Response to Kathleen R. Arnold's review of Welfare Reform and Sexual Regulation

Extract

Let me begin by thanking Kathleen R. Arnold for her comments and Jeffrey Isaac for the invitation to participate in this exchange. Clearly, Kathleen and I are both indebted to the Marxist and Foucauldian traditions. For my part, however, I find the Gramscian insistence on the historically specific, complex, and contradictory character of every historical bloc and hegemonic institution more compelling than the social theories that envision the social structure as a closed totality (Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri) or construct state power in an ahistorical and one-dimensional manner (Giorgio Agamben). Contemporary welfare reform, for example, resembles the racially exclusionary “substitute father” rule of Aid to Families with Dependent Children. But welfare reform, with its workfare requirement, child support enforcement, family cap, fatherhood programming, abstinence education, and marriage promotion dimensions, is also somewhat unique. The Gramscian paradigm encourages us to be skeptical when it appears as if the state in a late-modern developed society is becoming either a simple instrument of capital that is obediently shrinking into irrelevance, or an omnipotent machine whose seamless coherence and unbroken continuity leaves democratic forces absolutely no strategic opportunity for constructing a counterhegemonic bloc and fighting back.