Rush Limbaugh is host of the most listened to radio talk show in the United States, with an estimated audience between 13 and 20 million listeners weekly. The show has been known to garner calls from such influential, conservative politicians as Vice President Dick Cheney.
Last night I was thinking about how, whenever I write in a journal, it's generally addressed to a dominant subject who on some level, I aim to gain the recognition and approval, or admiration of. April phrased the writer's position in Hegel's master-slave dialectic as one of the slave, and ultimately this is good, because the writer or artist gets indirect recognition through her or his works. I think part of this involves letting the form and the content of the world cleave evenly into the slavish and the lordly. For, while there's no way around the vulnerable, other-oriented structure essential to the written language, the tone of what's written can certainly oscillate between one that is desperately vying for attention, such that what's being discussed becomes almost irrelevant, and one that is more confidently engaged with issues – ultimately, self-addressed, like all truly scholarly work. And how strange, that writing should appeal to others more powerfully in proportion to its being self-addressed! The difference is that leisurely sense of play which must exist to meaningfully deal with the realm of ideas.
Now, this is related to a more general problem of lifestyle that I worry about – if this conceptual war, or war in principle, against shallow attention-seeking bleeds into any action we might take, or make, then does that mean that there is something essentially oppressive about romantic desire? Let me make the steps between that leap more clear. Is it possible to be involved with someone romantically without resorting to that sheerly other-oriented behavior that so traditionally leads women to be, or feel incapable of, a substantive societal or political life on a general par with men? To provide a feasible model, and because the word “romantic” is ultimately so expendable, I'm going to say No. To do this involves defining romance on the one hand, as the experience of passive upsweep as your love (not lust) for somebody overtakes you, on the traditionally but not exclusively feminine side. Simultaneously and alternatively, romance works as the action taken by the traditionally masculine role, something which involves earning a worth which allows one to receive affection from the object of desire, and earning this by precisely overwhelming her . The 'romance,' as it were, is always going to possess this structure – the Hegelian Master-Slave dialectic can again be used here to say that the feminine has her immediate needs sated by the masculine, who receives indirect recognition, by way of substantive action, as opposed to the woman's direct recognition, by way of immediate physicality. Thus woman is “master,” man is “slave.” Not only does a patriarchal Christian conception of chivalry and selflessness give the slave the upper hand here, but even the more reasonable Hegelian model claims that, ultimately, the slave who achieves recognition indirectly through the fruits of her or his labors is more free than the master, who as such grows utterly dependent upon what the slave can provide.
I do need to read and think more about how Hegel moves from this asymmetry to a mutual recognition before my conclusions are set in stone, but it is clear that the traditional romance outlined above will oppress the woman insofar as she can only occupy this space wherein she ought be happy so long as her immediate needs are satisfied. And part of the difficulty, using the analogy, is that the slave does have the privilege of being aware of the entire structure of the relationship, for she or he produces what satiates the master's needs through work (labor? action?), through earning money to buy dinner, say, while the master merely is led out the door to the restaurant table. Receiving such things well is a difficult art and a dangerous one to practice exclusively.
In the traditional heterosexual relationship, the female, treated as master, generally does not recognize herself as such, in the usual sense of the word. Because of our desire for mutual recognition, or at least related to this desire, we too easily take liberty and assume that the other feels the way we do, and furthermore that this is just how all love feels when in reality the other is watching this play unfold and grows in danger of assuming that the simple, passive immediacy is just how women feel about love, which of course is, on his side, mostly a result of the asymmetrical fetishization of woman as flesh and all of the aesthetic judgments which, despite their complete relativity, have been essentialized so as to say that the female form is “just more beautiful.” This narrative is never free of some hetero-normative subtext, no matter who voices it. And the process of fetishizing another person's being-as-flesh causes problems when it leads to trying to understand their desires as they are inertly expressed in the flesh, as can be seen clearly by the eyes of the other. This touches upon the well-known feminist argument that even our basic epistemology is founded upon a conception of knowledge as sight that not only goes along with a conception of woman as body, as object of sight, but also does an injustice to the knower's ability to experience himself as body. Think of the judgment men so often make that a woman is romantically or sexually interested in him simply because a) her appearance “appeals” to him, as it were, and b) she does not actively resist the performative actions he takes to embody his own desire, actions which are, in the traditional role of slave, an anticipation of the woman/master's needs so that the slave himself can gain the liberty he desires. If she accepts the dinner out, a gift which is supposed to be offered, and indeed precisely is offered in freedom on the part of the giver, oftentimes if she even accepts the man's company and conversation, she becomes aware of herself as in the awkward position of being expected to feel as if she has received some great privilege, and as such now bears a certain romantic responsibility to the giver. The woman is only really recognizing and relating to the other when she, too, is able to freely take action, when she asserts her subjectivity as more than the inert fleshly recipient of desire, and as such, all too often the only thing the man is seeing is his own desire, projected into the features that form the actual visceral content of his desire. No relationship really happens in the traditional heterosexual romantic power-struggle.
I believe that, at base, this situation is only able to continue at all because of the false consciousness a woman develops when she finds her needs for mutual recognition seems to have no other outlet than the fetishization of her own body, and comes to believe that self-actualization results from the “I” molding its body into what it wants aesthetically, which is really, of course, only the internalization of what whoever it is that she wants wants out of her, as object. Ultimately what I think is the teleological goal here is an efficient way to produce the married, monogamous, childbearing couple, obviously something useful to a greater society looking for a higher population, or new workers for its economy. Now, the Disneyland attitude so many children in middle-class America are brought up with disagrees – its claim is that some other more lofty self-actualization is the goal of their romantic relationship, with that structure in society perhaps only as a dutiful consequence of romance. But all one need do is travel a little, or indeed ask a member of a more impoverished economic class, to make this deflowered utilitarian aspect of the romantic relationship strikingly apparent. And where we turn to our own movement past the Industrial Revolution, our economic independence, or our world population problems, as proof that this is not essentially the goal of the heterosexual romance, I am confident to say that insofar as the dynamic still exists despite these things, it is for the sake of a) a new goal on the part of those oppressing, but more tragically, more crucially, out of b) sheer emotivist ignorance of what the dynamic really is, what it must entail, as I outlined above, how essentially inextricable from those exclusionary and power-laden roles the concept of 'romance' is.
Where we might look for love as an egalitarian friendship, founded upon a condition of mutual recognition, we need another name entirely, and certainly not before the ones who have so much to lose learn how to analyze their Disneyland lifestyles, and are able to define their terms. This must involve a radical revaluation of gender and reproductive roles and priorities in society – i.e., are we in this over-populated, orphanage-filled, purchased-at-Wal-Mart world really fulfilling ourselves by pursuing those two related and omnipresent goals of material wealth and biological children to be supported by this wealth? How is the picket-fence that most heterosexual women and men have, on some level, hardwired into their life's ambition going to further either a personal or a global good?
Genuine relationship must be fostered within a condition of leisure, of not at all safety but precisely as a sublimely trivial play. This attitude is so often cast aside by a frenzied set of sexual scruples and romantic longings which are eager to classify the other as either a) an object acceptable for some predecided romantic role, or b) an object unacceptable for such a role. In my view, what we know as love is composed of physical intimacy (which is only a ritual exception to the
arbitrary Victorian norm of prudish scrupulousness), sexual intimacy (which, in the ideal sense, is impossible when one is wearing all those anxious hetero-normative blinders, tinted lenses, and the like), and friendship. None of these, except for the purely symbolic act of physical nearness, is really possible within that dynamic of romance, which is left as a surreptitiously oppressive structure which has been artlessly sheathed in ritual.
"Excepting one whom I love still more,” answered the voluntary beggar. “You yourself are good, and even better than a cow, O Zarathustra.”
“Away, away with you, you wicked flatterer!” Zarathustra cried with malice. “Why do you corrupt me with such praise and honeyed flattery? Away, away from me!” he cried once more and brandished his stick at the affectionate beggar, who ran away quickly.
