deal with these food sources. Once flowering plants made an appearance… things started to change more rapidly… There are still tiny moths that eat fern spores and pollen grains, using a special cavity in the mouth to process these granular foostuffs, But most others have moved on, with the evolution of a long tubular moutnpart called the proboscis”

p. 135 “Moths with ears were flying around their prehistoric worlds at least 28 million years before echolocating bats were on the scene … must once have been used for something other than bat avoidance, probably to hear other approaching predators but perhaps also for communicating with each other”.

p. 144 “Parasitoids… are a crucial part of ecosystems and have an important role in regulating the size of moth populations without eliminating them… reghular fluctuation of moth numbers over the course of years, tracked by a fluctuation in abundance of its parasitoids.”

p. 170 “migrating moths are naive; they’ve never done the journey before and will never do it again… they rely entirely on instinct to know when and where to go. Environmental cues of temperature, other weather patterns and day length interact with the moths’ genetics to make this work.”

p. 185 The most extreme cold conditions, as low as minus 70C, are endured by the Arctic Wolly Bear moth… most northerly breeding species of moth, eking out a remarkable life in the icy realms of Canada and Greenland… termperatures only become warm enough for activity on sunny afternoons in midsummer, so it takes on average seven years, a severely punctuated seven years, for the caterpillar to complete its development.”

p. 199 Alice Blanche Balfour (1850-1936) grew up with a love of natural history… her most significant finds happened during her 60s and 70s… bequathed her impressive collection of pinned specimens, notebooks and equipment to the National Museum of Scotland.”

Books History Women's history

Notes from The Return of the Taliban: Afghanistan After the Americans Left

p. 64 “Sensing victory, Taliban deputy leader Sirajuddin Haqqani penned an opinion piece that – of all places – found space on the editorial page of The New York Times on February 20, 2020. He was a “specially designated international terrorist”, according to the FBI, with the US Department of State offering a reward of up to $10 million for information that would bring him to justice. While aply arguing that “Everyone is tired of War” and “that the killing and maiming must stop”, he hinted at Taliban readiness for making the compromises necessary to develop a consensus on the form of the future government of Afghanistan. The deliberate choice of words, such as making a commitment “to working with other parties in a sonsultatiuve manner of genuine respect to agree ona new, inclusive political system in which the voice of every Afghan is reflected and where no Afghan feels excluded” clearly sounded democracy-leaning to those who had no clue about Taliban ideology. References to a “right to work” and a “right to education” for women sounded equally empowering. Separately in Doha negotiations, Taliban leader Shahabuddin Delavar had provided categorical assurances about permission for women’s education and work. Kabuil was stunned; but they were now yesterday’s men.”

p. 89 “Of the 33 cabinet slots, 30 had gone to Pashtuns and only two to Tajiks and one to an Uzbek, making it obvious that the Taliban’s idea of diversity was almost meaningless.”

Books History Women's history

Notes from Women of the Left Bank: Paris 1900-1940

p. 48 “Women not protected in the higher reaches of society met secretly in restaurants and bars, travelled by train and hired cans, and frequently risked exposure, if not legal punishment, should they reveal their sexual orientation through dress of publicly demonstrated erotic attachments. … The Marquise de Belbeuf became an object for woman-haters, who considered her perverse and degenerate. Adopting male dress and forms of behaviour, the marquise reversed the premises by which patriarchal society functioned, assuming for herself male pivileges and power … On 3 January 1907, the Marquise de Belbeuf and Colette were very nearly arrested for enacting a scene of lesbian love in a pantomime skit at the Moulin Rouge…. the mime portrayed the awakneing of a mummy from her eternal sleep by the kiss of a former lover. The scene incited a near-riot in the theater, making it necessary to call in the police. Future performances of the play were banned by Lepine at the request of the marquise’s ex-husband; Willy, Colette’s estranged husband lost his position no the newspaper L’Echo de Paris, and the two women were forced to stop living openly together.”

p. 99 For women, America was a particularly oppressive environment, and amond the expatriate women were those who took up Edith Wharton’s ‘argument with America’ on the ‘woman question’ finding in their personal sense of alienation from their native land important literary themes.”

p. 101 Janet Flanner’s only published novel, The Cubical City, recreates the cultural life of New York in the 1920s… the t hematic concerns of the novel turn on American sexual puritanism – in particular its double standard of behaviour for men and women – and it contrasts life for a modern woman set ‘in the midst of a mechanical civilisation (New York City) with that of ‘ancient females who in small select numbers had received in absentia grain, praters, milk, worship of hyacinth buds placed on credulous rural shrines… “for thousands of years the concernrated aim of society has been to cut down kissing. With that same amount of energy … society could have stopped war, established liberty, given everybody a free education, free bathtubs, free music, free pianos and changed the human mind to boot.”.. reflects her determined effort to break free of midwestern puritanical thought.”

p. 139 In 1937, “writing from Budapest following her trip to Salzberg and Vienna, Flanner commented almost as an aside that ‘history looks queer when you’re standing close ot it, watching where it is coming from and how it is being made.” .. It was precisely her avility to capture the ‘queerness’ of history observed close up, her instinctive knowledge of ‘where it is coming from and how it is being made’ that is revealed in retrospective reading of the Paris Letters.

p. 188 “Stein distinguished herself by making herself appear to be a man… Once her liaison with Toklas was established, Stein made the following remark in her notebook: ‘Pablo & Matisse have a maleness that belongs to genius. Moi aussie, perhaps.” (A Different Language, 136, fn 31)… Unable to step outside the heterosexual cultural imperative, Stein clothed her homosexuality in heterosexual forms.”

p. 194 Adrienne Monnier – “An unabashedly feminist analysis of women’s relation to books, ‘Les Amies des Livres’ examined the historical circumstances that had traditionally prevented women from becoming part of the reading public. These conditions included differences in education between males and females but more important were the circumstances of family and marital life that made the home the place of woman’s work rather than of leisure: ‘Women are asked to take care of their persons and their homes above all; they are not praised for devoting themselves to housework and it is not considered proper for them to become lost in books, whether these books be frivolous or serious”.

p. 217 “the misogyny of Surrealism, a subject Anne Chisholm discusses at some length in her biography of Nancy Cunard who was – briefly – Louis Aragon’s mistress. “…Women plated a small part in the Surrealist scheme of things. For all their desire to live unconventionally and to shock the bourgeoisie, the Surrealists had highly conventional, even traditional, ideas about women. No woman writer or painter emerged to join their activities or sign their manifestos. They found it thrillling to visit brothels and befriend prostitutes but at the same time there was a strong romantic, almost puritanical streak in their sexual attitudes.The ideal was an exclusive, reciprocated love with the perfect woman. Foreign women were fashionable in the group, perhaps because they tended to be more independent and available than middle- or uppper-class Frenchwomen; but Nancy was all too obviously someone, a person in her own right, with more money and freedom of movement than seemed safe or appropriate.”

p. 243 Djuna Barnes “poetry did not seem to follow the currenst of the most recent American and English poetry – and there is no reason why it should have … her interest in earlier historical periods and to the use of outmoded and antiquated verbal forms. But Barnes was also at work reconstructing the ‘abandoned traditions’ of woman’s culture. This effort simultaneously searcged for woman in the patriarchal culture that had abandoned her and sought to give back to woman the voice that had for so long been silenced… Barnes’s work has fallen prey to the same set of received notions that until very recently informed studies of Gertrude Stein: both women have been chastised for being significantly different from their Paris colleagues and for failing to maste the Modernist enterprise.

p. 268 Natalie Barney “saw in English culture and extreme form of patriarchal power and described England as a country “where nothing is provided for women, not even men”. (Chalon, Portrait of a Seductress, 15)

p. 400 “The thirties has been defined as a ‘masculine decade’, a male preserve in which narrowly defined class distinctions exluded ‘issues of gender and sexual politics’. The collective experience of this generation of writers was masculine, its participants products of the English public school The Auden Generation, like the men of Bloomsbury, shared preparatory and public school experiences, were educated at Oxford and Cambridge, and were predmoinately homosexual.

p. 401 “homosexuals of the period defined themselves against a romanticized image of the rugged and heroic young men who died on the battlefields in World War I…. feared a failure of courage and conscience, imagined war as the ultimate ‘Test’ of masculinity, and dreamed of ways to escape the death sentence meted out to those who passed the ‘Test’.”

p. 411 Woolf saw in the Fascist state a more violent and indoctrinated form of the patriarchal dominance already at work in Western society, a force that associated the female with weakness in order to keep women (and other marginal elements) outside the societal power structure. As an alternative to the masculine values enforced by the Fascist state, Woolf proposed in Three Guineas that women establish themselves as a Society of Outsides, defining the goals of freedom, equality and peace in terms radically different from those established under state patronage.”

p. 415 Natalie Barney shockingly racist, anti-Jewish views

p. 419 Nancy Cunard “began her work as a journalist at the outbreak of the Ethiopian war, reporting first for the Associated Negro Press at the League of Nations. During the Spanish Civil War she wrote for various British publications, including the Manchester Guardian, the most prestigious of the pro-Republican English papers, and practiced a form of activist jounalism more common roday than in the 1930s… also took an active part in relief work,”

Books Environmental politics Feminism History Politics Women's history

Notes from Left Feminisms: Conversations on the Personal and Political

Nancy Fraser p. 38 “the ecological dimension has to be front and centre. It is not reducible to, but it is deeply intertwined, with the dynamics of the economic, financialisation and social reproduction crises. It was when I took this objective of a crisis critique that I found I could not any longer keep the ecological dimension in the margins”

p. 48 Akwugo Emejulu “If you see something that needs to change, you have to do it yourself. The idea that someone else either understands the issue better than you or has beeter ideas than you seems anti-egalitarian. This does not mean you are making someone else take responsibility for their own liberation… Rather , it’s to say: “If you want change to happen then you actually have to grab a broom and gather with others to make that happen.”

p. 53 In the UK you are one of 24 Black female professors out of 19,000 professors nationwide, 14,000 of whom are male.

p. 68 Sheila Rowbotham “After abolition the memory of the extraordinarily far-sighted and creative things that had been done just got completely pushed aside. The GLC’s radical scope was much wider than previous left councils in the past. Ken Livingstone had been influenced by Harvey Milk in San Francisco and was aware of the liberation and feminist politics in a way that was unusual among Labour Party politicians. I worked in Industry and Employment, the area for which Mike Ward was respobsible. Mike had been inspired by the visionary measures adopted by the Communist council in Bologna, but he also knew in detail about the history of local government in Brighton. Robin Murray, the chief economic adviser, had experience as a development economist and in community politics in Brighton where he lived. My immediate boss was Hilary Wainwright, then in her early 30s. … She contrived to link the creation of forms of democratic planning with economic policies that served human needs, transplanting the Lucas Aerospace Workers’ Alternative Plan into Local government.

JL So what did you do at the GLC?

“I initiated policies on childcare, deomstic labour and contract cleaning for the London Industrial Strategy. … creating jobs by funding women’s workplace co-ops and nurseries. We also funded a launderette run by older women under the Westway. About 20% of people in London at that time didn’t have their own washing machine. Many were pensioners. There had been municipal washing places that were being closed. The women who used one had campaigned for a replacement, a community laundrette. Westway was funded by Industry and Employment and the nursery by the Women’s Committee, headed by Val Wise. So the women who used the launderette had contact with the little children, and they also used to do the washing of all the nappies for the nursery.”

Veronica Gago Professor of Social Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires p. 85 “I think in Latin America the vocabulary of environmentalism has more to do with anti-extractive struggles than with ‘environmentalism’. The vocabulary is changing fast with younger generations. Whilst comrades in other areas talk about ecofeminism, I think that here, in Latin America, the struggles, the vocabulary, the imagery, have to do more with strategies of anti-extractivism and indigenous movements… extractivism for us is the main issue in rethinking the exploitation of land, the exploitations of corporations and the distribution of common resources… the agro-business model is now exploding in terms of environmental problems, both with the basic issues of food and water, and with the dispossession of indigenous people through the expropriation of plants. There is also a very long discussion about the colonial frame of developmentalism in ‘the Third World’, and the dilemmas ralted to the international division of labour for our countries.”

p. 92 Wendy Brown, Emeritus Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berleley. “One of the things I paid too little attention to in Undoing the Demos (2015) was the disintregration of the social… In erican case that disintregration has had two important effects. First, this process literally takes apart social bonds and social welfare – not simply by promoting a libertarian notion of freedom and dismantling the welfare state, but also by reducing legitimate political claims only to those advanced by and for families and individuals, not social groups generated by social powers. Second, something I didn’t emphasise adequately in 2015 … is the extent to which neoliberalism could generate a political formation that combined libertarianism with a very strong statism that works to secure, essentially, the deregulated public sphere that neoliberalism itself generated.”

p. 97 “We live in such nihilist times. By which I mean, drawing from Nietzsche, not that there are no values circulating, but that our values are commercialised, trivilaised, fungible; they’re traded, trafficked in, used for branding and profit.”

p. 107 Lynne Segal – “The mantra promoting notions of the autonomous, individualised self is indeed so strong today, although it has little connection to what it is to be human. This is especially pernicious when we enter the world of care, one where public support is crucial for so many. For instance, spaces for mothers with young children are being demolished before our eyes. According to the Sutton Trust, there was a 50 per cent cut in early years day care provision between 2010 and 2017, and at the very same time there was almost the exact same rise in referrals for children in crisis, creating an explosion in demand for child protection services; it is all so short sighted.”

p. 114 Lynne Segal “Biology and culture, biology and environment are never in any way separable. Donna Haraway has so much to say about how complicated this relationship is, seeing biology as an “endless resource” of “multiple possibilities”. Similarly, the neuroscientists Steven Rose points out how even the environment of chromosomes is unstable, making patterns of genetic transmission entirely unpredictable. Genetic outcomes not only depend upon endless external physical, social and cultural factors, but also on unstable internal cellular features. So, when we are trying to explain something as complex as how we become women, or men – if indeed we do identify with these gender positions we’re seen as born into – the complexity is quite phenomenal! The idea that we could separate out the intricacies of the biological from the convolutions of culture is foolish. And yet we have evolutionary speculators, such as Richard Dworkin, providing “biological” reasons why women wear high heels and tight dresses. However laughable, the media present these biological musings as gold standard science. Thus, popularisers of scientific folk tales come to be seen as leading scientists.”

Hilary Wainwright p. 130 After 2019 general election”one of the reasons why we lost, say, in the North East, and, to some degree, Wakefield, some of the north-western towns, and certainly in Stoke, is because in fact people’s political alienation, their experience of having no control over the decisions shaping their daily lives, was not actually a result of their experience of Europe, but rather their daily life experience, especially of Labour Councils that took their voters completely for granted, treating them more or less with contempt. Even on the interviews on the election night, you heard working-class people who voted Tory explain their decision by saying “Labour’s done nothing for us round here” as much as they talked about Brexit.”

p. 185 Angela McRobbie, Professor Emeritus at Goldsmiths University of London “Most of the time I’ve been working in Germany in the last three years has been dedicated to an AHRC three-city study of fashion micro-enterprises in London, Berlin and Milan…. The argument has emerged that it is the existence of a social wage which permits small creative enterprises to function where there is support and subsidy for rent of studio space and equipment, and a huge number of courses for upskilling and further training. Germany is the land of free at-the-point-of-delivery vocational training. The social democratic heritage, even as it is being transformed, remains pretty intact. And since Fashion is a female-led field, these provision benefit the context of women’s employment.

Gargi Bhattacharyya Professor fo Sociology at the University of East London

p. 197 “from Thatcher onwards – and escalating when we come to 2008, and the formal new institutionalisation fo the new austerity – part of how any public consensus around welfare or any social support operates is by increasingly making all of us guilty until proven innocent. Nearly all state functions become modelled as punitive, so instead of via the cuddly daddy who will tell you off, who will give you all a sweetie if you’ll just come and line up. Instead, we’ve got the state patriarch sating “Well I’m not sure any of you are my kids anyway. Can you prove it?” And so then we’re all endlessly having to prove how we are deserving of t he smallest indulgence, even the indulgence of being allowed to live our lives. That really shifts expectations. … it’s always “How can I avoid punishment?” even if the punishment is only taking away some of the small supports … everyone gets trained to look over their shoulder and to not ask for help because sometimes the threat of punishment is greater than the small social good that might be gained… The machinery enacting our rights is becoming increasingly punitive.”

Sylvie Walby p. 214 JL You describe feminism as a project, rather than an identity. Why?

“The concept of a ‘project’ contains the implications of change, of movement, of fluidity, of possibility. The concept of ‘identity’ is very fixed. I’m not comfortable with the concept of identity because of its tendency to essentialise, albeit on the level of culture rather than biology; hence I find it a relatively unproductive term … the concept of ‘project’ is better than ‘movement’ because it contains notions of practices, as well as ideas.”

p. 218 “There is a possibility of a cascade of changes, something which appears to be quite small can have very large effects … The concept of a cascade is really important. It’s an analysis of society as being made up of multiple systems. .. of two main kinds: regimes of inequality and institutional domains. The notion of the crisis ‘cascading’ is that it cascades through these interconnected systems. It’s not that the whole society will move at once, but that steo by step, one system could change another. But there’s no inevitability; and any specific system could absorb it. I used the example of the financial crisis, for example … there was no inevitability that there should be austerity. You might say the same with Covid there’s no inevitability that the closing down of the economy had to mean austerity. The government can simply print money” And if we compare the two crises, the government in this instance has simply printed money, whereas it didn’t in the previous one.”

Sophia Siddiqui, Institute of Race Relations

p. 250 “The reproductive labour of migrant women is essential to maintaining the capitalist system, as the care work needed to sustain families is increasingly outsourced onto their shoulders. But in every conceivable way, migrant women remain cordoned off from the body politic through immigration regimes that exclude them and push them out to the edges of society. And these immigration regimes often prevent them from being with and caring for their own families, who they have to leave behind in their countries of origin, to care for the families of more affluent others. We can’t look at these issues in silos; we need to see them together, particularly in the context of the multiple crises of care and of capitalism. That was how the term ‘reproductive racism’ emerged”

Books Environmental politics Feminism History Politics Women's history

Notes from Revolution: An Intellectual History by Enzo Traverso

P. 28 During the 20th century we became accustomed to victories and defeats as military clashes; revolutions cornered power with weapons, defeats took the form of military coups and fascist dictatorships. The defeat we suffered at the turn of the 21st century, however, must be measured by different criteria. Capitalism has won because it has succeeded in shaping our lives and our mental habitus, because it has succeeded in imposing itself as an anthropological model, a ‘way of life’. The most powerful armies are not invincible. The peasants of Vietnam, one of the poorest countries in the world a century ago, succeeded, through a struggle that can justly be defined as heroic, in defeating, first, Japanese and French colonialism, and then, despite the napalm attacks, American imperialism. What we have not managed to stop, however, is the ongoing process of universal commodity deification that, like an octopus, is enveloping the entire planet. Capitalism took its revenge through the current Vietnamese economic boom.

P. 44 

Railways also offered a metaphor for both the circulation of capital and its cyclical crises. As Wolfgang Schivelbusch has brilliantly shown, the concept of circulation, previously related to the lexicon of biology and physiology, in the 19thcentury enlarged its scope and was quickly metaphorized to express systems of communication and the unification of the social body. Circulation meant a healthy body, whereas any static element appeared as an obstacle or a symptom of disease. Cities, territories and nations began to be viewed as living bodies, the objects of what Foucault would later call modern bio politics. Schivelbusch quotes a popular book by Maxine du Camp, published at the time of Huassmann’s reshaping of the French capital under the Second Empire, which was significantly titled Paris, ses organes, ses fonctions, as vie. The wide boulevards that replaced the old labyrinth of small streets and redesigned the structure of the city along modern, rational lines, mean “a double system of circulation and respiration”. The social concept of “traffic” joined the physiological concept of circulation. According to Marx, circulation is, alongside production, a crucial moment of capital’s life, and the link between them is time. The three volumes of Capital depict a conceptual totality: the linear, homogenous time of production in the first volume; the cyclical time of circulation in the second, where Marx analyses the process of rotation and enlarged reproduction of capital; and the organic time of capital in the third, where he reconsistitutes the entire process as a unity of the time of production and the time of circulation”

P. 52 Machines are motors that replace the muscular energy of workers and animals… radically modify the old metabolic pathways between human beings and nature… introduce an anthropological break between ‘labor’ and ‘labour power’ which Agne Heller has depicted as the transition from a ‘paradigm of work to a ‘paradigm of production’ Now, socialism meant liberation from Labour rather than rough labour … .. This conception contains the premises of a socialist utopia grounded on an idea of total freedom and human liberation from any material constraint, and t the same time a dangerous idealisation of technology that announces the controversial relationship between socialism and ecology in the 20th century. In fact, Marx’s entire ouvre is shaped by an unresolved tension between the two contradictory tendencies. On the one hand, a positivist attempt – so typical of the time – to discover the ‘laws of motion’ of the capitalist mode of production and, beyond capitalism of history, which resulted in the evolutionary scheme of the succession of social formations described in his introduction to Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. ON the other hand, a dialectical vision of history as an open process, made of unpredictable turns and bifurcations, with a predetermined direction and whose final result depends on human agency. In this second conception, the development of productive forces – science, technology, motors, machines etc – was a premise for both socialism and a negative dialectic that reinforced exploitation and destroyed nature itself. This tension between a ‘determinist’ and a ‘constructivist’ Marx, that never found a satisfactory resolution in his work, makes sterile the antipodal portraits of him either as a ‘Promethean’ advocate of productivity or the forerunner of modern political ecology.

P. 96 It was Walter Benjamin, a heterodox Marxist, who turned Marx’s metaphor upside-down. He proposed a radically anti-positivist historical materialism that would have ‘annihilated in itself the idea of progress’….famous theses on the concept of history contain the following sentence: ‘Marx says that revolutions are the locomotives of history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train – namely the human race – to activate the emergency brake.” … Marx celebrated the ‘demonic energy’ of industrial capitalism and the rising workers’ movement. Benjamin wrote in 1940, when it was ‘midnight in the century’. Today railways evoke Aushwitz sooner than glorious revolutions. 

P. 79

At the end of 1918, when he was Commissar for the Arts in Vitebsk, Marc Chagall painted Forward, Forward, a canvas which he described as a study for the anniversary of the October Revolution…portrays the Revolution as it was perceived by its actors, a jump towards the future and a feeling of weightlessness. This feeling can very well coexist with the worst material conditions – the ravages of war, food shortages, penury – and arises from the deep conviction that everything is changing, that the old world is finishing and a new one is coming, brought about by a transformation from below.Building a new society is a difficult task, a titanic ambition that requires enormous sacrifices and whose outcome still remains uncertain, but the present is shaped by this gravity, a sensation that affects bodies like an electric pulse and energises them. Revolution is also a corporeal experience.”

P. 82 The events of Hune 1848 revealed the birth of a new political body: the constitution of the oppressed and the labouring classes into a historical subject. In his recollections Tocqueville mentions some individual figures, and even describes the barricades, bit it is only when speaking of his own class that he distinguishes its members (‘landlords, lawyers, doctors’) Describing the popular classes of Paris, he paints them as a single body that acts by moving its different organs.. This people acted as a conscious body, what Marc, in the same years, called ‘a class for itself’. .. IN My Life (1929) Leon Trotsky devotes similarly striking pages to portraying the effervescence of Petrograd in 1917 and the awakening of its proletarian classes. He did not write as an external observer but as a leader of the revolution , and so it was from inside the people itself that he experienced the molecular process through which it moved to the centre of the political stage. This meant, n his words, ‘the inspired frenzy of history’ This frenzied inspiration was eminently creative…Trotsky explained the way in which he himself, a leader, had been absorbed by a people who ‘suggested’ the words of his speeches to him and transformed them into the wilful expression of an unconscious collective process”

P. 126 Some pages of Literature and Revolution sketch an impressive image of a future nature completely reshaped by technology and leading to a redefinition of human life itself. .. In a socialist future, men ‘will be accustomed to look at the world as submissive clay for sculpting the most perfect forms of life’. .. According to the principles of functionalism, art will be ‘formative’ rather than ‘ornamental’ and will achieve a new a harmonic relationship with nature, not in a Rousseauiam sense – a romantic return to the primal and idyllic ‘state of nature’ but rather thought the complete submission of the planet to the needs of a superior civilisation. This would bring significant changes in distribution of mountains and rivers, forests and seashores…. In his anthropocentric view, the relationship between human beings and nature had to be hierarchical… socialism would reshape human life itself by accomplishing a bio political plan that would ultimately take a eugenic form’.

P. 146 Antonio Gramsci elaborated an impressive theory of socialism as redemptive of (rather than liberation from) labour… Whereas Taylorism transformed workers into ‘trained gorillas’ by breaking the ‘pschyo-physical nexus of qualified professional work’ socialism would re-establish such a nexus on a superior level, by creating a ‘new type’ of conscious worker, able to control and manage the labour process in which he was involved. This superior kind of producer and human being, Gramsci stressed, was the outcome of an almost eugenic plan: “A forced selection will ineluctably take place; a part of the old working class will be pitilessly eliminated from the world of labour, and perhaps from the world tout court.” This regenerated ‘superior’ specimen would possess some corporeal and ascetic habits forged by his role as producer. … Proletarian power, he explained, meant ‘self-coercion and self-discipline (like Algiers trying himself to the chair)”… this biopolitical reshaping of human beings as productive and disciplined bodies fetishised both the homo faber and the development of productive forces. The advent of the New Man as an ascetic producer was incompatible with the hedonism of the socialist ‘winged Eros’. 

P. 148-9 

“The Atlantic Revolutions of the last quarter of the 18th century – a cycle of uprisings that swept from America to France to Saint-Domingue (Haiti), establishing the ideological and political bases of our modernity – are deposited in essentially national memories. They were obviously correlated n the consciousness of their actors, but their entanglement did not produce supranational memories: whereas the American and French revolutions are frequently opposed as two antipodal paradigms, the Black Jacobins have been silenced for a century and half and therefore excluded from an essentially Western revolutionary canon. .. At once an omnipresent heritage and an ungraspable memorial object, revolutions have today again become, to use Edmund Burke’s famous phrase exhumed by Marx and Engles, ‘spectres haunting Europe’. They speak to us of the past but perhaps they are still announcing the future. Their universal legacy is, first of all, a concept. If the world ‘revolution’ is old, it is only after 1789 that it takes on, in all languages, its modern significance. Borrowed from astronomy, it was previously used to designate a ‘rotation’, meaning the re-establishment of stable institutions after a period of troubles. This is how the British defined their ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688… while the upheaval led by Cromwell in the 1640s was considered a ‘Civil War’. .. [US] their rebellion was a ‘War of Independence’ and one would have to wait two decades for it to become the ‘American Revolution’. 

P. 159 “Roman Law, Agamben argues, distinguished between auctoritas and potetas: the first embodied by a personal, physical, one could say ‘biopolitical’ authority; the second by a juridical and representative body. The state of exception was the junction of auctoritas and potestas, ‘Two heterogeneous yet coordinated elements’, in the figure of the dictator”. This distinction is the source of two opposed currents in the history of juridical thought: o the one hand, the thinkers of political sovereignty and, on the other, those of juridical positivism: decisionism versus normativism, the two traditions in embodied in the 20th century by Carl Schmitt and Hans Kelsey. Schmitt thinks of the state as forged and shaped by an existential and political will (Nomos); Kelsen, on the contrary, as a structure of formalised norms. The former posit is the priority of power; the later that of law. For decisionism, I is power that determines the norm, as the original source of any juridical system; for normativisim, on the contrary, it is the law that determines power, which exists only thanks to a system of rules that structure it. In fact, power is usually the resul of a combination of force and law… That is why Weber did not which to dissociate force (Macht) from legitimacy (Herrschaft).

P. 162 

“In the 1790s, the philosophical background of counterrevolution was irrationalism, which considered the idea of a world regulated by reason as downright nonsensical. Created by God, the world of Legitimism was organised by Providence, not reason… Burke, however, represented the ‘moderate’ current of counter-revolution; he was attached to the juridical framework of the British monarchy, had approved of American independence and looked positively on the development of market society. In continental Europe, counterrevolution was far more radical and sometimes took on an almost apocalyptic favour. It thinkers considered social and political inequalities to be just s natural as the vocation of human beings to obey their superiors. Contemptible and descpicable, mankind deserved only to be chastised. History was a torrent of blood, a perpetual massacre, a slaughter in which human beings were punished for their sins. Authority, hierarchy, discipline, tradition, submission and honour; these were the values of counterrevolution.”

P. 167 

“In the 1920s the profile of counterrevolution also changed.The collapse of the European dynastic order fixed by the Congress of Vienna.- what Karl Polanyi defined as “The Hundred Years Peace” – had rendered obsolete that philosophy which, for a century, had inspired the partisans of order and found its pillars in Catholicism, anti-republicanism and conservatism… the right became ‘revolutionary’ and conquered a mass support that it did not have, except for very short periods, in the previous century. .. Nationalism acquired symbols and rituals borrowed from a Jacobin model – the people in arms – previously abhorred. It’s leader, often of plebeian origins, had discovered politics in street fights and the revolutionary lexicon suited them better than parliamentary rhetoric.”

P. 184 

“For Ernst Bloch, the author of The Principle of Hope (1954-9), the dreams of a better world arise from the tensions of a ‘non-synchonic’ world, in which different and sometimes antipodal temporalities, belonging to different eras, coexist in the same social space. In his view, this heterogenous structure of historical time – he called it Ungleichzeitigkeit – is the source of utopian thinking and imagination, in which the past and the future merge to invent a new aesthetic and intellectual configurations. Thus, his work consisted primarily in excavating the past as an inexhaustible reservoir of experiences, ideas and objects that hear witness to the search for a liberated future: imprints, vestiges, traces (Spuren) of collective dreams, the images that portray a desired community of free and equal human beings. The principle of Hope, a three volume book like an impressive encyclopaedia of utopias, is paradoxically devoid of any prediction of a future world. It is rather a historical investigation of ‘future pasts’, a critical inventory of the innumerable ways in which people have gained or ‘anticipated’ the future down the ages… Bloch is a kind of archaeologist who, with incredible erudition, patiently unearths and recomposes the ‘daydreams’ of our ancestors : exhibitions, circuses, dancing, travel, songs, movies and more. Bloch analyses utopias inscribed into the entire spectrum of human knowledge, from medicine to architecture, via aesthetics and technology.. on the one hand there is the ‘cold stream’ of utopias prefiguring a hierarchical, authoritarian and oppressive order like Plato’s Republic, Saint-Simon’s New Industrial Order, and Etienne Cabet’s Icaria… on the other hand, the ‘warm stream’ of libertarian and communist utopias well represented by Thomas more, Charles Fourier and Karl Marx… in the 20th century, the apocalyptic age of wars and revolutions, utopias had become both concrete and possible, abandoning their previous character of abstract fantasy.”

P. 226 “In France and Western Europe, the word ‘intellectual’ is usually related to the Dreyfus affair, the political crisis that deeply shook the Third Republic. .. Before that the word existed and was used – infrequently – to designate certain new actors or modernity: scholars, writers, journalists, clerks, lawyers, in short people living by the pen. Th word often took a negative meaning. Unlike ‘intellect’, a noble human faculty – the ‘intellectual’ was cast as a modern, ‘cerebral’ agent, divorced from nature, condemned to sterile and uncreating thinking, shut inside an artificial world made of abstract values.”

P. 227 “Unlike in France, where intellectuals were well represented within the institutions of the Third Republic – above all the universities which, including the Sorbonne, were Dreyfusard bastions – in Germany the gulf between scholars (Gelehrte) and intellectuals (Intellektuelle) was almost insuperable and even deepened under the Weimar Republic. There, scholars belonged to state institutions, embodied science and order, and transformed the universities into strongholds of nationalism. Whereas academics educated the superior layers of state bureaucracy and selected the political elites, the real of intellectuals was located in civil society, outside the academy. Temples of tradition, some of the best inverse ties were located in small cities and rural regions. The intellectuals, on the contrary, were at home in the big cities, where they emerged with the rise of a powerful culture industry.”

P. 230 in Russia “they were a minority of outcasts, in a twofold sense: on the one hand, as a group of cultivated people in a nation of illiterate peasants, and on the other, as representatives of literature, journalism and liberal arts in a society with a still embryonic and repressed public sphere. Their clash against absolutism pushed them towards political radicalism, and tsarist despotism pushed them towards political radicalism.”

P. 239 “In contrast to anarchism, which always welcome bohemian artists and writers as its own natural representatives, Marxism looked at the intelligentsia which suspicious, never quite coming to terms with a strange actor that appeared simultaneously attractive and highly repulsive. Insofar as Marxist thinkers were themselves intellectuals – sociologically speaking at least – such paradoxical behaviour clearly revealed a crisis of identity and a reluctant self-definition. This uncanniness began with Marx and Engles …”

P. 245 “a) intellectuals are a bourgeois layer b) they can join the proletariat only by deserting their own class c) the proletariat needs the intellectuals in order to build its socialist ideology d) déclassé intellectuals – lumpen or bohemians – are an unstable and unreliable social stratum that tends to join the political reaction, as in France in 1848. One of the most striking aspects of this debate lay in self-negation: nobody was ready to admit that the overwhelming majority of Marxist leaders, activists and thinks were themselves déclassé intellectuals… Wedded to a teleological vision of history that posited the transition from capitalism to socialism as an ineluctable process bringing the triumph of science, culture, technological progress and a higher development of productive forces, Marxist thinkers could not imagine these colossal accomplishments being carried out by marginal actors.”

P. 246 “Michael Bakunin ,a wandering anarchists coming from the Russian aristocracy, lucidly recognised that the transition from the ruling classes to the radical left implied a willing declassement.”

P. 270 “‘Artists are often outsiders and transgressors,’ writes Michael Lowry, ‘but few of them embody as many boundary-defying qualities as Claude Cajun: lesbian, surrealist, dissident Marxist, non-Jewish Jew, photographer, poet, critic and Resistance activist. Claude Cahun was an heiress, in Bourdieu’s sense of the word, since she had bourgeois origins – her father was an established publisher and her uncle, the literary critic Marcel Schwab”

P. 278 “Whereas the introduction of Marxism in China expressed both the powerful attraction of European modernity and a critical reassessment of Confucian culture, in Dutch Indonesia it reflected a new relationship between nationalism, anti-imperialism and the Islamic tradition amongst a young generation of intellectuals who, like their Chinese comrades, had experienced both Japanese and Western emigration. This was the case of Tan Malala.. introduced to Marxism by Hank Sneevliet, one of the leaders of Dutch socialism and a founder of the Indonesian Community Party. …  during the 1920s .. ravelled throughout the east, from China to Thailand, from the Philippines to Singapore, as an agent of the Communist International, being arrested several times. 

P. 334 “Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of one party – however numerous they may be – is no freedom at all. Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently. Not because of any fanatical concept of ‘justice’ but because all that is instructive, wholesome and purifying in political freedom depends on this essential characteristic, and its effectiveness vanishes when ‘ freedom’ becomes a special privilege.” Rosa Luxembourg, The Russian Revolution.

P. 380 Herbert Marcuse “Freedom is living without toil, without anxiety: the play of human faculties. The realisation of freedom is a problem of time: reducing of the working day to the minimum which turns quantity into quality. A socialist society is a society in which free time, not labour time is the social measure of wealth and the dimension of the individual existence.” (Preface 1957 to Marxism and Freedom: From 1776 Until Today.

P. 446

 1920 “the Bolsheviks organised a Congress of the People’s of the East in Baku, Azerbaijan Society Socialist Republic which convened almost 2,000 delegates from 29 Asian nationalities … despite their small number among the delegates, women played an important role in the discussions. The chairmanship was equal – two male and two female presidents – and the question of women’s rights was put on the agenda. The Turkish feminist Najiye Hanukkah insisted that there was no national liberation without women’s emancipation and claimed a complete civil and political equality for women in the East. Their struggle, she emphasised, went well beyond “the right to walk in the street without wearing the chador”. … congress prefiguring “what today would be called intersectionality”.