“Well I’m not dumb but I can’t understand…why she walked like a woman and talked like a man.”- Notes on Lola
“…these are intimately linked I believe to questions of technological synthesis, the way in which we feel the world through our technologies in such a way that they engender us, and steer us away from a much more (symbolically) masculine instrumental relationship to our capacities. The entire Gaia feminization of the world which some protest, and which marks something of the vitalisms of contemporary philosophy, are questions of immersion, how deeply should our body sink into our capacities, and feel our way forward through what is modern. The contest between instrument and embodiment is an aesthetic contest between distance and speed, something mediated by affect and our control of affects (most regularly codified and regimented in the register of gender). In this sense, the battleground of gender, in politics, and the seemingly reactionary political entrenchment on the issue of sexual rights and actions is to be expected, and in fact, respected, as the entire social body seeking equilibrium amid vast change in capacity to feel and do.”
Quote taken from: kvond.wordpress.com/
A considerably different approach to the conventional conceptions of ‘gender’ and the ‘individual’. What the author is avoiding are the traditional binaries of object and subject, the ‘ego’ or ‘self’ separated from the environment like an epiphenomenal effect which through perceiving can only interpret the world, not directly affect it.
In this way preconceived notions of what it means to be ‘male’ or ‘female’ will also understand clearly the effects of the technologies on the roles of standard people of each sex. By calling oneself ‘male’ or ‘female’ they assign to themselves a designation which transcends the inert genetic differences in sex. The basic function of reproduction is an arbitrary fact, nothing which is valued in itself. It is rather the role one plays in producing and sustaining the process of reproduction that stamps itself into the psyche of history- masculine and feminine archetypes are designed around the current sociological models of gender identity…the material relations of people and the roles the tend to play statistically over long periods of time as they reproduce, populate and interact economically.
Consider how long the female was given the role of cleaning the nest, or the ‘house’ as it is now called, or how long women statistically dominated secretarial work in the market.
How much of the image of the man and woman is linguistic? There are three tiers here functioning to create our conceptions of gender- purely linguistic expression, economic behavior, and biological classification. If we took away all the idiosyncratic and stereotypical cliches of each sex…if we suspended the narrative…how much of the meaningfulness of the roles would be left? Only the reality of the economic behavior and the biological differences.
It is the life of our techne that engenders us. There is no archetypical phenotype that is intrinsic to the sexes. The only distinction which is real is the genetic. To believe that ‘manhood’ or ‘womanhood’ is intrinsic to the sexes and not a product of constructivist conditioning is narrow minded.
By first avoiding this, the isolating sense of being effected and controlled by the external environment without participating with it is ignored, and the individual develops a more interactive sense of ‘self’.
(Be advised, one is being conditioned by an environment, one is not ‘free’. Only now can you become more of an active cause instead of just a passive effect. It is the belief that one has freewill which prevents the more adequate understanding of the world and how it operates. Freewill is a confused idea which by virtue of its being unclear can only result in clouded reasoning. It is also an infamously misused phrase used by philosopher’s, as well as a rhetorical device used to better appropriate civil law and order- a man made to believe he is ‘responsible’ is more easily controlled. Freewill…a necessary illusion for the creation of a state.)
Secondly, through the technological relationships of people certain identifying characteristics are attributed to certain roles. The ‘gender’ sense of individuality is affected as much by practical, social roles as it is affected by the inert, genetic classifications.
The excellent point made in the quote is that not only are there determinations in our social interactions which define our social identities, but we are also in some kind of control of the direction and the fashioning of our technological capacities and relationships.
Indeed, there is no war between ‘sexes’. Inert hormones and sexual organs do not wage war. Only people with hormones and sexual organs wage war. Only ‘ideas’ can wage a war. Rather, the war is the growing pangs of a new sense of identity for new forms of material organizations and the politics of their beginnings. One cannot think in terms of old archetypes such as masculine virtue and feminine virtue and contrast those standards to the discourse of our modern world with any longstanding relevance.
The distinction which has always remained and will always remain despite the socioeconomic changes of the human lot is the genetic distinction- the gender defined scientifically. The ‘ethical’ or ‘philosophical’ definitions describe and explain only a passing stage for the overall ecological development of the environment, and therefore mistake an interpretation of the identity of the gender as something which stands for all possible technological relations…the very things which originate the identity we define as ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’.
Ideological conflicts then are as explained ‘a body seeking equilibrium’ .
Because the identity of gender is inert as a biological definition, and therefore meaningless, and changeable as the socioeconomic definition, and therefore determined by capacities and technologies, there really is no ‘male’ against ‘female’ during this symbiosis. The entire construct of ‘male’ and ‘female’ is a linguistic object, not a virtual object in the world. In the world, the identities have no casual affect on the environment- the environment does not respond to our conceptions of gender. Only the particular capacities of each sex affect the environment differently, and these are inert unless they are addressed through an ideology.
Only a deconstruction of the identities is possible, or else one is only speaking ideologically.
Ideology stands backwards- it bases conclusions on the viability of a specific type of socioeconomic context’s functioning in the past, or by its theoretical cooperation with the ideology that is in mind at the present. A change is only thought to be negative by comparison…so when we hear things like anti-industrialism or anti-consumerism, by comparison to an older model of society we might judge such things as negative, signs of decline in quality. In light of that, ideology extends as far as becoming a type of preservation effort for the species as it is known and understood at the time, not eternally.
But there are no such things as ‘mistakes’ in nature because nature has no intentions. Thinking in terms of ‘evolution’ and ‘devolution’ is confusing. There is no such thing as ‘man’ who is getting ‘better’ or ‘worse’. Point being, an ideological judgment which rests on the premise that certain characteristics of society are universally preferred above all other possible characteristics, assumes that the ‘system’ is supposed to be some other.
Alas, not only have our gender identities dissolved, but the particular technological stages which produced us are of relatively short duration.
The distance between the instrument and the embodiment (in this case, the technological environment which is instrumental in forming identity, and the evolving-to-embody the ideological conceptions of gender which are afforded by the capacities in the environment) is a circular and self regulating process of organization: the instrument, man, is first a capacity of the environment, then man becomes the embodiment of the image and idea of ‘sex’ he fashions as he expresses his material capacities. There is no ‘first’ material circumstance or ‘first’ idea which set this pendulum swinging.
The ‘distance’ is the ratio of speed to ‘feeling out’ the new capacities, the conflict is simply a slowness of orientation. An unfamiliar characteristic change to conventional social roles will always produce conflict, since ideology is that fundamental effort to preserve a known type. When the conflict is absolved, the ideology changes to incorporate that new image and idea of the conventional social role.
Out from natural technological circumstances, social roles which are occupied by each gender are created, and these roles are then ideologically synchronized and formed using the material relations of the society. This to develop and expand trans-gender capacities and powers.
Think Spinozean deep ecology and of the world as a single plane of immanence (to borrow Deleuze’s phrase). The contingent divisions of the things we term as opposites are not causally isolated individuals distinguishing themselves in their opposition to other individuals. Conflict then is precisely the evidence that a new organization and increase in power/capacity is happening. There are no real conflicts, only interactions. The metaphors ‘problem’, ‘contradiction’, and ‘error’ are only semantic, logical possibilities, not real possibilities in the world. Nature is not dialectical in the above way. One might conceive of change as being the result of some overdetermination (to borrow from Althusser ) rather than as the result of dialectical conflict or contradiction.
Because of the singular, prevailing condition of causality in nature, the extremities or limits of a ‘body’ only apply practically, scientifically (as in physics, biology and chemistry), and do not exist, or rather, make no difference existentially when we analyze centuries of development at a time as a large scale ‘body’ adjusting and growing. The nature of the animal species is something of the ‘attitude’, so to speak, of the total ecosystem. The praxis of the human species is its gendering, one could say, and the ecosystem matures in the same way an individual does (to be analogous).
There is a bigger pseudo-teleology working through the cultural and technological contingencies of civilization- a virtual production machine. That is to say, what causes what causes us to evolve to points in time when we are existing in a particular society is a kind of organization which transcends our very partial and limited interpretations of what ‘evolution’ is doing. We are analyzing only a brief period of time, relatively speaking. One could even entertain the possibility that indeed, if there were some teleology at work, the last nine billion years in section X of the universe could very well be a glitch! How could one know for sure it was not? (This is why teleology is nonsense…since the complete design cannot be conceived, positive and negative features of it cannot be distinguished from one another.)