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I just wrote a nice long piece, previewed it, pushed the back button and lost it. So this will be quick and dirty.

I recognized so much that was plainly true in Kauffman’s distaste for personal testimony and deploring the cult of individualism. I have always disliked super-heroes and “great man” theories of history.

On the other hand, once you’ve been raised an individualist it is hard not to feel free. It is also hard not to notice that you are alone and limited to your own eyes and skin. And don’t we all—especially women—long for autonomy?

On the other, other, hand we know people don’t always deserve their fates; we can’t survive on our own unaided efforts. Don’t we all crave connection?

It is hard to imagine a satisfying body of literature that isn’t full of subjects who motivate the stories. Why do we even tell stories? Abstract characters are not very interesting.

I can’t help thinking that there’s “good” testimony and “bad” testimony. One is complex, examines the context of subjectivity, acknowledges chance; the other merely gloats or whines. Or worse—is completely fabricated to sell a product—isn’t that “the ideology of freedom through self-expression”?

Kauffamn clearly believes in justice. There can be no justice without subjects capable of making choices. Kauffman’s very reasons for deploring the co-option of feminism and the commoditization of the personal are that they narrow rather than expand the possibilities of thinking and acting.

It seems a contradiction but I don’t think it is. Individualism is not the same as subjectivity, and we do make choices. Maybe the important thing is not whether the choices are free but whether they are just—-based on “right” thinking. So the challenge for the feminist is not to be seduced by the culture’s rewards and apparent validation of false consciousness. The feminist challenge is to discover what right thinking is and how—or whether—it can break “language’s mastery” over us, that is, the power of ideology to keep us from understanding the contexts of our choices.