Are women's experiences the battleground for the political-cultural war?
Thoughts on "Feminism Against Progress"
Introduction
I was going to write a review of Mary Harrington’s Feminism Against Progress, which has been one of my favorite feminist philosophical arguments since, like, Simone deBeauvoir (I haven’t engaged with them all). But I wanted to digest it more, and stay in conversation with those ideas, especially concerning the marketplace and the social and cultural role of technological advances, and how each factor into her reactionary feminist philosophy. The book is also a (dare-I-say intersectional?) coherent synthesis of the history & philosophy of technology, and of the effects of a highly technologized market economy on human nature.
If a misogynist on trial for crimes against women (heading to jail?) is going to be president again, then we (citizens of a social order) should probably reckon with what that misogyny is and think about what kind of feminist philosophy makes sense and can be most coherent above all the conflating and universalizing ideas about what it means to be a woman and what a coherent feminism should be—and I think Mary Harrington’s “reactionary feminism” is a good place to start. It posits a coherent feminism that is aware of and integrates industrialization, other feminist philosophies, market economies, and cultural and material progress, and thus is a pretty good place to ground oneself among a whirlwind of late-capitalist, post-industrialist, trans-humanist philosophies.
Mary Harrington’s critical, philosophical framework—and her ethical suggestions—pave a clear path to a coherent feminism which takes women’s experiences seriously, as they exist in a modern, secular society reckoning with powerful technologically-deterministic forces.
Power & Intersectionality
The most powerful intersection of our time might be the intersection of technology and the changing class roles in society. This includes the upward mobility of other “classes,” including women, migrants and minority groups under “class.” Technology—the study and application of scientific method and knowledge to material prowess over the natural world—has largely been driven by men. There have been exceptions (from Marie Curie to the Jennifer Doudna) but the industrial march from assembly lines to nuclear fission to microchips has been a visionary manipulation of reality led by mostly men of the leading cultural paradigm otherwise known as “the West.”
Technology has often assumed control and power over women’s bodies and experiences: from medical advances to birthing children to the contraceptive pill. Household technologies, from washing machines to microwaves, changed domestic labor on men’s terms for the women who did the work, argues Ruth Schwartz Cowan in her 1983 book More Work for Mother. Women are challenging old narratives of science, technology and medicine more and more. Sarah E. Hill’s This is Your Brain on Birth Control, Cat Bonahan’s Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, and Nancy Nichols’s Women Behind the Wheel: An Unexpected Personal History of the Car are just a few of the books released in the past year or two in the women-writing-critically-about-the-technological-paradigm “genre” on my radar.
To believe in a technologically-deterministic vision of society & culture is to believe in a vision of society & culture envisioned by a colonizing and universalizing paradigm led by. . . men—men of science and men of progress and men of belief in technological prowess. Of course, this has been changing and the number of women in technology has been increasing—exploding—in the past several decades.
Yet technological idealism is a materialistic view of society and culture that reduces human experience to materialistic terms (to pills, to bodies to be cured and fixed, to brains to be optimized, to struggles that can be automated and managed and controlled). This is a reductionistic worldview.
This is “the machine” metaphor: the system, the system that regulates the modern, secular world order. Cultures aren’t traded as much as material goods are bought and sold according to market principles. Korean and Chinese semiconductors along with Chilean and Bolivian lithium conduct and store the powers that channel the energies that run our devices that feed us endless content to consume, no matter what truth-value it has.
Fear & Market Consumption
As I read Feminism Against Progress, I wrote down this phrase: “subcontracted to the machine.” Maybe because of my love for the music of Rage Against the Machine.
“The machine,” according to her reactionary feminist philosophy, is the technologically industrialized arms of the powerful social system that sets the parameters of what is possible. What has been subcontracted to the machine “is an order where matters once deemed the proper realm of philosophy or religious faith, such as questions of birth, death or desire.” As long as these things are subcontracted to the machine, ethical philosophies grounded on human interaction are easily reduced in complexity because some higher order (or higher power, i.e. the gods of technological prowess) can fix (or resolve) the problem. Human complexity becomes solvent to the powers of technology, and perhaps we (our mammalian brains) adapt to this because it seems easier in the present moment than dealing with more complicated or painful or burdensome struggles. Technology makes us subservient. . . in the words of Edward James Olmos’s werewolf-spirit-channeling character in 1981 Wolfen: “You got your technology, but you lost. You lost your senses.”
In the words of the Mary Harrington, “if we have technological control, we don’t need moral codes any more. Except what this produces is, in practice, a new moral code: a cyborg theology.”
In place of moral codes, then, we have whatever remains of how we mediate human interactions given our complicated—highly evolved and socially integrated—natures as men and women. In other words, what remains is a sexed struggle between men and women, and this struggle—unmediated by norms—becomes outsourced (and off-shored) to the marketplace, controlled by extractive institutions compelled to make a profit from their constituents, or users, not unlike how Big Tech make money off of the data they can extract from our personalized (and only seemingly private) accounts.
It is this “nature” of the sexes that Mary Harrington, and many other feminists along this reactive feminist wave, focus on. If evolutionary biology and deeply ingrained modes of psychology are anything to be taken seriously, then we should take them seriously. One side of what-feminism-has-become wants to “transcend nature” and to transcend nature’s uncomfortable and maybe-possibly. . . evil. . . trappings of subordination and subjugation.
But what is evil might be, as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest alludes to and as Hannah Arendt declares, banality. I forget which Weird Studies episode it is, but I often think about the discussion of the Terry Gilliam movie Brazil as an illustration of the evil inherent in bureaucracy, because bureaucracy is so distancing and dehumanizing. I thought of this a lot while struggling under labyrinthine college administration, when I navigate the byzantine American healthcare system, and when I consider the algorithmic complexity that seems to be creeping into everything.
In this sense, Nature would be the opposite of Evil.
The reactionary feminist seeks recognition of and realignment with nature—with human nature and biological limitations (and wonders) of our bodies and of what it means to be a woman—also to be a man—in a world not necessarily mediated by technological prowess and control and technologically-deterministic beliefs, but lived-in as turbulent as it is, alongside the turbulence and changes occurring inside our own bodies.
What I want to posit here is that neither gravitational pole of the American cultural left, nor of the cultural right, has been taking experiences of women seriously enough—in their stead, both poles of this collectively-decided and culturally-mediated debate have been using experiences of women as the battle pulpit to bark about other things.
Maybe this is just human nature, being indirect dealing with uncomfortable things like this, but it is this thing—changing social roles and thus experiences of women— which maybe is impossible to define or pin down, which has diverted society’s collective direction into the impossible choice of two sad electoral candidates we (in the U.S.) are (possibly) condemned to choose from this year.
Fear is a normal reaction for any woman to have when an originally male-bodied but now female-identified person enters their realm or domain of private or protected space. Fear is a normal reaction for women to have when men in positions of power declare what rights they can and can’t have over their own bodies, and children’s bodies.
Rage is a normal reaction for any man to have when women (of a same tribe, nationality, or group) are abducted, denigrated, raped, violated, maimed and kept as hostages. This is what makes October 7th symbolically different as act of terrorism than September 11th. A terroristic act is premeditated and designed to provoke, but violently attacking women is by degrees qualitatively different than violently attacking working people.
Identifying someone as victim and identifying another person as perpetrator can reduce a conflict to us-versus-them, and by analysis make culpable whoever did it. When the paradigmatic result is punishment and not healing, growth, nor maturation, then the solution is guilt for one party, and relief for another.
This can be manipulated. The system can revisit a conflict over and over again: retrial after retrial after retrial, with no growth or healing or maturation ever accomplished. Same conflicts are revisited again and again, with cosmetic differences and deepened resentments; ignorance renews itself and nothing is collectively or individually learned. A context of presence—that is, understanding what is presently within us at an embodied, biological and humanly-evolved level—deepens understandings that we (as humans) might be more ready to process, debate, and act upon.
Only out of this internalization of conflict, of digesting it and processing it, can someone form an ethic of justice.
Guilt is what we (as humans) reckon with when we violate someone else’s experience. There’s no market for guilt, no one can consume a pill that reliefs them of guilt. It’s a matter of personal responsibility, relationship feedback, and self-reflection. The market can sell ways to avoid guilt, but not the genuine human experience of processing it.
A market that capitalizes on fear, rage, victim-perpetrator narratives, and whatever deeply limbic or primal natures of the human-embodied experience has and can manipulated against them is, by nature, dehumanizing. The capitalizers capitalize on those they dehumanize and capitalized-against begin believing in skewed understandings of their own human nature.
Out of fear, we consume more . . . but I digress. A market economy is still possible so long as our human foundations to relate and see one another as conflicted, natural, imperfectly human and real people is still possible.
Back to Nature
The epigraph to Feminism Against Progress’s Part Two: Cyborg Theocracy is from Horace’s Epistles: “Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret—You may drive Nature out with a pitchfork, but she keeps on coming back.”
This reminds me of religion, and the human nature to anchor onto a system of beliefs and axioms. But it also reminds me of climate change, and the over-technologized strategy versus the “let nature be” strategy to manage climate-change-based risks.
Climate change narratives talk about rewilding, and Mary Harrington even alludes to Yellowstone’s rewilding by the reintroduction of wolves to the ecosystem, with its trophic cascade (the degree to which the environment changed as a result of causation is up for debate). Rewilding sex by not taking the pill, she says, can reorient women towards understanding and knowing their bodies better, more intimately.
Rewilding can also let green spaces supplement otherwise landscaped, commercialized or industrialized spaces become more integrated to their surrounding environments. Similarly, the Dutch government implemented a program “Room for the Rivers” to reduce flood risks by allowing rivers periodically to flood on their own. So far, it’s been successful. It’s becoming more common for some places to rewild spaces by not landscaping them, letting indigenous methods of growth invite species to grow.
Respecting the wild rather than trying to control and manipulate it may be the best path to monitoring human-inhabited spaces in an age of climate change. This may not come easily or without pains, but it may be the best way to invite sustainable life on Earth.
Likewise, a sustainable social life might be best way to invite sustainable understandings of our Selves, and rewilding ourselves as a society of women and men who are ephemeral manifestations of genes, natural selection and sexually dimorphic traits (yet with this paradox of free will) living among one another, amongst turbulent political-cultural polarization, in an age of unprecedented industrial-technological power, might (paradoxically) be the path to mutual understandings. Rewilding sex and rewilding relationships without technological intervention or mediation might be the simplified humanist future we need.
The question of this post, though, is: “Are women's experiences the battleground for the political-cultural war?” It’s as if women’s experiences have taken the place of the issue of climate change. Yet both are so varied and complicated and difficult to anchor down to reductionistic platform points and campaign slogans, and both are scientifically so contingent on other things, like, what kind of woman, what kind of climate change?
But I pose the question because the over-mediated political discussion(s) have become so muddled, it’s hard to know what people are even talking about sometimes. Is it really about “trans people” or about “Palestine” or about “free speech” or about “abortion” when, what we really need are better methods and ways to understand each other without mediation, as persons living presently with one another?
What do you think?