An Immodest Proposal (in pursuit of the regendering of power)
By: Aly Bennett
Tags: Power, Satire, Literary Criticism, Philosophy, Gender Equality

An Immodest Proposal (in pursuit of the regendering of power)

The trouble with “I” — how to phenomenologize persons without individuals? “Speaking personally” (Burroughs, Naked Lunch)— what sense does this have, if at base the person who speaks does so not as an individual (which they will never have been or even have been becoming) but from a personal perspective, which is more an arbitrarily particular checkpoint filtering social noise? Resonation or reverberation are how I understand mimicry and repetition at base, but these aren’t the only way of happening. Resonance is when the vibration-energy (or frequency) in another person generates in me a like or counter (dissonance, ay sure) energy, which can be super indirect, tacit (held but not known; connaissance not savance). At least two further possibilities have uneven dynamics: invitation (Eros, though in the limited English sense, meaning opening-to-flow, rather than the Classical Greek trilogy) and compulsion (power, in the sense of forced flow [force violent, ideological, or otherwise]). Not that resonance is even/level/just to begin with, but it’s indirect; two are not involved with one another in resonance as such. The mixing is external and formal/structural. They co-vibrate without coming together. Shared identity without union.

Start again. Jung opens Memories, Dreams, Reflections (I’ve read literally only the first three sentences) by claiming, “My life is a story of the self-realization of the unconscious. Everything in the unconscious seeks outward manifestation, and the personality too desires to evolve out of its unconscious conditions and to experience itself as a whole” (3). At bottom, that is, Jung describes himself as who flows from “the unconscious” outward. If out-flowing, unconscious must then be internal, nestcepas? Yet it is internal-base, to be superseded (“evolve out of”). But if base in that sense, then what actually is the unconscious? Is it connected with some notion of primitivity underlying civilization? Is it basically something like genetic code that predisposes one to intercourse with one’s world in some ways over others? This wild thing in need of taming and control? In addition to the innumerable issues with historicizing any such psychic state-of-nature/civil person claim, and the inevitably paternalistic overtones that accompany this mode of thinking in the historical forms of imperialism and settler-colonialism, it seems to me that Occam’s razor (not that I know anything about this, but you know what i mean, something like the principle of prioritizing evidence-most-evident and not creating more and more complex systems to accommodate explanatory problems — especially those resulting from dogmatic misconceptions) might usefully shave off those problematic dynamics and, and in the same motion, allow us to analyze precisely those dynamics (alongside others) as social phenomena. That is, rather than approaching the unconscious as a diachronic problem (primitive-base in need of evolving “ever farther in and further up” or however it is that CS Lewis — or was it Joy? — heavy-handedly allegorized this) ……..

The phrase I want to get to is this brilliant introduction to Aj’s annual party: “Pricks, cunts, and fence-straddlers…” (Burroughs again). Rochester has this poem, “The Imperfect Enjoyment” (~p. 28), where he says (something like) “her hands, her face, her every look’s a cunt”. Like, whaaaaat? Rochester is a penetrator — this is his identity (see this and numerous other poems detailing his prodigious failures to rise) — and he engages with the world on those terms. His remarks apply to body parts (and non-body parts, and non-parts like expressions) and genders — his program might be summed: “any hole to make me feel whole”. Foucault’s economy, in volume 2, follows this perspective just as unquestioningly as do Enlightenment thinkers and — maybe just all men qua men? Anyway, the logic of economizing pleasure’s use is grounded on its phallic logic. Of value is “seed,” even when not taken in a reproductive sense, and the apparatuses and economies in place regulate this (as) commodity (the mode being reproductive, even when not). My focus here is really the fence-straddlers, among whom I am numbered. But it feels like first it has to be said that what has been written in the canon of Euro-American thought is limited to a prick-ish approach — phallogocentrism, ay. So before the question of straddling the fence is the question of the other side. What is a cunt-oriented economy? Already oriented returns to the phallogo-feel. Cunt-defined economy, so. To begin, the that which begins is not inside going out but outside coming in (in potentia, anyway). A self is what receives a world, not what penetrates it. Penetration in Jung’s approach to himself, again having read three sentences so like …, happens as the unconscious progresses at once externally (advances out from within) into the world and internally (as the unconscious “levels up,” penetrating deeper interiors by manifesting ever-further-reaching exteriorizations). said otherwise, the problem with “i” is that it is already rendered as a sovereign prick-penetrator, in what is called western thought. So, how can any analysis of the self claim to describe phenomenologically (or more broadly scientific, really, of any sort), if the self has always-already been limited to a in-thing that expands, explores, and invades out from itself (does this not serve to describe the problems of psyche as well as society? Phallogopersonalism no less than State imperialism.

In my analysis, the fundamental error in western thought here has been to identify oneself as the a priori (known ahead of time) cause of oneself. To feel oneself one’s own quasi-cause is no small feat, for many of us, while for others (i.e. cis-white-men as a useful caricature) this quasi-causation of oneself seems unacknowledgeable because so deeply assumed (selfhood and sovereignty). This is the phallacy (litereduced from “phallic fallacy”): that the self is an inside which moves outwards. The whole complex for which Jung succinctly provides an account is an attempt to describe the entire world using penetration as the only mode of knowing. Of course this means that one must be penetrating oneself, fundamentally, which is the basis for this entire absurd psychoanalytic babble about the unconscious. One penetrates the world while/as/in order to penetrate oneself. This self-penetration is the move that grants one self-quasi-causality. It strikes me as naive to an absurd extreme that this has gone unquestioned because of the masculine-power-structuring of thinking. Of course it is only as a reaction to my long delayed recognition of this that I say so. “Nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom” (Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room) identifies the problem of a self who at once claims innocence and maturity — the mature-authorization to act impulsively (as driven by the flowing-forth from within, which is trusted) despite the naive-innocent lack of understanding or contemplation. David delays investment in others (namely, Giovanni) by presenting himself to himself as on a journey to find his true self. He does not recognize himself, nor see himself despite his long gazing in mirrors and reflections and memories, because he at once claims and disavows himself — removing himself entirely from the present. The disavowal puts him in the future, the exterior manifestation of the true self for which he searches; the claim puts him in a deep past that need not consider itself reflexively because it is accorded trust without question.

So, since I’m talking to myself I’ll assume at this point that I’m convinced by my analysis and move on. The digression from which I want to return is the question of the unconscious (the most inward in-self), which appears tenuous (untenable?) after my analysis. What if the unconscious is taken as a flux of all one receives? That is, the experiencings of living. It is no primitive or immature base to be transcended, but is the field of potentials from which a self who flows can flow forth. A person is a nexus, a coming together of personal experiencings. Is that nexus not the unconscious? Flux and flow… that’s all there is to me. And the flux isn’t me-generated, nor the flows me channeled — this is the sense in which I assert the non-existence of myself. I am who flows back out from the in-fluxing of my experiencing living (the unconscious is social; I do not exist apart from this in-flowing and fluctuous experiencing-living).

Anyway, an immodest proposal (pursuant to the regendering of power) that might contribute to an address of the problem of masculinity and phallogocentrism: This body proposes that all men shall be permitted no clothing other than what is necessary for given climate-conditions. Men who lack phallic control (who find themselves unable to check their penetrative aggressions) shall receive castration or/and accessorization of State-keyed chastity constraints (with increasing levels of dissuasion, from mere containment to in-facing metal spikes). Rehabilitation programs shall be instituted to train all men in getting fucked in the ass (and other ways) not as punishment but as pleasure (all women and enby shall have fence-straddling opportunities, to be addended).