Rogueish
k-punk: Marxist Supernanny→
03/20/12
The problem is that late capitalism insists and relies upon the very equation of desire with interests that parenting used to based on rejecting. In a culture in which the ‘paternal’ concept of duty has been subsumed into the ‘maternal’ imperative to enjoy, it can seem that the parent is failing in their duty if they in any way impede their children’s absolute right to enjoyment. Partly this is an effect of the increasing requirement that both parents work; in these conditions, when the parent sees the child very little, the tendency will often be to refuse to occupy the ‘oppressive’ function of telling the child what to do. The parental disavowal of this role of is doubled at the level of cultural production by the refusal of ‘gatekeepers’ to do anything but give audiences what they already (appear to) want. The concrete question is: if a return to the paternal superego - the stern father in the home, Reithian superciliousness in broadcasting - is neither possible nor desirable, then how are we to move beyond the culture of monotonous moribund conformity that results from a refusal to challenge or educate? A question as massive as this cannot of course be answered in one post, and what follows here will require a great deal of further elaboration. In brief, though, I believe that it is Spinoza who offers the best resources for thinking through what a ‘paternalism without the father’ might look like.
K-Punk on #nodads back in 2007.
The Great Dad's Misshapen Shadow: Men's Rights Fascists→
03/13/12
It was almost half a year, to the day, after Mohamed Bouazizi had set himself on fire that Tom Ball did the same. Just like the Great Dad who “is able to do her feminism for her,” the Men’s Rights activists appropriate real militancy and vacate it of its historical purchase in order to defend their privilege (that they are in no danger of losing) - the Dads Monopoly on Violence.
Fatherhood is these fascists term of solidarity for two central reasons. The first is that it allows them to adopt the veneer of a struggle. Dads are under attack, they say, just look at the court structure, we have an analysis, and a program. The second is who it excludes. This is much more important.
There is a sense in which these fathers’ rights activists are onto something. Their historical story - once there were dads, but now feminists have made being a dad impossible - is obviously nonsense, but they are right about their exclusion from dadhood. The thing is, this exclusion is inherent to the concept of being a dad. What would it mean, after all, to be fully a dad without remainder? It would mean to be autochthonous, to be a dad without being a son, or without having any kind of relationship with another parent; it would mean, in other words, being a psychopath (I think this is where Lacan’s utility as a no dads theorist might come in). Fathers’ rights activists want some kind of fantasy plenitude of dad-ness, and experience the impossibility of this as oppression.
What is it to Philosophise Fatherlessly? | That's Glory for You→
03/12/12
Philosophical fatherlessness begins with infertility. No dads is precisely the principle of this infertility.
This reminds me of Lee Edelman’s rejection of reproductive futurism, and also Halberstam’s criticism of Edelman, that Edelman “strives to exert a kind of obsessive control over the reception of his own discourse.” The constitutive absence of the dad that lies at the heart of #nodads is due to the tension inherent in the relation between dad and child; to use the abolition of that reproductive relation to abolish that tension, to stabilize the subject, as Edelman does, is not a #nodads move at all, but is in fact the ultimate pro-dads position because, paradoxically, the greatest dad is the dad with no child.
(Of course, there may be a distinction between reproduction and fertility.)
