Wherefore art thou feminism, when women seem to be the conservative sex?
Some few may notice, as fewer would admit: When they have any connection to social power, in a destiny many have, so valiantly and with productive inventions to which we are all indebted, resisted, women are quite typically the more conservative sex. This is especially true today because the state is both an absolutist one in ways that are normally concealed and this domination operates through psychological management.
There are forms of resistance to and struggle against this, which, badly articulated, in America have been leaving corpses in schools and recently elected a far-right president, that, though plainly reactionary, it would behoove the left to better understand (liberals only do, and I suspect by the logic of the system and their commitments to and in it can, in order to try to police it), that have their roots not or not only in the naughty misogyny of adolescent men who needed to better adapt à la Klein and Winnicott to the need to renounce violent aggression rooted in ambivalence allowing ‘hate’ (Melanie Klein’s effective Christian, Manichaean refutation of Manichaeanism: politically wielded, this means evil are those who think to be good is to oppose evil) with a recognition of the ‘good enough’ character of those who might be recognized as welcoming us as we should them, a social and political heritage persons that derives in part from having been nurtured, overwhelmingly by women acting as mothers, as children. They are also rooted not just in the psychology of malefactive deviants (typically men), but also the sociology of the uses of female empowerment in the corporate state, which is our dominant form of governance, as it has been throughout the industrialized world since about 1917, because the war then fought to defend European colonial empires ended several of them and led after the even more horribly destructive war that was its sequel to the end of the others. (The last African colonialist state was South Africa, the last Middle Eastern one is the one waging this war of extermintion of colonial subjects, now apparently not needed even in their bare lives, in Palestine. The patriarchal bourgeois society remained aligned with an aristocracy was replaced with the corporate state that, in the not always nor entirely mistaken guise of the hated‘left-liberal’ progressivism, is the real object of hatred of the far right, especially in the United States given the persistent legacy of slavery and the recalcitrant refusal to give in of so many of its would-be, usually impoverished or declassé white, beneficiaries.) That corporate state has its problems, and the two were always linked, but fighting in it only patriarchal and colonial relics will not do, especially now.
That psychological management is fundamentally conservative, and its adepts who are inevitably more ‘feminine’ than ‘masculine’ at least in, almost if not absolutely, all ways we can recognize, are almost inevitably more attuned to personal ways of thinking, attentive to their own more affective vulnerablility and others need for their nurturance, women are less likely than men to see this in the distanced way that allows for negation and is requisite to any critical understanding. (I sincerely. hope as we all do and must that none of this is ‘really’ true, and of course it is not, as it cannot be, necessarily so). This makes them more apt to serve as unwitting enforcers. There is a way in which the psychological form of power is almost inevitable as long as there is a powerful corporate state employing many people in various kinds of management, and the widespread parity and inclusion of women in management roles that gender equality requires, and that, in other ways more than this, are salutary and rightly demanded, means they will effectively be a conservative force as long as the political has some basis in institutional or organized social life and social management. This is often manifest as their greater need for solicitude, defended by their keener, enforceable, emotional intelligence. And of course the police society's uses of psychology to nip all dissidence in the bud on the pretense that someone is or might be offended.
A feminism of the left, being opposed to patriarchy as a form of domination and not, or not only, to the mere preponderance of males as unfair distribution of goods and resources including uses of social power, which is a liberal project that does not and could not challenge the corporate state many women rightly prefer to the familial rule of fathers or husbands whose implicit claim is own them, can quite easily share the same disenchantment, even disgust, as the (male) author of the above nasty remarks. The feminist and sexual revolutions were part of a shift from a form of capitalism where most businesses were run by families led by fathers, who were figures of power identified, as in Roman antiquity, with an imperial warring state, to a corporate bureaucratic state form run by professional managers trained at universities, structurally independent of social identities even when in their conservatism they usefully relied on the older social forms. The former subjugated people explicitly, as in colonialism, the latter more through forming their desires, as with the market, with violent state power in places of affluence and not squalor being only the last resort. Though it is still capitalism. And it is ugly not only, if not least, because of that violent state power and the institution of squalor that is partly what it defends. This shift like so many was driven by demands and work from below, coopted from above. The old forms persist in the new ones, though what we can oppose in them is not that only, unless we are content to join in promoting what is in ultimately the liberalism of a rear guard. In practice, what this probably means is that ‘politics’ in the governmental sense can only pursue, in ways the leaders organize and manage, limited ends, after ‘the poets’ and others have clarified them, following the fruitful social chaos, with governmentality and the political having different relationships to time, which means the ‘site’ of the political is above all art, since that is where people in crisis do the work of thinking, often less in theorizing than in practice, the form of social life, which is my definition of the political.
In American culture almost uniquely political discourse meets with a concerted and personalizing opposition that usually styles itself as censorship of bad manners, psychological deviance, or (which amounts to the same thing) an imputed latent disposition to crime. This is bound to happen almost anytime anything you say (or write, or are believed, assumed, or imagined by ad hoc detractors to have left implied as a possible interpretation of any published work of thought or art) anything that anyone can take personally because they suppose it is addressed to them or impugns (criticizes, says something about) them. Those who say that “there is no free speech” are right, especially in America, for this reason and in this way — though they don’t have to be, and would not be if our corporate state and its corresponding culture were not like that, the legal system supportive of it, or if enough people did not allow this. This is the way of a privatized culture, which is the culture of fascism. It is the culture out of which fascism develops, upon which it is based, and which becomes it in its last resorts when it remains, in both institutional and cultural forms, privatized. In fascist and totalitarian societies, as in the corporate world, there is no political character of social life, except in the pseudo-politicizing form of some highly dictated, government (official party) or media-driven, social movements that are distinguishable by posturings and iteration of memes more than any genuine thought or contestations that are not simply exclusionary and moralizing, as in cancel culture, a phenomenon not of the left but the pseudo-left, a form of right-wing liberalism.
This is supported by styles of femininity that are conservative, and for that reason, one that may be almost natural yet cannot be called necessary since all explicit social forms and behaviors are plastic, malleable, subject to change by collective will as formed in concerted contestations. Which is part of the significance, clearly, of transexualism: given identities, including those of gender and sex, can be transformed, and there is no natural body (or pseudo-natural social ‘body’, which is what every national and, in any sense, regional or particular imagined community is) determining the governance of thought and potentiality, what people can do with their physical and virtual, corporeal and intellectual, or ‘spiritual’, selves. You can affirm the way you are as you find yourself to be in your situation, place and time, where, inevitably, we also must say, yes, here we are. It makes no sense (or is fascist) to try to enforce this givenness or legislate it, give you your law, on the grounds of what is given. How, or ‘what’ or ‘who’, we are is also plastic, malleable, subject to transformation, as it is to question, and modern (capitalist) conditions of life have rendered how we are in the world a question and a problem, and not just the defensive one of needing to avert environmental destruction, ostensibly to protect our form of life or merely remaining alive at all, even barely, which now is both happening as unintended consequences of the current global economic system as well as the intended policy of aggressive states. For this I believe it is most salutary to try to be as minimally ideological and concerned with elaborating our own possible identities as we can. Maybe it starts with cultivating not yourself and your garden but our solidarities. Maybe that starts with something like love.
Women, who historically were indeed as in renown, for reasons that have seemed ‘naturally’ (and who knows, now, as history is not destiny), so much better (though with equal fame and infamy not always) at this last just mentioned named thing, or activity, are not worse than men, which is one reason they must have equality in the public sphere and life of the state, but they are not better than men either. Who needs to believe that, and for what purpose? A normatively ‘feminine’ state and society (now there’s a bogeyman!) will not be happier or more just than a normatively masculine one, only different in its styles of living more and less well and freely. A left politics is not about kinds of persons; it is about ways of thinking, of acting, of living together. It cannot free people to be who they really are, because of who they really are, since there is no such thing, except in some of the personalizing mythologies of the state. I ask not who I am but what I can do (and does this really depend on who I or we ‘are’?), in the situation at hand, and what we can do together, even while continuing, I admit, to worry often about what the people I am with are (being? acting?) like, and how I am, our ethos, or character, that substance of the work of thinking that was called ethics, the ethical questioning that is part of the political that is a work of thinking no less than the, always more urgent, governmental or business activities (ultimately the same, a happy fact since they depend essentially not on capital but work) that we as activists we concern ourselves with of getting things done. Meanwhile, some activists get together and share their likes and needs as to ethics; they are right to, and I wish them luck.
Yet. As I like to be provocative, I will end this piece by doing what in French we call to lancer un défi. I know I am not alone in saying that I look back on more than half a lifetime of being treated nastily, and yes often in ways I consider horribly wrongful, especially in this conservative society, by functionaries of the capitalist state and people acting similarly. And I have found, unrelentingly, that it is more often women than men, performing what I do not hesitate to call fuckovers. This is a notion easily sexualized in our exploitationist consumer culture, which as the film critic I also am I well know; yet that is not what I mean. There are fuckovers worse than rape, and women can participate in them as easily as men, and to tell someone to fuck off is not to threaten sexual violence. So many feminists in my generation could only assert the contrary. This was effectively a premptive war against political dissent and all that goes with and contributes to it. And feminism was part of that.
Parenthesis, from a work in progress: That is part of the still unrecognized ‘argument’ of the infamous film Last Tango in Paris, which a revisionary reading popular in the #MeToo movement, now represented in the very thoughtful new film Being Maria, could only understand as ‘male violence’. In this film, Jeanne’s (played by Maria Schneider) revenge, following Paul’s (Marlon Brando’s) phony renunciation for the pose of a suitor from an American musical comedy of his performance, in impotent rage, of a transgressive repetition as assault, another in, for the filmmaker, a series of failed attempts to combat fascism in a personal way by sons rebelling against fathers, on a patriarchal culture he felt crippled by, with its stupid provincial authoritarianism, using her as pupil and denominalized love object, is a veritable quod erat demonstrandum of what radical feminism said and did at its destructive (and, oppressive, when empowered professionally by innovations in capitalism that adapted to women’s successful struggle for public sphere equality and parity and non-domestic life and work opportunities), worst. She refutes his more than problematic, by now certainly failed, challenge to the world of fathers in what is a veritable act of assertion of a woman’s rights in and to (colonialist and militarist) patriarchy, asserted on the pretext that she is countering male agression generally and a territorial transgression represented in her imagination as rape. Is her problem a failure to recognize she is part of what she would oppose, qua patriarchy? No, she’s not opposing anything. She is merely annoyed at his, now only comically proposed, aggression. He even chased her to her apartment and forced his way in through its entrance! Symbolic violence, indeed, something conservative functionaries with liberal masks are often involved in. (Something eager youths agitated by memes will loudly joining in on in what can even be politically correct pogroms, an observation that the left only shamely relinquishes to neoconservatives, sometimes morally blackmailing others that that is what they too are (everyone knows there are only two political parties, and factions). Political liberalism is idealist and its combats are often symbolic; hence the importance of identities, along with speech codes and the thought police. Companies need that, we do not.). For Maria and Paul it was hopeless long before it reached this point. She wants to get somewhere, and for a while she enjoys the ride. Does she want the good life? She doesn’t know what it is, though she trifled with the idea it might just be enjoyments and getting off. He wants to destroy a social world that has left him bereft and angry, for a lifetime of reasons.
He’s right in a way. So were the Dadaists and other radicals in the art world. This appeared in May 68 in France, and a few years later in the blind negation expressed by the Sex Pistols, and no one knew exactly what it means. Today, empty negations inspire us with the horror of their effects more than the joy and necessity of what it is actually a concession to the demands of conformism to call ‘rebellion’, though in fact, as in the Boomtown Rats’ song I don’t like Mondays, and much of Dada and surrealism (and punk) for that matter, they are both, and both truths matters. Liberals merely don’t like this; they are partly definable as the ones who don’t. Who isn’t against crime, and what else are they, like Maria, saying no to in a way they can make definitive (she kills him)? We can’t help Maria, or the angry white male shooters, and what Paul might have done differently I could only try to find in the subsequent history of male leftism in film and elswhere, which Italian culture speaks amply of and Americans almost not at all. While feminism by the 80’s had all sorts of answers that were being institutionalized, what I believe alone deserves to be called the project of the left is still trying to find out, as it is easy to know what you are against and hard to find what for.
A book on my shelf is titled Hatred of Capitalism. Ladies, I see it often in you and I think it’s rotten, here in this state, which I notice in our palplably disjointed time. And saying this I recognize keenly that it also divides us: liberals, often feminist, and feminine, and what to me it means to be the left. Take that in your face. Throw me out, after taking me aside, applying your corporate policy, again? That is very funny because it isn’t. Capitalism, not schmucks like me, is the enemy. And some of you are horribly clueless, and wrong, and I don’t like it. And you do not have to be the midnight rambler to say this. Though it may not hurt if your offensiveness is done with the sharpened virtual ‘knives’ of cutting words. We live in anxiously dark and interesting times. Love, hate, compliance and affirmation versus combative attitudes, is this really the question? It should not be, though it often is. If you think this is my moral problem, you can fuck off; I say it is our problem, and it’s a political one. Some feminists made the political personal. A corporate state does that quietly when business goes smoothly and loudly and violently when it becomes fascist when they did not. Always the right depoliticizingly psychologizes; the left takes what is given and makes it a problem. Politics is not a way of making love, though, as God knows and spiritualists affirm, it does indeed stem indeed as much or more (yet not only) from the love of the neighbor and stranger as it also does, and must, from quarrels against what we rightly hate about the world we live in. And of course, if you hate nothing, you are not political, though you might be a liberal and could surely work for the managerial corporate state. As a writer whose so-called aggression is expressed in words, and a radical punk who knows that defiance is not the same thing as rape (or theft, the logical obverse of property), I say, and in your faces also: politics is a civil form of war. Not between our tribes or genres, but against what oppresses us, oh you my dear fellows, whose wrongness piques me at times to an avowed rage so easily misread, you insouciantly unknowing collaboratrices. I don’t mind if you think that’s funny and only laugh. It isn’t only funny. We are taking arms against a sea of troubles that are real and not just in some people’s heads. (Shakespeare’s most radical, modern play is his most open and it leaves us with subjective problems that are political ones, for something is rotten in the state of things in our world, and that art in our time continued struggling to understand, as in Last Tango, which also references a ‘romantic’ wish or hope of Juliet’s, to love beyond patriarchal determinations and nominations of identity.) Maybe that means the era of the psychological administrative state is definitively over, allowing both a sigh of relief and whatever we do now with our anxious apprehensions. I didn’t mean to just renounce or forget about it, momma said, when she asked, what are you doing with your rage?