Listen and know?

The theme of the seventh issue of “Disagreements” - “Choose the floor”. The editor -in -chief of the magazine explains what range of problems he has in mind here.

Mother screaming at the child. A child screaming at the mother. The State Duma adopts a law on the prohibition of "propaganda of non -traditional sexual relations among minors." Among the voting "for" there are homosexual deputies. The photographer removes athletic models for advertising to attract the attention of a homosexual audience to the desired product. The woman comes home from work and prepares dinner to her husband while he watches TV. A man is rudely harassed by a woman - but, as it turns out, a dressed man. The website of the Russian Railways company requires that when buying a ticket, you choose your gender of two options: M or J. Gender Studies Department at the University deducts a student for poor performance. A stamp about marriage in the passport. Higher Education diploma. A teenager telling parents about his sexual orientation. A teenager who does not tell parents about his sexual orientation. The feminist activist persuades the doubting woman to get away from the rude husband as from “abusive” relations. The man demands that his girlfriend will have to tear him out - and then he is horrified by the fulfillment of his own requirement. The homophobic douses LGBT activists with its urine from a plastic bottle. A visitor to the “side oh side”, who is screaming that she was a lesbian, in response, ironically shouts: “Louder!” A woman finds a file with a strange and alien thoughts on a working computer in an office - and suddenly understands that she wrote it herself. The head of the department rejects the questionnaires of the women-Sovieting, fearing that they will go on maternity leave. The African American, who has been sexually violence, declares in court that it is depressed by two signs, sexual and racial, to bewilder lawyers. A woman who is not allowed to her beloved for a family date in jail, because their relationship is not registered. A person who is always late for love dates for 15 minutes - he himself does not know why. A friend of the paranoid, whom he considers relentlessly pursuing him with a spy. Dora's father, Freud's patient, is an impotent father, whose desire she desperately seeks to support. Freud urges the patient to say everything that comes to her mind - but forbids her to protect psychoanalysis before his opponents. The woman is afraid to point out the rapist so as not to condemn. A person who is asked why he is silent all the time, and who knows the answer to this question - but cannot answer, because he does not want to. The court justifies the rapist. The shisophrenic judge is sure that he is the bride of God ...

What a confusion! How many different desires! How many different laws! How many different relationships, how many different others, others and others! ..

Do not forget about the desire

Criticism of obscurantism, heteronormativity, essentialism, oppression of women and in general any oppression can be simplified into two directions. The first is the desire for the emancipation of desire (or, simplifiedly, for freedom), the second is the desire for equality. I am convinced that these two aspects are important to consider and actualize exactly together, in their conflicting and complex relationships - which, unfortunately, is often forgotten.

What will happen if you forget the issues of emancipation of desire? Then it is easy to confuse the anti -conservative gender agenda with the struggle for universal good, with an attempt to trust the Enlightenment project, with the faith that everything can be agreed, that everything can be articulated, all demons are put into light, that the world can be launched and retold by the effort of the mind on more humane grounds. Such a moralistic understanding of criticism of the gender order, although it makes it in something more understandable, intelligible and popular, simultaneously deprives it of the complexity, without which in the intricacies of politics and desires we are doomed to confusion. But I think that it is precisely the defending of complexity and the right to complexity that can be put in the center of issues of emancipation and, in particular, the confrontation of the conservative gender agenda of the modern Russian state.

One of the options for leveling desires is the reduction of the gender agenda to a feeling of guilt.

The very concept of emancipation immediately flares up with complexity when we say that one of the components of the anti -conservative agenda is emancipation of desire - the goal is contradictory and impossible, but this is no less important. Is it possible to talk about the liberation of desire if the sexual desire is basically intertwined with non -freedom, with a certain scenario of pleasure, with knowledge resistance? Or such a weave is just a consequence of the social system? .. I will return to this issue.

One of the options for leveling desires - the reduction of the gender agenda to a feeling of guilt - leads towards the new moralism, the new cult of supercariness and even new churching. Unfortunately, it is precisely such an effect that feminist statements sometimes produce on the expanses of social networks and the media. For example, as a call to curb the desire, some read the flash mob " [1] , where, under a hashtag corresponding to people who had sexual violence, it was proposed to tell about their experience on Facebook. I saw many Facebook posts from my acquaintances of men, who, in response to the knowledge of violence for them, began to try to bring for themselves a certain spelled regulation of relations with a woman-something in the spirit of the moral code of the heroes of Leo Tolstoy-and blamed themselves for once deviated from him. Someone will say that this is an important step towards overcoming “objectivation”, but it seems to me that it is an important step that such an attempt to algorithmization of life means to greatly shift values ​​and priorities in the agenda both for gender equality and emancipation. Narosis of obsession, for example, is generally based on enjoying guilt and self -censorship, and the desire to be reasonable and conscious does not at all bring to neurotic knowledge about what they are blind due to crowding out.

Calls for morality sometimes flare up among activists and activists in the field of gender. For example, the post of LGBT activist Ivan Kilber is indicative, which he selflessly concludes the phrase “it was a Friday catechism, part 1.1.A,“ on the intersection of activisms ”. But in every joke there is a share of jokes, and in the interpretation of Kilber, the struggle with homophobia and mizoginia (as well as coronism, i.e. eating animals) is the basis of the new austerity, which makes us recall some monastic practices (evidence of which some comments on the mentioned post). I also want to emphasize that I have deep respect and sympathy for Kilber’s activities, like many other activists - however, this post seemed to me a vivid example of a certain type of rhetoric, which I am critical of.

Only clearly by sharing the pragmatics of the use of concepts can one evaluate the possibilities of combating conservatism on the gender field.

Another example of oblivion of complexity and non-obscurity, non-fiber desires are very popular psychological texts on the Internet about manipulators and manipulations in love relationships, which may not have an articulated gender component (for example, here ). These texts usually completely ignore the question of how the desire works in such relationships where partners feel dependent on each other, and mainly advise the victims of the manipulation to free themselves through “acceptance of themselves” and the rational “analysis of the situation” - and much less often indicate what social mechanisms can be addressed if it comes to physical restriction of freedom. “Acceptance of oneself”, which is often represented by the basis of emancipation, is one of the simplified elements of the school of ego-psychology, which, in fact, puts in the center of the question not a desire, but the ideal. Alas, talking about “accepting oneself” and the harmonious ideal of relations in which there are no signs of “psychological dependence” and “Abuez” are often taken to the agenda by activists and activists in the field of the gender - and the category of “dependence” is so eroded that, in fact, it strives to cover the entire territory of desire.

Here it is necessary to distinguish. As the social category of Abuez, it makes sense, but as a term regarding personal relationships, it hides the unity, the specificity of all individual desires of desire. And as a social concept, he requires a clear definition and can then lead to a new knowledge and new social settlement (for example, legal)-that is, to enter a public law, which, for example, will form a new way to form family relations, including confronting physical family violence. But the possible ways of emancipation in each case lie through desire, through his fate, which is not directly fixed by legal laws.

I believe that only by clearly sharing the pragmatist of the use of concepts, one can evaluate the possibilities of combating conservatism on the gender field. For example, recognizing the importance of the concept of “Abuez” for the formation of a new law on family violence - but its inexperienced in matters of desire.

Speaking about the ideal of relations deprived of “dependence” often also talk about the relationship where the partners agree on everything, everyone articulates - including issues regarding sexual desire. But why is sexuality what is difficult to talk about - that is, “obscene”? Some believe that this is a consequence of the patriarchal structure of society, which controls the population under control, its reproductive abilities and desires are interested in maintaining the supposedly dark, opaque sex zone. But I believe that the situation is more complicated. Although the social system and the regime of power can really regulate and produce certain practices of sexuality, a sexual desire is problematic precisely because there is something that falls out of the knowledge of another (parents, patriarchy, state, partner ...), something that the other does not know about himself and what he cannot. The conservative model proposes, indeed, to strictly distinguish between the sphere of normal and abnormal, light and dark, knowledgeable and unknown - including in sexuality. But to contrast such a division as possible, not at all the complete abolition of this border, claiming to open the world of the mind all the corners of the human soul-but rather the understanding of this border as a complex plexus, a complex node of the knowledgeable and unknown, in which it is generally pointless to talk about complete openness and transparency-but which can be somehow moved.

Sexual desire is problematic precisely because there is something that falls out of the knowledge of another.

In my previous letter of the editor -in -chief , dedicated to Christianity and capitalism, I spoke about surfaces where it is impossible to separate the internal and outer sides, such as the tape of Mobius and Klein's bottles. I also wrote about them in the note “The impossibility of wit as the impossibility of liberation” , criticizing the performance “Marathon of recognition”, where everyone was invited to make a kind of camming out, tell everyone their innermost shameful secret. I will quote this text: “Faith in the ability to speak out akin to the religious faith in the possibility of the final resolution of all problems, unleashing all nodules, into the ultimate television of human life and history. Emansipation, if possible, is completely different - if it does not prescribe integrity to her subject. Judith Batler, arguing in the article “Imitation and gender disobedience” about public representation as a lesbian, pointed out the performance and instrumentation of this act - and claimed that such an act could not apply for her full, Butler, representation that it retains the right to elbow, key for her freedom. Emancipation is possible if it returns us to itself not perfect, but torn, disagreed, not coinciding with themselves. And then emancipation becomes wit - the ability to play ambigence. ”

Everyone on his own experience is faced with the fact that not everything can be said, and it is usually more difficult to say, the more powerful desire is involved in the situation - and not at all in direct connection with sex issues. And the means of emancipation cannot become the desire to completely “speak out”, “work out injuries” or, again, “accept yourself” (although such practices may have the therapeutic effect); It is precisely the acuity, joke, ambiguity can emancipate. Freud analyzed the kinship of the mechanisms of wit and unconscious. The Freudian unconscious is not a dark accumulation of instincts at all, not inhabited by demons, a gloomy underput that can be lit by a flashlight of the Enlightenment, as often draws us a conservative idea of ​​sexuality, but also, alas, and many wrestlers with conservatism, driving up to reveal and ventilate this mythical underground. The unconscious is woven with consciousness and does not exclude it at all, not delimited with it with a wall. The unconscious exists thanks to the language, its ambiguity, its inconsistencies - and therefore any language has an unconscious that reveals itself just in the malfunctions of the unambiguity and transparency of the language.

But why is this unconscious weaving with sexual? What manifests itself in the excesses of the language - reservations, donkeys, random puns, erroneous actions? Desire - rooted in the relationship of the body and language. The writer Stanislav Lem has a review of the non-existent science fiction novel “Sexy”. In the novel, as a result of the explosion of warehouses with the drug “Antisex”, all people in the world disappears sexual attraction, this event in the history of mankind is called “sexual spray”. But, continues Lem, “Culture does not tolerate emptiness: a gastronomy took a place that has empty as a result of sexual codes. It is divided into ordinary and indecent; There are gluttonous perversions and albums of restaurant pornography, and eating in some poses is considered obscene to the extreme. ”

Consciously shift the points of questioning, the ways of producing knowledge - but do not wave to a conscious change in the ways of production of desire.

All this is directly related to how sexuality plays itself in the field marked by others - its prohibitions, desire, knowledge, ignorance, gaze, blindness ... and bring this question only to the representation of her identity (heterosexual man, homosexual woman, then select the floor) means, again, to level the specifics of sexual. The specifics, which consists in the possibility of failure of any calculation, any certified rules and any recorded guarantees of knowledge or skill. The reason for this failure is a desire.

Here I want to critically point out one mental structure, the key link in which is “identity”. This design involves a direct connection and consistency between the authority of the subject’s speech regarding certain social realities, his own life practice and its public social status; Or, in other way, between the content of the statement of the subject and the act of his statement. In this design, it is “identity” that serves as a bunch between all the elements, thanks to which they collapse to indistinguishable, pulling themselves together, one name, one name, be it “gay”, “woman”, “Christian”, “bourgeois” or “Uzbek”. An important installation of Quir-Theoria see me just a confrontation between such collapse-and the desire to wonder: what really gives and what can use the use of a particular identity in a particular situation? Otherwise, we will deal with the triumph of the identity policy, when it is assumed that only a Muslim can speak of the Qur'an, only a woman or gay can fight for the rights of women or gays, and only one who makes their bread exclusively with their own labor. Then, firstly, political as a common field will disappear, splitting into many interest clubs, and, secondly, the unconscious will be forgotten-a person seems to be completely identified with himself. Unfortunately, the trends in this understanding of politics are more clearly manifested during the current global right -wing conservative turn.

Do not forget about knowledge

The other to which we turn to our desires, on whose scene we play our ideas, our representations and elimination, is not the same as the sociological reality of the society in which we exist, but rather, only one of its implementations caused by our life to see and desire. But often they are simplified, suggesting that society directly produces a person. For example, they often talk about Patriarchate as a certain ubiquitous substance - or, as Kilber’s mentioned post, “discrimination of women and LGBT is institutionalized, spilled in the air, is part of the norm”. Но такой детерминизм предполагает, что, во-первых, существует общественное поле, полностью предшествующее вопрошанию человека, и, во-вторых, что оно неким прозрачным, непосредственным образом форматирует под себя субъектов. Однако знание об обществе, как и любое знание, связано с желанием вопрошающего, с тем, какой вопрос и кем был поставлен. Это не означает тотального релятивизма — речь лишь о выборе точек отсчета и процедур производства знания. Почему я так подробно останавливаюсь на таком теоретическом вопросе?

Потому что он точно указывает, как мне кажется, на место и задачи квир-теории (в том числе как академической дисциплины): сознательно смещать точки вопрошания, способы производства знания — но не замахиваться на сознательное изменение способов производства желания. И в этом смысле квир-теоретиком можно назвать Карла Маркса с его «Капиталом». Трудовая теория стоимости Маркса является как раз выбором точки отсчета, постановкой субъекта труда в центр политэкономической теории — и дальнейшая логика разворачивания «Капитала» происходит из этого выбора — вопреки предшествовавшим Марксу буржуазным экономистам. Эта верность своему выбору приводит Маркса к новому способу подсчета — то есть к изменению знания об обществе — и, как следствие, например, к обоснованию необходимости сокращения рабочего дня. Именно критикуя способ подсчета, предложенный экономистом Нассау Уильямом Сениором, который выступал против такого сокращения, Маркс обосновывает необходимость общественных перемен. Так происходит смычка теории и практики, или, говоря иначе, так проявляется тот факт, что теория Маркса есть «теория практики», или, опять-таки говоря иначе, перформативность его теории. Такая установка на связь практики и теории, заявленная впервые столь отчетливо именно Марксом, стала теперь неотъемлемым свойством квир-теорий.

Чем более нейтральной и объективной пытается себя представить теория пола и сексуальности, тем больший политический консерватизм за ней обычно стоит.

Теорию Маркса можно назвать квир-теорией и в более привычном смысле слова: как определенную критическую оптику взгляда на якобы «нормальные» отношения между полами. Речь не только о классической работе Энгельса «Происхождение семьи, частной собственности и государства», но и о множестве современных вариантов марксистской гендерной критики, например, производимой коллективом журнала Théorie Communiste. В центре этой критики — анализ исторически изменяющихся механизмов, предписывающих женщине задачи деторождения и воспитания детей, то есть воспроизводства рабочей силы. Приведу пару цитат из одного из текстов Théorie Communiste : «В капиталистической формации различие между общественным и частным становится глобальным благодаря определению женщин с помощью ограничивающего приписывания им функции деторождения. Скажем, невозможно совершить ни логический, ни социальный переход от присвоения женщин как воспроизводителей к домашнему труду. Домашний труд — это элемент социального механизма, который навязывает группе “женщины” репродуктивную способность». «Общественное — или, скорее, коллективное — присвоение [женщин] постепенно заменяет частное, и репродуктивная женщина становится “свободной личностью”, она становится паупером, который может выжить только благодаря тому, что издержки на его содержание будут восполняться коллективно, если только у нее есть дети. А в случае развода ей всегда будет дарована “привилегия” опеки над детьми».

То, что я выбрал в качестве основного примера квир-теории, производящей знание, марксистский феминизм, а в качестве основной теории, занимающейся желанием, — лакановский психоанализ, изобличает мои личные пристрастия и ориентиры (как говорится, фрейдомарксистские). Примеры могли бы быть и иными.

Гендерные теории — территория битвы за ангажированное знание, на которой ярко проявляет себя политичность любой науки. Причем чем более нейтральной и объективной пытается себя представить теория пола и сексуальности, то есть чем активнее она стремится предать забвению вопрос желания, лежащий в основе ее возникновения, — тем больший политический консерватизм за ней обычно стоит. Примером тому — теории XIX века об особом устройстве мозга проституток, преступников и гомосексуалов или современные теории о генетической природе гомосексуальности. Даже если предположить статистическую доказанность генетической природы однополого влечения, это не снимает политических вопросов о конкретной реализации такой «предрасположенности» в личной истории субъекта, в структуре его желания и в социальном поле.

Желать и знать?

Гармонии в поле гендерной эмансипации не может быть уже потому, что желание и знание вовсе не находятся друг с другом в мире и согласии. Можно желать ничего не знать; или можно быть способным желать, только когда чего-то не знаешь; знание может убить желание; желание знать может привести совсем не туда, куда ты хотел.

Расщепление между производством желания и производством знания выявил и флешмоб «#яНеБоюсьСказать». Многие сексистские иронические комментарии, как и вовсе не иронические признания смущенных людей в том, что происходящее в соцсетях по мере своего нарастания растревожило их сексуальность, проистекают из одного смещения, а именно — из прочтения рассказа о реальном насилии как фантазии о насилии — в вуайеристической рамке экрана гаджета и Фейсбука. Но этот сбой, это побочное возбуждение желания рассказом, вроде бы ставящим своей целью лишь выявление умолчанного знания, неустраним ввиду специфики самой темы.

Итак, этот номер «Разногласий» построен вокруг столкновения двух оптик: оптики квир-теории, занятой вопросами производства знания, и оптики психоанализа, занятой вопросами желания. Думаю, читатель сам сможет понять для каждого из материалов номера, где проходит линия фронта между этими двумя тесно связанными способами видеть и мыслить.

[1] Этот флешмоб и его различные оценки и интерпретации неоднократно возникают в материалах этого номера «Разногласий».