A Feminist Constellation

There's a cliché quote often falsely attributed to Oscar Wilde: "Everything is about sex, except sex, which is about power." Thankfully, this isn't a boomer's Facebook page, so we can have the same point restated by Deleuze and Guattari and seem all the more intellectual for it: "The truth is that sexuality is everywhere: the way a bureaucrat fondles his records, a judge administers justice, a businessman causes money to circulate; the way the bourgeoisie fucks the proletariat; and so on. And there is no need to resort to metaphors, any more than for the libido to go by way of metamorphoses. Hitler got the fascists sexually aroused. Flags, nations, armies, banks get a lot of people aroused. A revolutionary machine is nothing if it does not acquire at least as much force as these coercive machines have for producing breaks and mobilizing flows."

I've been ruminating on a handful of things lately, which I realize are interconnected. The angels are speaking now.

Patriarchy & Cultural Reproduction

My friend Ènziramire shared with me a paper by Thomas Waller called "Bad Object: Errant Marxist-Lacanian Ideology", published under Parapraxis. Waller explores the homology between psychoanalysis and Marxism occasionally supposed by Jacques Lacan and his protégé Jacques-Alain Miller (did you read Miller's article where he described his relationship to Lacan, who was also his father-in-law, as "moral and spiritual incest"? it's mostly an old man shouting at trans clouds, but that part was interesting enough for me to have remembered it). Essentially, Lacan and Miller attempted to elevate their psychoanalysis by its appropriation of semiotics beyond the shrink's couch, and in particular tried to re-articulate Marx through (or perhaps reduce him to) semiotic theory. Take, for example, the supposed homology between the money-form and the master signifier, or between surplus value and surplus jouissance. Not only are these "bad" homologies because they "[collapse] one term into the other rather than conjoining them through their disjunction," but in doing so they try to elevate Lacanianism to a discourse fundamental to Marxism in hindsight, ridding the latter of its critical power and the former of its contextual specificity to "set of artificial clinical conditions—above all, the analytic dialogue à deux."

I generally agree with Waller that Lacan's appropriations of Marxist analysis were generally driven by his desire for self-aggrandizement, both philosophically and perhaps psychically (the casting of Marxism through a Lacanian lens might be read, discursively speaking, as an attempt at "mastery" in the Lacanian sense, whose high-level functionality reflects the phallic desire of the obsessional neurotic to take and take and take all that he can from the Other). Lacan was a charlatan. However, we must appreciate the perspective from which he lies as an obsessional neurotic; as Žižek summarizes, "The obsessional neurotic 'lies in the guise of truth.' At the level of factual accuracy, his statements are as a rule true, yet he uses factual accuracy to dissimulate the truth about his desire." I submit the claim that Lacan supposed an homology between Marxism and psychoanalysis, or the reduction of the former to the latter, up to the point that it benefited his reputation, and not to the point that Marxism would reflect uncomfortably on Lacan as a conservative and chauvinistic man. We just need to take Lacan on his word and take it further. Real Lacanianism hasn't been tried.

I also disagree with Waller that psychoanalysis (whether in general or Lacanianism in particular) as a field of inquiry is, or should be, limited to the walls of the clinic; or, in other words, that the dialogue between analyst and analysand is wholly generative of the discourse and terms of psychoanalysis. This is not to suggest that psychoanalysis should not be, first and foremost, a clinical theory: the aim should be to treat people, rather than to philosophize for no reason. The best authors on psychoanalysis also tend to be the ones who actually treat people, not only because of their practical experience per se, but because their theory is guided by their practice (hm!). However, for starters, psychoanalysis is an analytical discourse: in the worst cases, the analyst does try to impose theoretical categories onto the analysand, such as Melanie Klein's strange thing with the Dick train going inside the mama station or whatever the fuck that was; in the ideal case, though, a psychoanalysis should really be an immanent investigation of the patient's own mental categories, the fabric of which predates the clinic and is the product of personal and social experiences repressed to various degrees. Freud's concept of hysteria doesn't come out of nowhere, but out of repeated cases of childhood sexual assault resulting in a consistent symptomology in female patients; the same for Oedipus emerging as an explanation for male neuroses as well as a larger framework (by extension) for understanding our deeply patriarchal and pedophilic society, as I've discussed before. Moreover, as we find certain mental patterns to be endemic in society, one must consider the possibility that those patterns are the product of forces beyond one's nuclear family. This is not to mention that a theory of social practice also falls flat on its face without considering individual and interpersonal relational dynamics. Aren't we better off combining our efforts?

And I know what some of you might be thinking: Deleuze and Guattari are right there! They historicized Oedipus and psychoanalytic theory as well as practice! They subordinated psychoanalysis to Marxism, the way it should be! I do like D&G and sometimes prefer their articulations of psychic processes to Lacan, in as much as their non-priority of Oedipus yields a more natural narration of mind formation. I like to imagine the force of desire running along the wrinkles of the brain, folding along the contours of one's life, increasing or decreasing the force necessary to travel along one path or another, giving rise in turn to subjectivity through the illusion of dialogue (i.e., discourse) and the supposition of "inside" and "outside". This articulation serves as a rebuke against an Oedipal priority, that the Oedipus complex is necessarily fundamental to language or human experience, or that psychosis must necessarily be a fail-state (rather, we should all be schizophrenic!). Simultaneously, as non-abstract as D&G are with their talk of machines and flows, I feel like their non-abstraction inadvertently and non-intuitively leans back into idealism: the reduction of Oedipus (as repressive structure) to a tool of capitalist class repression, or perhaps of psychoanalysis to Marxism, once again flattens the field of inquiry and elevates capitalism to an abstract plane determinate of interpersonal relations from above. Besides, if capitalism engenders Oedipus, what engenders capitalism?

Well, maybe it's sex. Thought I was gonna say "gender", huh? Would've been too good to pass up. Too bad I'm too real. Anyway, I think feminist critique closes the gap between the Marxist and psychoanalytic critiques, and this is often the register in which feminist critics operate. Both de Beauvoir and Irigaray emphatically reject the reduction of sexism and its genesis to a solely economic or psychoanalytic basis (which we may, albeit unfairly, identify with strawwomyn of Lerner or Butler) but, rather than casting aside either, conceptualize sex as the connective tissue between the unconscious and the social matrix, which in patriarchy is specifically repressed and weaponized against women. Irigaray is especially clear on her position that the exchange of women originates both Oedipus as incest-taboo (and signifying system) and capitalism as generalized commodity exchange (which germinates once labor's fruit is socially valuated, even if work-time isn't exchanged itself as a commodity until the emergence of capitalism proper; hence the earliest state records pertaining to commodity stores—especially, and not coincidentally, of female slaves as per Lerner). Properly speaking, this tissue is not subordinate to the individual or social levels, but they are shaped and mediated through each other, forming a knotty totality.

That being said, patriarchy's function (taking sex as its field) is specifically an intermediary one. Socially and historically, patriarchy sustains the male subject as economic agent by supplying him with labor (both housework and, via children, additional hands in the man's business) and a legacy through his children's inheritance of his property, through the lives and bodies of women who were historically exchanged from father to husband as commodity-object. On a personal level, patriarchy is the performance of the Oedipal drama: the symbolic roles which individuals inhabit from their imagined position in "daddy-mommy-me" are translated to interpersonal relationships, through which the drama is reproduced (through osmosis, but also almost intentionally) in one's offspring; the parental roles are also connotative of expressions and social roles which facilitate one's participation in greater society and are internalized part-and-parcel with the sexual-symbolic roles themselves. In short, patriarchy is a reproductive mechanism of culture across familial (i.e., Oedipal) and societal (e.g., capitalist, feudal, ancient, etc.) levels. When patriarchy is undermined, so is the society which depends on it to reproduce itself.

Degrowth Feminism

I had a realization when I was working on my civ-like game Resourciv, an early version of which I've just published on Itch with the tagline "sort of a horror game." My mother studied game theory under a doctor of mathematics who, she told me, invented cost-benefit analysis to weigh the pros and cons of dropping the atomic bomb—the inhumanity of which always stuck with him, then her, and then me. That's kind of the premise of this thing: to explore the friction between these war crime strategy games and the atrocities in which players participate to win, as well as a resource-driven approach to conflict between populations (and, hopefully, between subsets of a population). So, of course, I was brainstorming on how to implement patriarchy: maybe it's a specialization of labor, but the efficiency of that is difficult to represent; maybe it makes growth faster, but that's not very interesting. I eventually decided that patriarchy would over-extend the carrying capacity of a habitat, representing the extension of husbandry techniques towards human beings and the exchange/exploitation of women as chattel. But, that had an interesting implication: let's say, I implement feminism as the absolute negation of patriarchy. This would result in the population's growth plateauing and, eventually, declining to meet their environment's actual carrying capacity. I wondered: does that sound right?

The more I thought about it, and as I discussed it with my partner, the more it sounded quite right—in ways I hadn't considered. Back in Human Geography, we learned about the demographic transition: pre-industrial societies have high death rates and high birth rates, which about cancel out (keep in mind that the high death rate of pre-industrial society is due more specifically to the poor living conditions of early sedentary societies, the material context in which patriarchies emerged); developing societies experience decreasing death rates due to improved standards of living, but retain high birth rates because they were accustomed to high death rates up until then; finally, with "access to contraception, increases in wages, urbanization, a reduction in subsistence agriculture, an increase in the status and education of women, a reduction in the value of children's work, an increase of parental investment, and other social changes" (why not quote Wikipedia?), the birth rate declines until the overall rate in change of population stabilizes or even falls below replacement level. The initial demographic shift from a pre-industrial to developing society can be attributed more-or-less to material improvements in people's lives which cause them to die less. The factors contributing to the second shift however, i.e. the decrease in birth rate, can almost all be laid at the feet of the de-institutionalization of patriarchy and the socio-material factors on which it relied: less subsistence agriculture, i.e., less property ownership and inheritance outside of capital; women being empowered as economic agents rather than domestic servants, investing in their own career and education; women having less children whether because they prioritize their careers, don't have time for domestic labor, or just don't want to. You know what they say, that the ideal modern or capitalist nuclear family relies on one parent (the mother, usually) spending all their time caring for children and keeping house while the other parent (the father) wins bread.

But there's a contradiction in this development, in our own specifically capitalist context: the economy must grow at a rate equal to, if not greater, than the rate of change of the population. This is usually phrased in terms of labor replacement, as the elderly retire, but this is not per se: the population can meet its own material demands quite well, considering that we waste about 50% of food we grow and how many workers are employed in what Graeber calls "bullshit jobs"; the problem is not necessarily that we cannot meet our needs than that the capitalist economy is optimized for profits rather than for meeting those needs. A declining population means a declining body of workers and consumers who are necessary to make number go up; otherwise, if number go down, the firms will eat themselves alive to recuperate lost market opportunities. This is not just hypothetical, but what we're currently living through: the increase of rights for women—including not just advancement in education or careers but also abortion access and decreases in teen pregnancy—has resulted in a decline in population growth, because the birth rate was "artificially" inflated by the exploitation of women as a class. In other words, structurally speaking, the promise of feminism is incompatible with capitalist economy; although liberal feminism helped propel the post-Ford service economy, by unlocking new markets of labor and consumption, it now seems to have outstayed its welcome. This is in spite of capitalism's tendency to revolutionize the relations of production, which we can now also understand as intrinsically unstable (in the same way, Li Minqi points out, that capital really prefers to employ off-season peasants despite itself generating a proletariat).

So we find ourselves at a weird crossroads. The fascists perceive the problem: being fascists, of course, their "solution" is to roll back feminist gains in order to artificially re-inflate those birth rates (especially white births, in order to compete with immigrant families from pre-industrial or developing cultures whose birth rates haven't "yet" fallen, and whose numbers threaten the fascists both economically as labor power and symbolically as barbarians at the gate; I don't need to explain the Great Replacement "theory", hopefully). Liberals in the United States are supposed to be on the opposite side, so I would criticize them for naïvely burying their heads in the sand, acting like there aren't structural problems on our (once) current path—except that they seem to be enabling if not outright supporting the fascists in their program against women and immigrants. Either way, there's an unspoken option: to refuse to compromise the gains of feminism (or to make a scapegoat of immigrants), and to reorganize society in order to meet people's needs directly (given, again, that our productive capabilities far exceed our needs) while allowing the population to naturally decline.

Feminism implies degrowth, as does communism as per Kohei Saito. By corollary, feminism implies communism and vice versa, not only because of shared moral grounds, but because of what society's reproduction implies for its reorganization and what society's reorganization implies for its reproduction. Hell, the same can be said for racism and nationalism and all that. This isn't to reduce any one dimension of the social matrix to a primary contradiction: rather, it's to recognize the Gordian knot in which these things interface, that the implications of capitalist totality are more material, more physical, than we sometimes act like. One must cut the knot!

From LGBT to FGT

The LGBT movement is just cooked. The 'T' front is totally, irrevocably fucked: the transgender umbrella envisioned by Feinberg failed to manifest material benefits for anyone who fell under its shadow, and the access to healthcare and legal recognition that trans people had acquired on the basis of their temporary cool factor is also more-or-less out the window. If the judgment on Dobbs v. Johnson was anything to go by, same-sex and interracial marriage are next. All we have left are a spectacular pseudo-politics of identity representation, as if nothing matters other than finding increasingly granular signifiers for increasingly specific permutations of self-evaluated character. That or, alternatively to 2SLGBTQIA+, take "queer" as a universal identity—defined specifically in its vagueness—making no material demands of the cisheterosexual patriarchal society against which it purports to stand. We're at a dead end, and they want us dead.

Maybe it behooves us to construct new terms. Here's my pitch: FGT. Right off the bat, it's handy as an acronym because you probably won't want to shorten it like that for the most part. So, we incentivize people to think less in terms of the acronym as an abstract front (another weakness of LGBT is the confusion of what helps one letter as helping other or all letters—or, more generally, the identification of individuals as abstractly LGBT without consideration for their particular life experiences or material needs) and more in terms of its components: female, gay, trans. These three terms encapsulate specific relational axes towards patriarchy, not mutually exclusive within the scope of an individual's life, but structurally distinct in how they function per se: female, being a member of the oppressed sex-class; gay, having sexual relationships (or other attributes) beyond the class assigned to one's sex; and trans, having atypical sexual physiology. The location of an individual in one or more of these coordinates indicates their oppression (exploitation) or repression (subalternity) under patriarchy and, although one's behaviors and character are molded by their positionality in patriarchal relations, it's those relations we need to abolish.

Our demands boil down to autonomy and privacy, in as much as the patriarchal apparatus prevents us from meeting our material needs and surveils our clandestine attempts to do so ourselves. The FGT demands access to medical treatments and procedures necessary to guarantee our personal health and independence from chaperones: abortion, contraception, genitoplasty, hormonal replacement therapy, pre- and post-exposure prophylaxis for HIV/AIDS, etc. The FGT demands that no treatment or procedure modifying one’s sexual characteristics or physiological processes shall be administered without the patient’s informed consent. The FGT demands privacy on matters of medical care, sexual relationships, and physiological processes: that no state, firm, or organization should monitor our activities in order to punish, or profit, off of our existence; that the state keep no record of an individual’s apparent sex for identification or other records; and that the state not formally recognize any domestic or romantic unions of individuals. The FGT demands that female, gay, and trans people are empowered to fend off harassment and violence, on an individual or organized basis. The FGT demands the reorganization of society to meet the population's needs, without exploiting or repressing us for its reproduction; this requires, besides healthcare access and privacy, the socialization of childcare and domestic work, as well as sex education so that individuals know themselves (such self-knowledge often being one's best defense against abuse and exploitation). The FGT demands that these gains be distributed equitably, not implicitly withheld on the basis of race or class.

This, of course, is a thought experiment to imagine new and better discourses than the one in which we're now trapped. Maybe, if something doesn't work, we should try other things.