tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post7083669476138204243..comments2024-03-18T19:05:39.072-07:00Comments on Morphosis: The War of All Against AllAdam Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15803399373213872690noreply@blogger.comBlogger12125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-50555026517382621062019-01-29T03:09:28.695-08:002019-01-29T03:09:28.695-08:002 thoughts to bounce off what you're saying he...2 thoughts to bounce off what you're saying here.<br /><br />First, I'm not sure that the equivalence between Dworkin's thought, as you present it here, and 'rape culture', is justified. At least, whenever I've seen rape culture discussed, the term seems mostly applied to a normalisation of having sex without consent. I don't get the sense from the discourse that rape culture means true, sex-as-equals sex cannot happen under patriarchy. At least as far as general usage goes, 'rape culture' appears to be a more sophisticated way of stating 'no means no'.<br /><br />And then on the fact that we have entered an age of conflict. I have two thoughts regarding this. First, there is an episode of the Ezra Klein Show podcast I listened to recently where Klein interviews Frances Lee, an academic with a thesis that, somewhat bowdlerised, states that in the US, the breakdown of party hegemony and the production of tighter electoral races has changed the incentives parties operate under, making it more electorally beneficial (if not legislatively beneficial) for them to obstruct and fight with one another, rather than seek cooperation. This is good as far as it goes for the USA but doesn't explain why Britain's turning towards conflict too - except, what if the breakdown of the neoliberal hegemony has a similar effect to party hegemony (which seems sensible, given that both hegemonies are built upon widespread popular consent to a set of ideas). Basically, what I'm trying to get at is, we are in a state of being where there is not a hegemonic conception of 'how the world works'. And that state of being, it seems to me, is one where cross-ideological cooperation is almost impossible because there is no common bridge. Everyday you're talking to people who live in another world, and, what's worse, people who see that, if they cooperate with you, they may risk having a faulty reality imposed on them. Hence, war. Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10746576630308034424noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-28498263769054623932019-01-25T11:18:20.359-08:002019-01-25T11:18:20.359-08:00"by way of arguing that thought her position&..."by way of arguing that thought her position" >> "that though"Adam Robertshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15803399373213872690noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-66818887197601427952019-01-25T11:17:27.740-08:002019-01-25T11:17:27.740-08:00sarahcl: here, I think, we disagree (I accept of c...sarahcl: here, I think, we disagree (I accept of course I could be wrong). I have read <em>Intercourse</em>, and whilst Dworkin nowhere argues that heterosexual sex is <em>necessarily</em> rape, she does say, at length, that dehumanising pornography and patriarchal power-over structures of oppression have so interpenetrated contemporary life that, to quote her own words, 'violation is a synonym for intercourse': sex today is overwhelmed by 'the discourse of male truth: literature, science, philosophy, pornography' which is invasive, domineering etc. My point in the post is that she was talking about (without using this phrase) what we now call 'rape culture', by way of arguing that thought her position was a marginal one in the 1980s even in feminist circles, 'rape culture' is widely accepted by feminists today as a fact of conteporary life. That said, you are quite right that she insisted in interviews that the bald line 'all heterosexual sex is rape', which I (wrongly) included in the original draft of this post, was a misreading of her book.Adam Robertshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15803399373213872690noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-50698644607273494472019-01-25T11:02:27.321-08:002019-01-25T11:02:27.321-08:00Thank you, but I still don't think you are cha...Thank you, but I still don't think you are characterising her argument accurately, even with the change. Dworkin is saying that if someone believes that ‘sex’, inevitably, involves coercion, then *that person* believes that all sex is rape, and all rape is sex, and therefore sees any attempt to end rape as an attempt to end sex.sarahclnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-47119897813445543222019-01-25T03:34:05.372-08:002019-01-25T03:34:05.372-08:00This is also discussed in a Snopes article, primar...This is also discussed in a Snopes article, primarily about the false attribution of that quote to Dworkin's fellow anti-porn activist Catharine MacKinnon (which is my memory from the 1980s):<br /><br />https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/rape-seeded/Peter Erwinhttps://www.mpe.mpg.de/~erwin/noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-28447640929718819312019-01-25T00:44:00.026-08:002019-01-25T00:44:00.026-08:00Agreed, Phil: although I suppose I'd suggest t...Agreed, Phil: although I suppose I'd suggest that the 'particular type of political formation' you're describing in your last line there is: capitalism. Arguably this atomisation is inherently belligerent. The war of profit against individual human beings.Adam Robertshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15803399373213872690noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-2683988379854991212019-01-25T00:37:29.634-08:002019-01-25T00:37:29.634-08:00I agree that the belief that the underlying logic ...I agree that the belief that the underlying logic of reality is, in some sense, "war" is a very ancient one. But I'd also suggest that the contrasting view, that that underlying logic is justice, or co-operation, or love, is also an ancient one.Adam Robertshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15803399373213872690noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-13899496204369249202019-01-25T00:36:11.066-08:002019-01-25T00:36:11.066-08:00Thank you sarahcl; I have amended my original post...Thank you sarahcl; I have amended my original post.Adam Robertshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15803399373213872690noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-8015900366481550592019-01-24T15:14:25.578-08:002019-01-24T15:14:25.578-08:00“One case study might be the posthumous reputation...“One case study might be the posthumous reputation of Andrea Dworkin … I’m referring to the argument she makes that all heterosexual sex is rape”<br /><br />http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/LieDetect.html<br /><br />“Andrea Dworkin believes that all intercourse is rape. <br /><br />“FALSE. She has never said this. She sets the record straight in a 1995 interview with British novelist Michael Moorcock. And in a new preface to the tenth-anniversary edition of Intercourse (1997), Andrea explains why she believes this book continues to be misread:<br /><br />“[I]f one's sexual experience has always and without exception been based on dominance--not only overt acts but also metaphysical and ontological assumptions--how can one read this book? The end of male dominance would mean--in the understanding of such a man--the end of sex. If one has eroticized a differential in power that allows for force as a natural and inevitable part of intercourse, how could one understand that this book does not say that all men are rapists or that all intercourse is rape? Equality in the realm of sex is an antisexual idea if sex requires domination in order to register as sensation. As sad as I am to say it, the limits of the old Adam--and the material power he still has, especially in publishing and media--have set limits on the public discourse (by both men and women) about this book [pages ix-x].”<br />sarahclnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-24666668263851033642019-01-24T04:59:53.917-08:002019-01-24T04:59:53.917-08:00I think one could argue that the traditional Marxi...I think one could argue that the traditional Marxist/Leninist position, with its idea that the true, underlying basis of society is class struggle or class war, mediated by a series of violent revolutions, is itself an embodiment of the idea that "the underlying logic of the universe is war" and the "if you're not with us you're against us" mentality (sometimes directed against other Communists as well as against feckless liberals).<br /><br />I'm also inclined to wonder if this isn't partly derived (on both the left and the right), from Judeo-Christian millenarian/apocalyptic traditions (going back in some senses to Zoroastrianism): the idea that the end of history will involve a titanic struggle between Good and Evil. Norman Cohn, at the end of <i>The Pursuit of the Millenium: Revolutionary Millennarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages</i>, makes a specific (if brief) argument that both Nazism and Communism inherited medieval ideas of history being oriented around an uncompromising struggle against evil.Peter Erwinhttps://www.mpe.mpg.de/~erwin/noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-45947103190512157292019-01-24T04:14:36.988-08:002019-01-24T04:14:36.988-08:00PS Had to google Tony Robbins; I initially wrote t...PS Had to google Tony Robbins; I initially wrote that comment under the impression that there was a self-help guru called Anthony Daniels. Which would be interesting in its own way.Philhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07009879034507926661noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-58764497034772540372019-01-24T04:10:49.614-08:002019-01-24T04:10:49.614-08:00But the hippies were at war - those utopian dreams...But the hippies <b>were</b> at war - those utopian dreams were predicated on the defeat of the Man. Calling for peace and love in the USA, at a time when the government was sending young men to fight a war, was a deeply political and oppositional stance. Even in the UK it was a <b>counter-</b>culture - and it had roots in the (failure of the) first anti-nuclear movement, which was also an explicitly anti-government mobilisation (for peace).<br /><br />As far as antagonism goes, I don't see a huge difference between the early-60s peace movement, the hippie wave, the Women's Liberation Movement, the 1970s shop stewards' movement and punk - they were all, in their very different ways, movements of 'us' against 'them' (and with a fair amount of overlap in the definition of 'them').<br /><br />What they <b>weren't</b> was movements of 'every person for him- or herself'. There are movements of that kind - usually centring on a figurehead who promises to show their followers how to out-compete the other poor saps, and/or to remove the obstacles that have been holding them back - but usually they're either not political (self-help gurus from Tony Robbins to Jordan Peterson) or political in an anti-political way (Berlusconi, Tommy Robinson).<br /><br />So I'd pose the question differently. I think what has waned, (and perhaps disappeared completely) is the idea that we're all, at some level, in it together: political conflict - or rather, political <b>debate</b> - can take place with complete respect for one's opponent, to the point where it doesn't matter enormously if their side wins a particular contest and ours loses. There is a much greater consciousness of 'us' and 'them' than there was in the 'official' political culture of the 1960s and 70s, or of the 00s for that matter. But the normalisation of political antagonism over consensus isn't all that new; it has roots in important movements of the 60s and 70s (quite direct and visible roots in the case of the Labour left, which is one of the most partisan elements of contemporary political culture). Moreover, I stress the word 'official' - if the 60s and 70s were a time of political consensus and also a time of antagonistic social movements, something was clearly going on to keep the latter out of the former. Political consensus isn't the natural state, in other words - it's the product of the exclusion of conflict. (But that conflict is generally 'us against them' <b>as distinct from</b> 'each against all' - a type of conflict which has its own, particular type of political formation.)<br /><br />I'm afraid none of this is much use for your argument!Philhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07009879034507926661noreply@blogger.com