marxist/situationist essay on gender oppression

[Guest]

Gender and the Totality

M. Russell


It is important to assert from the start, if there was every any doubt, that male domination is not a function or a creation of capitalism. Accordingly, it is equally important to assert that forms of domination, if they are going to have any kind of durability such as patriarchy, are purely historical. The juridical and strategic modes of power will shift, develop and refine themselves with the grind of history, and must be understood within the context of history, a basic truism for anyone who believes in the collapse of the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’ – or in didactic terms, that the point is to change it. Consumer capitalism today represents the most highly developed form of oppression because it has innovated the most highly developed form of personal appropriation – the appropriation of things by means of the appropriation of people. This is the natural consequence of a very palpable but under-theorised development in the character of modern capitalism, namely the absolute triumph of the commodity form, which has succeeded in moulding society in accordance with its laws in toto, and has thusly soiled its logic through every sphere of social existence. While not to denigrate the unique experience of female oppression, today we are faced with the urgent task of locating female oppression within the general pathology that vitiates society as a whole, and which will not be destroyed without the complete transformation of social life. Following this, I will be dusting off some pre-positivist Marx and detourning his concept of the ‘creative human’ as the basis of by verdict. My verdict is that capitalist society is by necessity at war with the most basic of all human needs, the need to create: the production of human nature. Of course, this entails not only creation in the spheres of material production, but also in the production of the Self – what Sartre would have called a ‘style of being’, or for Foucault a 'stylistics of existence'. While the oppressive circumscription of the female identity and the mechanical stultification of her will-to-create have always been a most lurid characteristic of patriarchal society, here it will be argued that today the continuation of this alienation is imperative to the continuation of commodity society. In this way, to locate the construction, reconstruction and circulation of pathological and dehumanising gender roles within the totality is the essential antecedent to their destruction.

So if the commodity system functions in such a way as to circumscribe possibilities for the production of human nature, the production of the Self, then this must also imply the existence of a human subject whose activity can be constrained and stilted, which corresponds to the existence of a “human essence” that can be used to gauge what is ‘alienated’ and what is ‘healthy’. In his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Marx conceives of such an essence in human belonging to its species being, or Gattungswesen. He sees human history as the history of the production of human nature, the dynamic interaction of human with its environment, the generative process whereby human makes itself and therefore represents the development of human creative capacities in the most expansive sense. It is through the humanisation of nature, the creative interplay with the natural world that human society is created, and it is within human society that human tastes, passions, pleasures and desires, in a word culture, are manifest. Marx asserts, “Individual human life and species life are not different things…though man [sic] is a unique individual… he [sic] is equally the whole, the ideal whole, the subjective existence of society as thought and experienced.” (Marx in Bottomore, 1964, p539) Thus it is the dialectical subjectification of the natural world which makes possible the dialectical subjectification of the social world and allows human to exercise its own creative capacities and therefore realise its own humanity. In bourgeois society human is severed from the ties in society that allow it to exercise its creative potentiality, for the vast majority of people the social is a seemingly unalterable progression of blind forces, their essence is alienated to what that essence has created. Instead of being in a creative interrelation with the social, human is not only detached from society, it subordinate to it. The inversion of subject and attribute, the end comes to serve the means.

It is in the dialectic between human and the external world in which subjectivity can increasingly subordinate the external to its purposes, and thereby alter their experience of lived reality, in Hegelian terms “the dialectic of negativity as the moving and creating principle”. (Giddens, 1971, p21) We create ourselves, as we are ourselves created; we create the social as it creates us. It is precisely this dialectic with the material that is repudiated for the female subject under patriarchy, just as it was denied to the proletariat of Marx’s time through mechanised work and the division of labour. It becomes a “motionless tautology” which as with Hegel’s dialectic between the master and the slave, reveals itself as the dialectic of nothing. (Butler in Benhabib and Cornell, 1987, p132) Not only is the repudiation of dialectic enacted on a large political and institutional scale, but also in the more mundane and insidious constriction of the possibilities for self-creation enacted ubiquitously through the various ways in which the female subject is forced to take on circumscribed identities that surround the prevailing discursive constructions of the ‘feminine’. These discursive constructions appear as a ‘natural’ configuration of the woman in any given historical moment, and are always framed within the masculine binary. In this way patriarchal hierarchy enables the issuing of gender roles, whatever they may be – the ‘good mother’, the ‘femme fatale’, the ‘tom-boy’, the ‘dyke’ the ‘lady’ the ‘career woman’ the ‘wife’ – as a ticket to be bought and stamped in return for initiation into patriarchal culture As Vaneigem rightly stresses, “The role locates one in the representational hierarchy: at the top, at the bottom, in the middle – but never outside the hierarchy, whether this side or beyond it. The role is thus the means of access to the mechanism of culture: a form of initiation.” (1992, p188) The role therefore requires dialectic, but a subtlety violent one whereby individual participation serves to maintain its essentially vampiric existence. The role is the constitution of the alienated Self, the denial of the need for self-realisation, and the inscription of its inhumanity is everywhere etched in human flesh.

What then, are the mechanics of this repudiation? In Marx’s time, it may have been worthwhile to separate patriarchy from capitalism for purely analytic reasons akin to the Weberian concept of ‘status groups’, which have a powerful repressive functionality within modern society, but which are not necessarily based on economic relations as with classes. Today, due to a qualitative shift in the character of mature capitalism, and a corresponding modification in the way power operates within mature-capitalist society, this approach has lost its use value. As Marx tells us, the commodity embodies, in “cell form” the structure of capitalist society, and therefore the processes of abstraction and alienation inherent in the commodity form are at the very entrails of modern society, and will become increasingly absolute as capitalist society develops. (Giddens, 1971, pp31-35) Commodity society implies that the value of the social in the form of genuine human needs and desires is subordinate to the laws of value in the form of capital, just as use value is subordinate to exchange value. The totalising tendency of the commodity form leads it to thrust deeper and deeper into the heart of a social structure, and colonise larger and larger aspects of social existence in accordance with its own ends, until we reach the stage when the economy has brought human life under the sway of its own laws in total. Here consumption is the main artery that connects commodity rationality human life, and in the modern era is a powerful mechanism of social control. Due to their centrality in the reproduction of the mature commodity system, human consumptive patterns have been judged too important to leave up to the volition of human consumers – they must be meticulously managed and regulated down to the very last detail. Debord’s spectacular society makes its entrance at this historical juncture, when all human needs are reduced to an absolute pseudo-need for the continuing tautology of the commodity economy.

This is where the social role is primary. In order for the consumptive sphere to function with maximum efficiency (read: inhumanity) the subject must take on the characteristics of a specific type of consumer so they may be more readily identified, categorised and reified within the spectacular economy – they must themselves become an image. People are treated as confirming to particular categorisations, each of which is naturally parallel with specific purchasing and lifestyle proclivities. This process is basic to the functioning of spectacular capitalism; “the spectacle is the negation of life and the simultaneous affirmation of appearance” (SI, 2001, p21) In this sense, living under the dictates of a prescribed social role has all the characteristics of alienated labour. As Vaneigem writes “the present economic system can only be rescued by turning the individual into a consumer, by identifying them with the largest possible number of consumable values, which is to say, non-values, or empty, fictitious, abstract values”. (Gardiner, 2000, p117) Thusly the subject is cornered, they are forced to relinquish their real treasure, their own subjectivity for an empty image, they sacrifice themselves on the alter of the spectacular, negate any meaningful dialectic, and reject authentic self-creation in favour of a passionless asceticism. Of course, as with all oppression, this is precisely where the primary mechanics of patriarchy operate today. The domestic, for example, has become a central the site for the construction and perpetuation of female unpaid consumptive labour – that is to say the construction and perpetuation of roles. As Pringle writes “Under late-capitalism woman of all classes are substantially occupied with consumption activities centred around their homes, and the associated relational skills have become a defining characteristic of femininity…a woman’s value is largely reflected in her success as a shopper”. (McDowell & Pringle, 1992, p150) This is achieved through the emotionalization of labour, which should serve to remind us that lying behind every inhumanity is the human. Not only is the woman buying goods and services, she is buying herself.

Consumption has become directly sexual; we produce and reproduce our roles through the commodity. We are ordered to produce our masculine and feminine identity through our consumptive patterns. A man doesn’t just buy a car; he buys predatory sexuality. A female doesn’t just buy shampoo; she buys passivity. A housewife doesn’t just buy toilet cleaner; she buys protective marital instincts. The construction of pseudo-needs is affected through an endless and inescapable seduction of images of genuine and sometimes perverted human needs – of plenitude, total satisfaction, self-worth, love, fulfilment – an ‘ideal-typical’ fantasy life that act as an anaesthesia for the penury of genuine lived experience. The commodity trains, shapes and stamps us with the prevailing historical forms of selfhood. With the opening of the public arena to females this process has intensified beyond all measurement. The spectacle is a constant ordering without terminus; to improve, modify, habituate and normalize through the disciplines of fashion, dress, makeup or dieting, always in the language of fulfilment from a system that’s raison d’tre is eternal discontent. In this sense the domination of the spectacle rests on its ability to represent itself as a reflection of the human subject, which is in fact only a reflection of those fragments of social power which monopolise the representation of a coherent totality. The spectacle is the most elevated form of abstraction, the servility to abstractions now permeates all areas of existence and have assumed the role of subjectivity. Under the absolute reign of the commodity the individual finds it increasingly impossible to visualise themselves outside the dominant images of need, images that eventually become introjected. The spectacle speaks, and no response is needed. Dialogue, and therefore dialectic is terminate.

This is not to say that female oppression today is directly manifest from the commodity form and that the destruction of commodity society is parallel to the destruction of patriarchy. The basic point here is that female domination, as with most other forms of domination under late-capitalism work through the commodity form, and through the mechanics of spectacular consumer society. Everyday life has attracted the gaze of power to a large extent through the disintegration of meta-narratives, or unitary and mytho-poetic forms of domination, such as God, divine right, nationalism, humanism, liberalism, communism etc, which has been to a significant extent a consequence of the ascendancy of bourgeoisie ideology itself. As a result power has become diffuse and fragmentary, it is constitutive and subjective, and it relies on subjects to visually participate in their own subordination (perform their roles). It is a kind of power that, in Foucault’s words, “is bent on generating forces from within, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impending them, making them submit or destroying them”. (1980, p167) Consumerism provides a felicitous connective point between power and the everyday, and it is utilised most proficiently. While this carceral form of power may be less stable than its more unitary predecessors given that it relies on docility rather than consent, it is at the same time far more mendacious and efficient since it functions to constitute everyday consciousness and behaviour. But participation in roles must also embody an element of compensation, for the subordinate do not participate long in their own domination unless they are rewarded with at least a tincture of power. Gender oppression certainly moves along these ‘capillary networks’. 1

Take for example, the anoretic. Of course, the anorexia sufferer is a macabre parody of the modern aesthetic ideal feminine as she exists within the male dominated binary, but, as Bordo has written, she is also an proponent of power in the sense she attempts to reconcile and enact the contradictory demands of the discursive female role and therefore win entrance into modern patriarchal society. As she writes:
In this economy, the control of female appetite for food is merely is merely the most concrete expression of the general rule governing the construction of femininity: that female hunger-for public power, for sexual gratification, for independence-be contained and the public space that women are allowed to take up be circumscribed… On the other hand, even as young women today continue to be taught traditionally “feminine” virtues, to the degree that the professional arena is open to them they must learn to embody the “masculine” language and virtues of that arena-self-control, determination, cool, emotional discipline, self-mastery and so on. (1993, p171)

Energy, discipline and power are primary then, as anorexia sufferer Aimee Lui wrote “I need nothing and no one else… I will be master of my body, if nothing else I vow”. (Bordo, 1993, p173) In order to enter into the spectacular hierarchy the subject must pay images their due. Helen Clark perhaps, or Sigourney Weaver’s character ‘Ripley’ in Aliens represent this “new macho woman” in a pure form. In everyday life however, these binary polarities don’t simply collapse, “masculinity” and “femininity” have been constructed in opposition, and they only embody meaning in the context of opposition. Any attempt to reconcile them results in a relentless and bloody battle, a war that tears the subject in half. The emaciated body of the anoretic is undoubtedly a protest against the pathology of the social role, but it is also, in Foucaultian terms, the patriarchally defined ‘useful body’ par excellance. 2 Here we see the glaring inscription of the essential inhumanity of the social role, and the human consequences of a society that negates the human creative dialectic – the need for genuine self-realisation. As always, it is etched in the languages of human misery.

For Marx, to combat alienation, to re-appropriate one’s own essence, means to re-appropriate the facticity of history. In the same sense, if we are to combat self-alienation, we must reappropriate the facticity of our bodies as historical situations, situations that we have the ability to dialectically determine. This entails the reestablishment of the creative social dialectic, the violent repudiation of the motionless tautology, and the ability to conceive of difference and Otherness without hierarchy – the transformation of society in toto. Because, the only way it is possible to conceive of difference – and thereby constitute ourselves in relation to difference without the associated binaries, roles and hierarchies that are at the entrails of the commodity form and at the heart of all hierarchically structured society – is through the extreme dispersion of individual power through every facet of social existence. In a word: an-arche. Butler was right in stressing that the dissolution of binary restrictions and prescribed gender roles will only be achieved through the radical proliferation of difference and the radical proliferation of power to construct difference. (1987, p135) Here we would do well to remember the surrealist dictum “Poetry should be made by all; not by one”. (Gardiner, 2000, p38) As every genuine artist knows, art exists in the creative process, not the product. By recognising both society and the Self as dialectical situations, we recognise the need for any qualitative change in society will come only through establishing artistic method as a method accessible to every individual. This is especially true in the context of gender oppression, as it is true for the totality. This triumph is Breton’s red and black sword, and we can use it, not for the first time, to slash through our post-millennial gloom.

Notes:

1 Here it is instructive to note the fundamental principles of Weber’s theses on western rationalism; predicability, efficiency, calculability and control, which lie at the heart of the social construction of roles. The prescription of and participation in social roles is the will-to-power distilled, the power to mark, assign and classify; the symbolic power of ritualised acceptance and expulsion. The desire to maintain these discursive fortifications of predicability reflect the most human desire to exercise the greatest possible measure of control over one’s social reality, the face of Dionysus lurking closely behind the face of the Other. Roles are the Apollonian mask of Otherness.

2 It is also worth stating that the contemporary discursive constructions of femininity have sought to reduce woman to chief emotional, child nurturer and sex object in the wake of the radical feminism of the 60’s and 70’s. The degree of violence of anorexia nervosa is in direct equilibrium for the transgression for which it is a punishment, a clear reflection of the punitive capabilities of mature disciplinary society. This should serve to remind us, in case there was ever any doubt, that modern spectacular power and the machinations of inequality are both repressive and constitutive.

[Yuda]

Is this written by Matt Russell?

[Guest]

Matt Russell is Dead.

[Esspweb]

Great post. I really like it.
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