Promiscuous Relations

Robert McRuer (bio)

A review of Robbins, Bruce. The Beneficiary, Duke University Press, 2017.

Bruce Robbins opens The Beneficiary with a 1948 State Department memo written by George F. Kennan. The memo acknowledges a stark disparity between the United States and the rest of the world (the U.S. held 50% of the world’s wealth but had little more than 6% of its population). Kennan encourages the development of relations that would sustain that disparity. Robbins’s point in opening with this secret memo is to argue that many people would now find its explicit call for inequality between the U.S. and other countries embarrassing; he suggests that the embarrassment implies the existence of a perhaps unexpected strong cosmopolitanism, a developed belief that there actually is something wrong with such disparity and inequality. This anecdote allows Robbins to introduce the central topic of his book, the beneficiary, or rather the discourse of the beneficiary.

A beneficiary in Robbins’s study is one whose privileges and comfort depend, in various direct or indirect ways, on the suffering of others. The discourse of the beneficiary is at times in implicit conversation with certain Marxist arguments that point to the ways in which commodities appear while the labor that generated them is erased. The discourse of the beneficiary is generally more about those perceived to be very distant others, and often generates guilt that may or may not be alleviated by various humanitarian efforts. This is in contrast, as Robbins makes clear, to Marxism’s emphasis on nearness, solidarity, and direct political transformation. The Beneficiary thus of necessity engages a complex history of humanitarianism, illustrating many of its problems and pitfalls. Robbins acknowledges from the outset that we are all beneficiaries; anyone likely to be reading his book is already in a position to reflect on his or her beneficial relation to the rest of the world. The discourse of the beneficiary is, in fact, Robbins contends, always spoken to and by the beneficiary: to and by those whose privilege in some ways depends upon unjust relations. Even workers in quite dire circumstances in the U.S. are positioned in Robbins’s analysis as beneficiaries in relation to the rest of the world; it is perhaps controversial but actually important to his concluding argument (which considers immigrant workers in the U.S. who send remittances back to their home countries) that Robbins partially brackets more localized disparities (say, within the metropole, or within the U.S.) to reflect globally on the discourse of the beneficiary: those living below the poverty level of $11,000 in the U.S., including many immigrant workers, he points out, still have incomes in the top 15% globally. Robbins draws this figure from William MacAskill’s Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference; MacAskill makes clear that these figures of comparison have been corrected to account for the differential value of a dollar in different global locations (19).

The discourse of the beneficiary is now quite entrenched and might in fact be said to generate what Lauren Berlant calls cruel optimism. As the history of humanitarianism makes very clear, sincerely-desired, optimistic efforts on the part of beneficiaries to redress the injustices upon which our world depends often or usually risk participating in those very injustices. At the very least, humanitarianism reifies an agentic “us” always and everywhere helping a passive and objectified “them.” The discourse of the beneficiary, however, cannot be entirely dispensed with; ultimately it is from within that discourse or other compromised discourses that the imagination (arguably the key player in The Beneficiary) works to generate possibilities. Put differently, the discourse of the beneficiary can be worked with and through. Late in The Beneficiary, Robbins suggests that a quotation from John Berger could well have served as the epigraph to the book: “The world is not intolerable until the possibility of transforming it exists but is denied” (qtd. 126). For ancient Greeks, for example, slavery was not intolerable because they could not imagine a world without slavery. In the U.S., slavery did eventually become intolerable because an abolitionist discourse existed that—despite its various weaknesses—pointed to the possibility of transforming the system. The discourse of the beneficiary is indeed inevitably compromised, but it is from within that discourse that the imagination accesses the idea that the world might be configured otherwise.

Jean-Paul Sartre, Virginia Woolf, Jamaica Kincaid, Naomi Klein, and a range of other writers play an important role in Robbins’s study as he traces the twists and turns of the discourse of the beneficiary and the history of humanitarianism; the literary imagination, as this list might suggest, has often allowed for sustained reflection on the beneficiary. In the first chapter, Robbins works through the utilitarian humanitarianism of Peter Singer and others in Larissa MacFarquhar’s study Strangers Drowning. Singer’s image of a child drowning in a shallow pond (from which MacFarquhar’s study of “do-gooders” draws its title) serves as the starting point: if you walked by a child drowning in a shallow pond, you would not think twice about wading in and rescuing that child. Utilitarian humanitarianism seeks to extend this seemingly self-evident obligation; your obligation to distant, unseen children should be the same as that obligation to the child drowning. Thus, in his famous essay reflecting on a 1971 famine in Bangladesh, Singer asks how it could be possible not to do everything we can to alleviate the hunger there. Robbins concludes that Singer asks too much and too little, because on the one hand the call for alleviating distant injustice through sacrifice is unlikely to be taken up by many beneficiaries, and on the other, Singer’s attention to beneficiaries and nonbeneficiaries is insufficiently political. Singer’s appalled reaction to the famine is not, in Robbins’s view, properly attentive to the political causes of that famine, which could have easily been traced (and potentially altered).

I would underscore fiercely Robbins’s sense that Singer’s utilitarian philosophy is insufficiently political and would add that it can be read as actually self-serving. This is because, across his career, Singer’s utilitarianism is selectively or even capriciously appalled in ways that could position many of his ideas as outright inhumanitarianism, as when he argues that it could be morally wrong (taking into account the greatest good for the greatest number) to not kill infants with various severe disabilities. Arguably in both the example Robbins examines (the famine) and the one he avoids (Singer’s notorious views on disability), there is something to critique about the self-righteousness of a beneficiary like Singer, whose knowing, self-satisfied and consolidated subjectivity–a subjectivity consolidated in and through how he navigates the discourse of the beneficiary–essentially allows him to decide (and to dictate to “you”) who must be rescued through sacrifice and who should be killed.

The central figure across The Beneficiary is not Peter Singer but George Orwell. Robbins focuses in his next chapter on a particular assertion in Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier that for people in England to live in relative comfort, “a hundred million Indians must live on the verge of starvation.” It may not be an easy or welcome recognition that such “evil” relations exist, but “you acquiesce in it every time you step into a taxi or eat a plate of strawberries and cream” (qtd. 9). Robbins uses Orwell’s belief in an unjust global, capitalist system to reflect on later developments in the history of the discourse of the beneficiary, especially world systems theory, which has posited that the metropolitan Global North systemically depends upon extractions from the Global South. World systems theory may be more directly political than utilitarian humanitarianism, but still generates for Robbins one of the central problems that he locates in the discourse of the beneficiary: an “economic Orientalism” that sustains a too neat (and basically exoticizing) division between an “us” and “them.” We have learned, from Edward Said on, to critique discourses that so fully sediment an us/them logic, and world systems theory arguably generates, Robbins says, an “economic Orientalism.” Like the discourse of the beneficiary more generally, however, this compromised logic is still a site where the imagination generates alternatives.

Robbins is very concrete about compromised imaginations in the central chapters of The Benificiary. He demonstrates first, in an engaging history of “commodity recognition,” that our awareness of the way commodities reach us, and of the way labor and suffering are erased in the process, has often had a misogynist core. A key example here is the figure of Nicole shopping in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night: “as the whole system swayed and thundered onward it lent a feverish bloom to such processes of hers as wholesale buying” (qtd. 57). We learn to “see” the commodity and the exploitation and erasure of labor embedded in it by looking at the figure of the woman. However misogynist this discourse has been, Robbins insists that it provides a place from which other writers imaginatively consider alternatives. This includes feminist writers in the 19^th and early 20^th century who recognized the ways in which women were essentially being cast as commodity recognition’s magic sign and who began to shape politics that might configure relations of consumption and production differently.

Similarly, however compromised nationalist discourses may obviously be, Robbins suggests that the welfare state and its insistence that injustice can be alleviated emerged from within those discourses. This attention to what the welfare state made possible is important to the rest of the book and is a significant contribution of The Beneficiary. There are good reasons for contemporary cultural theory’s critique of the state, especially given how thoroughly the neoliberal capitalist state has lubricated the worst excesses of capitalism of the past 40 years. And yet Robbins dares to ask whether engagement with the state might be necessary, non-innocent as that engagement might be. Robbins makes this point especially with regards to discussions, in the second half of the book, of the climate emergency, which simply cannot be addressed solely at the level of an anarchistic local politics.

A central contribution of The Beneficiary for me emerges in (and beyond) Robbins’s chapter on Naomi Klein. The word queer never appears in The Beneficiary, but Robbins’s chapter on Klein can be read as queer theory and placed in conversation with the global, materialist turn that queer theory has taken in the past few decades. The chapter in question is titled “Naomi Klein’s Love Story.” Klein’s oeuvre from No Logo forward posits that capitalists run from particular kinds of relations in order to maximize profit. Robbins asks, provocatively, whether this description of the behavior of multinational corporations (they use people and leave them) is fully an analysis of capitalism or whether it is, even more, an analysis of men or masculinism. I would argue that Robbins’s description of Klein’s alternative to capitalist relations is queer in the broad sense:

her critique of corporate irresponsibility must also presuppose some alternative vision of commitment or relationship, whether achieved or not, that would perhaps be longer-term and certainly would be emotionally more fulfilling. Erotic inclinations and the possibility of their satisfaction are politically relevant, even politically indispensable. Perhaps what we are dealing with is, after all, a kind of love story. (emphasis added) (102)

This idea—that erotic inclinations and the possibility of their satisfaction are politically indispensable—is, for me, one of the central contributions of The Beneficiary.

The belief in “longer-term commitment” might sound conservative (or at least not particularly or obviously queer), but I would say that Robbins is actually teasing out the ways in which Klein is a promiscuous global theorist who uses outward-looking erotic inclinations to imagine otherwise. Promiscuous is a word that only appears once in The Beneficiary, in relation to Woolf’s observations of a “promiscuous mix of luxuries” and necessities on the London docks (), but I’m arguing that a queer, imaginative promiscuity, positioned by Robbins as globally indispensable, is made available in The Beneficiary as a path for reading Klein’s analysis of global injustice. Queer theorists have often lamented that our concerns in relation to gender, sexuality, and desire have been positioned as secondary or subsidiary to the (materialist, economic) concerns of supposedly “real” politics. The global turn in queer theory (at least since Licia Fiol-Matta’s groundbreaking 2002 A Queer Mother for the Nation: The State and Gabriela Mistral) has made clear that issues of gender, sexuality, and desire are in fact always imbricated in, and help to both sustain and contest, relations of power, and that our analyses of relations of power are necessarily incomplete without attention to these issues. By insisting that erotic inclinations are politically indispensable, that indeed a materialist politics must take them seriously in order to understand both the current state of the world and how it might be changed, Robbins is at least in the neighborhood of this indispensable queer work. Robbins makes it possible to understand Klein’s writing, I would argue, as an example of what the late queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz calls “cruising utopia.”

This is of course a strong claim and is not in any obvious way Robbins’s intent. I think it’s a claim worth making in the interest of not marginalizing questions of desire and eros in our conversations about global disparities (and not marginalizing queer theory, which—in spite of the global turn it has taken—is still not engaged as much as it might be by theorists of political economy more generally). Robbins ends the chapter on Klein with a sexualized image—”roommates with benefits”—that, he suggests, might be more appropriate for shaping a global ethos than the masculinist corporate ethos of use-them-and-leave-them. The metaphor of roommates with benefits emerges both when Robbins reads Klein’s meditation on London Fog in No Logo from the perspective of shops in Toronto and sweatshops in the Philippines, and from his provocative analysis of remittances sent home to the Philippines and elsewhere from workers abroad (remittances from elsewhere account for 10% of the country’s GDP). Robbins does not ultimately find Klein’s thoughts on reinventing the connections between consumers in Toronto and workers in Manila entirely satisfying; there are in fact no entirely satisfying answers in The Beneficiary, and perhaps that necessarily fuels the politicized erotic imagination Robbins traces in Klein. Again, however, Robbins sees within Klein’s meditation a will to imagine something else that could begin to undermine the global disparities that are the focus of Klein’s work generally. Remittances, likewise, are hardly the answer to global inequalities, but for Robbins they show both that the us/them logic of economic Orientalism is already inadequate for comprehending our world and the recognition that multiple agents are (promiscuously) engaged in imagining relations between supposed beneficiaries and non-beneficiaries otherwise.

Robbins’s analysis of Klein’s promiscuous approach emerges from a mother/daughter connection: the activist Bonnie Klein described her daughter, before she became an anti-globalization writer/activist, as mainly thinking about the question: “what’s wrong with having a good time?” (). Robbins argues that Naomi Klein continually tries to sustain a concern with pleasure and balance it with a concern for injustice, putting forward in the process what Robbins describes as a politics of “global justice for selfish people” (101). Bonnie Klein’s question animates the chapter, and as part of the queer moves he makes in it, Robbins takes the question quite seriously. The argument in the chapter is arguably queer because it does not dismiss pleasure as trivial—as, say, Peter Singer might as he consolidates a humanitarian subjectivity—but rather sits with pleasure and weaves it through his analysis. Klein is always in danger, as Robbins makes clear, of slipping into the self-righteousness that I earlier identified with Singer, but it is the imaginative eros of her project that saves her from going there.

Robbins’s title for this chapter doesn’t need to acknowledge more of Bonnie Klein’s own work, and he in fact may not be very familiar with it. Interestingly, the chapter title (probably inadvertently) flips the title of one of Bonnie Klein’s early documentaries, Not a Love Story: A Film about Pornography (1981), about the supposed abuses of the pornography industry. It’s an incredibly-compromised documentary that is very much of its time (in the U.S., this is right before the height of the feminist “sex wars” that pitted anti-pornography and “pro-sex” feminists against each other). It positions pornography as a form of violence against women through its objectification of those supposedly trapped within the industry. Despite the limitation (and in many ways predictability) of the documentary, it’s interesting to think of it in relation to Robbins’s larger points about imagination emerging out of even extremely compromised sites (such as, earlier, the misogyny of commodity recognition, or the nationalism of the welfare state). The young Naomi Klein would have undoubtedly internalized Not a Love Story‘s theses about masculinist exploitation, lack of responsibility, use of women’s bodies, fear of commitment, and so forth, even as she also (to judge by her later work) came of age alongside other more generative feminist alternatives. The promiscuous theory that Naomi Klein ultimately develops (“what’s wrong with having a good time?”) could be said to push through and beyond a hard-line anti-sex or anti-pleasure position to a queer place where alternative and multiple kinds of relations might be imagined.

Robbins rightly identifies Bonnie Klein as a disability activist; she is perhaps as well known for her work in and on disability culture following strokes that she experienced in 1987 as she is for Not a Love Story. Her work includes the memoir Slow Dance: A Story of Stroke, Love and Disability (1997) and the documentary Shameless: The ART of Disability (2006). The word disability only appears in Robbins’s study when Bonnie Klein is first mentioned (she is identified as a disability activist). Given this secondary context in which Naomi Klein came of age, however, I found myself wondering (as I often have when thinking about Naomi Klein’s work) whether disability theory also provides a site for understanding Klein’s oeuvre and searching for ways of imagining with and beyond the discourse of the beneficiary. The discourse of the beneficiary, after all, is in many ways a discourse of health, vigor, capacity, and—arguably—able-bodiedness. In contrast, non-beneficiaries are often literally disabled: by the toxic or backbreaking conditions in which they work, by exhaustion from long and inhumane hours, by conditions that inevitably generate mental distress (female maquiladora workers on the U.S.-Mexican border, for instance, exhibit astronomical rates of depression). The Beneficiary at times, if rarely, bumps up against this point about disability, as for instance when Robbins notes Orwell’s discussion of an Indian’s legs being smaller than an Englishman’s arms.

Disability activism at its best has generated an awareness of these global embodied differences, and as some disabled people in the West, especially over the past few decades, are clearly made into beneficiaries, they have often sustained an outward-looking vision that marks an awareness that bodies like theirs in other locations suffer more. Robbins concludes his final full chapter by arguing that young people who are beneficiaries are “more and more capable of seeing and knowing the system they live on and explaining the discomfort that goes with that” (138). It’s a cautiously optimistic note in the text, but begs the question of whether such critical epistemologies (or, we might say, cripistemologies) might be likewise germinating in other groups yearning to work through and beyond the discourse of the beneficiary. A crip outward-looking disability politics of solidarity, based on a phenomenological awareness that certain bodily experiences are in some ways shared and similarly marginalized elsewhere, is actually a nice contrast to the inward-looking utilitarian humanism of Singer which—as I’ve suggested—has no problem arguing that some disabled children should perhaps be killed.

Reading Robbins’s text through disability is perhaps as unexpected as reading it through queer theory. And yet, in explaining why Orwell is central to his project, Robbins argues that Orwell is a “heroic figure that recognized the inequality between rich and poor at the global scale was a massive hindrance to political progress anywhere” (136). Orwell kept searching, Robbins continues, “for evidence that [such inequality] was not as immovable as it seemed, and he found some” (136). In reading The Beneficiary in part through queer and disability theory, my point is to underscore that queer and disabled theorists and activists—like the young people Robbins invokes a page later, and like antiracist and indigenous activists, and many other groups—are similarly among those searching for evidence that global inequality between rich and poor is not as immovable as it seems. Robbins does not and cannot ultimately provide answers to these entrenched conundrums, but The Beneficiary is a book that invites us to look towards sites where multiple subjects (and of course not just individuals) are searching for and finding evidence that inequality is not as immovable as it seems. And, as Robbins modestly concludes in a final reflection on young people’s discomfort with our moment, “Perhaps something will come of it” (138).

Work Cited

• MacAskill, William. Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference. Penguin, 2015.