1969
As a political scientist, one would be
irresponsible if one were not to include within the study of the political, the
study of the social and of the economic.
Such a statement is clearly correct, and yet fraught with problems,
since it is, for one, too agreeable to liberals, who will tend to think that
this means that politics proper, as it has been understood by the discipline of
political science, is and should be the primary focus of political studies, but
that, of course, one must also consider the social and the economic as
important foci as well. Communist
political science, with its prioritization of the economic, calls the primacy
of the political into question, even as it remains more deserving of the
name 'science' than does the study of the political in a liberal framework,
such as what passes as 'political science' in most American and Commonwealth
political science departments. We can see the primacy of the economic as in comportment with historical consciousness, and thus as progress in the way the the process of consciousness is progress. The
social, however, in some respects, has now emerged, via the same mechanisms of historical consciousness, as the more important focus
of political science.
1969 represents and stands as the
height of the relevance of the social to the political, in the same manner that
Year II (1793-1794) of the French Revolution stands as the height of
consciousness of the political. The
portent of 1969 as a nexus, culmination, and example, is the scientization of
the social, but, as it were, under the aegis of the political. 1969 represents then, the possibility of the
social as the primary focus of the study of the political, of political
science. The social as the primary focus of political science is very different
from doing what is understood more broadly as 'social science'. That said, I am not writing here about
taxonomic debates within a deconstructionist mode, which latter, albeit perhaps
historically necessary, falsely aggrandizes the role of language in (free and
conscious) thought, and which has helped lay ruin to the liberatory potential
of semiotics.
We have reached the point in history
where the social scientist who does not present and consider herself or himself
revolutionary must always seem like somewhat
of a coward and like one confused; a point where a social science that
does not have a political program, a historical consciousness, and which does
not operate from the premise that radical (real) democracy is a precondition,
is doomed to imposture in relation to its attempt to stand as objective. As the French Revolution instantiated the
revolutionary as 'politician', 1969 as the pinnacle of many Western social
movements, established the social revolutionary as politician, as the focus of
political science at the personal level.
Stonewall, as a social rebellion of the most oppressed, established the
social as the political in respect of the fact that that gay men, bisexual men
and women, lesbian women, and trans persons who rebelled against the guard dogs
of the establishment (its proxy and interface with the people), can now be
called politicians, since their role in political history is more important
than that of more than half of the persons who commonly carry the name
'politician' in liberal systems.
The social remains the realm in which the most
oppressed - L.G.B.T.Q. persons, women, Native Americans, African-Americans, and
others, have been forced to express the political. The delegitimization of this realm appears as
liberal inclusion of the social under the political. The proper prioritization
of the social is paradoxically brought about by political liberalism as it
exists as an apparatus of capital, and simultaneously made impossible by this
apparatus. Thus, when we consider the
High Revolution (1793-1794) as the
pinnacle of the political-as-the-political, that is, of class consciousness of
the political as its redefinition of such in mostly bourgeois but also
protoproletarian terms, we can see the High Social Revolution which can be said
to have culminated in 1969 in the West, and the actions of L.G.B.T.Q. persons
on June 28, 1969, as more clearly political actions, and can say of these L.G.B.T.Q. persons, that they were politicians. The primacy of the social in the
examination of politics, on the general level, both delegitimizes mere
examination as the practice of the political scientist, and clears the space
for the understanding, formerly barred from the political, that
heteronormativity is now the primary problem posed to political science.
Dorothy Allison wrote, "I believe in the
truth in the manner of someone of who has been denied any use of it." We who have been denied 'political' as a
description of what we do, especially when it refuses the mendacity of what
constitutes and what does not constitute politics (e.g. queer cruising, women's
daily life at home) do not subscribe to the liberal legitimization of the false
political (the realm of abusive, public heterosexual masturbation known as
'society'), but rather to our historical consciousness of what the social has
been in relation to the political causes us to rename the political, that is,
to align it with the reality of what it is.
A social movement in this view, is mass political consciousness which
delineates (and tries to execute) a plan of action against the traditional
political. 1969, as the height of many
social movements, represents the hope and promise and active living out, of the
redefinition of the political.
