#4: Интернационал здесь и сейчас


Elena Petrovskaya, Moscow

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Which political role can feminism play in the contemporary world?
Which strategies of solidarity between women of different social, national, and ethnic backgrounds are possible today?

 

I must note that feminism has never paved its way under the aegis of universalism. Quite on the contrary, feminism has always emphasized the multiplicity of differences. As an event, universalism is an idea that stems from an alternate interpretation of difference and its role in political struggle. To be concise, one could express this as follows: why should we strive for difference if it already exists, if we encounter such a great variety of genders, ethnic identities, faiths etc.? As strange as it may seem, the truth is what is never given in advance, which is why it demands universality. Yet this universality does not come first but last: universality demands nothing more and nothing less than a change – a liberation, if you will – of subjectivity itself.

 

However, I do not think that it is feminism’s contemporary vocation to fulfill universal goals: instead, local problems usually take center-stage. In our country, for an example, even traditional forms of feminism are still extremely marginal. I would even say that they are unwanted. As ever, one must bear the burden of the elementary discrimination against women, which is but poorly camouflaged on all layers of social life. This means that women themselves will need to play no small role if they are ever to face the purely practical side of these issues.

 

Do you feel that qualities like “vulnerability” will die out as unnecessary capacities?
Or is it possible to engage in a certain revolutionary politics of vulnerability?
How can feminism convince human beings of both genders of the need for emancipation and of the benefits of real freedom?

 

It makes little sense to oppose weakness and strength to another. By doing so, we involuntarily substantiate weakness, transforming it into a variety of presence (in the philosophical sense). But weakness is actually related to a different situation, namely to a situation in which objectification fails to take place, where there is only a redistribution of power. In philosophical jargon, we call this the situation of immanence. Weakness is good in that, in failing to become political (i.e. a figure for power), it present a challenge to the hierarchies that social language calls ‘success’. Weakness is a way of life that circumvents the powers-that-be, which include the much-cited bounding of gender-roles. Weakness does belong to femininity, especially if one understands the latter as a quality color-coded by gender. Non-violence is a well-known variety of weakness; furthermore, it is weakness recast politically. But on the other hand, the politics of non-violence are highly questionable, because they – and more broadly, weakness – do not contain any form of teleology. Weakness means the positive absence of goals, of goal-acquisition, and of the pretence to power. In this sense, weakness is not simply a form of “defenselessness” in the face of “masculine” aggression.

 

Does love have any political potential in your opinion?
Do you think that there is anything specific in the feminine experience of love?

 

I doubt that everyone knows the experience of love. Love does not only consist in stepping out to meet the Other; it also means that you are permanently ready to become an Other yourself. The experience of love is the experience of becoming. In this sense, it contradicts love’s existing institutions. For an example, marriage’s socio-economic components are quite concrete, setting the boundary for love’s anti-social aspects. And love really is anti-social. Yet we all indulge in love’s culturally illuminations and in its psychological experiences. To understand its liminality, its anti-sociality is an impossible undertaking. More often than not, our experiences of love are as pre-scripted as contracts. This even applies to love’s more odious guises. But if these experiences were not predetermined, they would not be experiences. This brings us back to vulnerability. To be unafraid of losing, to love with any guarantee, without any certainty that this will ever happen again, to love at full risk… Is this what makes up the specificity of “feminine” love? It may well be.

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Irina Aktyuganova, Petersburg

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Which political role can feminism play in the contemporary world and in Russia specifically?
Which strategies of solidarity between women of different social, national, and ethnic backgrounds are possible today?
Or is it better to shift our focus from the differences between men and women in order to address different universal features, such as political power-relations or social class?

Feminism is fate. No matter how the circumstances of your life or your inner attitudes develop, feminism is something you can never ignore, once you have been drawn into its discourses. Feminism is struggle. And if we want to reach some positive goal in society and politics, we cannot make do without its intellectual and political successes, its potential possibilities, and, in the final analysis, without its experience. More concretely, for us, the feminist frontline has shifted, becoming internal. Hence, it runs through our heart and our minds. Our only hope for transmitting all that occurs on this inner line-of-conflict, our only means, our only medium is culture.

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Katy Deepwell, London

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Which political role can feminism play in the contemporary world?
Which strategies of solidarity between women of different social, national, and ethnic backgrounds are possible today?
Or is it better to shift our focus from the differences between men and women in order to address different universal features, such as political power-relations or social class?

 

I start from my political perspective as a Western socialist feminist, for whom feminism is a resource and a source of strength. Feminism is not irrelevant to any form of political, social or cultural question today – especially as a form of critical and creative thinking about women’s position in the world to enable women’s perspectives to be heard. Women are 52% of the world. They possess intelligence, wit, untold capacity for endurance, invention, creativity and patience but what they frequently lack are opportunities, advanced forms of education and material resources (including money) to realise their ambitions. What women can produce in the world is still an unknown. It is impossible to specify what a feminine side of anything really is, only to realise that the feminine is usually the rubbish-dump for everything that masculinity does not value. Would social organisation be different if women’s imagination ordered the world – we don’t know. Plenty of women have written of their aspirations for social change and their utopian hopes for revolution on a macrocosmic and microcosmic level. Yet, the women leaders we have had in the world have suprisingly come largely from the right of politics, and their role has been to maintain and expand a social order which they did not invent, and this they have done with passion and conviction and very negative consequences. Do I believe that women can work together for social change and that solidarity and political and social alliances are possible? Certainly, but like any coalition, such co-operation relies on mutual respect and trust, which patriarchy and women who believe that the current political and social arrangements are the best (ie neo-liberal consumer capitalism) do not value. Without trust and mutual respect between women, regardless of their background, education, age, sexual orientation, etc, women will be unable to work together for any form of change. Is gender enough to form such coalition? For me, this depends on the problem and the skills in organising a campaign or a movement for social change. Women collectively have supported so many political and social movements as strong factions: as abolitionists, Cuban rebels, in nationalist liberation struggles, in many civil rights movements. Women have hoped these movements would free them but they have always been bitterly disappointed by the low regard in which their male colleagues held them and their constant complaint that the “larger” struggle was the only goal and women’s liberation or demands constituted a minor issue to be resolved after the revolution. The point is that women must also free themselves, morally, emotionally, socially as well as politically.

 

Do you feel that qualities like “vulnerability” will die out as unnecessary capacities?
Or is it possible to engage in a certain revolutionary politics of vulnerability?
How can feminism convince human beings of both genders of the need for emancipation and of the benefits of real freedom?

 

Is feminism only about striving for equality? And equality in whose terms and in what social order?

 

There is an illusion that the following “human rights” if extended to all will automatically bring to women equality: the right to vote (alongside the political freedom to express one’s views), the right to education, equal pay for equal work, the right to medical care, to shelter, to security and safety (ie. freedom from exploitation, violence and abuse) and to freedom of movement. These United Nations-style human rights should be defended by everyone in the world for all their citizens. Yet is women’s claim to be “full citizens” in the world which remains in doubt in many countries where women’s access to political participation as representatives, to education, to safety, security or shelter, to travel and even to health care are controlled or specifically limited by either the state or their husbands, fathers or male members of their families. In the West, women’s secondary status as citizens in relation to such rights was the impetus for the women’s movement (which is not over yet) and for campaigns for women to gain access to the different opportunities in the job market, to have control of their person, to live a secure and safe life free from abuse and exploitation (sexually, financially or emotionally). In the East, while Soviet administration enshrined certain rights for women in its social apparatus, women constantly complained of experiencing the “double burden” of a full day’s work and the sole responsibility of domestic work and childcare at home. The illusion of a matriarchal home life (where women controlled domestic politics) was matched by the Soviet machismo worlds of culture and politics. Maybe this was no different from life in many other Western countries (e.g. Spain where machismo and matriarchial domesticity also co-exist) although many more opportunities appear to have existed in Soviet times for women’s employment, participation in the political process and for their general education and training. Is the privatisation and confinement of women to the “home” in post-Communist regimes, a liberation or a trap? Does it represent a refusal of women’s responsibility to be “full citizens” of the world or just a temporary concentration on consumerist, private pleasures in their lives to the maintenance of their home and families (for consumer capitalism). Vulnerability and dependency in the home are not qualities on which freedom and emancipation can be organised, in spite of the fact that freedom and emancipation is premised on moving from a position of weakness to one of strength and full participation in a democracy. If you are truly aware of the politics which inform your domestic life and in your neighbourhood and your city, then maybe this is the basis from which to become politically motivated and act. The desire for autonomy, the ability to make informed choices and to negotiate the circumstances in which you have opportunities, these are the pre-requisites of freedom.

 

Does love have any political potential in your opinion?
Do you think that there is anything specific in the feminine experience of love?

 

To think of love as an energy for revolution is so romantic. When we talk of love we usually reserve it for one kind of love: the sexual love for an adult partner. This kind of love is unpredictable, explosive, all-consuming, fleeting, dramatic and powerful: we “fall”, we “are”, we “have” and behave as if no one else in the world ever felt or had love before. Everyone would like to see love as the solution to their problems. Sexual love is a joy but it is a private quest between two people and its most pleasurable moments are experienced as such: however illicitly or secretly obtained. Sexual love has social consequences:- marriage, divorce, separation, the birth of children, social approval and disapproval, social sanctions and taboos. It leads to the reinforcement of some of the most oppressive social codes of behaviour in both public and private life: where control of sex and/or reproduction is attempted. But love itself is so perverse. Think of the terrible consequences of certain kinds of “love”; sado-masochistic love as a struggle for power (in fantasy or reality); unrequited, ending or embittered love where it produces murder, violence against the ‘loved one’ and/or physical, sexual or verbal abuse; or even that patriotic form of love for one’s country (in the excesses of nationalism and war). We are encouraged to think that finding (sexual) love would mean the end of loneliness, the end of desparation, the end of despair. Women are taught to think that this form of love is their salvation whereas it may ultimately be just a form of torture, producing long-lasting and unwanted suffering. Maybe this conception of sexual love is just too limited but for me it does not provide a basis for emancipation. Possibly what we need more is emancipation from the idea that this kind of love is the only goal – if we want a better society and not just more forms of personal pleasure. Maybe we need to invest less in this form of love between two people and more in other forms of love (social, collective, familial) and think more carefully about love not just in terms of ‘having’ or ‘not having’ but giving as well as receiving. What about the love in friendship or the value of love within and from our families, the love of life, the love for building and changing our environment, investing in a love of nature? We cannot forget that there is always in our society the love of money, the love invested in consumer materialism, in “having” the best of everything – even if this produces an incredible poverty of thought and imagination or spiritual well-being. And then there’s the love of knowledge, the love of books, of ideas, of thought processes, of knowing that there are other incredible people out there in the world who made and wrote and produced the most marvellous and the most terrible things before we were born and who have lived or now live in cultures which we are not familiar. Perhaps this is a love of knowledge which is worth investing in if we want to build respect for all citizens of the world and thereby change the world.

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Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari /// Now-here

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Philosophy takes the relative deterritorialization of capital to the absolute; it makes it pass over the plane of immanence as movement of the infinite and sup­presses it as internal limit, turns it back against itself so as to summon forth a new earth, a new people. But in this way it arrives at the nonpropositional form of the concept in which communication, ex­change, consensus, and opinion vanish entirely. It is therefore closer to what Adorno called “negative dialectic” and to what the Frankfurt School called “utopian.” Actually, utopia is what links philosophy with its own epoch. In each case, it is with utopia that philosophy becomes political and takes the criticism of its own time to its highest point. Utopia does not split off from infinite movement: etymologica1ly it stands for absolute deterritorialization but always at the critical point at which it is connected with the present relative milieu, and espe­cially with the forces stifled by this milieu, Erewhon, the word used by Samuel Butler, refers not only to no-where but also to now-here. What matters is not the supposed distinction between utopia and scientific socialism but the different types of utopia, one of them being revolution. In utopia (as in philosophy) there is always the risk of a restoration, and sometimes a proud affirmation, of transcendence, so that we need to distinguish between authoritarian utopias, or utopias of transcendence, and immanent, revolutionary, libertarian utopias.

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, “What is Philosophy?”, New York : Columbia University Press 1994, p. 100

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Vladimir I. Lenin /// Russian Resolution

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At the Third Congress, in 1921, we adopted a resolution on the organizational structure of the Communist Parties and on the methods and content of their activities. The resolution is an excellent one, but it is almost entirely Russian, that is to say, everything in it is based on Russian conditions. This is its good point, but it is also its failing. It is its failing because I am sure that no foreigner can read it. I have read it again before saying this. In the first place, it is too long, containing fifty or more points. Foreigners are not usually able to read such things. Secondly, even if they read it, they will not understand it because it is too Russian. Not because it is written in Russian—it has been excellently translated into all languages—but because it is thoroughly imbued with the Russian spirit. And thirdly, if by way of exception some foreigner does understand it, he cannot carry it out.

Vladimir Lenin. Five Years Of The Russian Revolution And The Prospects Of The World Revolution. Report To The Fourth Congress Of The Communist International, November 13, 1922 . https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/nov/04b.htm

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Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels /// The Expansion of World Capital

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The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere. The bourgeoisie has, through its exploitation of the world market, given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of reactionaries, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.

From the Communist Manifesto, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/index.htm

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Jacques Derrida // The New International

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“The time is out of joint”: time is disarticulated, dislocated, dislodged, time is run down, on the run and run down, deranged, both out of order, and mad. “The time is out of joint.” Theatrical speech, Hamlet’s speech, Hamlet’s speech before the theater o f the world, of history, and of politics. The age is off its hinges. Everything, beginning with time, seems out of kilter, unjust, dis-adjusted. The world is going very badly, it wears as it grows, as the Painter also says at the beginning of Timon of Athens (which is Marx’s play, is it not). For, this time, it is a painter’s speech, as if he were speaking of a spectacle or before a tableau: “How goes the world? It wears, sir, as it grows”.

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Viktor Mazin, Petersburg

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Which political role can feminism play in the contemporary world and in Russia specifically?
Which strategies of solidarity between women of different social, national, and ethnic backgrounds are possible today?
Or is it better to shift our focus from the differences between men and women in order to address different universal features, such as political power-relations or social class?

 

I feel uncomfortable about writing for women. And this isn’t because I think that I am a man. Hell no! I can’t speak for men either, even more so because I don’t even want to speak for them. I don’t feel comfortable about speaking for anybody of any category at all. Speaking for women (for the elderly, for children) is a task that can be left to the politicians and their “masculine” mugs. After all, they need to go on and on chopping their teeth in order to divert our attention from the Black Flag. In this sense, I agree that feminism is “an integral part of neo-liberal ideology”, or to be more precise, of “neoliberal” oligarchy. But this does not mean that the “liberal” does not turn into a patriarch at home, nor does it imply that the laws passed by “liberals” have any pro-feminist quality. Was the trial of the American president’s phallus really a perfect example of in how far feminism has spread to the American legal system? In the end, the President didn’t only launch his rockets into the open mouth of bureaucracy; he also fired some missiles at the Third World, even if this wasn’t the only reason. Phallocracy may well wrap itself in the cloak of feminism, but does it ever really succeed? Isn’t the entire neo-liberal discourse perforated by rockets, missiles that you will never be able to hide?

 

Perhaps we should remember that any talk that addresses the variety of feminism will still be refering to a mass of highly complex theories, of variagated interweaves of Marxism, psychoanalysis, criticism, deconstructivism etc. In sum, the American capitalization of feminism, even in its legal guise, is nothing more than camoflage for neoliberal ideology. In this context I remember this one thing that happened in Rio de Janeiro. One guy from America, a professor for psychoanalyis and feminism, totally turned “the discourse of the Left” upside down. One night, he happened to find himself in a certain club, which was actually a whorehouse. By morning, he had already forgotten all about how the girls had reached this place. With a shaking voice, he was babbling deliriously: “They’re all mine, if I want them, they can be mine and mine alone”… I don’t want to pass judgement on him. I also don’t want to talk about what the United States have done to Brazil. Read Chomsky. I simply want to emphasize the following: discourse is commerce, among other things. Discourse can be exchanged for money. Discourse helps you to valorize yourself, reserving a place in society’s structures. That American was just plowing the fields of feminism. Feminism is a way of making money.

 

In Russia, “feminism” is perceived as a four-letter word. Patriarchal “men” will say that it is because of feminism that women have gotten out of hand, that they have become incapable of doing anything, which is why the family as such is falling apart and the whole country is going to hell, that our only hope is a strong president and so on. On the other hand, some “women” who call themselves “feminists” are ready to tear apart any “man” who dares to hand them their coat or to light their cigarette. It would be great if we could start by really understanding what “feminism” and “feminists” actually are. I am rather pessimistic as far as this is concerned, even if books on gender-studies are being published, even if Irina Arikhstarkhova or Irina Zherebkina are prolific writers…How many people actually read these books? And how many people listen to the psychologist who says that women should serve both men and god, because this is how psychology works? How many people listen to the biologist who says that nature has adapted women to hearth-keeping, monogamy and subordination? And how many people read woman’s magazines and watch woman’s TV, all of which have been inculcated with positions rather distant from any kind of feminism. More often than not, TV shows for women provoke little more than horror and disgust. It is as if they only had one goal, namely either to emasculate women or to transform them into slaves. One constantly has the feeling that these TV-women live by the Lacanian equation of “Woman = Other = thing”. They do everything to make the woman into a Thing. A Thing on the same level as a car, a mobile-phone or a thick gold chain, belonging to a “real man”. “Wow, if I had something like…” As far as the differences between “men” and “women” is concerned, this has always been and still is a very difficult question. The only thing I can say with certainty is that the differences between “men” and “women” do not take place between “men and women”. Wherein does this difference lie? In the social construction of gender-roles? Not only. In the biology of childbirth and monthlies…? Not only. In psychic structuring in relation to the phallus? Not only.

 

Do you feel that qualities like “vulnerability” will die out as unnecessary capacities?
Or is it possible to engage in a certain revolutionary politics of vulnerability?
How can feminism convince human beings of both genders of the need for emancipation and of the benefits of real freedom?

 

Contemporary Russia’s means of mass disinformation have market-launched two saleable models for “femininity”. The first model is indepedent, self-assured, strong, and aggressive. The self-made woman , to put it differently. This ideological ready-made is called the “Self-made Woman”. Recently, I was reading a magazine and saw that one of the two or three most popular women of this type is Condoleeza Rice. In how far can this aggresive model can be called “feminine”? Well, friends, it’s up to you. It’s still a mystery to me how this political monster could have ever become a role model for women in Russia. Maybe you’re right: “coldness” is considered cool, while human qualities like patience, passivity, and the ability to understand the Other are totally out of fashion. At the same time, I remember the Tao and its finely argued victory of the weak, passive, and flexible, all of the things that do not correspond to the Western model of the “real man/terminator”, “Condi Rice”, but they do correspond to the Russian model of “tobacco and a three-day-beard reeking of vodka”. What you call “the revolutionary politics of weakness” sounds incredibly attractive to me. But I don’t think that weakness will die out, since it is actually no more than a phantasm of the “strong”, self-assured paraoiac, taking on “responsibility” for the fate of the other, bringing phallocentric “freedom”, which supply “women” with goods and production or making lots of little bunnies (the Russian version of “coolness”).

 

The second mass medial model transports the woman as a thing. This market brand can come in two variants. One of them is custom-tailored to the majority of Russian women, who are stilled keyed into the patriarchal order. This type feeds on the discourse of “tradition”, on “nature” or “that’s the way things are” and “it was always like this”, or “this has been the Russian way since day of old”. This is the functional type, the “woman” who cooks and cleans well, the woman that raises offspring. Under more recent circumstance, she functions much like a refridgerator, a vacuum cleaner, a washing machine or some other appliance. She is the hearth-keeper (while he is the “bread-winner”, the “hunter”). This “woman-thing” caters to broad segments of the working-class. The other type caters to the businesspeople and the oligarchs. As a rule, it is connected to the marketing of the modelling business and its schoolyard, the so-called “Golden Youth”. Unlike the first type of “thing” model, the second type has already been objectified beyond belief. According to the media of mass disinformation, especially those that serve the “Golden Youth”, this “woman thing” has already been robbed of any capacity for thought and speech; she has become a purely decorative element. This “thing” does not have to function properly as a house-wife. Instead, she works for the business-views of her partner and competitors. This type has replaced the older type of the femme fatale who will drive you out of your mind, a phantasm thought up by “knights”, poets and Don Quixotes, “unreal men”, that is. But in the economy of total consumption, it is impossible to drive anyone out of their minds. From what mind can you be driven? The real man is a brand manager.He still has “that thing”. This is the business-perspective that the women’s magazines and women’s TV shows all propogate: get “that thing”, what’s it called, you know, like…

 

Does love have any political potential in your opinion?
Do you think that there is anything specific in the feminine experience of love?

 

Sex+sentimentality instead of love – this is how Jean-Luc Nancy has characterized the “American way of life”, i.e the image that they offer us as something that is better by default, since there is no alternative. A quick roll in the hay, a few tears from a cheap Hollywood melodrama, and it’s off to work, out into real “life”, down to the Golden Calf. Love will only distract you from your work. Show me a lover that makes a good worker. What the hell is he thinking about? He’s supposed to be working. So, dear friends, it seems like love has a great deal of political potential! Love and death force us to consider what our lives actually mean. Love forces you to reconsider the values that have been imposed by the American ideology that has come to dominate Russia today. Love is what allows subjectification. Love is the one horse upon which you can place all of your stakes, e.g. your career, all your money, your effectivity, your success. “Everything” will suddenly seem petty and unimportant, nothing more than a “paper sword”, according to the poet Shnur (=the lead singer-lyricist of the rockgroup Leningrad). But in a society that forces you to love the bodies of products, where you dream of BMWs and Motorolas, it seems unthinkably difficult to love. It is so unthinkably difficult because already prerequires subjectification. The vicious circle: to love, you need to be a human being, and to be a human being, you need to love.

 

Note that we’re not talking about being in love. Those in love are prone to the hysterical and even psychotic consumption of goods and services. I call this behaviour psychotic, because this kind of consumption is connected to the disorder of narcissism. In this context, consumption is a kind of supporting treatment, preventing complete collapse. The “branded” girls of the so-called “Golden Youth”, its “golden lionesses”, constantly live in this state of psychosis. The male world of capitalism has turned them into products. In this final analysis, this means that they can only see themselves in shop-windows, as tradeable goods. But in a society of consumerism and information, products are fluid. The environment is subject to constant change. In this industrial zone of constant obliteration, it is nearly impossible to stabilize any image at all. This is the world of patriarchy, but simply no more than a patriarchal hallucination.

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Ekaterina Degot, Moscow

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Which political role can feminism play in the contemporary world?
Which strategies of solidarity between women of different social, national, and ethnic backgrounds are possible today? Or is it better to shift our focus from the differences between men and women in order to address different universal features, such as political power-relations or social class?

 

Even if they prefer to remain in their “grant ghetto”, failing to become civil-rights-activists, Russia’s feminist organizations face a mass of political questions such as prostitution, family violence, the status of women in Islamic regions etc. Today, it is paramount to differentiate all of this from the discourse of feminist liberalism, which has displayed what I would call “positive gender racism” throughout recent years: the woman is equated to the Other, thus confirming as a privileged victim. This gives rise to fundamentalist statements (a woman is soft, caring, intuitive etc. “by nature), which, in turn, form the basis of political decision-making: in contemporary Russia, it is politically necessary to stimulate the woman’s role as a housewife by decree, for an example. They also form the basis for intellectual decisions: in American cultural studies, it has become necessary to prohibit anything that is not marked by “Otherness”, anything rational or masculine, condemning it because of its one-sided point of view.

 

The discourse of the “Other” has been very harmful in all of its variants, be they synthetic-deconstructivist or rehabilitational. The Other does not exist. What we need today is a reassertion of the subject’s universal heroism, not as androgyny, but as something abstracted from gender (and ethnos). This abstraction DOES NOT mean any coincidence with “masculinity”. People who identify themselves as to whether they are women or men fail to understand that this status is no more important that than a congenital illness like asthma or stuttering: it simply conditions the bounds of our possibilities; it is something to be taken into account, but little more. Solidarity between women of different social or ethnic backgrounds is possible and necessary in the same measure as solidarity is necessary between the ill. Incidentally, there is no place better suited toward solidarity than a hospital.

 

Do you feel that qualities like “vulnerability” will die out as unnecessary capacities?
Or is it possible to engage in a certain revolutionary politics of vulnerability?
How can feminism convince human beings of both genders of the need for emancipation and of the benefits of real freedom?

 

Tolerance, softness, sentimentality etc. are not typically feminine qualities. Instead, the proven biological difference between women and men lies concerns the dominance of this or that hemisphere of the brain; left-hemisphere dominance and the resulting propensity for language and logic is actually more common than among women, while men’s brains are often dominated by the right hemisphere (spatial orientation, emotion, intuition and creativity). So in terms of biology, everything is actually the other way around. However, culture superimposes its own stereotypes (projected and confirmed through the historical division of labor), forcing women “not to be too smart” and men to hide their emotions. Discovering “the hidden Other in you” may be beneficial in the psychological sense, but as a cultural demand (resonating constantly), it imposes the unreal ideal of “androgynous all-roundness”, becoming source of frustration and even force (such as the force that prohibits men from urinating while standing up etc.) Also, I do not think that contemporary society disqualifies weakness and “the attempt at understanding the Other” in any way. Quite on the contrary, tolerance has become the norm, whereas radicalism and certainty are condemned as outbreaks of “totalitarianism”. As soon as you say “I think this or that”, people will already be accusing you of being a Bolshevik. Social life is dominated by those qualities that society itself sees as “feminine”, but this change has taken place under the slogan of “Women are also people”. As on the political stage, the victim is given certain privileges, so that the role of victim is easier to impose.

 

During the last decade, art that privileges vulnerability has done a great deal of damage. Today’s essayism, for an example, confronts us with lots of lame writing that masks its authors’ inability for thought – men write like this more often than women, by the way. Contemporary exhibitions are flooded with pieces that have not been ‘made’: they are formally and intellectually helpless, shown under the auspices that “the weak also have a right to life”. All of this reminds me of radical ecologism, which sees yogurt as a form of life with rights. It seems to me that we have come to long for the artwork as a display of heroism, an explosive event, rupturing time, giving rise to the truth. These qualities are not “masculine”. Art is cognition, intellectual activity, flying above life. This is what freedom is all about. In everyday life, it is more laudable to display subtlety.

 

Does love have any political potential in your opinion?
Do you think that there is anything specific in the feminine experience of love?

 

As Houellebecq has justly noted, it is impossible to buy a single bed without the risk of catching the shop-assistant’s scornful gaze. With love, society places a great burden on people – and most of all women, since their feeling of self-sufficiency is far smaller on the strength of their social defenselessness. So-called “love” is an endless form of communication which eats up horrendous amounts of time and presents a serious obstacle to any further personal development. Again, women are most likely to fall victim to this “love”. It is this kind of “love” – an idealized sphere of “gifts and liberation”, elevated to an absolute – which is so often praised highly through mass culture as something “authentic” in contrast to calculation. In this end, everybody simply sits around, waiting for “gifts and liberation”. Bataille and Mauss have long since shown that the gift-economy flows into a form of moral terror, since receiving a gift implies obligation. In practical terms, it is far more honest to admit to the contractual and reciprocal character of any interpersonal relationship. It would be self-deceit to ignore this, and what’s more, it could even end in the conscious exploitation of one’s partner.

 

On the other hand, there is such a thing as an amorous encounter, but it is marked by the qualities of an explosive Event (although this event-explosion can be prolonged, if you are lucky), and for this reason, it is exclusive, as an encounter that takes place between two people. To blur the event of an Encounter across society’s entire collectivity would mean freeing oneself of any human and political responsibility and passing up the chance for any kind of truth. (An old Soviet anecdote, a kolkhoz farmer honestly prefers group sex because it is easier to shirk there.) In the end, it is time to stop pretending to criticize consumerism while lapping up the rhetoric of liberal democratism, which actually covers up a great deal of violence.

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Sarat Maharaj // In Other’s Words (Interview with Daniel Birnbaum)

Posted in #4: Интернационал здесь и сейчас | Нет комментариев

THAT SARAT MAHARAJ IS A BIT TOO INTELLIGENT for the art world, as a friend of mine recently claimed, I cannot accept. Without the presence of a few minds like his, the whole business would be just too dull. A biographical remark in a recent publication notes that the South African-born art historian, based in London since 1976, “has lectured and published throughout the world on cultural translation and difference. He is an authority on the work of Richard Hamilton, Marcel Duchamp, and James Joyce, and his experimental writings include essays on textile art, sound work [Maharaj’s “Xeno-sonics”] and visual theory constructions [the essay “Monkeydoodle”].” The contibutor’s note doesn’t mention his incredibly articulate manner. The pleasure I get out of listening to Maharaj is always countered by the depressing realization that I will never handle the English language–or any other–with such precision.

I met up with Maharaj at Berlin’s Humboldt-Universitat, where he became the first Rudolf Arnheim Professor of Art History last summer. He is spending a semester away from London’s Goldsmiths College, where he has taught art history and theory over the last decade. His seminars in Berlin are already famous, attended not only by academics in the city but by critics, architects, and artists as well. On the Thursday evening that I sat in on his lively class, two of the fastest talkers in the business, architect Rem Koolhaas and curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist, bombarded the audience with more information than a university student typically receives in a semester. In another seminar, Maharaj discussed problems that originate in the analytical philosophy of science and branch out into domains as various as cognitive biology, the writings of Marcel Duchamp, and globalist economics. The author of such essays as “The Congo is Flooding the Acropolis: Black Art and Orders of Difference” (1991) and “Perfidious Fidelity: The Untranslatability of the Other” (1994), Maharaj has recently left the semi-obscure confines of advanced critical theory to join the group of curators assisting Okwui Enwezor in preparing and www Documenta11, which opens in Kassel this June. (The art historian has devoted a seminar titled “Thinking Documenta and Doing Documenta” to creating a reflective space for the critical assessment of this mega-event.) This year will also see the publication of two new books by Maharaj: an extensive collection of essays designed by Ecke Bonk and given the Joycean title Works in Progress: Experiments in Think-speak-write Sequences 1 (INIVA) and A Strife of Tongues: Richard Hamilton/Marcel Duchamp/James Joyce (Typosophic Society), which Hamilton is designing. Maharaj’s theoretical competence, combined with his willingness to bring the concepts of cultural, diversity and difference to a more public forum, makes him a key intellectual voice on the Continent today.

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