Genders must not be mixed...

It seems to me that in order to subjugate them successfully, any cultural or
ideological form must bind itself to the human passions and drives of its
putative subjects. The Law is an instrument for the organisation of affect,
and it follows that the unleashing of affect - those rebellious outbursts of
fury, lust and weeping that we take to be so transfigurative - is to some
extent the deployment of a force already marshalled and co-opted by the big
Other. This is one of Judy B.'s better points, I think: don't look to
emotion for a refuge from the tyranny of social "repression" -
subjectivation does not always operate in a repressive mode; it also
enables, mandates and endorses, as in Zizek's account of the idiotic
superego that says "you may".

This resolves in a way the question of whether or not the depravities
practised by ordinary people acting as agents of genocide are the expression
of unconfined (and perverted) lust, or a result of the repression of proper
human sympathies by the icy rule of ideology (the question being whether we
ought to castrate - chemically or societally - our barbarous passions, or
try to fuck our way out of ideology, in order to be good non-Nazis - the
choice here is between rapist Koestler and orgone-accumulator Reich). In
fact, lust can be ideologically "leveraged" (as we say in the business of
business as usual). It is terribly difficult to lust efficiently (that is,
guiltlessly) without the support of a good ideology. Conversely, there is
such a thing as revolutionary chastity - Joan of Arc, and many who came
after.

Nobody looks a bigger moron in my eyes than the moron who proclaims that all
the ills of mankind are the fault of the Church of Rome for being sniffy
about sex and wanting all women to be an exact duplicate of momma, and that
the best solution to war, poverty and the subordination of women is to stock
up on porno and nipple-clamps and get into the habit of paying for sex (what
kind of cheapskate imperialist expects to get it on tap for nothing?).

I was thinking the other day about the tendency of my poems, and other
writing in fact, to home in on the viscera whenever "politics" came into
question. As a good rationalist, I am in favour of the icy rule of economic
determinism, augmented by the number-crunching chic of information theory,
with a dash of European social-democratic piety to leaven the mixture and
stop it looking too insanely right- or left-wing. This accommodation of
cynicism and sentiment places me on the side of the ruling class, although
they have yet to contact me and issue me with a membership card & full
privileges. The anti-corporate-globalisation protestors' accommodation of
sentiment and cynicism is of course the exact opposite, and places them on
the side of the oppressed, although I don't notice that many of them
actually starving (unless eating a purely macrobiotic diet counts) or dying
of dysentery (ditto) so I'm assuming that membership cards are being
withheld on *that* side as well. Here I am, stuck in the middle with you.
And then I end up writing these things that look like the product of a
Poundian mania, for what I don't quite know.

I wonder why one so seldom hears poets and intellectuals say that they are
on the side of the ruling class nowadays? It used to be much more
commonplace I'm sure; to read certain critics, you'd think that everyone up
until about 1978 was a counter-revolutionary stooge. Of course the ruling
class are awful people who do awful things, and the Struggle is necessarily
a Struggle against Them and Everything They Stand For. But to be honest I
think the oppressed are also awful people who do awful things, and the only
reason we don't have to Struggle against them too is that the ruling class
are doing it for us. "We", by the way, are wonderful people who are always
trying to do the right thing, which is Struggle. Struggle, struggle,
struggle. We'll struggle with ourselves if we have to - right now I've got
some books on re-engineering my gender orientation, and I'm determined that
by the end of next year I'll be a thirty-seven-year old Californian diesel
dyke into bondage, wicca and amphetamines (the hardest part, I think, is
going to be becoming a true Californian*).

Ah, I am making light - and yet strangely heavy weather - of some serious
issues here; which is almost always a reactionary thing to do. I forget what
the point was I was trying to make. I think it was that I don't really
believe that gender, and gender-differences, are a pure cultural invention
opaquely superimposed over a radically genderless (if residually "sexed")
body. The reason that gender is so difficult for many people to uproot may
be that the hetero-normative "wound" was given prior to the arrival of the
subject's ability to recognise and master it, but what is wounded is then
precisely narcissism, and one should be immediately suspicious of any
project that seeks to restore a wounded narcissism: "that there should be
nothing, and no-one, different from me" - sola ipse, Sinn Fein.

Dominic

* Boom, boom.