"...By far the worst is the hamburger lady, and because of shortage right now of 'qualified technicians', e.g. technicians who can work with her and keep their last meal down, Screwloose Lauritzen and I have been alternating nights with her, unrelievedly. If you put a 250-lb meatloaf in the oven and then burned it and then followed that by propping it up on a potty-chair to greet you at 11pm each night, you would have some description of these past two weeks. Which is to say the worst I seen since viet napalms. When somebody tells you that there is a level of pain beyond which the human mind cannot retain consciousness, please tell them to write me. In point of fact this lady has not slept more than 3-5 minutes at a stretch since she came to us - that was over two weeks ago and, thanks to medical advances, there is no end in sight; from the waist (waste?) up everything is burned off, ears, nose etc - lower half is untouched and that, I guess, is what keeps her alive. I took one guy in to help me change tubes and he did alright, that is alright till he came out, then he spotted one of the burn nurses (pleasant smiling zombies) eating a can of chile-mac at the desk, and that did it: he flashed on the carpet. It is fucking insane is what it is."

-part of a letter sent by Al Ackerman from Portland, Oregon, U.S.A. 1978

'Afghanistan, where U.S. and NATO forces are battling a Taliban-led insurgency, is too fragmented between clans to be controlled militarily, Gorbachev, 78, said in an interview today in Berlin. While he said President Barack Obama would be unlikely to take his advice, Gorbachev said he saw no chance of success even with more U.S. troops.'

 

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'Gorbachev said that relations between Russia and the U.S. are improving as America undergoes its own perestroika, or rebuilding, which he said had begun with the election of Obama as president last year.

'America should implement perestroika in the context of American society,” Gorbachev said. “I believe that people of America, most of them who voted in these elections -- and most of them voted for Obama -- did vote for change.”'

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A theory and practice which claims to be an advancement of Marxism, developed as a critique of the Soviet Union. While Mao Zedong (1893-1976) valued Stalin as a “great Marxist-Leninist”, he explained Stalin committed some crucial errors:

1) He did not understand dialectics and ended up in metaphysics. He hence sometimes did not understand the demands of the masses. He did not distinguish between the different kinds of contradictions.
2) During the 30’s the regime of Stalin sentenced many innocents to death.
3) He did not conduct democratic centralism within the party good enough.
4) He did not handle the connections with foreign Communist parties well enough, espeically his handling of the 1927 events in China.
 

The result of these errors according to Maoism was that the Soviet Union was governed by a bureaucratic nomenclature which later was to conduct a “silent counterrevolution” turning the Soviet Union into an imperialist country, not crucially different from the USA.

These are the most distinct components of Maoism:

1) Guerrilla warfare/People’s War: The armed branch of the party must not be distinct from the masses. To conduct a successful revolution the needs and demands of the masses must be the most important issues.

2) New democracy: In backward countries socialism cannot be introduced before the country has gone through a period in which the material conditions are improved. This cannot be done by the bourgeoisie, as its progressive character is long since replaced by a regressive character.

3) Contradictions as the most important feature of society: Society is dominated of a wide range of contradictions. As these are different of nature, they must also be handled in different ways. The most important divide is the divide between contradictions among the masses and contradictions between the masses and their enemies. Also the socialist institutions are plagued with contradictions, and these contradictions must not be suppressed as they were during Stalin.

4) Cultural revolution: Bourgeois ideology is not wiped out by the revolution; the class-struggle continues, and even intensifies, during socialism. Therefore an instant struggle against these ideologies and their social roots must be conducted.

5) Theory of three worlds: During the cold war two imperialist states formed the “first world”; the USA and the Soviet Union. The second world consisted of the other imperialist states in their spheres of influence. The third world consisted of the non-imperialist countries. Both the first and the second world exploit the third world, but the first world is the most aggressive part. The workers in the first and second world are “bought up” by imperialism, preventing socialist revolution. The people of the third world, on the other hand, have not even a short-sighted interest in the prevailing circumstances. Hence revolution is most likely to appear in third world countries, which again will weaken imperialism opening up for revolutions in other countries too.

Maoism as a theory has grown its strongest roots among revolutionaries in the third world, and some of these movements, e.g. the CPN(M) in Nepal and the CPP of the Philippines, are advancing in their guerrilla warfare during the beginning of the 21st century. Western Maoism grew from the 1960s, and some of the movements have had some success in establishing themselves as the main communist parties in their countries.

The Master-Slave dialectic is a process described by G. W. F. Hegel in the early 19th century, in which the unmediated contact between two subjects leads to the subordination of one subject by the other. This concept has been used to theorise forms of oppression such as colonisation and patriarchy and the struggle against this subordination, known as the “struggle for recognition.”

The master-slave dialectic was first outlined by Hegel in his System of Ethical Life, where it appeared in two forms: (1) the war between two subjects (such as ancient city-states), which can lead to a stand-off, i.e., peace, or the victory of one over the other; in the case of a decisive victory, the defeated subject may be wiped out (if the dominant culture produces no social surplus) or enslaved, and incorporated into the dominant subject; and (2) in the subordination of small-scale proprietors by wealthy families, reducing them to the status of employees or servants.

In the later Phenomenology, only the first of these dialectics was elaborated, as part of the process of development of subjective consciousness, and this passage has become Hegel’s most well-known and widely interpreted passage.

In 1937, Alexandre Kojève built a whole philosophical system around the master-slave dialectic, which was widely influential amongst the French radical intelligentsia in the post-World War Two period, and was used by Frantz Fanon as a basis for his analysis of colonialism and the struggle of subject peoples for their own national consciousness.

The essential form of the master-slave dialectic is this: both subjects are “duplicated,” that is, they have both an ideal and a material form, on one side, their ideas, beliefs, political and religious hierarchies, techniques of production and so on, and on the other side, their land, crops, animals, their bodies and means of production generally. The two subjects do not recognise each other’s property relations and go to war to protect their rights against the life-threatening intrusion of the foreign subject. Hegel places great emphasis on the willingness of one subject to risk death rather than subordinate themselves to the other, and eventually forcing the other to submit.

As a result, the ideal side of the subordinated subject is destroyed — their language, religious beliefs, techniques of production and even their own needs are marginalised or destroyed; the material side of the subordinated subject are “taken over” by the victorious subject — their land for example, and their labour. As a result, the enslaved subject is forced to work to meet the needs of the master subject, according to his law and his beliefs.

Modern society arises through the slave-subject raising itself up and overcoming the “stoic acceptance” of their enslavement, while the master-subject is “dissatisfied” by the worthlessness of recognition by the slave, desiring recognition from a subject like themselves. Crucial to this process, is that the slave actually produces the master’s needs, whereas the master’s culture is reproduced only thanks to the labour of the slave. This turns the tables on the master, and ushers in modern society in which all citizens have rights and the state comes to be an expression of the will of the people as a whole, not just the aristocracy, who remain, accoridng to Hegel, the ruling elite.

Foucault's genealogical account of "sexuality" constituted a milestone for the theoretical fronts of numerous struggles (feminist, LGBT etc.). By undermining the notion that there is a natural "sexuality" which has expressed itself throughout the ages - organizing itself into various human types (the heterosexual, the homosexual etc.) - he thus historicized the modern regulatory regimes that produce these various "sexualities," giving us a powerful tool for attacking the tyranny of the norm. This account remains undeniably, urgently useful.

There are problems with this project, however. The main one, I would argue, is that it is an account which, to a large extent, ignores consciousness, subjectivity (keeping in step with Marx's old critique of liberal humanism: Social relations produce consciousness, and not the other way around). Foucault's is an account of subjugation/subjectivation without subjectivity. And yet we know that "sexual" subjects are not just subjects (and objects) of discourse, but also of practice, thought, experience, desire; Althusser's account of subjugation/subjectivation, with its more directly Lacanian tenor, at least preserves a way of dealing with subjectivity as it is produced through ideology functioning through in concrete institutions, what he calls ideological states apparatuses like the educational system, the churches, political parties etc.; this is one reason, among many others, why we need a reactualization of Althusserian structural-Marxism.

In greater part the late Foucault articulated his ideas directly in opposition to psychoanalysis, which had failed to take into account the historical contingency of its objects of study (the phenomena of human subjectivity) and had also been highly normative in its presuppositions and practical deployment (pathologizing "the homosexual," for example).

Nevertheless, psychoanalysis can be read in other ways. Its discourse is full of fissures and contradictions which challenge normative patriarchal-heterosexuality, and its claims to naturalness and superiority. This has led Judith Butler to supplement her mostly Foucauldian-performative theories with subversive readings of Freud and Lacan. For example, her deconstruction of Freud's 1917 essay, Mourning and Melancholia in Gender Trouble shows that Freud's own theories problematize heterosexuality's naturalistic and supremacist posturings. And in her book Bodies that Matter, she uses Freud and Lacan to develop the subversive notion of the lesbian phallus. This return to the psychoanalytic canon allows her to explore the complexities of psychic life without getting bogged down in the biological deterministic and behaviorist preoccupations of today's psychology. (Behaviorism is to psychology as structural functionalism is to sociology...a status-quo-supporting menace.)

Butler's utilization of these sources is not all that strange. I would argue that psychoanalysis has had a queer impact since its inception. Consider its role in the development of the contemporary concept of "gender." When we read scientific, literary and other texts of the early-to-mid 19th century, we can see that the concept of "sex" had not yet been split, or, more precisely, interrogated into proliferating further categories, such as sexual orientation and gender. By the end of the century these other concepts were developing, and Freud's theories of "psychosexual development" further propelled the process. Despite his normative aims, he effectively problematized the notion that biology automatically results in a particular psychic identification and trajectory of desire; Freud can, then, rightly be considered one of the fathers of our contemporary notions of sexual orientation and gender. By the middle of the 20th century gender itself had been bifurcated into its supposed component parts (much like the atom was forced to confess, under the scientific gaze, the existence of its constitutive quarks): gender role and gender identity; this was largely through the work of psychologist John Money who, like Freud, developed highly subversive ideas that he "repressed" for the promotion of normative aims (for example he saw nuture as being determinate in the last instance as far as gender role and identity were concerned, and yet he - with the help of other collegues at Johns Hopkins University - developed the psychologically and physically mutilative standards of "care" which seek to erase all signs of intersex variance in so-called "hermaphroditic" individuals).

These concepts became powerful tools for challenging patriarchy and other regimes of domination. Nevertheless, it is my view that both sexual orientation and gender - although they have served historically "progressive" roles - have reached the limit of their usefulness. I am embarking on a radical critique of both of these concepts, especially gender. I want to take up the challenge set by the lesbian feminist Monique Wittig (in The Category of Sex and other essays) and Judith Butler's work, both of which point to the fact that sex is always-already gender, or more precisely, that gender functions as a mask which covers up the prior construction of sex itself.

My point in saying that sex is constructed is not that physical differences among the human population (largely revolving around what we call reproductive capacity) do not exist; any more than I mean, by saying that race is constructed, that there are not small physical differences among the various human populations that have presumably resulted from micro-evolutionary adaptations to climate and other context-specific environmental factors (people from sunnier climes have higher concentrations of skin pigmentation, people from high altitudes have larger hearts because there, oxygen is scarcer, and it needs to be processed efficiently, etc.). My point is that the way material reality - bodies included - get entrapped, as it were, within the network, the power-structuring void of the signifier, is never given in advance (I will develop this idea more later). It is always emergent, resulting from complex processes that are overdetermined by economic, political and other factors. The physical differences in question do not automatically result in the concepts of sex and race. (It is not at all clear, for example, that the various terms supposedly equivalent to "man" and "woman" in the cultures of the world are truly equivalent, especially when we consider that many cultures have recognized more than two "sexes," and that the suppression of this diversity has been one aspect of the Western colonial/imperial projects; we cannot even be sure that such signifiers used in one culture have precisely the same signifieds over time; Saussure observed that individual diachronic changes in a semiotic system, such as culture, result in changes throughout the system...And consider that the modern concept of race is only a few hundred years old, and has also been part of the justifying ideology of Western colonialism/imperialism. The biological, "scientific" notion of race goes back only to the late 19th century, making it a contemporary of sexual orientation).* This is what I mean when I say that "no particular social category is inevitable or natural." There is nothing natural about signification, even though "There is no symbolic communication without some 'piece of the real' to serve as a kind of pawn guaranteeing its consistency" (Žižek 30). Any counter-hegemonic strategy must constantly interrogate these ongoing, ever-shifting processes of signification.

But back to the topic of psychoanalysis. Isn't there something rather queer about the following theses, making us somewhat justified in calling psychoanalysis a queer theory avant la lettre, as it addresses the formation of subjectivity while at the same time undermining the notion of any natural or inevitable subjectivity?

Concerning fantasy, Žižek says, "...in Lacanian theory, fantasy designates the subject's 'impossible' relation to [objet petit] a, to the object-cause of its desire. Fantasy is usually conceived as a scenario that realizes the subject's desire. This elementary definition is quite adequate, on condition that we take it literally: what the fantasy stages is not a scene in which our desire is fulfilled, fully satisfied, but on the contrary, a scene that realizes, stages, the desire as such. The fundamental point of psychoanalysis is that desire is not something given in advance, but something that has to be constructed - and it is precisely the role of fantasy to give the coordinates of the subject's desire, to specify its object, to locate the position the subject assumes in it. It is only through fantasy that the subject is constituted as desiring: through fantasy, we learn how to desire" (6).

And Žižek says, concerning "the Freudian notion of the drive" that "its object is ultimately indifferent and arbitrary (32)." And furthermore that "the drives are by definition 'partial,' they are always tied to specific parts of the body's surface - the so-called 'erogenous zones' - which, contrary to the superficial view, are not biologically determined but result instead from the signifying parceling of the body. Certain parts of the body's surface are erotically privileged not because of their anatomical position but because of the way the body is caught up in the symbolic network...The final proof of this fact consists in a phenomenon often encountered in the hysterical symptoms where a part of the body that usually has no erogenous value starts to function as an erogenous zone (neck, nose, etc.)" (21).

*If sex itself is constructed, sexual orientation gets even shakier. "Its apparently-solid ground is no rock, but thin air."

All Slavoj Žižek quotations from Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture.