Post-feminism, anarchy, and the need for aggression
Since capitalism and bureaucracy both equal fuckery, a truly radical left wing feminism would believe in fucking and not fuckery.
Fuckery differs from fucking in that it is essentially about power. It is a diversion of desire into power, of more vital energies into practices of domination, discipline, control, and the like. While its ultimate form may be rape, its normal form is capitalist and bureaucratic domination. This is what constitutes normal life for most people today. It is a managed, and sad, life.
Fuckery is stately, sterile, and stale. It tends to be organized, and so may follow rules and respect stated duties and rights. It produces resentments in subjects of every gender, genre, and kind. Today, much of the dysfunctional character of our society and the bad politics are a result more than anything of the ways in which capitalism and bureaucracy are oppressive and alienating.
The problem is not with any demographical category, any group of people or kind of persons. The problem is with the system.
The shift would require honesty, and thus would be incompatible with the rules that require politeness, which as French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu reminds us, "Is always a political concession." Specifically, it cannot be interdicted and punished, made against the rules or illegal, to insult someone, no matter how, or express anger at them, more or less no matter how, so long as you are not actually threatening them. And the barrier for that must be very high, not as low as possible, which is the approach that has been taken by our corporate and university world and our liberal protestant political moralism in general.
The operative conceptual opposition is fucking vs. fuckery. From "Don't fuck with me!" which still needs to be something people can say, to "Let's fuck with this!" And thus from governance to politics through art.
People can fuck with their own gender, and in other ways with who they are, alone and together. Think of Patti Smith singing "I don't fuck much with the past but I fuck plenty with the future." The word partly connotes aggression, and this is appropriate. We need it, it matters.
An identity is not something to establish or defend; it is only something to criticize and experiment in changing. We should do this collectively. We should do it often with ourselves, and sometimes people do it, creatively, with each other. This happens in love, because it calls one’s form of life radically into question. Fucking is not so much a shared pleasure, which can exist in friendship, where people’s respective boundaries are respected rather than challenged, as it is a quest to change the other. Hence, its risks.
(That is also why total institutions tend to take careful measures to prevent it. They don’t prevent people being raped, by authorities or other inmates, but they do try to prevent autonomous love relationships. The society as a whole tries to regulate them, which is why we have marriages and not just love affairs.).
Susan Sontag said we need an erotics, not a hermeneutics, of art. Let's further admit that eroticism always includes aggression and transgression. Further, hermeneutics leads to management and statecraft, while erotics leads to anarchy.
There obviously is no politics - not, anyway, in the Western civic republican, democratic, and libertarian tradition that entirely defines the political as we know it (something classical China never knew at all) - without aggression. But there certainly is a possibility of governance and bureaucracy without aggression. It could in fact function without affects that it has not regulated, or even without persons, whose role in practice it cannot abolish completely though in theory it can. (As it already has in our military operations, where the targets of state violence are persons with flesh who can suffer but the operations are carried out in such a way that the subject controlling them cannot be touched.). As with management, so with hermeneutics: the machinery of capitalist governance can do plenty of work if needed interpreting what people do and say, in order to make those actions and reactions profitably usable in its system. Our left-liberal politics is a management discourse and it works exactly in this way.
The problem is not authority but aggression. It is a need for the Freudian death-drive. Not because we should be suicidal, but because we should not be, especially in the way that modern bureaucratic capitalist societies tend to be, which is quietly, in spite of themselves, not by hating something but by accepting everything and hating nothing. If there is nothing that anyone can say no to, than more and more people will start to feel as if there is nothing to live for. There is of course, and much, but much in the way our societies are organized (for profit and control) ignores and obscures this, it covers it over. The demand for total communication and transparency, and for the absence of any obstacle, this is moving towards death without will or aggression. And that is what is sought, desperately. The proper affirmation and use of the death drive is not to commit suicide, but quite the opposite. Its role is to enable us say no to something. That alone enables what Bataille gave as the definition of the erotic: the affirmation of life up to and through the encounter with its limit. It is because I am able to die that I am able to stake my existence on something contingent that I care about, and that alone enables me to truly affirm life. What I thus affirm is not my bare life so much as my form of life.
This is the decisive opposition today: our systems of governance will protect and defend bare life, life as such, and so, for example, the politics of abortion prohibitions, and of human rights as animal rights or the mere right to be kept alive, even biomedically, a politics visible in the promotion of suicide as a new option of psychiatry when people cannot be kept or put out of their misery otherwise, as well as prohibitions of harmful activities taken to an extreme that is only possible if the government infantilizes its citizens by arrogating to itself the role of a family and thus giving the exercise of power more scope for intimate social control and violation, etc., sacrificing the meaningful form of life people can only maintain as a self-creation to a bare life it can profitably manage. While on the other side, that of desire and freedom, people will stake or even risk their lives for a free and happy form of life as developed and manifest through art, education, culture, and a genuine rather than artificial politics.
Our medical systems of managing persons deny this entirely, arrogating to themselves as part of a state apparatus the power and right to determine when and how people bodily live and die, in order merely to control people profitably and as needed to control the risks that we all present to capital and its governments. The most characteristic form of this today is psychiatry and its places of confinement, which psychiatric patients are constantly threatened with, as meanwhile, you are “helped” to manage your life as painlessly as possible as you perform your sad duties as obedient (or “compliant”) worker, consumer, debtor, and problem “case.” Needless to say, the discursive practices of the doctors and the policing management of the places of confinement they wield as ultimate threat, pointedly are aimed at countering all risk, avoiding dangers (conceived as beyond or beneath moral responsibility), and interdicting all aggression. The equation of aggression and violence is typical of all regimes of management of this type. The consequence is that what is left is the sad task of managing a sad life. The therapies, both medical and discursive, are aimed at preventing painful affective states that are also presumed “dysfunctional” (they make you function less well as an embodied and ensouled tool or worker, less effective in doing the work you are supposed to do); they are targeted at removing painful symptoms, and while a way of “thinking” is taught, it aims at no affirmative good beyond the absence of disabling pain. This yields a strict homology between the treatment of persons in talk therapies with dying patients whose pain is managed in hospital beds. In hospitals, psych patients have it made clear to them that they are essentially persons suspected of a violent will to resist. Patients in these places are trained to become passive and dull, in a state for which the old lobotomies were simply a crude analogical expression, revealing the essence of the treatments. These facilities are also training in boredom prior to possible re-entry into the boring world of work. The logic of all this is thanatological. And much of the reason and rationale of thus lie in the systematic exclusion of aggression.
The most extreme realization of it was the effort to show that a life can be destroyed by showing that it has no meaning or value to those governing it; the Nazi concentration and death camps were the extreme point of this for that reason. Their essence is best captured in a statement made by an SS officer at Auschwitz and recorded by Primo Levi: “There is no ‘why’ here.” That is, we will show you that a human life can be thrown out like garbage; nothing you experience will be able to be regarded by you as having any meaning.
That means that we will still have forms of authority. These should be weakened in terms of existing institutions and references to persons. We would thus move beyond things like patriarchy without making the mistake of replacing the rule of one kind of person with that of another. This is the most typical mistake of the liberal left. It traps everyone in resentment. It doesn't move forward but replays the same problems in a different key. The authority we should strengthen is one that aids the autonomy of individuals; it is the authority of discourse.
True, that can be and is used by capitalist bureaucracy, but there is a gambit that is vital today and that is that it need not. Let us begin by noting that there have always been two purposes in the use of language. One is to get work done, and this use is what is involved in all management and governance; its basic form is the command, often disguised as a statement, it is the mot d'ordre, or order-word. Communication is part of management and so are worlds and workshops of interpretation, at least in and of themselves. But the other use of language moves in a different direction entirely, and it alone can be associated with liberation. This is the use of language that seeks not only expression and understanding but experimental novelty, and things like it, as it moves towards an outside, allowing in principle all kinds of transgression, basically through art. This tendency is intrinsically political though in a way that is necessarily rare as fare as trying to actually intervene in the world of everyday life and work. But all real politics lies in this, since the essence of the political is not management but contestation, problematization, and thus also controversy, and, indeed, struggle, in Greek polemos. The Greek invention of politics as the form of social life in the city also includes in this problematization and contestation the relationships of friendship and love. There is aggression in this, and it needs to be directed politically at contesting the order of things in the city. The one thing that a political community must never do is try to perfect itself by abolishing conflict. That is what our managed societies are largely doing today, and that is why they are increasingly managed through the resources, and pervasive discourses, of psychology, which is merely a way of controlling persons. Capital operates in terms of opportunity and liability in a field of risk. It treats persons as opportunities to be exploited to generate more capital, or as liabilities to be neutralized, or both.
It is often thought that a just republican state is one in which there is a rule by laws instead of persons, or one in which the people rule, defining democracy. But in Western political traditions, these are really negative principles (and the second is actually contradicted and excluded by the first; that is, just authority is not that of laws ruling over inclinations and it is also not that of persons ruling over others who have authorized them to) , while the only clear authority is that of reason and more broadly (since it includes imagination as well as judgment) thinking. The only truly proper authority anyone can want to follow is that of their own thinking when properly conducted; anything else is at best a compromise. In American sophistical capitalist democracy, people think this means that people do what they please, but actually it means that the authority of thinking clearly and rigorously remains as a personal ideal, after rule by fathers, kings, priests, scholars, brotherhoods or communities, and others is finished. This yields both the possibility taken up in Plato and Aristotle (rule by thinkers of others) and that of anarchy, where thinking finally extends to the abolition of rule or governance itself. The sole figure of authority that does not go with resentment is that of autonomy achieved through and understood as thinking, which apart from the social and political figure of anarchy, or the question thereof, has only ever been realized in works of art, and perhaps philosophy and theory considered as an art.
Judith Butler’s recent work is an example of a left-liberalism that is essentially managerial because it places fear of mortality above a more affirmative and radical will that would be based not on bare life but form of life. Thus she makes the basis of her construction of universality the ability of a person’s life to be mourned, and thus their ability to be die or be killed.. This also serves as the basis of her Martin Luther King-like appreciation of non-violence. Similar too is all the uses of the Holocaust and victimology generally in left-liberal identity politics, which supposes that people who are oppressed or victimized derive some moral privilege from that fact. There is a moral privilege, or at least a political advantage, possible in the response that people can make to oppression, but not in the fact of being oppressed. It is a terrible mistake when people make the wrong uses and employments of melancholy.
A world without aggression may also have no compelling authority that people believe in. It will be one that is headed for its own oblivion, death, not with a bang but a whimper. In this world there might soon be no birth as figure of novelty (as suggested in the film "Children of Men"), and there would also not be enough real fucking. People might still do it while ceasing to understand what it could mean. But love, unlike marriages and families, was always rare, as politics is with respect to governance, just as thinking is to planning and justifying, which are both tied to the weak figures of necessity.