shlevy

jadagul:

bambamramfan:

anosognosic:

balioc:

azdoine:

balioc:

Under modern post-industrial bureaucratized high-tech capitalism, it is less rewarding than ever before to be a subject.  No one really has agency, these days, even the people who really seem like they should.  Every decision is usurped by external rules and dependencies, every little fiefdom has a million stakeholders, every individual is ultimately in thrall to some faceless behemoth of a system.

Under modern post-industrial bureaucratized high-tech capitalism, it is more rewarding than ever before to be an object.  Commodification and cultural churn mean that there’s an eternal seller’s market for cool things, which is great if you primarily construct yourself as a cool thing in search of a buyer/audience.  Loosening social norms mean that you can be pretty much any kind of cool thing you want.  Individual freedoms, combined with communications technology, mean that you have a nigh-infinite range of potential buyers/audiences available for you. 

This alone accounts for a lot of the widespread weird stuff going on with gender these days. 

#shitpost #kidding on the square

Okay, bearing in mind that I might be butting in without context (I certainly am butting in, just a bit), and bearing in mind that you might be completely joking… I actually have no idea why you arrived at this conclusion.

Having come to your tumblr from your wordpress blog (where you wrote eloquently and amazingly about the importance and significance of identity-narratives), I don’t understand why you single out contemporary gender weirdness (which is “at worst” just an influx of gender-based identity-narratives) as having this unique cause in post-industrial capitalism.

Which is to say, if post-industrial capitalism has explanatory power for gender-based identity narratives, I don’t see why the same explanatory power can’t be applied to understand all kinds of other contemporary and non-conventional identity-narratives. If gender-based identity-narratives are tied to being an object over being a subject (I’m not sure they do involve being an object; but I’m also not sure that I understand you correctly), I don’t see why other identity-narratives wouldn’t be (or couldn’t be) the same.

I especially don’t think that non-conventional gender-identity-narratives are particularly and specifically rewarding in money or capital, even if they might be occasionally rewarding in social capital (and I don’t think they are generally rewarding in social capital, most of all for people in the lower and middle classes, but full disclosure: I am a binary trans woman, so I’m extremely biased).

(Full full disclosure: I came to your wordpress from your essay on Hastur in Exploring Egregores, and I came to Exploring Egregores from lurking in various rationalist online spaces, I don’t recall the details.)

Anyways, I hope this post finds you well and that I’m not ruining your joke.

First off: thanks very much for your kind words.

That said, sure, let’s unpack that last sentence in a little more detail rather than just throwing it out there as a snarky shitpost.  Ain’t nothing wrong with taking things seriously and asking serious questions. 

(NB: “kidding on the square,” as defined by Al Franken, means, “it’s just a joke! except that it’s not really just a joke.”)

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contemporary gender weirdness (which is “at worst” just an influx of gender-based identity-narratives) 

For starters, I think you’re not parsing that phrase the way I meant it.  This isn’t just “now people are sometimes trans or nonbinary or V O I D G E N D E R or whatever.”  (Especially given that, even if the contemporary constructions are new, gender fuckery of that approximate kind is as old as dirt.  See, e.g., Nero.) 

This is the whole damn insane discourse surrounding gender issues and gender relations.  This is the fact that, if you take their accounts seriously, the feminist center-left and the traditionalist center-right and the Weird Left and the Weird Right all seem to be living in completely different universes. 

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In very broad-brush and simplistic terms:

Traditional masculinity (to the extent that it’s a thing at all) is mostly about Being a Subject, and provides lots of tools that make subject-hood work better.  It pushes you to take action, to make decisions, to possess things and people and take pleasure in it.

Traditional femininity is mostly about Being an Object, and provides lots of tools that make object-hood work better.  It pushes you to construct yourself into something desirable and compelling, to seek out appreciation, to be possessed and take pleasure in it. 

People vary in the utility they get from subject-hood and object-hood.  Probably everyone needs both to some substantial extent. 

To some extent, identity-building always pushes towards the object side of the equation.  It’s about being rather than doing; it involves saying, “witness me! appreciate me!”  The pure Platonic subject, like Doom Guy or the main character of an old-school dating sim, has no actual traits that can be perceived (and thus nothing on which to hang an identity); he is simply a perspective-that-does-things, a blank empty force of happening in the world. 

But – a given identity, depending on its content, can lean subject-ward or lean object-ward.  This often gets finicky, but stupidly blunt-edged examples will illustrate the principle well enough…you can identify as a Man of Action who explores and conquers, you can identify as a Beautiful Concubine whom everyone wants to have, and those things turn out to work pretty differently. 

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A lot of the most classic, most central feminist thinking devolves to “we’ve set up a society where man = subject and woman = object, but being a subject is awesome and being an object sucks, so this is very unfair.”

And, like, it’s not hard to see where that comes from, especially if you’re in a setup where your designated Subject People have the power to get the things they want – rewarding work, freedom to make personal decisions that matter, ownership of desirable Object People – and your designated Object People mostly have to fit themselves into a particular narrow mold and deal with whichever random Subject People take control of them.

But that was then, and this is now. 

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So OK.  Now we’re in a situation where being a subject just doesn’t work very well, for anyone.  Even powerful people don’t really have power.  Even free people aren’t really free.  But, on the flipside, being an object is better than it’s ever been; you’ve got a million skillion different cultural elements that you can mix-and-match into your very favoritest kind of Display, and you have the whole wide internet in which to hunt down the exact people who will best appreciate your fabulous self, etc.

Before anything else: this turbo-boosts identity logic across the board.  Even someone who would have been a pure-strain Subject Person thirty years ago, a Manly Man who loves power and decision-making and ownership, is now going to be comparatively less interested in real subjectivity (wielding power, making decisions, enjoying ownership) and more interested in being an, er, object-defined-by-subjectivity.  A smaller proportion of his Psychic Rewards from Manliness is going to to come out of actual manly action, since actual manly action has been crippled all to hell, and a correspondingly greater portion is going to come out of the sheer fact of being powerful and decisive and so on, and out of having other people perceive him as such. 

Or, in other words – even a billionaire CEO doesn’t really get to feel like he has untrammeled autonomous command over anything these days, but he sure gets to listen to a lot of people talking about what an awesome genius he is. 

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So where does this leave us in terms of gender?

Well, a bunch of women who were all excited to get their hands on the Fabled Power of Subjectivity are learning that it’s not as cool as they imagined it would be, which is partly because it was never as cool as they imagined it would be, but mostly because things have changed since the days when their dads were tiny patriarchs and being rich meant never having to say you’re sorry.  A lot of them, I’d wager, have an intuitive sense that they’ve been cheated somehow – that they’re not really getting the same deal that men have, that the men are in fact somehow hoarding all the Subjectivity Awesomeness via Sexist Black Magic. 

And a bunch of men are growing up with the intuitive understanding that Real Success consists of being an extremely desirable object, and they are furious that the world does not actually contain any way for them to pull this off.  A dude needs tremendous talent, and tremendous luck, to be as good an object as your average twenty-year-old girl in a tight t-shirt.  So they mutter dark mutterings about how women have all the good things in the world, and it drives them insane, but it’s not like they’re totally making it up. 

At the very least, this gives you 4chan-style being-a-cute-girl envy, even in the absence of whatever brain wiring gives you “standard” trans-ness. 

I kinda suspect it gives you a lot more. 

Interesting discussion, but

being a subject just doesn’t work very well, for anyone.  Even powerful people don’t really have power.  Even free people aren’t really free.

This is an incredibly distorted view of things. Maybe it’s that we’ve grown so focused on national or international news which the individual can hardly hope to affect, or maybe it’s that the internet tends to concentrate young, depressed, chronically ill and/or disabled people, as well as academics, all of whom are in various ways not what we might call people of action, broadly speaking. Or maybe it’s that certain sectors of upper middle class intellectual labor, exactly the sort of people who write things on the internet, are being squeezed especially bad by the changing economy.

Not to say that things have not changed at all, that we are not undergoing a crisis and a painful and uncertain transition, but subject-people have always been highly constrained by all sorts of limitations, even wealthy, powerful ones, even as they enjoy all manner of privilege (e.g., a rich kid in the 50s might have gotten away with raping a black girl, but he would not have gotten away with marrying one).

And, more importantly, being a subject works just fine for a whole lot of people if you’re not looking only at the level of who gets to be a billionaire or famous actor or whatever. There are plenty of successful small and medium business owners. There are plenty of people who achieve upward mobility. There are plenty of people who conduct their careers ably, leveraging their talents and abilities to reach a secure position with a considerable range of options. There are plenty of people who act in their communities, who are local leaders.

I just get the feeling people around here believe that everyone is just wallowing in helplessness, how were’re all just limp puppets to historical forces, how that’s just normal life. But it is absolutely still possible to “wield power, make decisions, enjoy ownership” on a small, local scale. Shit, there’s a whole masculine blue collar ethos built around doing just that, which doesn’t require being rich or having people work for you.

The internet is not the world, friends.

So @anosognosic is correct here, though would describe it differently, enough that I don’t think @balioc would disagree. Let me try to explain/bridge this.

All three of us agree that under bureaucratic post-industrial capitalism, there are more strings.

It is absolutely true that if you actually ARE a subject, then your power is greater than ever. There exist more strings, so there are more strings you can pull. You have the freedom to communicate to almost anyone on the planet, buy things from anywhere, travel anywhere in a short period of time, create more varied forms of art ever, etc. You can actually choose your identity and presentation to a greater degree. Authentic subjects rejoice in this increase in power.

However, the same does not hold for the fantasy of the subject. This state is readily defined as “No one tells me what to do.” The cliche image for this is the man living on his farm or ranch out west, who can get up in the morning and do whatever he thinks best. He’s responsible for his livestock, he makes his own food or trades directly with the producers of it on other farms. He could decide to take the day off and take his boat out to the lake, and make up for the lost work by working harder tomorrow.

In reality, this man is highly limited by his environment. Weather might destroy his livelihood in a number of ways. Changing commodity prices can bankrupt him. A monopolistic neighbor could raise the price of necessities or block throughways in order to pressure him to sell his land. The well might run dry, disease might wipe out your cattle, etc. It was a harsh life that offered a lot less possiblity than the modernity balioc is talking about, but the chains were rarely in the form of “some other person telling you what to do.” That is the traditional American subject fantasy.

(I do not mean to knock this desire either. It’s intensely alluring and part of me wishes everyone had at least the option to choose it. There is a reason the American Dream has incorporated it so deeply, and it’s not just false consciousness. It just isn’t the same as subjecthood, which you can easily tell because it’s a very limited life.)

Anyway, so in as much as a certain form of subjecthood has begun fading away, it’s that. And as balioc says, people who thought they were grabbing it and getting the American Dream, have had reason to feel disappointed, which then gets projected to thinking “they must be keeping some essence of subjecthood from us still.”

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Sidenote: on the objecthood matter, I’m sure balioc is aware of this but I feel he didn’t make it clear enough: most women are not “the average twenty something.” I agree that the A20S woman has a default level of objectified desire most men will never experience no matter how hard they try, but it should never be forgotten most women have given up on this too. I suspect balioc’s actual point was though that the trumpenbroletariat type men he’s talking about, mostly experience women as those A20S types, and thus think most women are appreciated this way, and that perspective informs their bitterness.

Thanks for this; I think your addition made much more sense of this post for me.

I thought the original balioc post was definitely onto something. (And explains a lot of my friends and my dating life: I know so many people who just want to not have to make decisions, goddammit, and that sounds a lot like “don’t want to be subjects” in balioc’s framing. Applications to kink are left as an exercise for the reader).

But it also felt like it was missing something, because I definitely feel like an agent. So the passage

Now we’re in a situation where being a subject just doesn’t work very well, for anyone. Even powerful people don’t really have power. Even free people aren’t really free….even a billionaire CEO doesn’t really get to feel like he has untrammeled autonomous command over anything these days, but he sure gets to listen to a lot of people talking about what an awesome genius he is.

just rang incredibly false to me. Becuase I feel like I have a lot of power, and spent a lot of my time acting and causing things to happen and making real decisions. And more generally that I’m effectively able to shape the world around me. Which seemed to be what balioc was claming can’t happen.

But you’re right. What I don’t have is the ability to be independent of other people’s decisions and powers and strings. What I do have is the ability to choose the strings, and pull back on them. So I’m a subject, if a limited one—but agency is always limited except to an omnipotent singleton, so that’s not really new.