The radical feminism that was not

The failure of radical feminism was that it could not question, let alone negate, the corporate state. It is not a patriarchal project exactly, even if contemporary capitalism does draw on roots that in being statist were also patriarchal, not or not only because men could perhaps rule social groups on the model of fathers who do, but because that is partly the legacy, and the genealogy. But today it is not bound to that. We could very easily have a "feminist state" that is that of capitalism's corporatist state.

That notions and institutions of law or order are "paternal" in some deep psychoanalytic, linguistic, or anthropological sense - that is, a science explaining the histories of various forms of social life - would only mean that much or all governmentality is patriarchal just by definition, rendering the claim tautological. But the problem is not just that bands of women might not enforce through totems or symbols or whatever, some form of effective 'paternal' social legality. Suppose that our governmentalities become more 'soft', flexible, chaotic, warm, encouraging, gentle and kind, in an effectively monarchical thinking that is styled as feminine. That is quite possible.

The radical feminists I knew were university scholars. Some of them did excellent work. But their blind spot is they had no way to criticize, and little interesting in doing so, the institutional formations they were part of. The university is a keystone of the corporate state.

Alas, the people running these places, then and now, were not professional scholars, and when they were that also, they were not acting as such. They were not engaged in open inquiry but social enforcement. And the feminists gave them a new set of norms for doing so.

The followers deep in the crowded field of eagerly appropriated memes could be very stupid, as is a problem in all social movements. Those that are hierarchically organized, by organizations, with leaders, who are often professional "activists," meaning nonprofit corporate managers, who were trained at institutions run by such managers, being nonprofit corporations themselves, tend to differ quite remarkably in the kinds of conversations or discussions (which may not be conversations as much as support group sharing activities, since such groups allow declarations, affirmations, and encouragement, but not the kind of discussion that in fact always involves the articulation of real antagonisms).

I just picked up Kathy Acker's Don Quixote. She was a leftist writer (in my 'book'; such concepts as left and right when used censoriously, as I do, obviously belong to what I (self-)criticize, but also remind me of places and times where self-criticism was not confession and criticism of others not censorial exclusion, because the political is not 'the police', or something like that....). She's claimed by 'feminists'.

I think feminism is dead because it is a form of identity politics, and the stance defining the political left was established in the revolution in France, whose work was, as still is, continued in other places. That stance is equal liberty of persons. American society links liberty to property right and equality to right of opinion. Feminists of the left refused such conservative formations. But all identity politics goes wrong when it identifies the project of liberation with the targeting of subjects to be liberated from the domination ascribed to other subjects who are to blame for it. This means that liberation will ultimately settle down into a nation-building (or subject-formation) project that will then involve its own defense and policing against hostile others. The feminism of policing against men who violate women is a feminism of the right, no matter how necessary or good you believe it to be. That is what triumphed, and it is what #MeToo has mainly achieved. The feminists of the left want to transform society through what amounts to processes of open discussion (not a didactic instruction, which would have to be modeled on a state church or something like it) in order to ask people to transform their own thinking about what they desire. The ultimate horizon of this however was and remains the bounded state apparatus with forces of policing. That constrains activists at their most governmentally effective but least interesting to call for more policing. These reflections incline me to consider that perhaps feminism should be regarded on the left in terms historically similar to how we think of the abolitions of serfdom, slavery, and monarchy. This is also true of every social welfare demand that could be granted without dismantling the corporate state, including paying women (and men and children) who do housework.

What I finally concluded about what needs to be recognized is that:
People should treat other decently, and that includes men who are involved with women.
There are political struggles against ways in which people do not.
In my time, some social subjects made claims I thought were exaggerated. That does not mean they might not be right, or even someone who challenges one of them while making some other claim that they might not recognize. I wanted to do that, and as a young university student in America there was no way to do so.

No one challenged the corporate state. The radicals would not even dream of it.

Why didn't they have better dreams? Cinema was already good that, it's even better now, at least in terms of what I have seen of it, and learned from it, in all the years since. Yet I can think of no more damning thing to say about the young intelligentsia of my generation, or what I saw of it.

Now you can challenge the corporate state in artworks, usually made under its auspices. Yet I am not against the great museums run by boards of trustees. I love them. I love the artworks, honor and admire the people who work there. I'm less sure about the trustees. I think they should pay to comfort their ample and productive consciences and give the creative workers a totally free hand. They usually do in fact, unless you bite the hand that feeds you. Unless you take risks.

I don't care how universalistic are the tastes of the bosses. I don't care if they eat rainbow colored food and sleep under canopies with their signatures.

"Does that mean you don't know what you want?"
"Possibly."

Feminists in claiming to make the personal political, made the political personal. Their liberty and equality were expressed as property right and freedom of social exchange. If the lady is a boss but thinks her freedom of will is about not being commanded by a man who pretends to be her boss, or is criminally disobedient when she sets the rules of her little company, then she isn't asserting her right to not be fucked, but doing something else. The bosses fuck you over in ways for which sex of any kind is at best, usually, a metaphor. I care less about who is fucked sexually without their having signed a consent form, or uttered a legally binding verbal declaration equivalent thereto, then about other ways people are wronged.

Feminism had a horrible blind spot.
Tu quoque, they will say. Bosses will always say, it's you. You are that man. It's about you. It's about who is the criminal.

My motto is art as if it were crime.
As it is also political, this means one has friends and enemies.
"No one may hate anyone or regard them as their enemy," say the upholders of the total state. They alone say this.

Though it seems now ours is re-feudalizing. But at least we know there is no going back, as the liberals are determined to try to do.

For me the first step in trying to see how to criticize and oppose the nascent or renascent neofascist state is to get as clear as possible about what was wrong with it in the first place. The liberals I know are happy if they have good positions in the corporate state, where they can pursue their progressive agendas. They were happy then and are less happy now. I was unhappy (about the way this society is) then and am just as unhappy (about it) now. In fact, the society I live in is unhappy enough that of course I look for my happiness outside any close affiliation with its major institutions or ideologies. In the university then and the art world now, people like me can only hope to be tolerated. I do see many people saying things that one can learn from in terms of their social criticism. What is so relentlessly depressing is most of the things any of them succeed at all in being for. I end this with the observation that I have met at least one detestable black landlord and more than one detestable black security guard, and their blackness was not what bothered me most about their behavior. I did not like being battered for being suspected of a disobedience they imaginative construed as disrespect of their persons, I did not like being left along with my neighbors (not all white or privileged, so I count when I say this?) to freeze in 20 degree weather because the landlord wound up being unable to pay his mortgage before selling the portions of his investment portfolio that we were living in. Oppression doesn't happen because it's what some kinds of people do, it happens because it is what someone or other who is in a position to do it does. In a democratic political space that depends on open discussions, that are usually involved in real contestations with strategic and tactical stakes, it is possible for people together to think about such things. In a liberal space, which is that of the corporate administrative state, it is not. Liberalism is liberty for property owners. The revolutionary ideas of liberty in equality and equality in liberty open onto something else.