The Constitution of Interests: Beyond the Politics of Rights by John Brigham

Author:John Brigham [Brigham, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Civil Rights, Political Science, General
ISBN: 9780814712863
Google: bv0UCgAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 10673349
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 1996-12-01T00:00:00+00:00

Consciousness Rising

Perhaps the epitome of outrage toward law derives from abolitionism, the early nineteenth-century struggle against slavery. In this movement, leaders like Frederick Douglass, the black author and activist, William Lloyd Garrison, publisher of The Liberator, and John Brown, the radical abolitionist of Harper’s Ferry, carried outrage into political practice. In the visage of John Brown, especially in the view of him we get from Thomas Hart Benton’s imagist portrait, we have an American enraged. The result is the political mobilization of anger. Of Brown’s radicalism, which history has refused to separate from his rage, Frederick Douglass wrote: “He denounced slavery in look and language fierce and bitter; thought that slaveholders had forfeited their right to live; that the slaves had the right to gain their liberty in any way they could; did not believe that moral suasion would ever liberate the slave, or that political action would abolish the system.” 3 Brown’s raid on the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry falls somewhere between the armed resistance of the Civil War itself, which by the conventions of politics we ascribe another status, and the political activity of legal reform.

In politics, where the distribution of power (both active and passive) is the subject, consciousness is a precondition. Spoken of most broadly, to be conscious—or even unconscious—is to be in some mental state in relation to others. The women’s movement traditionally has focused on consciousness. As noninstrumental awareness or denial, consciousness is about the forms of politics rather than within them. Like the courtla of southern African triballife, in which the entire tribe discusses a subject until it has been discussed enough,4 outcomes are affected discursively. Recent scholarship points out how discursive practices operate in ideological struggles where they are not transformative. In contemporary thought, the body as metaphor in politics has been the subject of a good deal of work by women.5 Most dramatically, the politics of abortion has made the body its subject; it has redefined who and what is inside or outside, and what is on its own.

Cruelty is implicit in domination, as Kate Millett’s compelling conclusions on sexual politics demonstrate. Her aim is at the tendency of even the most traumatic social relations to mask the force behind them. Millett calls our attention to the fact that “[w]hen a system of power is thoroughly in command, it has scarcely need to speak itself aloud; when its workings are exposed and questioned, it becomes not only subject to discussion, but even to change”6 The link between rage and social relations is so embedded in law and systems of power that it is hard to put in words, yet it is an essential quality of the radical legal form.7

Consciousness-raising is not about confrontation with the obvious and widely accepted. That is, it is not the “ordinary” response in a system that operates hegemonically. Altered consciousness or ideology is, in fact, counterhegemonic. It counters that which dominates because it comes from seeing the obvious in the not widely accepted. Thus, consciousness is linked with rage, as captured in this 1978 statement by Andrea Dworkin: “The oppressor .

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