When I am exposed to pristine (left-leaning) texts (such as Judith Butler’s ‘Gender Troubles’) I invariably experience a psychological and emotional sense of uplifting, transition and transcendence. However, following this experience, just as I put the book down, I reencounter the reality of the material world and it all comes crashing down. What had just seemed to be a new reality collapses into the material solidity of the present moment and I am left wondering whether the entire exercise had been nothing but a Trotskyite nightmare comprised of an inherent seduction (rather like being ‘groomed’ and suddenly coming to the realisation that such a process had been ongoing).
This situation reminds me of Carl Jung, an ethnic German born in Switzerland, who in 1956 published a ridiculous little book purportedly about ‘UFOs’ – but which contained a section openly attacking the USSR (parroting US Cold War Propaganda) just 11-years after Jung’s ethnicity had perpetuated one of the worst crimes in human history – killing and maiming 41-million in the USSR! Jung NEVER addressed the inhumanity of his fellow Germans but felt able to lend his academic weight to the ongoing demonisation of the victims of German immorality. From that day onwards, Jungian thinking and theory become just another path leading to an illusionary freedom – with those who describe themselves as ‘Jungians’ simply making the same interpretive mistakes as their progenitor.
That and the fact that Soviet academics, writing in the 1920s, clearly debunked Freudianism as a pseudo-science and something of a Bourgeois myth! Eventually, we are all freed from our misconceptions. Of course, I am not suggesting that progressive gender studies are not relevant – far from it – but I am acknowledging that the progressiveness that certain strands of gender studies represents does not (and not not) be made to fit into the prevailing models of Bourgeois (concrete) reality we are all made to inhabit through the auspices of predatory capitalism. In other words, the fluidity of ‘progression’ cannot be accommodated in any real way by the solid reality of (prevailing) Bourgeois ‘conservativism’. Meaningful Revolutionary change cannot happen without a genuine ‘Revolution’ actually occurring in the (external) material world.
SANGHA KOMMUNE (SSR) 