BE WARNED that this thread is basically a philosophical chicken-fighting ring. It will get fairly wild and wooly, and there may be more-than-usual tolerance for trolls. Allusions, however, to sexual revenge/violence (you need to be someone’s prison bitch, etc), gendered epithets (bitch, ho, sissy, girly-man, I-can-see-your-adams-apple), gendered patronizing, racial epithets (ANY and all), personal threats, male posturing (about how tough you are, or how un-tough someone else is), etc etc etc, are still off limits. If you can’t make your point without this stuff, you didn’t have a very strong point.

NO super-long re-posts!!! Teasers and links!!! No bombardments of twenty posts in a row… we’ve had that before, and one regular said it was like having a bad sex partner that continued thrusting away frenetically long after the other partner had informed him that this was not doing it for her.

All that said… I’ll start my own critique of libertarianism here as a way of kicking this off.

Let’s begin with defining humans, since this debate is about how humans can best live together.

Human beings are animals that emerged from the biosphere a couple of million years ago. Our exact genetic type emerged in Africa around 150,000 years ago. Latecomers. Very late. It was only around 10,000 years ago that we quit being exclusively hunter-gatherers; which leads us to conclude that most of what we do now cannot be exclusively laid at the feet of an externmalized Nature, and certainly can’t be attributed to individual effort. It is well established that we are — like all primates — social animals, beginning with a long infant dependency period, and following on with the profound dterminative role of culture on the fomraiton of individual personality. This very conversation could not happen if we had no common language, as just a tiny example, and the medium we are employing to communicate was created within and by a highly complex social organization — initially by defense contractors, actually, in something called a nation-state, embedded within a late 20th Century world system… whose very dating system derives from an ethico-religious heritage.

So we accumulate and pass on knowledge, a clear form of aggregating social interdependency. We depend not only on others with whom we must cooperate to survive in the present, but we depend on “skills” and “knowledges” developed in the past and transferred across generations by cultures. A newborn Homo sapien does not have an internet gene, or an English gene, an automobile operation gene, or even an American culture gene.

The biological basis of this capacity to transfer accumulated signs, symbols, ideas, and “knowledges” is not fully understood by science; but one thing we do know is that the structure of the brain has a big role to play in all this; while it is important to note that the brain is a highly complex organ, and not some isolated computer-like machine (this metaphor is a reflection of technological culture, not a finding of science or particularly deep reflection). Though we take it for granted, partly out of a culturally inscribed dualism that mentally “separates” “mind” from body, we have one very important non-cognitive capacity that also differentriates us from other primates, and which likely played a highly detrminative role in the development of aforesaid brain: our hands.

Think about not having them as a thought-experiment; and you’ll quickly see what I mean.

Another important point here is the probable role of mirror neurons. Neuroscientist Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, arguably the top behavioral neurologist in the world, believes that mirro-neuron assemblies are responsible for our ability to use complex language, empathize, and anticipate the intentions of others. The research into this, as well as the work of social scientists and philosophers, disrupt another culturally-inscribed dualism: mental versus emotional. In fact, in human beings, this distinction is a purely analytical spearation that seldom operates in actual individual experience. Our cogntive-affective(-conative) experiences are actually fused; and their analytical separation was embedded in a particular set of historical circumstances, and promoted as an epistemology by a particular group of people who held immense social power.

It’s always helpful to those in power to explain that they are in power because they are innately superior… even when this “superiority” is itself the exercise of that power, as it has accumulated and been passed on through many generations.

Since we are products of this biosphere, and since philosophical debates often start with triva then dive further and further into things about which we feel we can generalize, then describing the biosphere from which we come seems a way to move directly into the contentious ground of epistemology.

DeAnander made a gift to me of Liaisons of Life: From Hornworts to Hippos, How the Unassuming Microbe Has Driven Evolution. I strongly endorse this accessible little book to anyone.

In it we learn about Beatrix Potter - yes, the children’s book artist and author. That was her second career. She was a brilliant autodidact in the field of botany; and one of the first to suggest that lichen might be a symbiosis of algae and fungi. She and others were drummed out of the scientific community, because the epistemology of Darwinism was one that mirrored the “red in tooth and claw” account of nature which emphasized “competition” as the motive force in evolution. Her suggestion that symbiosis might play an equally or more prominent role in the biopshere was fraught with political danger; because this social darwinism was the epistemological justification for European colonalism and imperial expansion.

Biosphere:

The biosphere is the part of the earth, including air, land, surface rocks, and water, within which life occurs, and which biotic processes in turn alter or transform. From the broadest biophysiological point of view, the biosphere is the global ecological system integrating all living beings and their relationships, including their interaction with the elements of the lithosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere. This biosphere is postulated to have evolved, beginning through a process of biogenesis or biopoesis, at least some 3.5 billion years ago.

Now we have to deal with a couple of scientific concepts that have controversial applicatons: autopoiesis and sympoiesis.

Autopoiesis:

Self-reproduction.
The proces whereby an organization produces itself.
Self-producing systems, where a system can be a cell, an organism and perhaps a corporation.

…a network of processes of production (transformation and destruction) of components that produces the components that: (i) through their interactions and transformations continously regenerate the network of processes (relations) that produced them; and (ii) constitute it (the machine) as a concrete unity in the space in which they (the components) exist by specifying the topological domain of its realizations as such a network.

Sympoiesis: similar to autopoiesis, but without clearly defined spatial or temporal boundaries; permeable or semi-permeable.

As a further preface, I want to introduce the issue of perception. Human beings perceive directly and interpretively. I’ll start with a simple example.

I look down my street. A jogger approaches. At first, she appears small; then she gets bigger and bigger; then she passes me and starts to appear smaller again. Was she actually changing size? No. We agree on that because (1) we all share the epxerience of seeing this apparent change, provided we are sighted individuals (for a blind person, this approach and departure would have different changes in perception associated with noise, perhaps). (2) We have all learned through experience that these changes in apparent size signify directional motion that we can interpret. A newborn actually believes for a time that things are just getting bigger or smaller.

Concrete perceptions can be interpeted in highly semiotic, cogntive-affective-conative, and abstract ways.

A stone is a stone is a stone… within whatever sympoietic complexities it may be ontologically embedded. When it is encountered by a human, however, it might be as a sight, an obstacle, a resource, a tool, a chair, a clue to something else, etc etc etc. It may be a particular kind of stone, granite, for example, which further particularizes it in the mind of the human who is now perceiving this stone, a human trained in one kind of taxonomy.

We’ll return to this at length, because it is an essential element of the critique of the radical scientism of one strain of libertarian philosophy as well as the general abstractionism that unites nearly all strains of libertarianism.

The biosphere, of which Homo sapiens is both product and part, is also heavily impacted by the conative actions of human beings, so much so that the biosphere has been in many respects irreversibly altered by the deeper and deeper encroachment of a non-evolutionarily-determined built environment that might be called — for brevity — the homosphere.

Until the emergence of Homo sapiens, and of agriculture and its attendant technologies, the homosphere was “contained” within the biosphere, a dynamic subset of it, that did not interfere with the general trend of evolution, which — with help from Alexander B. Kazansky — I will briefly describe here:

There are autopoietic and sympoietic systems nested within one another in the biosphere; and yet the biosphere itself and as a whole, is a kind of autpoietic system, essentially closed except for a steady supply of energy from the sun. Evolution is neither exclusively gradualistic nor catastrophic, but appears to proceed through theinterplay of autopoietic and sympoietic systems — the former creating periods of local relative stability, and the latter generating abrupt system breaks (crises), that are followed by general re-self-organization, with the tendency toward greater and greater complexity.

This is not unlike the darwinian theory of Stephen Jay Gould, which he called “puncutated equilibrium.”

Among the most dramatic events within evolutionary complexity prior to the metastatic expansion of the homosphere — from a human perspective — were observations of predator-prey cycles, within which humans sometimes found themselves. Unbeknownst to humans who observed this, because they were not possessed as we are of our cumulative scientific perspective, was that even the predator-prey cycles were not autopoietic examples of competition; they are nested within sympoietic biomes as stable cylces within other cycles, within relational, self-organizng sub-systems.

Not nearly as dramatic, and invisible before our ability to extend our perceptions with things like micrscopes, is the vast fraction of total biomass that emerged and thrives symbiotically… and which is inextricable from and necessary to the level of evolutionary complexity that gave rise to human beings.

So in a very real sense, the whole Nature Metaphor that operates in the background of many dominant epistemes — that of competition and conquest as the major motive force in nature — is fundamentally wrong. The autopietic whole of the biosphere is autopoietic, and its stability is predicated on cycles and symbiosis… not competition, except at a very limited, local level, among a very few species, and in ways that are reproduced cyclically.

As an example of this conquest/competition notion in action, and across variable dimensions, we are linking Audrey Mantey’s AV, “Conquest.”

Again, file this meme, because it will come up again.

We need to move now to a discussion of “boundaries” and “bodies.”

Libertarians are bascially classical liberals. Liberal discourse has divided the spheres of our lives into public and private, then drawn boundaries between these two spheres. Freedom is seen as an aspect of the individual, who is “private.” This freedom is exercised in a “public” where choices are made in relation to others (without others, the notion of freedom becomes very difficult to operationalize). Freedom, then, is a private right in public: “a public [individual] privilege.”

Most of these choices, in the real world, are consumer choices… and this is as painfully significant as it is profound. What has been excised from this worldview is something that does not reduce easily within this dichotomy between public and private: community.

I’ll come back to that, too. For now, we need to unpack this business of “boundaries.” I will make the case that this also means unpacking gender.

Liberalism is a male philsophy posinig as an “objective” one.

[T]o understand male domination of the female other it is necessary to reveal the way in which woman as the Other is forced to represent death (like evil or sin) in life: she takes on man’s fear of mortality (so, too defilement); the struggle for recognition, then, explains how domination avoids a confrontation with the reality of one’s own death. Once a woman recognizes her (gender) identity as free and autonomous, man’s fear re-emerges as the inevitable fate of any being whose consciousness is embodied.

- Pamela Sue Anderson (“Life, death and (inter)subjectivity: realism and recognition in continental feminism” International Journal on the Philosophy of Religion, February 2006)

Anderson jumps in pretty deeply, and by quoting her, I am inviting us all into deep philosophical water.

What can she possibly mean? Man’s fear of mortality? Struggle for recognition? Fear as the inevitable fate of embodied being? Intersubjectivity?

[T]he psychoanalytic process should be understood as occurring between subjects rather than within the individual. Mental life is seen from an intersubjective perspective. Although this perspective has transformed both our theory and our practice in important ways, such transformations create new problems. A theory in which the individual subject no longer reigns absolute must confront the difficulty each subject has in recognizing the other as an equivalent center of experience… Intersubjectivity was formulated in deliberate contrast to the logic of subject and object, which predominates in Western philosophy and science. It refers to that zone of experience or theory in which the other is not merely the object of the ego’s need/drive or cognition/perception but has a separate and equivalent center of self… What cannot be worked through and dissolved with the outside other is transposed into a drama of internal objects, shifting from the domain of the intersubjective into the domain of the intrapsychic.

-Jessica Benjamin (from The Bonds of Love, Pantheon Press, 1988)

Subject-and-object is a dualism. If woman is object, then man is subject. Think.

The dilemma of being male in a male-dominant society is that our first experience of fusion – blurring of the boundaries between ourselves and another – is with women, our mothers.

From that point forward, our gendered identity – as constructed in patriarchal society – is thoroughly dependent on being not-woman, moving away from that which is “woman,” on the progressive de-valuation of women. This not-woman-ness, or masculinity, is ruthlessly policed all of one’s life. Empathy with women, even women to whom one might be sexually and-or affectively attracted, then, presents a great danger: the danger of fusion, of again losing that boundary of male-identity, and with the loss of the boundary to loss of the social identity itself… a form of social death. This is one aspect of sexuality as it is still constructed; and the mental-emotional association of women with the mortal and permeable body (all that bleeding, and internally-receptive sex, and baby-making, and nursing), alongside the deeply embedded fear of fusion that defines masculinity, leaves both men and women at a terrible impasse where inter-subjectivity is nearly impossible.

The one in power needs recognition, but with this I-It duality and implicit prohibition against fusion, the one in power cannot simultaneously be the subject in a subject-object duality and receive this recognition. Objects do not recognize. The one who is not in power also needs recognition, but any recognition received is highly conditional, and requires that her own subjectivity be suppressed. And so what recognition she receives is not recognition of her true self, at all.

This is a profound a state of alienation from one’s fellow human beings. It paves the way for a philosophy of Hobbesian all-against-all, or an “agonal” (fundamentally competitive) worldview… including the Hobbes-Lite of libertarianism.

This fear of fusion becomes a unexamined psychic representation of The Boundary, and it then serves as an analog for other areas of life.

Nancy Hartsock, writing in Money, Sex and Power (Northeastern University Press, 1985), mulls over the relation between embodied women and death in the emotional cosmos of the socialized male:

In pornography the desire for fusion with another takes the form of domination of the other. In this form, it leads to the only possible fusion with a threatening other: The other must cease to exist except as a separate, opposed, and for that reason, threatening being. Insisting that another submit to one’s will is simply a milder form of the destruction of discontinuity in death, since in this case one is no longer confronting a discontinuous and opposed will, despite its discontinuous embodiment.

Em – bodied. Body. We experience ourselves as bodies. We are bodies. Permeable, breathing, eating, drinking, excreting, oozing, mortal bodies.

Jessica Benjamin examined the relationship between domination and the abstractions of modernism – individualism and “objectivity,” in The Bonds of Love:

…the missing piece in the analysis of Western rationality and individualism is the structure of gender domination. The psychosocial core of this unfettered individuality is the subjugation of woman by man, through which it appears that she is his possession, and therefore, that he is not dependent on or attached to an other outside himself. As a psychological principle, autonomous individuality derives from the male posture in differentiation; that is, from the repudiation of the primary experience of nurturance and identity with the mother. The individual’s abstractness [the abstract individual of modern philosophy and jurisprudence –SG] lies in the denial not merely of the nourishing and constraining bonds that engage him in society, but also of the primary emotional bonds, conscious and unconscious, that foster and limit his freedom.

Submerged beneath the universal claims of this individual, then, is not only his historical and cultural specificity, but also his gender. While most modern theory has considered this masculine identity to self-evident to be mentioned (the particularity of gender would compromise his universality), it is, nevertheless, retained as an “option”: when necessary, it can always be mobilized to exclude or devalue women. [The feminist critique] has uncovered the masculine identity of the seemingly universal individual of modern thought and society; indeed, it has shown that neutrality itself is the sign of masculinity, its alliance with rationality and objectivity. The feminist critique has rejected the assumption in modern thought that individuality and rationality are universals while gender is particular, secondary, not essential to their constitution.

Let us be clear about the stakes of this critique; it is not a matter merely of exposing bias, or of the exclusion of women from a world they wish to enter. If the rational, autonomous individual’s claim to neutrality is compromised, then so is his claim to universality. If his way of being in the world is not simply human, but specifically masculine, then it is not universal. And this means that his way is not the only or inevitable way of doing things. Furthermore, if this subject establishes his identity by splitting off certain human capabilities, called feminine, and by refusing to recognize the subjectivity of this feminine other, then his claim to stand for equality, liberty, free thought, and recognition of the other is also invalidated. And this means that his way cannot be the best way of doing things…

…a convincing case for the masculine character of modern scientific objectivity… …the missing piece – gender – to the well-known critique of modern science as fundamentally inspired by the project of control and domination of nature… …the relationship between the subject and object may be represented in terms of the relationship between the subject and his love object. …as the character of male domination over woman has changed, so has the metaphor of scientific knowledge. Beginning with Bacon, modern science adopted the metaphor of subduing nature and wresting her secrets from her [a rape metaphor –SG]…

Yet while denying invisibility to nature, the contemporary scientist maintains the invisibility of his personal authorship, protecting his autonomy behind a screen of objectivity. This impersonality of modern science… is actually the signature of its masculine identity. We may note that this image of the scientist as impersonal knower who “tears the veil” from nature’s body is reminiscent of the master in the fantasy of erotic domination, and his quest for knowledge parallels the rational violation in which the subject is always in control…

…Because men originally define themselves through separation from and opposition to the mother… they reject the boundary between subject and object. Thus the masculine stance toward difference accords with the cultural dominance of a “science that has been premised on a radical dichotomy between subject and object.” The world outside, the other, becomes an object… As the first other, the mother, becomes an object… object status infuses the world and the natural environment. (Benjamin, pp. 189-90)

Now, objectification, boundary, recognition, and control.

Susan Bordo’s very insightful and important < i>Unbearable Weight – Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (University of California Press, 1993) examines anorexia nervosa as an extreme manifestation of our gendered conception of the body (and our gendered relationship to the food that “builds” the body). She uses three “axes” to study the differences in male and female experience: the dualist axis, the control axis, and the gender/power axis.

The sense of estrangement from the body has been a constant in philosophical as well as religious discourse in the “West” at least since Plato. With it, there has been a devaluation of the body, and with that, a devaluation of the biological more generally.

This dualism that so arbitrarily separates body from mind is not materially demonstrable – on the contrary, we are who we are as bodies. Dualism is an epistemological problem, that is, a form of interpretive (and socially-constructed) knowledge. It is also a misleading kind of “knowledge.”

First, the body is experienced as alien, as the not-self, the not-me. It is “fastened and glued” to me, “nailed” and “riveted” to me…

Second, the body is experienced as confinement and limitation: a “prison,” a “swamp,” a “cage,” a “fog”… from which the sould, will, or mind struggles to escape…

Third, the body is the enemy… the source of obscurity and confusion in our thinking…

And, finally, whether as an impediment to reason or as the home of “the slimy desires of the flesh”… the body is the locus of all that threatens our attempt at control. The situation, for the dualist. Becomes an inducement to battle the unruly forces of the body, to show it who is boss. (Bordo, pp. 144-5)

Alien… as in alienated, broken. We even refer to bodies as possessions… something not us. My body. Your body. His body. Her body. Yet we know that we cannot otherwise exist except as embodied beings.

With the right cut, a surgeon can make an emotion disappear, a memory evaporate.

Yet this dualism and its contempt for the body is what Bordo calls “the anorectic’s metaphysics.” And I reiterate that anorexia is just an extreme manifestation of the enculturated relation that metropolitan women have with food.

[A]lthough dualism is as old as Plato, in many ways contemporary culture appears more obsessed than previous eras with the control of the unruly body. Looking now at contemporary American life, a second axis of continuity emerges on which to locate anorexia. I call it the control axis.

The young anorectic, typically, experiences her life as well as her hungers as being out of control. She is a perfectionist and can never carry out the tasks she sets for herself in a way that meets her own rigorous standards. She is torn by conflicting and contradictory expectations and demands, wanting to shine in all areas of student life, confused about where to place most of her energies, what to focus on, as she develops into an adult. Characteristically, her parents expect a great deal of her in the way of individual achievement (as well as physical appearance), yet have made most of the important decisions for her. Usually, the anorexic syndrome emerges, not as a conscious decision to get as thin as possible, but as the result of her having begun a diet fairly casually, often at the suggestion of a parent, having succeeded splendidly in taking off five or ten pounds, and then having gotten hooked on the intoxicating feeling of accomplishment and control. (Bordo, p. 149)

This description might also fit the situation of compulsive exercisers and bodybuilders are obsessed with control. On patient of a psychotherapist said, “You make of your own body your very own kingdom where you are the tyrant, the absolute dictator.”

In these days of almost terminal commodification of everything, we are seeing both men and women pressured to “market” themselves as sexual commodities. And with the hyper-valorization and sexual objectification of young, unhealthily lean, and idealized bodies, there is a devaluation of those who “fail” to meet these standards, those who are old, and those who choose not to “market” themselves thus. Appearance trumps character, integrity, humility, decency, empathy, wisdom…

But as Bordo goes on to point out, men – while many are opting into the sexual self-commodification racket – are not primarily valued by reduction to bodily appearance. The experience of women – sexually-objectified and judged first by appearance – is different, more incessant, and far more oppressive.

Ninety percent of all anorectics are women. We do not, of course, need to know that particular statistic to realize that the contemporary “tyranny of slenderness” is far from gender-neutral. Women are more obsessed with their bodies than men, less satisfied with them, and permitted less latitude with them by themselves, by men, and by the culture. In a 1984 Glamour magazine poll of 33,000 women, 75 percent said they thought they were “too fat.” Yet by Metropolitan Life Insurance Tables, themselves notoriously affected by cultural standards, only 25 percent of these women were heavier than their optimal weight, and a full 30 percent were below that weight. The anorectic’s experience of her body – her inability to see it as anything but too fat – although more extreme, is not radically discontinuous, then, from fairly common female misperceptions. (Bordo, p. 154)

A final gendered reason for anorexia that Bordo’s research turned up was fear of becoming a woman (read: sexually objectified, prey) led many anorectic’s – who began to avoid food at puberty – to “fight” against their bodies’ attempts to become voluptuous, that is, the kind of person who is reduced to her (passive and acquiescent, another control theme) sexual capacity. Oddly enough, women who suffer from compulsive over-eating are also often unconsciously resisting reduction to a sexual object, in a world where sex – for many women – is anything but mutual, caring, and respectful.

This short examination, via Bordo, of anorexia nervosa and women’s standpoints – that differ from men – on food, is not comprehensive (read Bordo’s book), but a snapshot designed to sensitize ourselves to the real-life issues of gender and food, bodies and boundaries.

The Jewish philosopher Martin Buber described the difference between two forms of relation: the I-Thou and the I-It, relational versus objectifying (establishing boundaries).

The model inhering in the objectification of women is transposed to nature… or vice-versa. Both Carolyn Merchant and Maria Mies have written quite extensively on this.

In an interview, Merchant explains:

MERCHANT: The identification of women with nature has been very close in most of the history of western culture, and in other cultures, with the idea of nature, or Natura, as a feminine noun in many Latin and Romance languages. The idea, for example, of Mother Nature or the Virgin Earth.

By the Renaissance, the end of the 16th century, right before the period of transformation that was the scientific revolution, nature is conceptualized as female. The earth is a mother. The earth has physiological systems, circulation systems such as the tides and the movement of clouds forming and then pouring rain back on the earth, and so on. A lot of this goes back to Greek and Roman ideas as well, ideas recaptured in the Renaissance.

The cosmos is alive. And the earth is alive. It’s a living organism. It has a body, soul, and spirit. Metal and stones are alive; it’s a very animate earth. And nature is God’s agent–God acts through nature as Natura, as female, bringing about punishments and rewards in the mundane world.

Bringing forth abundance.

Or withholding it, in the form of famine or drought. So, in terms of women and nature, there are a lot of very strong connections in the Renaissance.

The scientific revolution changed all that. It conceptualized matter as dead. Atoms are hard, glassy particles; they’re inert, with no spirit or vital forces within them. They’re simply moved about by external forces: momentum and energy. God puts the motion or momentum – mass times velocity – into the world at the beginning, and it’s simply exchanged among particles…

INTERVIEWER: And this is what you call “the death of nature.”

MERCHANT: Yes. And the ethic therefore changes. If nature is dead, and humans are external, humans are engineers, and the image appears of God as a mathematician and engineer. Then people can manipulate and manage nature, without having to propitiate nature, and without nature retaliating.

My argument is that the mechanistic worldview, which has become the dominant view… a framework that gives permission to exploit and dominate nature. The results are seen in the ecological crisis.

Merchant’s historical perspective is reflected and reversed in Mies’ analysis in her book, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale (Zed Books, 1986, 1991). Women are “defined into” a now-objectified (feminized) Nature, even by the political left that claimed to stand for women’s “equality”:

[T]he male worker’s participation in the [Imperial Core’s –SG] political process, his rise to the status of a ‘citizen’ [shares] the social paradigm of the ruling class, that is, the hunter/warrior [conquest –SG] model. His ‘colony’ or ‘nature’, however, are not Africa or Asia, but the women of his own class. And within that part of ‘nature’, the boundaries of which are defined by marriage and family laws, he has the monopoly of the means of coercion, of direct violence…

However, the process of ‘naturalization’ did not affect only the colonies as a whole and the women of the working class, the women of the bourgeoisie [ruling class of big owners –SG] also were defined into nature as mere breeders and rearers of the heirs… But, in contrast, to the African women who were seen as part of ‘savage’ nature, the bourgeois women were seen as ‘domesticated’ nature.

What Mies calls the hunter/warrior paradigm of masculine identity, I have come to call “the conquest meme.” Note how effortlessly this notion of conquest as central to male and imperial identity can shift between women, colonies and nature.

Man conquers woman. Man conquers nature. Man conquers colony. In each case, the “Other”, what Buber would call the objectified “It,” is rendered subordinate to the archetypical Male… even the other men within the colonies are stripped of their essential humanity, and consigned to “savage” nature.

One of the great lessons of Hitler fascism was that to propagandize the population into support of genocide, the emotion that had to be associated with the target population was disgust. Once the effort to associate the Jews with vermin was well-established and successful, the follow-on and industrialized mass killing was conducted with the eager participation of some and the acquiescence of the many.

I argue that the mobilization of disgust toward nature – reflecting the disgust mobilized against the bodies of women, and the disgust mobilized against the targets of the Imperium – has been essential to the orgy of ecocide we are now witnessing.

One need only watch the televised commercials for “pest control” exterminators to see the imperial war metaphors used to sell their services. Even the terms, “pest” and “bug” are homogenizing terms, intentionally inexact, designed to disappear the names of the targeted species, and with that disappearance any critical assessment of the whys and hows of this extermination. The emotion mobilized is plain disgust, and with it the consumer embraces the necessity to kill, kill, kill.

This killing becomes synonymous with “cleanliness.”

When Rachael Carson wrote her paradigm-shattering book, Silent Spring, in 1962, she was questioning the massive global use of the chemical insecticide dichlorodiphenyl-trichloroethane (DDT). The captains of industry and science, however, were proclaiming that DDT was the “greatest contribution to the future health of the world.” It was, in a word, Progress.

It killed bugs.

Biophobia ranges from discomfort in ‘natural’ places to active scorn for whatever isn’t manmade, managed, or air-conditioned. Biophobia, in short, is the culturally acquired urge to affiliate with technology, human artifacts, and solely with human interests regarding the natural world.

—David W. Orr

Cleanliness, of course, is an intuition, not a definable property, more than anything a question of appearances and the sense that one is protected from some unseen biotic danger. In medicine, we can define “asepsis” as the lack of living microorganisms; and the notion of cleanliness has asepsis operating in the background. The idea being that microorganisms are dangerous and have to be destroyed.

This fear of microorganisms is so widespread that it has become the basis of several multi-billion dollar industries that sell us hundreds of products that “kill germs.”

Germs.

Bugs.

Pests.

Weeds.

These are conflations that are designed to de-value living things. But they sell products like crazy.

The problem with it, of course, is that there are a lot of different microorganisms, that play a lot of different roles in nature, and very few are dangerous to humans… many only when they are brought into inappropriate contact with humans.

We wipe out other species as we encroach on their habitats, as we thoughtlessly expand the homosphere into the biosphere.

The application of pesticides (and high-nitrogen fertilizers) to soil kills the “bugs.” All of them. Whole communities of them. Yet these microorganisms are essential for healthy soil.

In crushing their boundaries, we have come to harden out own; and we call this purity… or cleanliness.

Boundaries represent “sovereignty” if they are not “transgressed,” and loss/lack of sovereignty when they are permeable. The permeability of the female body is associated with both lack of sovereignty and (ritual) impurity.

I am indebted to my friend, DeAnander, for the term “taint.” The permeability of the body caries with it a “taint.”

Permeability in the female takes the forms of menstruation, penetration(s) during coitus, childbirth, and nursing. The taint of this permeability is partly a product of the fear of mortality – a mortality we are reminded of when we are brought face-to-face with the necessary semi-permeability of our own bodies. Taint is akin to taboo.

Anthropologist Mary Douglas, writing in 1966 (Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (Routelege)), says:

The body is a model which can stand for any bounded system. Its boundaries can represent any boundaries which are threatened or precarious. The body is a complex structure. The functions of its different parts and their relations afford a source of symbols for other complex structures. We cannot possibly interpret rituals concerning excreta, breast milk, saliva, and the rest unless we are prepared to see in the body a symbol of society, and to see the powers and dangers credited to social structure reproduced in small on the human body.

Libertarianism tried to put an abstract boundary-fence around the individual body as the basis of its political philosophy. It is a bizarre attempt to take a physiocratically-demarcated (presumably impermeable) body, assign it an abstract “owner,” and then give that disembodied owner legal primacy within human affairs.

Libertarianism attempts to separate personhood from the biological body. It substitutes an abstract impermable boundary where nature erects no such thing.

It is an even more bizarre attempt to legally separate three key and inseparable dimensions of our existence from one another: personhood, culture, and nature.

Libertarian definitions and taxonomies are very revealing.

The central tenet of libertarianism is the principle of liberty, namely individual liberty. To libertarians, an individual human being is sovereign over his/her body, extending to life, liberty and property. As such, libertarians define liberty as being completely free in action, whilst not initiating force or fraud against the life, liberty or property of another human being. Or as Thomas Jefferson stated, “Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others.” This is otherwise known as the non-aggression principle.

The ahistoricism of citing a slave-holder on the question of “liberty” has not been lost on everyone. There is also that special category, “property,” which is given special force within most versions of libertarianism. (I exclude here left-libertarians, or libertarian-socialists… who are rooted in the ideas of anarchism.)

Property is treated like a “natural right,” which is clearly an oxymoron, because no such thing as a “right” exists in nature. Property is a politically enforced boundary system; it requires legal infrastrucrture to issue “deeds” and the like. Some libertarian thinkers have taken the retroactive step of trying to build a “natural” basis for “rights,” but claiming that rights are an expression of something called “rational faculties,” a position made most popular by the ideological Stalin of libertarianism, Ayn Rand — whose philsophy, cribbed as it was from Neitzsche and Spencer, she wouldn’t even call “libertarianism,” calling it instead “Objectivism” (capitalization hers).

In fact, property is no more an expression of nature than the monitor in front of me right now. On cannot refute that statement by asking, “Is that monitor your property?” No one is saying the institution of property does not exist. We are saying that it is a social construction, and generally a social construction of power. One’s personal belongings like clothes or hand tools can only be compared to “owning” millions of acres of land through the legerdemain of abstraction.

This is just one problem with appealing to Property as the final authority in an ethical or political system. To give it one meaning across all the categories of actual property, one has to absrtract away all specific meaning. Libertarians make the leap from conflating “life” and “liberty” with “property,” to claiming that only individual property is a desirable category… excluding public property, communal property, or even other categories like “commons” and “usufruct.”

It is no wonder they are forced to deny history, to adopt a position of radical ahistoricism. They have pegged their entire worldview on a false-universal that has only existed in its present form for a tiny fraction of our species’ history.

They are completely wrong-footed by the facts of American history, which are largely one of land thefts later codified by states. The individual and communal beneficiaries of this system now are absolved of responsibility for the theft (which only seems fair), but also of responsibility to set the thing straight to the extent possible. Some libertarians will actually argue (anecdotally, never statistically) that no one currently owning property is actually benefitting any longer from the vagaries of indigenous genocide, slavery, the Mexican War, Jim Crow, et al.

The libertarian position on this question is untenable; and so they have developed debating playbooks over the years, soundbytes, that smoothly employ logical fallacies to paper over this gaping contradiction in their philosophy. They will answer questions with questions, like, “What would you have us do?”… the implication that doing anything would trigger the Libertarian categorical imperative against “coercion” is adding to the problem of inherited power and powerlessness, instead of a necessary means to dissolve oppressive power. Taking the titles for property away from the rich, you see, is the ethical equivalent of murder… because the right to life and the right to property are the same thing in their conflated cosmos.

Libertarians abhor complexity; and reality is complex. They want a nice, one-size-fits-all slide rule, where they put the variables of reality in, and they get nice clean answers back. They want binary algorithms that reduce away complexity.

Freedom, good. Coercion, bad. As if there are not many more permutations of human intercourse available.

Simplicity.

It is the complexity and permeability of nature that confounds the libertarian touchstone… to be fair, the touchstone of the dominant social ideology of patriarchal capitalism well beyond the strictly orthdox libertarians: the notion of the Rational Man and the social contract.

And so we come to it at last, unavoidably… the question of “human nature.”

Where I live now, drivers are frequently obliged to stop in the middle of the street to avoid squashing squirrels. I live in North Carolina, and the Eastern gray squirrel has a scientific name, Sciurus carolinensis, that suggests I am living in their biological epicenter.

These rodents are — by best accounts — around 30 million years old, making them our great great great grandparents in evolutionary terms; and their adaptability to multiple climates, as well as urban landscapes, suggests they will be around long after we have figured out how to commit collective suicide. They are so thick in my own suburban neighborhood that we could harvest them for meat now without putting a dent in ther population. Our abundance of white oak trees sheds tons and tons of acorns each year — a squirrel staple — and squirrels are voracious omnivores, even occasionally indulging in cannibalism.

They have adpated through changing coloration almost before our eyes, with black varieties emerging in urban centers in our lifetime; but their behavioral patterns are more ancient inscriptions. Cars have been around for a century, more or less, with an explosive proliferation in the last 50 years. The result is a fatal mismatch.

Squirrel defensive patterns emerged to cope with other threats — hawks, owls, weasels, racoons, foxes, coyotes, bobcats, and big snakes. Today, we can add to that, dogs and cats; but they themselves are still behaviorally etched with hunting patterns they carry from their feral cousins. My own dog hunts them relentlessly in the back yard, and the squirrels win around 99 times out of a hundred… whereupon they bark back at the enraged pooch from the trees.

What the squirrel has perfected over the aeons is a combination of deception and footwork that matches the predators’ tactics.

When faced with a potential threat, the squirrel shifts her tail back and forth, flicking it in the same way a fisherman jiggles an artificial lure to attract the predator’s eye, or the way a bullfighter agitates a cape to deceive his victim. A squirrel’s tail can be bitten off fairly easily, leaving the rest of the squirrel intact to live on; and predators typically orient on movement. Squirrels can even heat their tails up to fool pit vipers, serpants that orient on thermal signatures from their prey.

In conjunction with this tail-deception, the squirrel does a kind of rapid-rewind two-step dance as the predator closes in, weaving back and forth like a boxer to set up a repetitious pattern of oscillation by the predator. At the last moment, in a kind of rodent jui-jitsu, Sciurus carolinensis breaks the rhythm of the back-and-forth, and dives 45 degrees lateral to the accelerating predator. The charging animal overshoots the squirrel, and by the time she can turn to remount an attack, Sciurus has scampered up some vertical surface, whereupon she can leap from tree to tree, or roof to tree, or tree to power line, and make her escape.

Over 30 million years, the species itself has recognized a pattern, and adapted its defensive tactics all the way into a fixed neural pathway. When the squirrels on my street see an oncoming car, this amazing adaptation fails. They are reacting to a conscious predator, and the car is neither conscious, nor a predator. It’s just a car. The Gotcha Two-Step that lets the gray squirrels run up trees to talk trash back to my mutt doesn’t throw the car off at all. It is simply a terminal display without an audience, unless the driver sees the squirrel and slows down.

There is an intuitive contradiction between the notion of intent and the kind of instinctive pattern embodied in our exemplary squirrel. If the behavior cannot change, then the idea of what the squirrel does or does not intend to do is silly. Intention implies the ability to choose between alternative courses of action. We also know, from experience, that humans can, in fact, make choices that demonstrate what we call “intent.” There is a bewildering myth that these choices are unconditioned and decontextualized — to which we will return further down — but we can deliberate and choose between A and B, or even A and B and C, et al. And this intent — which corresponds to and interacts with bipedal locomotion, manual dexterity, symbolic memory, and language (also highly symbolic) — has augmented, altered, and in some sense atrophied our instinctive, or heritable species pattern recogntion.

If we place a resident of the same street that proves so hazardous to squirrels in a hypothetical situation matching that of an ancestor a mere 200 years ago, that modern person is unlikely to thrive for more than a few days. Place them in a situation similar to that of our own species 5,000 years ago — an evolutionary blink — and s/he would perish in short order. Yet people in the planet right now, people who are in every sense members of the same species as us, who actually do live in circumstances that are similar to the conditions hypothesized above, and who get by.

What this strongly suggests is that human nature is not merely plastic, but that plasticity is a key aspect of human nature. If we accept that suggestion, then it raises the question: What is the material basis of this plasticity, and this capacity for intent? Part of the answer seems to come from research on something called a mirror neuron.

Vittorio Gallese, of the European Science Foundation, explains:

About ten years ago we discovered in the macaque monkey brain a class of premotor neurons that discharge not only when the monkey executes goal-related hand actions like grasping objects, but also when observing other individuals (monkeys or humans) executing similar actions. We called them “mirror neurons”. Neurons with similar properties were later discovered in a sector of the posterior parietal cortex reciprocally connected with area F5.

The observation of an object-related hand action leads to the activation of the same neural network active during its actual execution. Action observation causes in the observer the automatic activation of the same neural mechanism triggered by action execution. We proposed that this mechanism could be at the basis of a direct form of action understanding.

Further studies showed that in humans the multilocal concentrations of mirror neurons are highly concentrated and active. Moreover, they are somatotopically organized for actions that a subject observes and imitates in others; that is, when a small child sees an adult stick out her tongue, the child observes and imitates with the activation of particular sites in the brain that correspond to these points of the anatomy… one place “lights up” when the action is sticking out one’s tongue, another area if the child is trying to imitate skipping, another to perform the manual actions of “patty-cake.” The intent to imitate is reflected in brain activity in the same way that intent is shown “lighting up” certain neurons in macaques just before they reach for an object.

At the very least, this implies a dramaticaly different species learning strategy than the more Pavlovian (or Skinnerian) system we observe in a squirrel. It is highly individual and malleable — therefore adaptable in a lifetime, and not an epoch. It is also — contrary to the libertarian ideological reading of this individuality — thoroughly social.

Combined with humans’ extreme infant dependency, this basic learning strategy of imitation serves as one of the key building blocks of social development and symbolic thinking. Complexes of mirror neurons create the neurological substrate for representational awareness. Action observation can lead to action simulation, even if that simulation is only mental. In a sense, then, the term “internalization” for learning is quite accurate. What human conversation, and see how many times posture, hand gestures, and vocalized sound effects accompany the symbolic narrative of words — literally, the body mimicking a perceived external reality.

There is a relation — far from fully explored, and only dimly understood by this writer — between one’s species position on a continuum between autonomic and Pavlovian behaviors — which we certainly still retain — and behaviors shaped through the social development of “understanding” (related materially to the performance of these mirror neurons) that determines the scope of a species’ behavioral repertoire. In the case of humans, our proximity to the cognitive-affective-conative pole of this continuum results in the plasticity and individuality of these behaviors. I will argue that this plasticity and individuality give us the capacity to survive in environments as diverse as the Amazon and the Arctic, and just as surely, make us vulnerable to phenomena like the “tyranny of fashion.”

It is also the basis for empathy, and its counter-identification, cruelty. We often talk about “emotional attachment”; well, that initial point of attachment is likely to be a mirror neuron complex. “Identification” with others has a powerful somatic dimension, so much so that we refer to the a strong emotional reaction as being “touched,” to an emotionally charged action as “touching.” The somatic basis of these behaviors is certainly reducible to what Gallese calls “an automatic, unconscious, and pre-reflexive functional mechanism, whose function is the modeling of objects, agents, and events.” But the relational dimension of this phenomenon is “representational,” and this symbolic capacity, it seems, is the basis of not only our capacity for abstraction and generalization, but our predispostion to “make meanings,” and to “project” our understanding in ways we might refer to as goal-orientation (conative behavior).

I made note above to the notion that individual decisions are ideologically and inaccurately represented as un-conditioned and uncontextualized. I also asserted a claim that cogntive, affective, and conative behavior are not separable. These two points are related, and both refutations are central to the point of this treatment: that active pattern recognition is indispensible to the kind of critical thought needed for human beings to effectively deal with the complexities of 21st Century life, and that vested social power has created an ideological superstructure that privileges behaviors that are closer to the Pavlovian pole of our behavioral continuum.

I use the term active as a modifier for pattern recognition here, because the cognitive pole of the learning strategy continuum is not characterized simply by pattern recognition, but by the disposition to actively seek patterns, as opposed to having patterns simply etched onto our psyches as part of a fundamentally passive learning process. A good synonym for “active” pattern recognition might be “critical” pattern recognition.

Direct experience is located in the individual. The rise of industrial capitalist patriarchy — which concentrated power in the hands of a metropolitan male bourgeoisie — corresponded to an ideological (mis)representation of this fact. It developed a philosophical point of view that leapt from experience as an individual phenomenon to the notion of pure, almost Platonically abstract autonomy residing in the individual. This is the basis of classical liberalism, libertarianism, and paradoxically even post-structuralism (which traces its origins to an intellectual rebellion against precisely this kind of “modernist” reductionism). This point of view effaces the signficance of social learning, of childhood development, and of persistent, historically-constituted patterns of dominance involving various social classes, e.g., men-women, manorial lords-peasants, capitalists-proletarians, settlers-natives, and so forth. This ideology also assumes the pretense that there is no behavior that is not intentional. Implicit in this pretense is a false dichotomy — that either people can choose or they can’t.

What connects this pure-autonomy point of view to the false (in my view) separation of the cognitive from the affective (the mental from the emotional) is its androcentrism, as I explained above.

These are Male points of view, the term here applying not to a biological determination, but to a pattern of male socialization in a gendered and heirarchical division of social labor. Women mostly raise children; and anyone who has raised children knows very well that the question of choosing or not choosing is a grotesque simplification. This is an illusion that is only available to those who live most of their cognitively-engaged lives in environments composed mostly of like-minded, and equally abstracted (male) adults. The history of the analytical division of reason from emotion, and the gendered notions that underwrite it is so rich that I am disinclined to review it here. The evidence for the Reason-Emotion dichotomy being synonymous with the Masculine-Feminine dichotomy it is so utterly overwhelming as to be axiomatic.

These ideologies — which are patterns of ideas that simultaneously reflect and reproduce patterns of actual social power — are impediments to making the points further along, so I feel compelled to set them out of our path here. Individuals, especially with regard to the behaviors that are nearer the non-instinctual pole of our spectrum, are more, not less, determined by their socialization. They are not the pure autonomists of the libertarian fantasy, without history or context, but thoroughly inflected by by history and context. This pure autonomist human would simply and quickly die. Moreover, the experiential representations that constitute the archives of our experience, our memories upon which our behavior is completely predicated, are not and never have been “objective” cognition. This “view from nowhere” that constitutes objectivity is the modernist (male-bourgeois-imperial) substitution of The Objective… for God — another male authority figure that, in our collective imagination, lives in outer space. Our actual life experiences are always simultaneously symbolic and affective.

Theorists of human “intelligence” have — as I am doing in this paper — articulated their theories in a dispassionate form of discourse. This is an argumentative convention, and as such, it does have some positive value. One pattern that is easily recognized by most of us is that of someone who has personalized a point of view in such an extreme way that it is not only outside the confines of empiricist logic, but outside the “fuzzier” logic of experience and approximation. There is little point, for example, in debating with an angry man who is cursing and screaming and appears to be on the verge of committing an assault. So I acknowledge the value of constructing an argument in a way that confronts oppositional assumptions, and stands itself up for critique. This is part of a cumulative social learning process.

Theorists of intelligence, however, have often engaged in the sacralization of the empirical, what has been called alternatively “empiricism” or “scientism,” the suffix suggesting — accurately in my view — that this point of view has crossed over from interrogative method into the realm of ideology. We see this most blatantly now in standardized testing regimes in schools. “Intelligence” is “measured” using empirically validated responses to questions or procedural problems. Intelligence is the ability to assimilate empirical information, and so it can be measured empirically. This is a thoroughly tautological conception of intelligence; and it has tremendous political force.

It is the basis of what Ivan Illich called the monopolization of knowledge, that is, the enclosure of certain kinds of knowledge, that creates the basis for “management” by “professionals” and technocrats. I went to training for a year when I was in Special Forces as a detachment medic and “physician extender,” and while deployed abroad, I diagnosed a whole host of infirmities, and prescribed treatments for them… successfully. One does not have to go into debt and attend medical school for eight years to learn when it is and when it is not appropriate to administer epinephrine for anaphylaxis or how to cure a case of hookworm. The real irony — in the context of this paper — is that in most cases, it is not the empiricism in which the licensed physician is trained that is employed even by the physician to conduct the diagnosis and determine the treatment. The logic that is employed is, instead, much like the logic we employ in our everyday lives — approximation and pattern recognition. This dimension of human intelligence is not only not empirical, we could hardly get through a day in our actual lives if we were required to engage in empirical reduction before every decision.

Empiricism is, in fact, a social sorting mechanism to winnow people into their proper places in existing hierarchies. That does not mean that empirical studies and research are valueless. It means that there is no dimension of human learning that is value-free. Empiric-ISM privileges the roles of empricists within social heirarchies, and devalues the experience of those who are further down these heirarchies, including the approximating logic we use in our everyday lives. It attempts to subordinate pattern recognition as a learning strategy to technocratic knowledge, to special and specialized knowledge.

This kind of argument, in fact, is seen as “academic” or “theoretical” primarily because the content of this argument has been placed off limits, de facto, by an intellectual division of labor… even though the author is not himself an academic, nor is this written for an academic publication. This type of work is circumscribed by customs and institutions — and, in fact, uses a great deal of synthetic thought based on approximate forms to logic. The area where approximate logic — pattern recognition — has been driven out of the public sphere is in the cognitive lives of the majority. As in the case of the decontextualized abstraction of the pure autonomist, refered to in the canon as Rational Man or Economic Man (the gendered terminology is not unimportant), the masses are compliant within a system to the degree to which they have internalized its ideology. The citizen-subject must make choices that are prefabricated, and must be trained to see those choices as “natural.”

From this perspective, that is, from the perspective of institutionalized and customary social power, the free-standing human ability to recognize patterns carries a dangerous potential. It can become the basis of the kind of critical consciousness that sees the patterns in the system itself, and thereby raises embarrassing questions about social power.

In the previously cited Unbearable Weight - Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body, Susan Bordo first describes the very real challenges that were presented to empiricism by thinkers from Mary Wollstoencraft, to Karl Marx, to Michel Foucault. With Foucault, the most contemporary of the three, and Jacques Derrida, an academic movement called post-structuralism, or post-modernism emerged. While the purpose of the latter two was simply to do what philosphers do — not inaugurate a new academic trend — and stood “against the ideal of disembodied knowledge and declare[d] that ideal to be a mystification and an impossibility.” By this, she was referring to the Objective standpoint, the “view from nowhere, ” that had replaced God as the arbiter of truth with the emergence of “modernism” (hence then term post-modernism). They were confronting scientism, or empiricism.

Life itself was teaching people that pattern recognition is in many cases a more useful form of logic than empirical logic, and with the socio-economic and political destabilizations of the 60s and 70s, the categories of thought that accompanied them were destabilized, too. Moreover, as the Vietnam War came to a close, the world economy was reset on a revised foundation — one where the key and irreplaceable economic role of the US as a whole, was to buy, buy, buy. The virtuous citizen was no longer the frugal family member who saved and eocnomized; but someone who could define herself/himself by the act of purchasing.

The post-structuralist challenge had to be diverted away from imperial capitalist patriarchy. These adjustments and conformations do not happen by fiat from above. They occur through an infinite series of accommodations to material power. In the case of post-structuralism, Bordo notes, this was accomplished by shifting from “the view from nowhere, to the view from everywhere.”

Howard Gardener’s theory of multiple intelligences — itself a challenge to orthodoxy on the question of human intelligence — lists Lingusitic, Logical-Mathematical, Spatial, Bodily-kinesthetic, Musical, Naturalistic, Interpersonal, and Intra-personal as categories of intelligence. I would argue that what each of these intelligences has in common is the ability to differentiate and identify particular kinds of generally approximate patterns. I would also point out, by way of reinteration, that the basketball player who both recognizes, responds to, and performs certain kinesthetic patterns is not doing so in the hard-wired way of our suicidal street squirrels. Human beings learn more directly through the individual, far from the instinctive pole of behavior, suggesting that we are biolgoicaly determined not to be biologically determined.

The challenge mounted by empiricism, and subsequently by post-structuralism, is a challenge aimed at the intelligentsia. The fact is, most people still believe in God - so the struggle between post-modernists and philosophical materialists, for example, is not on their collective radar. (The Enlightenment replacement of God with Objectivity was not coded for the masses as religious agnosticism or atheism, but as Masculinity.) The reason a basic conformity among the intelligentsia is so crucial is that this segment of society shapes society’s mass ideologies. A renegade intelligentsia — or a feral, insurgent one — has the power and the intellectual “proficiency” to intentionally subvert ideologies by re-connecting them to practical activity. This capacity cannot merely be confronted — where it risks exposing the ideological character of the dominant belief systems; it must be met preemptively with innoculation.

This innoculation process is the main purpose of both establishment education and cultural production. And that innoculation consists in large part of anesthetizing the independent and active pattern recogntion capacity of the people.

The determinative role of metropolitan, especially US, consumer culture cannot be overemphasized in a description of this process; nor can we overstate the power of television — and to a lesser extent film — to standardize culture and consciousness into a compliant consumer passivity that is perceived as a life of active freedom. The last generations put their trust in doctors and lawyers and bureaucrats; and now we are in the hands of advertizers schooled in Pavlov.

Bordo describes showing her class an episode of Phil Donahue. The topic of the program was a televeision commercial for non-corrective (cosmetic) contact lenses, designed to change eye color.

In these commercials as they were originally aired, a woman was shown in a dreamlike, romantic fantasy — for example, parachuting slowly and gracefully from the heavans. The male voiceover then described the womanin soft, lush terms: “If I believed in angels, I’d say that’s what she was — an angel, dropped from the sky like an answer to a prayer, with eyes as brown as bark.” [Signficant pause] “No… I don’t think so.” [At this point the tape would be rewound to return us to:] “With eyes as violet as the colors fo a child’s imagination.” The commercial concludes: “Durasoft colored contact lenses. Get brown eyes a second look.”

The question posed by Phil Donahue: Is this ad racist? Donahue clearly thought there was controversy to be stirred up here, for he shocked his audience fullof owmen of color and white women to discuss the implications of the ad. But Donahue was apparently living in a different decade from most of his audience, who repeatedly declared that there was nothing “wrong” with the ad, and everything “wrong” with any inclinations to “make it a political question.”

Not only did the audience then mount a “what’s the fuss about” defense of the ad; Bordo’s students did, too.

They were blinkered by a libertarian standpoint… individual as (consumer) chooser. Ahistoricized.

There was no capacity to see the pattern that connects the norms of femininity, the devaluation of women as they are (and of people with brown eyes), the the grotesque consumer objectification of women implicit in the verbiage of the male voiceover, the construction of female inadequacy, the identifcation of women’s value with their appearance, womens’ subordination within a male-dominated society… nothing. There was, in short, an utter failure of active-pattern-recognition; and the remarks that both Donahue and Bordo heard were predictable enough to have appeared from a playbook. But these responses were more than just igonrance of the patterns of social power that positively bristled from this ad; there was almost a disciplined hostility to “politicizing” the ad… that is, hostility to calling attention to those patterns.

The discipline of consumer culture is one that makes politics synonymous with being the party-pooper, the drag that is spoiling everyone’s collective fantasy.

…there is a disciplinary reality that is effaced in the construction of all self-transformation as equally arbitrary, all variants of the same trivial game, without differing cultural valance. I use the term disciplinary in the Foucauldian sense, as pointing to the practices that do not merely transform but normalize the subject… a 1989 poll of Essence magazine readers revealed that 68 percent of those who responded wear their hair straightened chemically or by hot comb. “Just for fun”? For the kick of being “different”?

Bordo called this the perfect “postmodern conversation.” The self-same post-structuralism, or postmodernism, that pretends to be the decisive theoretical refutation of “modernist” empricism operates in precisely this way. It first equates identifiable patterns — women are subordinated within a male-dominated society — with generalization (all women are totally subordinated in a pure male autocracy), then it cites exceptions to the generalization. “Condoleeza Rice is more powerful than the average male.” This is just the old empiricism dressed up in new “post modern” clothes.

As postmodernism has ossified into a linguistially-opaque academic orthodoxy, there is a term that is often used by its acolytes as a kind of PM McCarthyism: essentialism. This epithet is deployed against anyone who has the nerve to challenge the dematerialized solipsism of this trend. Essentialism is the accusation that the identification of patterns in certain groups of people, women, African Americans, and so on, is tantamount to a biologically determinist generalization.

Philosophy professor Ron Mallon noted that there are two strategies of anti-essentialism: skeptical anti-essentialism and constructionist anti-essentialism.

Skeptical anti-essentialists will use the ‘scientific’ argument, for example, that there is no such thing as race, because as soon as you try to define it, there are exceptions. All people we consider to be Black do not have dark skin.

Constructionist anti-essentialists will de-naturalize. Being Black is not a ‘natural’ phenomenon, but the result of being perceived in society as being Black.

Both these approaches ignore the fact that in everyday life, we readily recognize Black people. White people recognize Black people. Black people recognize Black people. Latin@ people recognize Black people. Black folk need not conform to every single characteristic that might be associated with being Black (the capitalized version is synonymous in many circles with the term African American). The existence of an exception might disprove a generalization; but it does not refute a pattern.

Mallon states that there can be “kinds” without “essences.” One does not have to deny the kind to refute the essence. He is talking about patterns.

It is perfectly possible for someone to exhibit a set of real characteristics that mark that person as Black or female, for example, without implying any kind of “core-essence” whatsoever. There is such a thing as being African American, and it is more than a mere socially constructed narrative, and this category is an embodiment of a speciic shared history and social standpoint. There is such a thing as being a biological woman, also a category thart embodies historcal and social patterns.

The straw man of Essentialism implies that each woman, or each African American shares a set of individually necessary characteristics to qualify for ‘membership;’ that these characteristics are intrinsic; and that the actions of ‘members’ of a group can be explained by a set of shared properties that might not be directly unobservable. This is obviously false. Yet the anti-essentialisms, both skeptical and constructionist, do not do an effective job of rebutting this falsehood. One cannot attack the notion of Black-ness simply because all those who are considered and consider themselves to be Black do not have dark skin. No one uses one single individually necessary criterion to make such an assessment. My youngest daughter is very light-skinned, yet most people readily recognize her as Black, based on both phenotypic and cultural characteristics, and on her context (Raleigh, NC). A ‘kind-group,’ such as Black or female, is characterized by a constellation of features, which are recognizable as a pattern in a context, without any individual necessarily having all those features – features that are morphological, geographic, and-or cultural. If my daughter lived in a Puerto Rican neighborhood, she would blend in quite well and be mistakenly thought to be Puerto Rican… the exception to a pattern that would generally work. The problem is not the existence of kind-groups, from the point of view of a politics of liberation. It is breaking down false assertions that the kind-group is responsible for its own oppression based on an intrinsic defect or the idealization of a kind-group based on some mythical intrinsic property.

Acknowledging that women and Blacks exist as women and Blacks is perfectly possible while at the same time rejecting racist and sexist essentialism. In fact, it is necessary to mount any politics of resistacnce against paterns of oppression against these grups. How do Blacks and women and their allies fight for social remedies aimed at women and Blacks (I use these two categories not to exclude others, but as examples), or for self-determination, once we erase these categories?

The liberal politics of anti-essentialist ‘equality’ has already led us into this swamp, and it’s where we met David Horowitz screaming reverse-discrimination. He does not claim Black people are genetically inferior. He says Blacks are culturally inferior.

The other anti-essentialist strategy, of breaking with ‘nature’ and substituting the socially constructed narrative, is equally ineffective, and dangerous.

The problem, with post-modernism generally, is its pig-headed rejection of the ‘metanarrative,’ that is, a pattern analysis that maps the systems of power that contextualize oppression. Showing that racism cannot be justified, because race is not ‘natural,’ has proven ineffective. Horowitz and his ilk have rather effortlessly redefined their racism in cultural terms, and mooted the constructionist argument against naturalism. And by reducing everything to identity (which is plain philosophical consumerism), post-modernists have surrendered any possibility of coordinated, collective struggle against oppressive systems… because they deny the existence of those systems. In a real sense, the post-modernist constructionist critique of essentialism itself falls back on skeptical anti-essentialism, because its fallback position is based on pointing out exceptions to generalization as a way of ‘proving’ the generalization doesn’t exist.

Empiricism.

“There is a radical difference, notes African American feminist bell hooks (as cited by Bordo), “between a repudiation of the idea that there is a black ‘essence’ and recognition of the way black identity has been specificaly constituted in the experience of exile and struggle.”

Libertarianism is a blindfold to protect its wearer from the implications of history, to insulate the wearer from the recognition of complex patterns.

Bordo’s students as well as the vocal guests on Donahue were not engaging in this debate, however, by pointing to the hidden empiricism in anti-essentialism. They were reciting the mantra of consumer capitalism: You can be anything you want. What constitutes being, however, is highly superficial. It is a pose, an act, a script, a performance. All academic postmodernism has done is take this sales ptich and dress it up as philosophy. You can choose your “identity.” It can be “transgressive.”

This rhetorical strategy has been employed, not surprisingly, to concentrate all agency in the individual (a reversion to plain classical liberalism with its pure autonomist) and ridicule the social movements of socialism, Black Freedom, (materialist/radical) feminism, et al — movements predicated on “meta-narratives” (patterns) of systemic oppression. Politics is not confronted by poststructuralist orthdoxy on its own argumentative merits, but expelled from a clique. If you critique the colored contact lenses, because they are the manifestation of a social pattern, then you are (gasp!) being a drag. You are… no fun.

Power is redefined from being a social reality into an attitude. The plastic surgery made me feel empowered.

As Bordo points out, even calling this tendency “postmodern” is pretentious. “Modern,” by definition, is the latest in change… so how can it ever be “post”? This pretense is simply a way to evade the obvious. Postmodernism is consumerism. Pick you identity from the supermarket shelf. This is “choice.” That’s new?

The Objectivist “view from nowhere,” Bordo points out (citing Thomas Nagel) has just been replaced by the “dream of everywhere.” This neutralizes the standpoint of real people in the real systems — constrained by time, space, and social power — from where active-pattern-recognition is apt to translate into social struggle to change those patterns. Referring specifically to gender, Bordo explains “certain feminist appropriations of deconstructionism”:

Here a post-modern recognition of interpretive multiplicity, of the indeterminacy and heterogeneity of cultural meaning and meaning-production, is viewed as calling for new narrative approaches, aimed at the adequate representation of textual “difference.” From this perspective, the template of gender is criticized for its fixed, binary structuring of reality and is replaced by a narrative ideal of ceaseless textual play. But this ideal, I argue, although it arises out of a critique of modernist epistemological pretensions to represent reality adequately by achieving what Thomas Nagel has called the “view from everywhere,” remains animated by its own fantasies of attaining an epistemological perspective free of the locatedness and limitations of embodied existence — a fantasy that I call a “dream of everywhere.”

Libertarianism infiltrated the Academy through postmodernism.

The pristine autonomous individual (not the contingent embodied one) is out concluding one “contract” after another as his/her way of geting on in society, which s/he inhabits not as a network of relations, but like… the mall.

I’ll wait for the subject to come up in commentary, before I start citing Carole Pateman on the question of contracts.

That’s enough for now — hodge-podged as it is — to provoke a conversation…