The problem with MIA’s new video is not, as Anna Pickard claims, that it is “too shocking,” it is that it is not shocking enough. The video’s big “reveal,” that the state’s violence is directed at the redheaded, turns any possible shock into pure silliness. Now, I imagine someone will say that I’m missing the point here, that prejudice directed against redheads is really no more silly than prejudice directed against black people or Muslims, and that by showing us this, the film makes a serious point about the arbitrariness of racism. This is wrong: racism is indeed unfounded and constructed and arbitrary, but it is not silly. The mistake here lies in thinking that, because racism is based on a social construction rather than a biological reality, it is therefore unreal, a mere error or fiction with only a mental existence in the psyche of racists. But in fact there is little more real than social constructions, because they create, and exist through, a material reality of practices and distributions of people and things. By eliding this materiality, and suggesting that an alternative racial reality could be produced simply by an arbitrary switch of what signifiers are racialized, the MIA video flatters its liberal audience, reinforcing the belief that racism a matter of ignorance or error that can be avoided by the sufficiently enlightened.

Worse, perhaps, the video ends up letting the actual racism and violence of the US state off the hook. The first half of the video presents us with a mystery: who are these police, and why are they raiding this building? The moment when we see the bus full of red-haired young men functions as an explanation, an explanation which immediately places us in an alternative reality in which the US features a number of signs of oppression that suggest places out side the US: Northern Ireland (murals) or Palestine (kids in keffiyehs throwing rocks). The problem is, that this, it seems to me, strongly suggests that we should see the first half of the video as also part of this alternative reality; but police raids of this sort are of course no “alternative” at all to actually existing US reality.

I don’t think I’ve written much about MIA before, not just because I don’t like her records very much, but because I’m rather uncomfortable with the fact that I don’t like her records. Oh, I can come up with any number of plausible reasons why, but they all seem to have a borrowed kettle quality to them: I have too many reasons for not liking her, none of which are finally quite persuasive. I don’t like the superficiality of her gestures towards politics, but why is this a problem when I’m so happy to take as interesting the surface features of other artists, from Lady GaGa to tATu? Is it that I’m happy to let the girls talk about fripperies like gender and aesthetics, but politics is SRS BSNS that should be left to the men? Perhaps I judge MIA differently because she presents herself as serious about politics; but, again, why do I let my interpretation of her work be determined by  MIA’s interest in politics when I’m more than happy to ignore Britney’s lack of interest? This suggests, I think, a potential problem with popism’s otherwise admirable commitment to the death of the author, which is that it tends to work better when the interpretation of the record is wholly disconnected from the artist’s self-understanding. The problem is that this requires the artist to be ignorant: the female (usually; feminized, in pop, almost always) pop star is forced into the position of the subject not supposed to know.

Or another thing; I dislike the appropriations involved in MIA’s presentation of herself as speaking from a generic third-world position (this is most annoying in the uncredited “baile funk” tracks on Piracy Funds Terrorism, which may be Diplo’s fault rather than MIA’s, and the cringeworthy line about how she “puts people on the map who’ve never seen a map,” which is MIA’s fault); but, for all that I could make arguments about self-made native informants, she surely does have an experience as someone growing up in Sri Lanka and working in the western music industry that qualifies her to say something about the third world; why is it that I somehow want to deny this?

I find myself in the odd position of not being able to trust my judgment about MIA; but I’m pretty sure “Born Free” isn’t as good a record as “Jimmy.”

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It’s not a surprise that the celebrity reality genre arrived in the UK so much earlier than in the US; as with so much else (Thatcher, financialization), the UK exhibits the tendencies of late capitalism in a purer form, with celebrity having been abolished over there a long time ago. Instead, there’s a continuum of decreasing glamor from the soap, to Heat, to Nuts, to the glamor model (the inclusion of the term “glamor” in the name being, of course, a sure sign of an absence of glamor in the thing).  The difference between the last two categories is kind of interesting; while glamor models perform an absurdly hyperbolic version of femininity (the really quite charming Jordan being perhaps the best recent example), the lads mags put as much, if not more, effort into insisting that the version of femininity they present is not a performance at all, which is the specific performance of which Jo Guest, Donna Air, and Sheridan Smith are masters.

This reminds me, in a roundabout sort of way, of the dual descriptions that circulate on the internet of Fox News’s female anchors as looking like either porn stars or transsexuals. What I think maybe  people are groping at with these misogynistic and transphobic comparisons is a sense that Jamie Colby or Megyn Kelly perform gender in a way that’s somehow too obvious. The mistake here is to think that it’s only when you’re sexy that you’re performing sex; but Tamron Hall’s no-nonsense short hair, or Brit Hume’s rumbling monotone delivery are also gendered performances.

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A little while ago I wrote this as the introduction to a paper, the argument of which it ended up not, really, introducing; so I cut it, with hopes of returning to it at some point. I was reminded of it when Dominic followed up a debate on subjective intentions, structure, and agency (which got trapped in a familar and depressing spiral) with a discussion of Dworkin (a much more hermenutically thoughtful reading of Dworkin than my own).

The uninterrogated reference to a masculinist construction of subjectivity in Dworkin’s Intercourse can be seen particularly clearly in her discussion of “militant virginity.” For Dworkin, Joan’s virginity is above all a physical integrity that comes to stand metonymically for a more general idea of subjective autonomy.³ Dworkin contrasts this sort of virginity with the virginity traditionally prized by Christianity, in which female purity is valued because it implies passivity.⁴ However, Dworkin does not mention another tradition of Christian virginity that appears much closer to Joan’s, the tradition of heroic masculine virginity that one finds in medieval romance and, in particular, the various forms of the Arthurian legend. Here, as with Joan, virginity is the virginity of warriors; and, again as with Joan, virginity is associated with activity and with self-posession (this is most strikingly apparent in the contrast between Lancelot, who is sent mad by physical intimacy with Elaine, and Galahad, who remains a virgin and is thus able to succeed on the quest for the Holy Grail). Read in a medieval context, then, Joan of Arc is, more even than Dworkin realizes, appropriating a masculine rôle; her virtue indeed has the masculine quality suggested by the etymology of that word.⁶ However, virtue is not masculine merely etymologically; the virility associated with virtue has a long tradtion as a form of masculine subjectivity predicated on the subordination of women. For this reason, the appropriation of masculine subjectivity, achieved by Joan and celebrated by Dworkin, is strictly limited as a mode of feminist resistance.

Rather than either of these Christian conceptions of virtue, Dworking construes Joan’s virtue according to an older, classical conception of virtue which is connected with strength, ability and (a connection Dworkin makes but, surprisingly, does not comment on), manliness. Here too, however, virtue is implicated in a masculinist conception of agency. The connection here lies in etymology (the “vir” in “virtue” being the Latin for “man”) but, perhaps more importantly, has a long tradition in political theory. One of the most prominent political theorists to emphasize this concept of virtue is Machiavelli; furthermore Machiavelli makes a great deal of the gendering that the term “virtue” carries with it, so studying Machiavelli’s political theory can make clear some of the problematic features of the understanding of agency that underlies Dworkin’s analysis of Joan.

Machiavelli employed the early-modern Italian term virtù, rather than the English virtue, a term which means virtue in the non-Christian sense discussed by Dworkin. In particular, as Machiavelli uses it, virtù has a definite sense of agency, or ability to act decisively, the sense foregrounded by Dworkin. Machiavelli, however, emphasizes the masculinity of virtù by defining this kind of agency by reference to its other, chance, which he personifies as the goddess Fortuna. The way these two terms map on to a gender binary is particularly clear in Machiavelli’s play The Mandrake Root, which is a kind of comedy of the sexes. The play concerns the attempt by the braggart Callimaco, with the assistance of the “rascally go-between” Ligurio,⁷ to seduce the young wife of the old and foolish Nicia. These three characters provide different images of masculine virtù. Callimaco is the heroic, active man of virtù, whose masculinity is defined by an overt agency. Callimaco says that he must “try something, grandiose or dangerous, ruinous or infamous,”⁸ a type of agency he later describes in explicity gendered terms: “Flee danger, but if you cannot, then confront it like a man. Don’t cringe like a woman!”⁹ Nicia is the mirror image of Callimaco, a man who is not properly manly because he does not act. He is literally impotent (the play opens with him unable to get his wife pregnant) and metaphorically so, too; his unmanliness is shown by his lack of control over his wife (as Callimaco puts it, “I wouldn’t call myself a husband if I couldn’t dominate my wife”¹⁰). Ligurio, finally, represents a third, more ambivalent presentation of masculinity, as he maintains his agency not through a direct and heroic action, but through manipulation and a careful negotiation of contingency.

What is important about all these constructions of masculinity is that they show how virtù, the masculine virtue of independent agency, is itself, paradoxically dependent on the feminine. This is most apparant in the case of Nicia, who is explicitly considered unmanly because of his inability to dominate his wife. However, it is also true in the case of the ambivalent heroes of the piece, Callimaco, whose heroic virtù is set into motion by the women he is trying to seduce and is, in the final analysis, dependent on her approval, and Ligurio, whose crafty virtù depends on taking into account how the women he is trying to dupe will respond to his actions. The point I want to make is to emphasize the way in which this idea of independent agency is gendered, and also the conceptual difficulties this masculine gendering of agency engenders. This latter is particularly apparent in The Prince, which is especially important as this is one of the foundational texts for the modern concept of the political subject. The discussion of the relationship between virtù and Fortuna occours throughout The Prince, but the conceptual difficulties and the gendered polarity of the terms are most visible in Machiavelli’s image of Fortuna as a flood, against which virtù is defined as a series of dikes and embankmments which perform two separate and not necessarily compatible functions, both channeling and resisting Fortuna.¹¹ Machiavelli oscillates between these two responses to Fortuna, sometimes emphasizing the importance of adapting ones “course of action to the nature of the times”¹² to such an extent that self-direction seems to disappear almost entirely. Indeed, I think it is in this response to this vanishing of autonomy that Machiavelli abruptly switches course, replacing the theme of adapting to Fortuna with direct opposition, at the same time as Fortuna’s gender is emphasized, with Machiavelli arguing for the need to “keep her down” and “command her,” using force “to beat her and struggle with her.”¹³

It is on this note that Machiavelli ends the chapter on the rôle of fortune in politics, perhaps hoping to exorcize with rhetorical violence the ambiguity that runs throughout the chapter. However, the conceptual difficulty remains; virtù, the masculine virtue of autonomy and self-direction, remains fraught. If to exercize virtù is to exert ones will in opposition to a woman, or the female godess Fortuna, then the concept of virtù requires the resistance of its female counterpart, which necessarily imples the possibility that this female resistance might be successful. This definition of masculine mastery is thus self-defeating, containing within the definition its own negation.

This makes clear some of the difficulties in the account of subjectivity that underlies Dworkin’s Intercourse. The identification of femaleness with subjection, which Dworkin counterposes to the freedom enjoyed by the male subject, is an inherent part of that male agency; thus the latter cannot be a genuine alternative to the former. Instead, the terms of Dworkin’s critique of women’s subjection reinstates that subjection. Dworkin’s position here exhibits the logic of what Brown calls “wounded attachments,” in which an identity is constructed around the “wound” produced by exclusion from the sovereign subjectivity of liberal modernity, in a way which re-installs that sovereign subject as the desired object.¹⁴ This, suggests Brown, leads to the doomed attempt by some feminists to achieve feminist ends solely by appealing to the very liberal legal structure they themselves recognize as iredeemably patriarchal.¹⁵ Dworkin’s account, that is, amounts to a critique of the effects of the modern understanding of agency in the terms of that account itself, where what is needed is a critique of this account of agency.

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Anarchism is the usher of science-the master of ceremonies to all forms of truth. It would remove all barriers between the human being and natural development. From the natural resources of the earth, all artificial restrictions, that the body might be nurtures, and from universal truth, all bars of prejudice and superstition, that the mind may develop symmetrically (“The Principles of Anarchism”).

Which is not to say that Parsons was only interested in science as a theoretical enterprise. Rather, she emphasized how technology changed the conditions of labor and resistance; including in some unconventional ways:

Each of you hungry tramps who read these lines, avail yourselves of those little methods of warfare which Science has placed in the hands of the poor man, and you will become a power in this or any other land.

Learn the use of explosives! (“To Tramps”).

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Your old-school Marxist (and that is who Žižek is channeling in this instance) accepts the identity politics formulation of struggles around race and gender and, recognizing the limitations of identity politics, supposes that class is somehow different. But as this horrible example of class identity politics makes clear, there’s nothing preventing class being assimilated to an identity politics framework, too. The way to avoid the problems of identity politics is not to privelege class. Quite the contrary, making this distinction between class and other organizations of oppression prevents us from understanding any of them. Poulantzas criticizes Foucault for failing to ground his theory of power in class, but Foucault is right here and Poulantzas is wrong; Poulantzas mistakes a form of appearence of economic power, class, for the power itself. The question facing a Marxist theory of power is to figure out how abstract materialities appear as particular stratifications and identifications.

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“I’m gonna be a tractor,” Garretson said. “Tractors are fun.”

Although Garretson does not have a six-cylinder diesel engine, independent-link suspension, or a comfort command seat with air-suspension swivel, the 5-year-old said she was excited to be both red and shiny someday. Garretson added that as a tractor she would sleep in the barn with the cows and the chickens, but not with the pigs, because the pigs make too much of a mess.

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But the reaction of the common man, woman, and child—”That? Why you can’t change that! You must be out of your mind!”—is closest to the truth (The Dialectic of Sex, 1).

I approve, of course, of Firestone’s call for the abolition of childhood. Her refusal to justify naturalized hierarchies is probably more intransigent, and more necessary, in this case even than in her anakysis of women’s oppression. But, as with her discussion of the biological roots of sexed oppression, there’s a frustrating gap in her account between the biological generalities and the historical specifics. Firestone of course recognizes that the particular forms taken by oppression are not fixed; but what remains unclear to me is where these particular forms of opression come from. If the biological is supposed to be determining, but the form taken by the biological is itself determined by something else, isn’t it the “something else” that is really determining (behind the curtain, pulling the strings, as it were)?

This problem is particularly apparent in the discussion of the oppression of children because, in Firestone’s account, the oppression of children seems to have only really got going relatively recently, some time in modernity. But surely the difference in strength between children and adults predated this; so what caused this continuum of capability to become interpreted as a difference between two kinds of people, children and adults? Firestone does suggest an intriguing reason for the rise of the ideology of childhood, although she doesn’t follow it up (and, indeed, it’s not obviously compatible with her overall analysis of children as an oppressed class).

The childmen and childwomen of medieval iconography are miniature adults, reflecting a wholly different social reality: children then were tiny adults, carriers of whatever class and name they had been born to, destined to rise into a clearly outlined social position (86).

The rise of the ideology of childhood, then, was also the rise of a group of people who were not (yet) carriers of a class and name, who were “innocent,” in the sense of unformed by a past or by connections with others. And when you start thinking of children like that, they start to seem a lot like the bourgeois subject.

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Of course, this particular piece of art didn’t actually involve any abortions; but it did a great job of highlighting fault-lines among those who consider themselves pro-choice.

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