Between the light and me

Conjugate deterritorialized flows. Follow the plants: you start by delimiting a first line consisting of circles of convergence around successive singularities; then you see whether inside that line new circles of convergence establish themselves, with new points located outside the limits and in other directions. Write, form a rhizome, increase your territory by deterritorialization, extend the line of flight to the point where it becomes an abstract machine covering the entire plane of consistency.
—Deleuze and Guattari

What can you say about A Thousand Plateaus? Its authors, preferring the decentralized horizontal root-network of the rhizome to the dichotomous and hierarchical column of the tree, disclaim for their text the name of science, disclaim even that it is a book. A book may be bound within covers, but lines, intensities, zones escape from it to join with their like in the world or in the author. We and our books and our states look whole, but we’re really assemblages of parts and energies that cross and recross and in so doing reconfigure flesh and borders.

Unlike some of their ecstatic but still Puritan American epigones, Deleuze and Guattari understand that the process may be violent and may even produce its own orders of fascism. Better that than the fascist guarantee of the statist order. They hate Freud as I hate Marx, which is amusing, and in their description of what psychoanalysis does to the analysand they inadvertently produce the motto for the kind of art criticism practiced by the Pierre Bourdieus and Franco Morettis of the world:

You will be allowed to live and speak, but only after every outlet has been obstructed.

Their book, of which I’ve read only about a hundred non-consecutive pages, is impossible to read or to understand. You must read it—I pick up the mode of exhortation from them; they got it from English and American literature, which they prefer to the French, as do I, as Moretti and Bourdieu do not—you must, I say, read it as suggestion, provocation and poetry. Argument is ephemeral, political argument the most ephemeral of all. Only literature lasts, not as monument—though it accidentally may—but as energy, as a kind of battery you can plug yourself into. Motto for a counter-sociology and an ahistoricist criticism:

Literature is an assemblage. It has nothing to do with ideology. There is no ideology and never has been.

I read Deleuze and Guattari as a set of notes for an apolitics.

When they invoke revolution or the Oriental state, I ignore it—Maoism is the final stupidity of Enlightenment’s slapstick suicide—but when their wiser “segments” prevail, they know that there is finally nothing you can do about power or the state: they will always be with us. You can only hope to be intense outside of it, or to make some of its territory over with your energy. It’ll take it back in the end—worse, it’ll make you give it back in the end—but at least you really lived.

I have no intention of blunting the self-help/how-to angle of this text; hip graduate students are embarrassed by it—so un-French—but I love it. Self-help is just the curdling of wisdom literature, and the blending of their tones is unavoidable in an American age becoming an Asian age. Our greatest huckster-philosopher Emerson learned well from Eastern texts, as did his ephebes Thoreau and Whitman, and I myself have turned for how-to and self-help to the Tao Te Ching, in Stephen Mitchell’s free translation, a book that could be stocked in the business section of Barnes and Noble (Mitchell’s wife, appropriately enough, is a New Age guru of some kind). Deleuze and Guattari know as well as I do that this language of America/Asia, East/West, is a nonsensical delusion, merely political language (all politics is identity politics), but we are stuck with the language to a certain extent. I place here in this connection the perhaps surprising fact that Edward Said loved this book, for all its self-aware Orientalism and Americanism.

What America and Asia do for Deleuze and Guattari is give them an image of ecstatic and mobile assemblages that relieves their sick-soul-of-Europe feeling. They are anti-Adornos, anti-Europeans. There is life after Auschwitz. The European response to the capitalist inter-penetration of self-help and wisdom is to eschew wisdom altogether: this is why Zizek, quoting Heidegger and faithful to Adorno, identified the U.S. and the Third World as “metaphysically the same,” with only Europe able to offer resistance in the form of resistance itself. Emerson and Lao Tzu counsel us not to resist but to go with flow. That’s the point, and what so offends the European philosopher about America and China.

Where does this leave me? (Who cares about me? the renegade Frenchmen might demand.) Hard to say. I endorse their defense not only of literature, but of English and American literature specifically. What the critical theorists and the negative theologians of post-structuralism miss in their endless dismantlings of Woolf or Whitman: the Anglo innovation of a deracinating modernity produced its own antibody—an art that made religion redundant as a haven from the market. People who “seek their roots,” who insist on maintaining their chimerical cultural integrity against rootless cosmopolitanism, look foolish next to the anarchic alternative offered by the post-Romantic line of aesthetic flight. The autonomy of the aesthetic was the last century's only reliable anti-fascism, which is way more than one can say for witless Marxism.

For my part, I have left in succession the Catholic Church, the anti-church of a Dawkins-like atheism, the counter-church of Marxism. My last allegiance is to literature, and it is a real allegiance—I will war against its infidels (polemos: war).

But the Churches you leave—they leave their mark on you. I was discussing Deleuze and Guattari with a colleague and he kept telling me I was getting it wrong, I was lapsing into dualism and they are monists. Had I the presence of mind, I would have retorted that D&G in their best moments understand that the distinction itself is a dualism and that dualisms are not only undesirable but unavoidable. What I did say: I was brought up Catholic, monism doesn’t come naturally to me.

And this is why discussions about what people “believe in” are so misguided. “Do you believe in God?” I don’t have any idea what the word “God” means. If it means a man in the sky, well, only fools could believe such a thing. If it means an unmoved mover, condition of possibility of being, energy immanent in all things, then the word belief loses sense, and the thing referred to—not a thing at all, a kind of Heraclitean fire—is not in any case soliciting belief. I don’t see what difference it would make if matter were random and senseless or patterned and in-spirited. We’ll still suffer pain and die, Gilles will still take his line of flight away from illness and down to death. Spinoza counsels dispassionate understanding. It’s never been my style.

(I note that Spinoza and Deleuze both perished—the latter indirectly—from lung ailments. If I may hazard illness as metaphor, lung disease is actually a good death for the monist. Pain and suffering and evil are for monists not somethings but nothings—diminutions in power, things that don’t happen rather than things that do. Nature pays tribute to the monist by merely subtracting his breath. Dualists should die by positives: plaques, tumors, bullets, automobiles.)

A final word about monism and me. What makes atheism so unsatisfying a response to orthodox forms of Christianity is that atheism decapitates Christian metaphysics but leaves you with its body. Christian atheism, if I can call it that, still argues for a fallen human nature, it just cannot say from where it fell. For this reason, monism, whether in the form of Buddhism or Taoism or Marxism or Transcendentalism or Spinozism or Deleuzeanism, attracts the young Christian renegade. Monism feels naughtier than mere atheism—it gives us not no God, but a better God, a more omnipotent God. Monism is the thinking person’s Satanism. I am not immune to this attraction, not in the least, and I for one could read Emerson, if not Deleuze, all day. And as politics, or as apolitics, it comes down to this for me: I will never stop seeking ways to make due, to intensely be, outside the walls of the Church and the State.

But my Christian atheism—my Mediterranean paganism, I should say, my “roots,” heaven help me—reasserts itself. I think not of Milton, George Eliot, Emerson or Woolf, monist geniuses every one, writers I revere. I think instead of Beckett, of Shakespeare in his darkest hours, of a Keats more miserable than his admirers know, of the great counter-Whitman and counter-Emerson, America’s very greatest poet, Emily Dickinson, and her perfect poem:

I heard a Fly buzz – when I died –
The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air –
Between the Heaves of Storm –

The Eyes around – had wrung them dry –
And Breaths were gathering firm
For that last Onset – when the King
Be witnessed – in the Room –

I willed my Keepsakes – Signed away
What portion of me be
Assignable – and then it was
There interposed a Fly –

With Blue – uncertain stumbling Buzz –
Between the light – and me –
And then the Windows failed – and then
I could not see to see –

The great poem of anti-immanence. (A lot of anti- and counter- in this post. I told you I was a dualist.) The immanentist would insist that Dickinson’s speaker suffers false consciousness when she perceives the fly as coming between the light and her. For the fly is part of nature, as is the corpse-to-be, and as Grant Morrison (pop monist) told us at the end of The Invisibles, we never fell at all. Nature is unfallen. The corpse and the fly and the light are all the same stuff. It doesn’t feel that way, though, and, much as I will always try to follow the writing advice from A Thousand Plateaus that furnishes an epigraph for this post, I nevertheless place my own weary metaphysics under the sign of this poem, as a reminder of how it feels.

Coffy, Tori Amos, Susan Sontag

Three great women born in the same century as me. Will this century produce any great women—or men? It’s not looking good.

I watched Pam Grier’s signature film Coffy tonight. I have to say, I’ve seen exploitation films, and Coffy contains its share of exploitation—I’m thinking of a long girl-fight scene where the women are ripping each other’s shirts open, as well as an extended homophobic joke about lesbians—but in and among the exploitation, in and among the titillation, was an incisive social analysis and a fairly delicate character study. Coffy is a hard-working nurse who decides to get revenge on the drug lords for hooking her little sister on heroin. Trouble is, as she learns, the drug problem goes beyond dealers, and she eventually sees that it’s not just the white power structure that’s corrupt—I mean, what else can you expect of them?—but that leaders in the black community, even those who talk the nationalist talk, are in for their cut of the drug and blood money no matter what happens to real people. The film itself is more or less black nationalist as I see it; the corrupt politician is a sell-out who fucks white girls, but Coffy as vigilante redeems the idea of black self-help and militancy. Granted, her way doesn’t have any obvious future, but films are not political programs: as icon, she stands for standing.

Politics of any sort can be crude, but there’s no fundamental crudeness in this film. When we first see King George, the pimp that Coffy initially targets, he’s a walking caricature with a hat and a cane. But as he goes to his death—a gruesome lynching by car—at the hands of an Italian gangster’s henchmen, we see a kind and gentle side—displayed, significantly, in kindness to his own white girlfriend—that prepares us to be outraged at his murder. The film offers no easy answers.

Let me play the aggrieved ethnic victim for once: there are no positive portrayals of white ethnics, from the corrupt Irish cop to the servile Latino politician to the aforementioned smarmy Italian gangster, my demographic comes out very poorly. And why not—what did we ever do to help black people? I couldn’t help bit notice that Italians produced this movie though, in a gesture of what I suppose must, over and above the pornographic impulse, be sympathy for those who stand up.

People who disdain standing up in favor of lying down and complaining about it write for Salon.com, which I’ve been reading for about ten years in a general state of being-appalled. I swear it’s getting worse, though: the Salon writers 1.) used to deal with more than just pop culture—that is, they used to write regularly, if banally, about books; and 2.) use to have a sense that works of art could be more complicated than an internally-consistent, because only thought about, politics can be. Now, alas, Kate Harding:

Deborah Finding, a scholar at the London School of Economics, has written a dissertation called "Give Me Myself Again -- Sexual Violence Narratives in Popular Music." The title comes from a song by feminist favorite Tori Amos, but Finding's work also includes charming little ditties like The Crystals' 1962 "He Hit Me (And it Felt like a Kiss)."

[…]

And although the 1980s and early '90s saw a lot of pop songs that raised awareness about domestic and sexual violence -- in addition to Amos' work, she mentions contributions by Tracy Chapman, Suzanne Vega, Alanis Morissette and Sheryl Crowe -- "We've gone full circle in the post-feminist era." Finding points to Florence and the Machines' 2008 single "Kiss with a Fist" -- the lyrics of which inform us that such a kiss is "better than none" -- a catchy, bouncy song that presents mutual violence as no big thing ("You hit me once/I hit you back/You gave a kick/I gave a slap"). Is this what female "empowerment" looks like in the twenty-first century? Being abusive right back to an abuser? [Did Coffy live in vain?—Mario.]

[…]

Songs like Amos' "Me and a Gun," in which she candidly recounts her own rape, can help survivors feel less alone and more comfortable opening up about their experiences. Writes Peterson, "Finding's work is amazing because it illuminates the role of narrative in healing from assault or abuse by speaking these stories into existence." But popular narratives can also serve to normalize and/or trivialize abuse. According to Wikipedia, Florence of Florence and the Machine has explained on her Myspace page that "'Kiss with a Fist' is NOT a song about domestic violence. It is about two people pushing each other to psychological extremes because they love each other." All that hitting/slapping/plate-breaking stuff is just metaphorical, apparently. Except, the song is based on a couple she knew "who were so cool, but so visceral and so intense. The guy never hit the girl, but I saw her lamp him a couple of times, and she'd always give as good as she got. But it wasn't really physical violence, it was more about the fact that their animal passion for each other was the thing that was attractive for them. It was how joyful destruction can be, and how alluring it is to be in a relationship so fiery."

Uh, since when does "lamp" as a verb mean something other than physical violence? Does it just not count when a woman does it to a man? And has it occurred to Florence -- or the band's fans, reading that explanation -- that domestic violence often goes unseen by people close to the victims? Or that emotional abuse often leads to physical abuse? Or that there's a big difference between a pleasantly spicy relationship and "pushing each other to psychological extremes"?

I only feel that I have to comment on this because I am in possession of a fairly encyclopedic knowledge of Tori Amos lyrics, and this emptily sarcastic (“Uh, since when,” “just metphorical apparently”—the whole stupid glib tone of the whole stupid glib internet) sub-diatribe does her complex work no justice.

Now it’s certainly true that the ’90s in pop music presented a richer, more various and more intense vision of female experience—but the conservatism of the ’00s has created a pop cultural wasteland in every way, so that’s no surprise. Amos went on making good music, of course, not that the popmeisters of Salon know or care. Like the ephemeral and shallow politics they espouse, their aesthetic sensibilities stop at the talked-about. What gets me is Harding’s invidious comparison between Florence and the Machine’s aesthetic exploration of a relationship in which people are pushed “to psychological extremes” and Amos’s music, which comes off here as a simplistic “awareness-raising” victimology. Harding’s need to herd female artists into these roles (irresponsible employer of metaphor vs. responsible advocate for the oppressed) is classically sexist—and Stalinist, but never mind that. If I were a woman, I would be embarrassed that people calling themselves feminists were going around pretending not to believe that poets and lyricists can employ metaphors! Anyway, try these Tori Amos lyrics on for size, from 1999’s “Bliss”:

Father, I killed my monkey
I let it out to
Taste the sweet of spring
Wonder if I will wander out
Test my tether to
See if I'm still free
From you

Steady as it comes
Right down
To you
I've said it all
So maybe we're a Bliss
Of another kind

Lately, I’m in to circuitry
What it means to be
Made of you but not enough for you
And I wonder if
You can bilocate is that
What I taste
Your supernova juice
You know it's true I’m part of you

[…]

Steady as it comes
Right down to you
I've said it all
So maybe you've a four horse engine
With a power drive
A hot kachina who wants into mine
Take it with your terracide

Let us imagine Salon.com’s response to this song about a seemingly abusive and incestuous father/daughter relationship. Doesn’t Tori Amos know that incest is a serious crime? Uh, since when is animal abuse okay? There’s a difference between a psychological exploration of a bad relationship and sick references to “supernova juice”! I guess that’s just a metaphor, etc.

But notice that Amos writes about such a relationship without slapping disclaimers all over it that help the listener to fit it into a pre-fabricated political category. Has it never occurred to Kate Harding that simply encountering a painful experience in art, rendered with all of the emotional ambiguity of actual experience, can be part of the very complex working-through of experience itself that we all have to do? Does she seriously not understand that when she insists that the personal be politicized she is destroying the personal by intellectual violence? (I pause to note that the song “Bliss” is, as far as I know, in no way autobiographical.) The cultural commissar and the domestic abuser have more in common with each other than either has with the insouciant pop lyricist. I recall that Tori Amos, who has never backed down from her own perhaps dubious brand of Jungian feminism, once told an interviewer that girls didn’t want to be called feminists because feminists, like the Man, bossed them around too much. (See also: Momus on the late mannerist years of identity politics.)

Speaking of, let us now turn to the third great woman in my triumvirate, Susan Sontag. More specifically, people's responses to her. A more clear-cut case of sexism in intellectual life I have never seen. Granted, as my explorations of Bourdieu demonstrated, a coercive sociology of literature has become mainstream in criticism and it reduces artists and thinkers, male or female, to their role as dominated taste-makers who uphold inequality. However, the reaction to Sontag—especially the deeply disgusting aftermath of her death, which includes her lover publishing photos of her corpse and her son writing a memoir about the delusions of her last days—comes with a clearly gendered subtext, as if the question on everyone’s lips was, “Who does this bitch think she is?”

Because Sontag did what other people just think about doing. She made herself as she wished herself to be, without apology, without complaint, without whining about how the world made her a victim (which it did, but only after she was in the ground), and without dumbing it down. At this point, the writer on Sontag begins to make allowances: Oh, she could be arrogant, Oh, she could be silly. But I’m not going to do it. More arrogant than Freud? Sillier than Barthes? Oh, but her politics…. Which are no worse than any other writer’s; everyone of her era was distorted by the Cold War. Now we all have to tear Sontag down because she dared to insist that we didn’t have to live in mediocre times, we didn’t have to settle for what fate handed us, we didn’t have to let the world walk all over us or anybody else. Beauty is possible, justice should be striven for, one must always think. And for these modernist demands in postmodernist times, from a woman, from a gay woman, from a gay woman moreover who didn’t stake her claims on her sex or her sexual orientation, she had to pay the price for not making obeisances to the lords of life, her corpse had to be dragged around the walls of the city to remind the bitch of her place.

The immediate occasion of my reflections here is Dave Hickey’s essay in Harper’s (not online) on Sontag’s journals, which he justly assails as a sensationalist intellectual hatchet job by son-of-Sontag David Rieff. Hickey pointedly remarks that Rieff cut Sontag’s journals into “a gay chick-lit memoir with a few big words,” and instead of kicking dirt at Sontag for her ambitions he examines some of the reasons they have come to seem so silly, remarking at last that she’d been “tricked by history.” I don’t believe history works that way, however, and neither did she. Adjusting your ambitions to history is a bad way to make history. I am reminded of Sontag’s clash with Adrienne Rich over feminism back in 1975. Sontag understood then that modern feminism and classical sexism weren’t as distinct as either’s partisans would like to believe. I conclude, as a fellow-traveler with great women and in the spirit of Coffy, with Sontag’s parting shot to the Adrienne Riches and Kate Hardings of the world:

Adrienne Rich, whom I have always admired as poet and phenomenologist of anger, is a piker compared to some self-styled radical feminists, all too eager to dump the life of reason (along with the idea of authority) into the dustbin of "patriarchal history." Still, her well-intentioned letter does illustrate a persistent indiscretion of feminist rhetoric: anti-intellectualism. "One imagined Sontag not to dissociate herself from feminism," Rich observes. Right. But I do dissociate myself from that wing of feminism that promotes the rancid and dangerous antithesis between mind ("intellectual exercise") and emotion ("felt reality"). For precisely this kind of banal disparagement of the normative virtues of the intellect (its acknowledgement of the inevitable plurality of moral claims; the rights it accords, alongside passion, to tentativeness and detachment) is also one of the roots of fascism—what I was trying to expose in my argument about Riefenstahl.

The undead novel

THE NOVELIST

Encased in talent like a uniform,
The rank of every poet is well known;
They can amaze us like a thunderstorm,
Or die so young, or live for years alone.
They can dash forward like hussars: but he
Must struggle out of his boyish gift and learn
How to be plain and awkward, how to be
One after whom none think it worth to turn.

For, to achieve his lightest wish, he must
Become the whole of boredom, subject to
Vulgar complaints like love, among the Just

Be just, among the Filthy filthy too,
And in his own weak person, if he can,
Must suffer dully all the wrongs of Man.

—W. H. Auden

Sorry to have missed a month. I have been engaged—am actually still engaged—in grandly farcical procedures related to my formal education. But I thought I might leave a note about the talk of the day in the world of literature, which is what it has been since about the days of Flaubert if not of Jane Austen: The Fate of the Novel.

The occasion: Zadie Smith wrote what seems to me to be a perfectly unobjectionable defence of the novel, as against the essay, memoir or broadly non-fictional prose genre called for by David Shields in his new manifesto Reality Hunger.

Smith, in perhaps a miscalculation of the cognoscenti’s current consensus, lists Franzen’s The Corrections as one novel that restored her faith in the form. People perhaps did overreact when The Corrections came out: it arrived just a week before 9/11, and both events seemed somehow to spell “the death of postmodernism,” the event by returning history to a grand drama of colliding collectives and the book by resurrecting the social novel, the family saga and literary language’s referential function all at once. This went to people’s heads—I remember being practically pinned to my dorm room bed, reading Franzen’s long book in just two days shortly after it came out, and I also remember a people on a New York Times message board wondering whether Franzen was more comparable to Tolstoy or to Dostoevsky. While the more quantitative answer, if I can put it this way, is Tolstoy, the qualitative terms somehow don’t seem to apply. Nevertheless, now in our resurgently pomo age of Obama and irony, we’re a little embarrassed we fell so hard for Franzen; it’s like an adolescent crush.

But, you know, I am personally not embarrassed. The Corrections remains a superb (if somewhat uneven) novel, and I am confident it will outlast its detractors. Why so many detractors? Is it just the 9/11 hangover thing? No, I propose that it’s this instead, at least on the basis of my eight-year-old memories of the text: The “hero” of the novel is Enid. Franzen’s famous reclamation of realist sympathetic amplitude as against declinist late- and/or post-modernism a la DeLillo re-imports into the “serious” (masculine) novel of ideas a concern for psychic interiors, affect and development. Franzen first seduces the reader into deprecating Enid before revealing her at the end as more interesting, more heroic and capable of more growth than her children. I think the rapture of the novel's initial reception, and also its critical depreciation in some quarters since, stems from its bold attempt to resurrect the domestic social novel on terms that respect the domicile’s historical ruler—domestic woman. And Franzen was thus, like Dickens, “writing as a woman.” Having confessed in a weak moment that we loved our mothers, our heartland American mothers—as much a symbol, psychoanalysis be damned, of primal authority as the father (which is why The Corrections is legible as a Bush-era book; it certainly is conservative, which fact about a work has never debarred artistic greatness, as even the Marxist critic allows)—we now regret that we had not rather admired some proper writer, some European reflexivist attuned to his own attenuation or some Third World insurgent for whom the old myths still breathe.

Smith remembers something many critics never even knew: there is always an appeal open from criticism to nature, however ideologically pre-processed we agree nature to be. If I said that to anyone in my English department, some robot police would come out of the walls and have me ejected from the university, but it remains true, and Smith, who is in the glorious position of being able to afford indifference to what the boss-man or boss-woman thinks, can say it all she wants. Whether or not we agree with her that the male of the species is more likely than the female to prefer the putative purity of the essay to the creaking scenery of the novel’s reality effects, all their messy and disappointing approximations of the world’s messes and disappointments, we can laud her for realizing that the famous line of modernist despair has two clauses—I can’t go on, I’ll go on. And on Sam did go, in novels that only make sense as novels, even if novels in ruins, because Sam was like a depressed Spinozist for whom the conatus is no happy fact, and no avoidable one either; I can’t imagine him granting a blurb to David Shields.

One quibble about Coetzee, though. This necessary re-commitment to that which one cannot in intellectual good faith commit to is what Coetzee’s recent works have been all about. I have no comment on his blurb of Shields’s manifesto; frankly, anyone who endorsed Clive James’s embarrassing Cultural Amnesia as Coetzee did should have his license to endorse revoked. But I found Diary of a Bad Year to be infinitely warmer and more affecting—and more novelistic: I think of Barthes’s great phrase, “the novelistic without the novel”—than, say, Life & Times of Michael K, which, while brilliant, reads sometimes like an exercise, sometimes like an inadvertent treatise. It’s as if Coetzee has only now discovered that the novel in disguise as an essay, rather than the reverse, is the only instrument on which he can play those traditionally “human,” or human, notes. Better than Zadie Smith can, actually, and she needs to write a better novel than On Beauty, as do I.

When it comes to speculations about the future of The Novel, I think we over-educated types would feel a lot better about such things if we kicked our residual Hegelianism. Literary genres do not have world-historical missions and destinies. There is no The Novel to end when the zeitgeist moves on or the mode of production shifts or the episteme evanesces, there only the various devices that our ingenuity and empathy invent to make sense of things. Douglas Cooper, author of the great and sadly-out-of-print-in-the-U.S. novel Amnesia, once said something to the effect that he wished to work in dead media because the other media are dying. As for me, I have no fear that The Novel will die because it doesn’t exist as such. And, anyway, who has time to fear such things when there are so many novels to read?

The Fetishist Manifesto

[An attempt to recapitulate and extend the arguments made in this blog thus far.]

From the news and the blogs, I read that in Britain, BNP leader Nick Griffin went on the BBC’s Question Time and gave out a version of the argument that white Britons are aboriginals being colonized by racist immigrants, that, indeed, whites are the real victims of racism. This is a very familiar argument here in the U.S. as well. Its most energetic advocate has been Pat Buchanan, and, as his own ethnicity and religion attest, it’s a position occupied most forcefully by the recently—thus, most insecurely—“white.” I heard it often growing up in my “ethnic” milieu, from Italians and Irish and Poles, and also, people-of-color unity be damned, from middle-class Asians (who didn’t see themselves as white, but as civilized, hard-working, temperate—not “black”).

Make no mistake: the thesis that whites are the real victims of racism is the logical terminus of a politics based on racialist attributions of moral authenticity. The politics works this way:

1. Claim a collective identity for yourself premised on culture—that is, on the inheritance of a set of characteristic, quasi-automatic group practices (forms of public art or worship, sartorial tradition, etc.).

2. Claim further than this identity is inaccessible to outsiders; one has to be a member of the group to “get it.”

3. Show that an external force menaces the group and its cohesion. Usually, this threat is a universalist ideology that either atomizes the group members by inciting them to seek their highest pleasures and perform their profoundest acts as individuals or that aims to re-found collectivity on a sense of shared material interests or a scientific politics of class or state. The usual suspects are capitalism and communism, but, since identity politics doesn’t believe in universalism, these ideologies are seen by cultural nationalists of all “races” to be mere masks for the figure of the rootless Jew.

4. Claim that the external threat justifies a redoubled effort to preserve this culture, along with an argumentative war footing that repels debate and replaces it with either piety or thought-terminating, conversation-stopping accusations (“You want to destroy America!” “You have white privilege!” etc.)

5. Argue that, since troubling a coherent culture is considered by the light of post-Holocaust ethics to be the ne plus ultra of political criminality, the representative of a menaced culture has ultimate ethical authority to speak and to define absolutely the terms of the debate against anyone who would introduce criteria offensive to culture.

Following these simple steps, you can attain discursive power. Since this line of argument was developed by insurgent minorities in order to enter and transform institutions, it’s no surprise to find other political movements, ostensibly opposed to dissident identity politics, adopting these tactics in their quest for power. Victim politics is always power politics because victimhood is a source of authority.

I am attempting to isolate the structure of victim-politics without reference to any particular aim or constituency. Surely, though, content matters. It makes a difference if we’re talking about the powerless trying to seize power, or the powerful trying to retain their power; it makes a difference whether we’re talking about Pat Buchanan or Leslie Marmon Silko. But I submit that it does not. The thought-structure is the same and, since victim politics repudiates materialist analysis, it predicates its definition of victimhood on rhetoric, emotion and collective definition. By basing moral authority on victimhood, you ensure that all contenders for power will have to claim to be victims, or else be marginalized. The question we should ask: is the contention for power a pursuit adequate to our capacities for thought and feeling?

By asking this question, I do not wish to evade the present realities of class/race/gender hierarchy. I don’t think “reverse racism” is a meaningful category, nor do I agree with the BNP leader that whites are victims of racism. What I am saying, however, is that victim politics qua philosophy offers very few intellectual resources with which to combat racism and that it almost ensures that white supremacists will begin talking in the language of culture and victimization.

For better or for worse, you can’t fight culture-based prejudice with a more robust idea of culture. Culture as lens will always have us sorting each other on sight into pre-fabricated categories, which is the illiberal essence of prejudice (pre-judging).

My disgust with curricular politics of turning literature and art into cultural studies arrives at just this point. Great art is always against culture, any culture, because it comes from depths below culture, from experiences that culture cannot assimilate, cannot iterate, cannot formalize, cannot collectivize. When great art enters a culture, it connects its auditors to a realm apart, a space above or below or alongside; it declares a separate peace, it secedes from the inherited and thus subtly coercive collectivity of culture.

Culture is a euphemism for religion. Art in modernity combines the two forces that religion has always sought to extirpate: secularity (earthiness, the chthonic powers) and magic (the art of immanence, of imbuing matter with spirit, of transforming the material through immaterial means). Great art lets us escape culture’s dictates, insists that we do: “You must change your life.” It is not, as its conservative “defenders” claim, universal—as if the universal were as solid as a rock you pick up in the road or a coin you take from your wallet. Rather, art is universalizing: it creates in the moments of its enactment-by-attention a universe that has not come into being. Its true friends wish to amplify its universalizing power.

Having said all this, let us return with sorrow to politics. What could possibly replace the politics, the ethics, the aesthetics of victimhood and identity that has reigned for the last forty years and more? The unimaginative have already proffered their solution: a return to the Enlightenment! (“Always more light!” as Derrida quipped.) We must, say the Enlighteners, return to the (false) universals of liberal capitalism or revolutionary Marxism, those terrible twins that slaughtered their way through most of the twentieth century. And I will have no truck with them, with their worship of institutions (the state, the market), their crude anthropology (enlightened self-interest, whether at group or individual level). They enshrine and deify humanity’s material interests, even as the cultural nationalists and the believers of Kansas (as in, “What’s the matter with”) were and are most persuasive when arguing that humanity has immaterial interests, too many to count. To satisy them with religion, however, or with its substitutes (Marxism, market fundamentalism, identity politics) is an intellectual error on its way to becoming a murderous moral error.
What then do I propose? Fetishism. A politics, an ethics, an aesthetics of the fetish, by the fetish and for the fetish.

Marx’s concept of the fetish has no use to me. Recall that for Marx fetishism was another name for what has become overfamiliar to us as “the naturalization of the historical.” Commodity fetishism is the dissimulation of relations between persons as relations between things: the mediation of market exchange conceals the real source of value in human labor-power and thus the extraction of surplus-value by the exploitative masters of capital. Remove the false worship of exchange-value, and the worker would perceive that his productive power serves the interests of the capitalist rather than of himself and he would move to set up the whole system on the basis of this insight.

Readers will recognize in Marx’s theory what I have already characterized in this blog as demystification-ideology, the illusion that if you reveal the truth of a situation behind its experiential complexities, then you will be able to transform the situation according to a truth pre-identified with the good. Anybody who works knows he or she is being screwed by the boss—that’s never been a secret.

But Marx’s theory that modernity presents a uniquely clear path to the destruction of exploitative relations, of social structures predicated on some having power over others, leads to his disastrous recommendation that the path to liberation proceeds perforce through a logic of subjective constitution and purgation through violence: a new protagonist of history makes himself through struggle and at the end dissolves himself into the new family of man. This, needless to say, never happened.

Twentieth-century Western Marxism, like the writings of early Christians from Paul through the Church Fathers, had to deal with the problem of the master having proclaimed that the kingdom was at hand even though that kingdom had not come (or that it didn’t look like much where it was supposed to have come), thus the theorists had to refine and refine and refine the theory of mystification, of fetishism. At their most powerful, they wed Marxian fetish-theory to that of Freud. For myself, having rejected Marxism at root, I will be progressing in this essay with Freud alone.

Freud’s theory of the fetish is every bit as dubious as Marx’s, but it’s far more psychedelic, psychedelic enough to be true. For Freud, fetishism takes hold when the child peers up between the mother’s legs and sees with horror the lack—the missing penis. For the child had assumed that the presence between his legs was primary, was ground to meaning and identity, and to see it gone is to see order and identity themselves endangered; Freud compares the child’s alarm to the cry that goes up when throne and altar (i.e., church and state, i.e., culture) are in danger.

Thus, the child requires a substitute for the missing part that he had wanted to love. So he averts his eyes. Here is Freud at his most ingenious: the child looks to the mother’s pubic hair, to her underwear, which could cover up the appalling sight of the lack, and these things (fur, hair, undergarments) become his primary objects of desire. Or he looks down, to the mother’s legs, her feet, her shoes, stockings, boots, garters—and these become the desired object. As in Marx, fetish is a substitute, but where Freud improves on Marx is in his insight that it’s a substitute for something genuinely absent, for something that we want to be there but which fundamentally cannot.

In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud notes that, from a strictly evolutionary viewpoint, only the genitals should count as objects of sexual desire, and yet they are not. More than that, they’re widely derogated: we are attracted to others in spite of their genitals, those animal grotesqueries in the groin, those hideous turkey necks and bearded clams. And so we avert our eyes and desires: to breast, buttock, mouth—or, more adventurously, further afield, to hair and foot, leather and silk. More adventurously still: to poem and play, theorem and theology, law and laboratory. Fetish is the other name of civilization.

Marxism is notoriously a religion, but psychoanalysis, like art, weds secularity to magic. What the Freudian fetish does for us: it does not disillusion us, but reminds us of the necessity of illusion and of the absence it covers. Much has been made of Freud’s sexism, and I do not personally believe in the theory of penis-envy that underwrites the fetishism thesis, but I recognize the value in any theory that does not insist on its truth at the expense of experiences that cannot be written as truth.

It’s Victorian prejudice—his culture—that leads Freud to assume the primacy of the phallus or to figure womanhood per se as lack. But it is secular truth to recognize the gaping hole, the primal absence, in our lives, and it is glorious magic-making to persist in this knowledge while creating objects about the lack, that embody the lack as they attempt to fill it, that narrate the lack in the process of overcoming it, that become the lack even as they try to become its opposite. Even if we were to adopt Freud’s sexism as our own, we would still have to allow the becoming-vulva of all fetish objects, the primordial invagination of all civilization, just as the majority of fetishists get around eventually to genital sex.

Art as culture-abrogating visionary irony is the fetish of the fetishist after psychoanalysis. As the opposite of politics, it recognizes the fragility, provisionality and fictionality of all identities and it insists on the immateriality of all longing. By not repressing such things—ah, I come to demystify after all—art does not have to act out the impossibility of their overcoming in war and violence.

Fetishism is other name of civilization, but fetishism recognized is the other name of art. I advocate not the aestheticization of politics that Walter Benjamin identified with fascism, nor the politicization of aesthetics he advocated and which became in the communist world what Sontag so notoriously denounced as fascism with a human face. Instead, I recommend that we take steps toward the replacement of politics by art. We must acknowledge that we are fetishists, that our fetish is irrevocable, that our lack cannot be filled, and we must act accordingly, in the happy knowledge of our tragic truth, in the bittersweet irony of our sad satisfactions. And we should never be satisfied.

Final notes on Bourdieu

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.
—Wilde, preface to Dorian Gray

Secularization is a form of repression which preserves intact the forces that it limits itself to merely displacing from one realm to another. Thus, the political secularization of theological concepts (divine transcendence as the paradigm of sovereign power) is content to transform heavenly monarchy into earthly monarchy, but it leaves its power intact. Profanation, on the other hand, implies a neutralization of that which it profanes. Once profaned, that which was not useful and remained separate loses its aura in order to be restored to usefulness. It is a question in both cases of political operations: but whereas the first concerns the exercise of the power that it guarantees in referring it to a sacred model, the second deactivates the apparatuses of power and restores to common usage the spaces that it has seized.
—Agamben, Profanations

Andrew Seal returns to Bourdieu. Seal allows in this latest post that Bourdieu does in fact come to demystify in an apparently hostile posture, but, Seal argues, the nature of his object justifies it:

Essentially, the fact that the "aesthete" or art-lover (or mondain) is constructed as inherently resistant to the type of analysis Bourdieu employs (she is, instead, "enchanted" and eager to forget the less ethereal realities of cultural acquisition) requires the sociologist to pay a different kind of attention—what comes to look like a more sharply critical and "disenchanting" form of attention—to the aesthete, and to exert more effort to "de-naturalize" the idea of taste to the extent that the additional effort comes to seem like an excess, like either supercilious reductionism or coolly calculated meta-gaming. This excess causes the Bourdieusian sociologist to look like someone who is trying to "outdo" everyone at a game of status that he insists we're all playing.

But this perception depends tremendously on whether we agree or not that something like an ideology of "natural taste" exists—if it doesn't, then the extra effort required to de-naturalize it does become unnecessary and even crippling to the Bourdieusian standpoint. I am fairly certain such an ideology does exist…

In other words, Bourdieu’s procedure finds its justification in the truth of the conclusion that Bourdieu’s procedure was to prove. I think this might be one of those rare occasions when we can use the phrase “begging the question” in its correct sense. It’s an uninteresting objection in the end, though: Theory in the hermeneutics-of-suspicion mode always begs the question, and rightly so, because it exists to interrogate the disinterested observer who claims to able to hold separate means and ends, premises and conclusions.

Bourdieu’s theory, though, has its totalitarian side, as all theory does, but the best theory—that, say, of the later Barthes or Sedgwick, of Adorno, of Said at the end, of Said’s friend Michael Wood—resists it. We can all find ourselves in Bourdieu—I know I can. Like the Freudian theory of repression, the Marxist theory of ideology, the pop-psychological theory of denial, the identity-political idea of privilege, Bourdieu’s theory of constituted taste is totalitarian because you cannot claim that it does not apply to you, and if you do deny its relevance, you are only revealing your deeper, because unwitting, entanglement in it. My father once said that it should be legal to shoot someone who accuses you of being in denial, since you cannot deny being in denial. So too with the theories of ideology, repression, privilege and the sociology of taste: they are repressive techniques of counter-repression, fundamental strategies of control.

But to say this is only to play Bourdieu’s own game by his rules, to ask who benefits and decide that the sociologist does. (And Bourdieu, to be fair, is following in the aesthetic footsteps of [one side of] his beloved Flaubert. I have never liked [that side of] Flaubert.) In theory, you can always one-up someone, can always raise critique to a higher power, which is why theory is never as interesting as other discourses which simply ignore power and benefit, to the chagrin of the theorist.

I want to know not what’s in it for the sociologist, but rather what the sociologist has to deny to gain his power over lives and texts. Let me quote again from Seal’s post as he explores the reasons that people like me have for hating Bourdieu:

Partly, I think it's a resistance to the idea that we may actually be fairly simple people, that the unruly tangle of our thoughts and passions, rationales and rationalities can be hammered out into a straight dull line. Partly, it's a fear that our "accents" give us away too easily, that we are wearing our inner motivations too nakedly, that we cannot even tell how markedly visible they are. Do I really have a strong accent and I just can't hear it?

The second part of that really doesn’t apply to me, as far as I can tell, probably because I am a graduate student at a third-tier place and not a first-tier one. Judging from the schools Seal has attended, I think I’m a smidge more “dominated” (to use Pierre’s taxonomy) than he is, and I have learned to work this for uncertainly-ironic authenticity— as I am always wanting to tell the querulous identity-politickers, marginality in intellectual and artistic culture confers glorious privileges of its own. I have both kicked the Pittsburgh accent and petit bourgeois ethnic prejudices out of myself and retained the ability to claim their infrequent irruptions as marks of legitimating color. What a time we’re having here in the dominated fraction of the dominant class, or perhaps the dominated fraction of the dominated fraction of the dominant class!

As you can see, I do not deny the general truth of Bourdieu’s thesis that culture is a complicated dance of status-acquisition carried out as part of a class war—though “class war” too is question-begging: it’s something the radical critic or the vanguard party member creates rather than finds. (Talk to my grandmother about the Pope and you’ll see what I mean.) I don’t even deny Seal’s first, revealing proposition: “we may actually be fairly simple people, that the unruly tangle of our thoughts and passions, rationales and rationalities can be hammered out into a straight dull line.” Yes, we may.

What I deny is that we can be made to experience our thoughts and passions and rationales and rationalities as straight and dull, or that it would be worthwhile to do so. This is part of the ideology of demystification, now in its senescence in the work of Dawkins and Harris—though if you think of them as writing books for thirteen year-olds, they appear in a better light. Demystifiers believe that perceived complication is the projected shadow of an orderly process. Adjust the light and you can eliminate the shadow.

It’s not that this is wrong, but it is the whole of Bourdieu’s practice—not his theory, which tries to account for experiential complexity with the famous concept of the habitus, a lived, experiential enactment of what was previously called an ideology, but precisely of his practice, which, in elucidating the workings of the habitus, streamlines its monstrousness in an attempt to bring a clearer and more just order. (Do not forget that Bourdieu takes Plato’s part against the poets. Do not forget what this implies.)

In this attempt to found order on simplicity, Bourdieu resembles the evolutionary psychologist—a figure shunned in the circles that welcome the radical sociologist, for reasons explained by the sociological theory itself. The evolutionary psychologist can give us the measurements of the ideal man or woman from the standpoint of genetic advantage, but he cannot explain why we fall in love with this or that person in particular, and leaves behind him the implication that we should not have settled for a mate with eyes so wide apart or cheekbones so asymmetrical.

Why, anyway, shouldn’t we resist attempts to tell us that we’re really quite simple, that we act only for greed and status? It doesn't feel that way, and it matters how it feels. I don’t know where Seal comes from, but where I come from only Republicans talk like that. Answer: that’s why Republicans win. But we don’t want to win: we want a better, more beautiful, more peaceful way of life, something the left hasn’t been able to argue for in good faith since Marx took the bait of capitalist anti-metaphysics (materialism) and of a demystification-theory that treats genius as delusion and cynicism as truth. It’s strange that Bourdieu should enjoy the prestige he currently does in English and comparative literature departments when his method is entirely colonial: confiscate the gods, bring enlightenment, introduce regularity and discipline. Well, people in literature departments always have been tempted, when it’s a question of Milton, to identify with God rather than with Satan or Eve.

There is a black hole in every theory because there is a black hole at the center of every experience. Theory is best which knows this, admits it and tries neither to deny nor to correct it. Theory that does not know this or that tries to correct it sounds to some of us like the midnight tread of a boot on the stair. I know those are strong terms to put to someone as pleasantly lucid as Bourdieu, but there we are. The poets didn’t start the war, we just have to endure it.

n + 1 = desire

THE YOUNG SYRIAN Do not stay here, Princess. I pray you do not stay here.

SALOME How wasted he is! He is like a thin ivory statue. He is like an image of silver. I am sure he is chaste, as the moon is. He is like a moonbeam, like a shaft of silver. His flesh must be very cold, cold as ivory . . . . I would look closer at him.

THE YOUNG SYRIAN No, no, Princess!

SALOME I must look at him closer.

—Wilde, Salome

Now if Bourdieu were living and in America, he would be thrilled to do one of his sociological excavations of the n+1 crowd, probably, alas, in conjunction with the McSweeney’s folks. Imagine the maps of Park Slope as a field of power that we’re missing out on because Pierre is gone! (n+1 has apparently gone after Bourdieu [preemptively?] in the latest issue, and anyone who does that is on the side of the angels as far as I’m concerned, but the article’s subscription-only, so I can’t comment.)

Anyway, the web controversy du jour centers around Mark Greif’s manifesto “On Repressive Sentimentalism.” Greif’s thesis, briefly and as I understand it: left and liberal activism around the issues of gay rights and abortion have conceded too much ground to a right-wing that demands obeisance be made to tradition (understood as that which protects us from living a purely hedonistic life that would bring destructive consequences to individuals and society). Consequently, we find pro-choice partisans characterizing abortion as a “tragic choice,” while the gay marriage movement sends up hymns of praise to holy matrimony and the splendor of monogamy.

What’s wrong with this? Well—and this is what has gotten Greif in trouble with the “check your privilege” crowd—Greif says that the example provided by the old-fashioned gay lifestyle along with the freedom brough to hetero relations by legal abortion and widespread contraception allowed all of society to move away from the tradition extolled by conservatives and toward a realm of liberty.

Sex, Greif says in a reprise of pop-Frankfurt School ’60s discourse is an enactment of and a model for a society free of “domination”—this, remember (as Greif does not always do), is Adorno and Horkheimer’s word for what the mind does in encountering nature:

You have to defend sex because we still have no better model than the actual, concrete sexual relation for a deep intuitive process opposed to domination. We have no better model for a bodily process that, fundamentally, is free and universal. It does not produce (there is no experiential remainder but pleasure) nor consume. It is cooperative (within the relation of the lovers) and, in that relation, seems to forbid competition. It makes you love people, and accept the look and difference of their bodies. Production comes back in with pregnancy and “labor”—that’s why contraception means so much. Competition can come back in with the conquest of partners, and a brutality or technical objectivity in lovemaking that allows men to remake cooperation as if it were struggle—hence utopians’ funny, sentimental insistence on love in the act. Sexual cooperation is the other side of our basic human nature, and matches and disarms economic competition. Conservatives look to the chimpanzees, utopians to bonobos. One viewpoint prefers that side of our evolutionary ancestry that punches and rapes; the other that side, of equal propinquity, that rubs genitals and makes out.

“Sex without consequences” becomes the metaphor for cooperative exchange without gain or loss. For basing life on the things that are free. For the anticapitalist experience par excellence.

So when queer acitivists come out in favor of fidelity and the domestic, or when pro-choice activists allow that they think there should be fewer abortions, they’re selling out sex, and thus giving up utopia. Greif, by the way, has a decidedly dystopian view of marriage (“For better and worse [and for richer and for poorer], marriage is also almost inevitably intolerable to any post-’60s individual who counts the accumulation of strong experience and passionate feeling as the sine qua non of meaningful existence”) and a defensible but rather glib account of the ethics of abortion (“An embryo is a tiny, contingent bundle of cells that needn’t have come together”—and what, pray, is Mark Greif [other than (probably) not tiny]?)

I think Greif goes disastrously wrong here, but to say so requires that I clear the ground of his other critics, who I think are actually a lot more wrong. First, we have the typical complaint about any radical propositions advanced these days: they reek of “privilege,” you can’t mess with people’s real lives, you who live in Park Slope cannot ask the gays of Peoria not to want basic middle-class amenities. Here is an example from Matthew Gallaway:

Unfortunately, in the piece in question, the author seemed to make no effort to hold the mirror up to himself, and say, "As a straight man, what have I done to rectify this situation?" Rather, given the tone of it, he seemed to ask: "Why do you gays want marriage? Don’t you understand that it’s really taking a step backward to want this horrible thing?" It would be like a white person who grew up in the suburbs with every financial advantage going into the inner city and saying, "Why do you minorities want material things? Don’t you understand that it will erode your soul?" Which is not to say that the white person is necessarily wrong, but he/she has to proceed with extreme sensitivity, and ideally LIVE in the inner city—i.e., to turn his back on the very thing that he wants to destroy—before he can make the case with any kind of credibility. This is why I found the tone of the article to be somewhat offensive—not wrong, necessarily—but rather insensitive to what it really means to be gay in our society at this juncture.

This complaint doesn’t totally lack persuasive force—it’s always a little bit disgusting when Marie Antoinette dresses like a shepherdess and reads Rousseau—but the logic of it, the logic, that is, of always having to be “sensitive” to “reality,” is profoundly conservative by any standard, and is a version of the stabilizing middle-class politics that it accuses its opponents of upholding. It leads to the erosion of any claim to normativity whatever and is thus congruent with the let-the-market-decide ideology that is only now ending its reign. By all means, let’s be sensitive to reality, but there are costs to transforming it, and, as gross as Marie in shepherdess costume is, the ressentiment of the peasant who only wants his cut of the pie also has a claim on our disapprobation (or at least on mine, as I have actually known such resentful peasants—I will in fact be dining with them at Christmas, when they will tell me again that I should get a real job and make some real money).

So much for the privilege critique. Far more interesting is Caleb Crain’s surprisingly stirring defense of the soul:

I'm not denying, by the way, that people in a marriage customarily agree to forgo sexual opportunities outside it. I'm saying merely that they agree to because they realize that they want to forgo them. Such a realization cannot happen to a Foucauldian motley of pleasures and bodies. [http://www.hermenaut.com/a156.shtml] Bodies have no free will; left to their own devices, they say yes to every pleasure they can obtain. Such a realization can only happen to a self, or to something you might even denominate a soul. Selves and souls, you might reply, are fictions, and I agree that they are not a given but are something people make in the course of living. I believe, nonetheless, that they are worth making. Keats called the world a "vale of soul-making," and on that understanding, a refusal to make a soul is a denial of incarnation—a refusal of one of the world's highest pleasures and deepest experiences. I am not of course saying that only married people have souls. I am saying that it's worthwhile to have a soul, in part so as to have the capacity to make a choice like marriage, but mostly because it would be a shame to go through life without ever thinking about what Hopkins would call the sakes of it. This is diving rather deep in order to answer a relatively shallow question, I admit, but this way of arguing about marriage seems to require it.

I dissent from any deprecation of the self, and a fortiori of the soul, in the name of liberating the body. A liberated body is merely an animal, and there are stark limits to the liberty that an animal is capable of. Human liberty goes further—it involves something else—and to exclude that something else from a human life is sort of to miss the whole point, frankly.

You know, reading this over again after a weekend immersed in Bourdieu, I find it so refreshing, so damningly alien to current academic discourse on culture, that I cannot now dissent from it, even though the language is a bit too theological for me. Two cheers for Caleb Crain.

Crain’s attitude also goes some way toward showing why Greif’s attitude toward abortion is discomfitting. Let me say at the outset that I am absolutely in favor of legal abortion; as a civil libertarian, my judgment is almost always against state involvement in matters of personal ethics. Nor am I one of those people who is intellectually persuaded that abortion should be legal, but who has an intuition against the idea of aborting the fetus or a reflex reaction that the procedure is disgusting. I am just the opposite in fact: I agree with Greif emotionally—the fetus’s fate does not move me.

However, intellectually, I can’t go along with so cavalierly defining personhood upward when every advance of human rights in history has been contingent upon defining personhood downward (from the dominant perspective). That is, black people and other racial minorities, women, gays, the disabled, workers, civilians in war zones—to secure their basic rights in a liberal society, they had to be established in our discourse as full persons. Some have even argued similarly for something like personhood on behalf of non-human life. This, incidentally, is almost certainly why I see fliers all over my university campus proclaiming legal abortion as black genocide. The roots of abortion in eugenics is not to be hand-waved away, and, while the procedure should remain legal, while we shouldn’t take for granted the freedoms it allows, while it may not feel like a tragedy in every or even any case, we still might wish to remind ourselves that we enjoy this liberty at the expense of one component of a historically efficacious humanist discourse premised, however indefensibly from a materialist perspective, upon the sacredness of all human life. In this sense, then, as a conflict of two right perspectives, abortion should be regarded as tragic.

(I know I’m neglecting the specifically feminist argument in favor of abortion—the claim that the patriarchal state should not restrict the female body—but that’s because it would only be persuasive coming from consistent anarchists. Coming from the same people who favor the expansion of legal definitions of assault and harassment and the concomitant expansion of state coercion, the single-issue libertarianism fails to persuade, except as a disavowed tragedy of its own. Also, if experience is any guide, men are as likely or more likely to support abortion rights than women. Matriarchy would not necessarily be pro-choice.)

Now then, sex. Whatever else sex is, it’s more complicated than Greif thinks. In fact, it’s hard not to read his anti-domination discourse as this proclaimed sex-radical’s inadvertent confession of vanillahood. Does Greif not know that some unknowable number of people, perhaps a majority, gets some sexual charge from the image of domination itself? Has he no idea how many people, men and women, want to be whipped, spanked, cuffed, pretend-raped, pissed on, shit on, kicked in the balls, trampled, made to lick boots, tickled unto torture? Has he no idea how many people want to do these things to others? Again, it’s impossible to say how prevalent this is, but there’s a lot of it out there. All sex, as Freud taught, is fetish, and all fetish is swerve from nature. I well know the rejoinder to this: fetish is all false consciousness, it’s the distortion of the healthy sexual impulse that comes with a culture of domination. But read Dialectic of Enlightenment again: culture is domination, and not avoidably either.

(As a married person, I feel too that I should say something for Hymen. Different arrangements are for different people, of course, but Greif underestimates the eros of deep intimacy.)

To embrace pleasure even in the image of domination—that, and nothing else, is the freedom promised us by true sex-radicalism. If the historical heritage of gay male sex-radicalism (a history, it should be noted in the context of Polanski-hysteria, of pederasty among other things) is to be our heritage, then Greif will have to think again. Think of Gide and Wilde in Algiers, think of Ginsberg and Burroughs, think of the last line of The Immoralist, the one about how it’s the boy who keeps bringing him back. Think of Foucault saying in the early ’80s, “What could be more beautiful than to die for the love of boys?”

These sex heroes didn’t pursue their pleasures because they thought they were free of domination, they pursued them because they saw real glory in taking an existential leap into the lawless arena knowing full well that it was a space of domination, that agony—agon—cannot be separated from becoming.

It’s in fact a slander, an insult, on this tradition to corral it into the “other Victorianism” of cultural Marxism as Greif does. No one had a more tragic sense of life than Foucault in the bath-houses in the heyday of the plague. That was freedom—for him, anyway—and it perhaps has more to do with the soul than Crain allows, and when Grief misrecognizes that, he, in derogating sentimentalism, becomes the arch-sentimentalist himself. Freedom can’t guarantee happiness—for a guarantee is always tyranny. If we could separate life from pain, we would be happy. We don’t want to be happy, and I think we are mostly right not to want it, and we wouldn’t know how to be if we could.

Fuck (Bourd)ieu

Our overall impression is that materialists of this type fell into a fatal error: neglecting the nature of the thing itself, they kept applying their most materialistic method merely to the relations between objects, to the void between objects and not to the objects themselves; i.e., they were the naivest metaphysicians precisely at the point where they most wanted to be standing on the ground.
—Nabokov, The Gift (qtd. here)

A discussion about whether or not Bourdieu's sociological critique of taste is meant to be an accusatory process of ideology-smashing or demystification. A few quotes, then, the last two by Bourdieu and the first about him (by a fan no less):

Bourdieu's analysis of the contradictions or contortions defining the dominated-dominant position produces an inexplicit but unmistakable effect of sardonic unmasking, along with the strong, lingering odor of bad faith that such analytic exercises inevitably leave in their wake...the moment of unmasking usually represents the triumphant conclusion of Bourdieu's procedure...
—Joseph Litvak, Strange Gourmets

But, as I shall try to demonstrate throughout this book, the sociologist—close in this respect to the philosopher according to Plato—stands opposed to 'the friend of beautiful spectacles and voices' that the writer also is: the 'reality' that he tracks cannot be reduced to the immediate data of the sensory experience in which it is revealed; he aims not to offer (in)sight, or feeling, but to construct systems of intelligible relations capable of making sense of sentient data.
—Bourdieu, The Rules of Art

...in order to escape from the usual choice between celebratory effusions and the reductive analysis which, failing to take account of the fact of belief in the work of art and of the social conditions which produce that belief, destroys the work of art as such, a rigorous science of art must, pace both the unbelievers and iconoclasts and also the believers, assert the possibility and necessity of understanding the work in its reality as a fetish; it has to take into account everything which helps to constitute the work as such, not least the discourses of direct or disguised celebration which are among the social conditions of production of the work of art qua object of belief.
—Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production

Once you introduce the word fetish, it's back to ideology, which is the leftist's word for sin. The theory of ideology, however, like the theory of sin, doesn't actually explain anything, which is why endless epicycles have to be added onto it with each generation that passes, all in an endless effort to keep alive the de facto conservative dogma of cultural materialism (the theory that existence determines thought, context determines text) lest anybody get above themselves. Cultural materialism is the inverse Platonism which unites the sociologist of art to the philosopher king, both of whom suspect the artistic image of misdirecting desire away from the rational order of the commonwealth.

No one can read a page of Bourdieu without catching the unmistakable whiff of smug self-satisfaction. Bourdieu began his career as a colonial anthropologist in Algeria and apparently defended the colonized against the depredations of their masters. It's worth remembering in this context that Edward Said saw his famous watchword Orientalism as co-extensive with Ernest Renan's project to construct philology as la science exacte des choses de l'esprit (an exact science of the things of the spirit), precisely what Bourdieu proposes to do.

This Marxist article explains that Bourdieu upbraided Sartre and Fanon for their revolutionary extasies, rightly explaining them as symptoms of a bourgeois populist nationalism that bore no relation to the actual state of the Algerian peasantry. I do not share the Marxist's belief that theory must make room for revolution, thus I don't share his critique that Bourdieu's sociology leaves no room for radical collective action. But if we move our gaze from the chimerical masses in revolt to the individual artist, or reader, or theatergoer, we find that Bourdieu forbids them the experience of the ineffable in the presence of the artwork, that he reduces their options to the quasi-unconscious, partly somatic enactment of a cultural routine or the conscious adoption of a stance that alters the coordinates of a pre-given field of objective relations. The leftist social thinker brings homo economicus in through the back door, unmasking disinterested appreciation as social interest, while scoffing at the possibility that the individual is not wholly exhausted by social explanation and by reference to his or her interests, as if the need for passion, truth or just a glimpse of the world beyond the field of possibles weren't a legitimate interest, one not to be traduced in moralizing fashion as so much fetish.