#the series built its own social and class structure to explore the complexities of exploitation and status outside that framework

[mayasaura]

It kind of confuses me when I see people talking about cavaliers as if the Nine Houses have established and normalised some radical social role of human sacrifice. It really doesn't seem to me like the role of a cavalier is that simple. The only members of their society we've seen who weren't horrified by the idea were the Tridentarii.

The career soldier, who was born into the military class and trained for that role since birth, believes no necromancer should ever have to see their cavalier die. The other child soldier was killed while putting himself between his cavalier and danger. The heirophant of the Emperor's law who draws on his cavalier like a battery—a level of exploitation the other Houses condemn—turns against the will of his God when he witnesses the sacrifice expected for lyctorhood.

The deliberate sacrifice of a cavalier is not normalised. Not even in the front lines of their military. The role of a cavalier is exploitative, of course, and that's where the interesting part begins. Is it any more exploitative than a king whose knights are trained to die in battle? Than employees who are forced to work or starve? Than the existence of a noble class, or capitalism?

Human suffering exists in any society, and in most societies I know of, much of that suffering we inflict on one another through exploitation. The Nine Houses are not unique in this respect. I am very much in awe of the worldbuilding in this series, tho, that it has managed to defamiliarise human suffering and class dynamics as to show us their grotesquerie plainly without ever tipping over into anything as straight forward as direct allegory.

[obscurehistoricalinterests]

Repossessing the Body: Transgressive Desire in “Carmilla” and “Dracula” (I)

Every time I encounter media where Carmilla is either the servant of Dracula or in love with him (very often both simultaneously), I want to flip tables. 

Carmilla not only despised men, but she was a veiled depiction of a lesbian woman. As an innocent human, she was preyed on and murdered by a male vampire who was obsessed with her and yet emerged from her grave a cunning and powerful figure who cleverly exploited the womanly tropes of her time (the helpless and delicate flower) to dupe and charm men into doing exactly as she wanted in pursuit of her goals. Her romantic interests and desires for companionship were reserved exclusively for women. Every time I see her being relegated to the role of love interest for a man, I feel like her nature and personality being denied, misused and erased.

Back in Ye Olde Days (1996), I discovered a fascinating article by Elizabeth Signorotti which put forward the theory that Dracula was written as a patriarchal response to the unleashed female power and sexuality depicted in Carmilla. This remarkable article, which I have split into parts and transcribed below, explains better than I ever could the power of Carmilla and the ways in which its themes of female empowerment and agency were perceived as a threat.

Repossessing the Body: Transgressive Desire in “Carmilla” and “Dracula” (part I)

Of the vampire tales to date, Bram Stoker’s Dracula has unquestionably become the most popular and the most critically examined. It constitutes, however, the culmination of a series of nineteenth-century vampire tales that have been overshadowed by Stoker’s 1897 novel. To be sure, many of the earlier tales provide little more than a collective history of the vampire lore Stoker incorporated in Dracula, but Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s little known “Carmilla” (1872) is the original tale to which Stoker’s Dracula served as a response. In “Carmilla” Le Fanu chronicles the development of a vampiric relationship between two women, in which it becomes increasingly clear that Laura’s and Carmilla’s lesbian relationship defies the traditional structures of kinship by which men regulate the exchange of women to promote male bonding. On the contrary, Le Fanu allows Laura and Carmilla to usurp male authority and to bestow themselves on whom they please, completely excluding male participation in the exchange of women, normative as discussed by Claude Levi-Strauss and more recently by Gayle Rubin and Eve Sedgwick. Stoker later responded to Le Fanu’s narrative of female empowerment by reinstating male control in the exchange of women. In effect, Dracula seeks to repossess the female body for the purposes of male pleasure and exchange, and to correct the reckless unleashing of female desire in Le Fanu’s “Carmilla.” 

In The Elementary Structures of Kinship, Levi-Strauss argues that women are “valuables par excellence from both the biological and the social points of view... without which life is impossible.” As “valuables,” women are seen “as the object of personal desire, thus exciting sexual and proprietorial instincts... [and also as] the subject of the desire of others, ... binding others through alliance with them.” Women, then, become the means of alliance, the ”supreme gift” that binds men together and creates social order. For Levi-Strauss, marriage most significantly reveals men’s complete control of women. He argues that traditionally “the total relationship of exchange which constitutes marriage is not established between a man and a woman, where each owes and receives something, but between two groups of men, and the woman figures only as one of the objects in the exchange, not as one of the partners between whom the exchange takes place.” As an essential and valuable “sign” to be possessed and exchanged, woman’s sole purpose is to provide the passive link between men.

Levi-Strauss’ exploration of the role women play in creating male alliance is further examined in Gayle Rubin’s “The Traffic in Women” and in Eve Sedgwick’s Between Men. Whereas Levi-Strauss ultimately romanticizes the exchange of women, Rubin examines the specific implications for women resulting from his argument. She states that Levi-Strauss’ “exchange of women” is shorthand for expressing the “social relations of a kinship system... [where] men have certain rights in their female kin...[and where] women do not have the same rights either to themselves or to their male kin.” Since women are “transacted” by men, they become only “a conduit of a relationship rather than a partner to it” and are denied the “benefits of their own circulation.” Rubin further stresses that “compulsory heterosexuality is a product of male kinship” because “women... can only be properly [valued] by someone ‘with a penis’(phallus). Since the girl has no ‘phallus’, she has no ‘right’ to love her mother or another woman.” In her examination of Levi-Strauss, Rubin underscores woman’s historical subjection to male desire and her exclusion from the social order governed by male alliance.

Sedgwick broadens Rubin’s argument by investigating “compulsory heterosexuality” as a distinguishing factor in female relationships and in male relationships. She argues that men’s relationships are defined by “homosocial desire,” that homosocial relationships between men must be distinguished from socially threatening homosexual unions, and the only way to eliminate the homosexual threat between men is to include a woman in the relationship, forming a (safe) triangular configuration rather than a (threatening) linear, male-to-male union. She contends that contrary to women’s relationships “patriarchal structures [assure] that ‘obligatory heterosexuality’ is built into male-dominated kinship systems, [and] that homophobia is a necessary consequence of... patriarchal institutions [such] as heterosexual marriage.” Women function in this system as signs and tools to ensure the survival of male relationships and to deflect the threat of homosexuality by serving as a link between men.

Sedgwick sums up social perceptions of women’s and men’s relationships as “diacritical opposition between the ‘homosocial’ and the ‘homosexual,’” an opposition that ”seems to be much less thorough and dichotomous for women, in our society, than for men.” She argues that all women in our society who promote the interests of other women (by teaching, nurturing, studying, marching for, or employing) are “pursuing congruent and closely related activities. Thus the adjective ‘homosocial’ as applied to women’s bonds... need not be pointedly dichotomized as against ‘homosexual’; it can intelligibly dominate the entire continuum.” The unity of the lesbian continuum, “extending over the erotic, social, familial, economic, and political realms, would not be so striking if it were not in strong contrast to the arrangement among males.” That arrangement, as Levi-Strauss has defined it, is a system of alliance between men that requires, in some form, the exchange of women to bind men and (as Sedgwick implies) to stave off homosexual anxiety. Sedgwick makes clear that women’s relationships are not governed by homophobia; therefore, excluding men from female friendships or from access to women poses more of a threat to male kinship systems than to female. Thus, female homosocial bonds potentially carry tremendous power to subvert or demolish existing patriarchal kinship structures, which is precisely what happens in “Carmilla.”

Throughout most of the nineteenth century the central figure in vampire tales was a male whose relationships were used to depict various conflicts in contemporary society. James Twitchell observes in The Living Dead that nineteenth-century writers mainly used the vampire “to express various human relationships, relationships that the artist himself had with family, with friends, with lovers, and even with art itself.” Other critics note that the vampire, a dead body that drinks blood and preys on innocent victims to sustain its own life, acts as a complex metaphor: it could represent the economic dependence of women; the parasitic relationship between the aristocracy and the oppressed middle and lower classes: unrepressed female sexuality; eugenic contamination; enervating parent/child relationships; and, of course, sexual relationships deemed subversive or perverse in hegemonic discourse.” Perhaps most interesting is Nina Auerbach’s contention that the demonized (or vampirized) woman in nineteenth-century literature and art really depicts a “hero who was strong enough to bear the hopes and fears of a century’s worship.” Auerbach’s comment may be true in some instances, but by and large the majority of women in vampire tales, at least in the early and mid-nineteenth century, were far too marginalized and victimized to be seen as heroic; like the male protagonists of those tales, who brutalized them, women vampires were generally perceived as loathsome and diseased.

Le Fanu’s “Carmilla” - the first vampire tale whose protagonist is a woman vampire - marks the growing concern about the power of female homosocial relationships in the nineteenth century. All of Carmilla’s predecessors - Lord Ruthven, Varney, Melmoth - were men. Le Fanu’s creation of a woman vampire anticipates the shift toward the end of the century to predominantly female vampires. In both art and literature, women and specifically women’s bodies became progressively associated with the vampire. One explanation for this shift, as Carol Senf points out, is the “growing awareness of women’s power and influence... [as] feminists began to petition for additional rights for women. Concerned with women’s power and influence, writers... often responded by creating powerful women characters, the vampire being one of the most powerful negative images.” But women’s potential power alone does not fully explain the proliferation of women vampires. The female body itself was demonized. According to Sian Macfie, “the function or dysfunction of the female body was juxtaposed with notions of the perceived threat of vampirism... [and these notions] were largely based upon a sense of women’s association with blood [as a result of menstruation]. However, the idea of female vampirism also came to be understood in a more figurative sense. In addition to the idea of literal contagion of the blood, vampirism came to be associatively linked to the notion of moral contagion and especially with the ‘contamination’ of lesbianism.” Citing Havelock Ellis, who hypothesized that “homosexuality... occurs with special frequency in women of high intelligence who... influence others,” Macfie concludes that “the notion of vampirism also came to be used metaphorically to refer to a social phenomenon, the ‘psychic sponge.’ The psychic sponge was understood to be a woman who was perceived [as] a drain on the energy and [the] emotional and intellectual resources of her companions.” As a result of women’s perceived link with vampirism, by the late nineteenth century “close female bonding and lesbianism are conflated with notions of the unhealthy draining of female vitality.”

“Carmilla“ is the vampire tale that most readily defines the established patriarchal systems of kinship discussed above and that most provokingly challenges nineteenth-century notions of the “contamination of lesbianism“ and the female “psychic sponge.“ Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire (1897) depicts an equally interesting lesbian vampire relation, offering insights into fin-de-siecle stereotypes of female sexuality and gendered identity, but Le Fanu’s tale is the first to investigate disruptive lesbian desire. Although “Carmilla“’s denouement is ambiguous, Le Fanu refrains from heavy-handed moralizing, leaving open the possibility that Laura’s and Carmilla’s vampiric relationship is sexually liberating and for them highly desirable. The ontological change in Laura between the beginning of the narrative and the end is never reversed, suggesting that her shifting desires are, for her, healthy and vital.

Le Fanu originally published “Carmilla” in the short-lived Victorian periodical The Dark Blue, then added the prologue and included the tale in In a Glass Darkly, five unrelated narratives held together by the figure of Dr. Hesselius, a student of psychic phenomena whose case histories make up these stories. Not only “the greatest” of Le Fanu’s works, “Carmilla” is also the most daring. It depicts a society where men increasingly become relegated to powerless positions while women assume aggressive roles. Le Fanu pushes his male characters, who lose all control over their women, towards the edge of his narrative. Ineffectual in either understanding or treating Styria’s baffling (female) “malady,” Le Fanu’s men suffer exclusion from male kinship systems because they are unable to exchange women. Instead, women control their own exchange, prompting W. J. McCormack to observe that in “Carmilla” “feminine nature is powerful, destructively powerful, and its objects become hypnotized (or hyperstatically controlled) in its power.” Le Fanu untethers “destructively powerful” feminine nature in “Carmilla” and refuses to thether it by the end of his story.

Part II is here.

[derstheviking]

Class Struggle or Postmodernism? Yes Please!

The Paris Commune holds a key to the historical materialist hypothesis that we have been wondering about. If it is true that the material world, the infrastructure, forms its very own dialectical contradictions in the face of existence itself, where the praxis that develops out of events of human activity is dialectically reflective of the economy and commodity production itself; in the Paris Commune of 1871 we see that the solution of the socialist mode of production (resolving the contradiction of private ownership) finds its way completely naturally from the localized contradictions and syntheses that drive history forward along the path towards socialism. Historical materialism needs to be a supplement to history but not to replace history itself. Thus, the socialist mode of production can be seen all throughout history, in Christian communities, the Iroquois, the Chachapoyas, the Shakers; these were all organic embodiments of communist practice that predated Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels. Therefore, whether the debate is about universalism, formalism, or foundationalism, class struggle finds its way into the equation, and communism is a universal, not a particular, that formalist logic is inherent in post-structuralism but must be overcome, and anti-foundationalism can be seen as an ideology that goes too far in rejecting historical and dialectical materialism, as Laclau and Mouffe do. The point here is to deconstruct the concepts of post-structuralists such as Foucault, Laclau and Mouffe, and Deleuze and Guattari, the concepts of the existentialists, the concepts of psychoanalysis, and the concepts of critical theory, and compare how they relate to the notion of class struggle.

Why then was it a unique idea that the base was dominant over the superstructure? We are not economic determinists, and do not conceive of a teleological relationship between the base and the superstructure, where one determines the other, as social complexity is self-evident that nothing exists in a vacuum, that human activity is the correlate subjective affect, that while public policy and academic political science would analyze the rationality or pragmatism of such a system, this is idealism, and we might as well be speaking of territorialized assemblages epistemologically if not just to grasp the idea of social complexity, but to make a case for transcendental materialism as the basic theory of subjectivity that best describes our current philosophical impasse. Badiou comments that Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘A Thousand Plateaus’, especially evident by the conclusion, is just as homogenous as a “One” as it is heterogeneous as an “Absolute” (concepts that will need further clarification include the rhizome, strata, territory, assemblages, and abstract machines). What value does post-structuralism offer that other theories do not in an analysis that explores post-Marxist political thought, and rejects neoclassical economics as a dishonest description of political economy, though taking a critical stance towards Ernesto Laclau’s final hypothesis of populism as a rejection of historical materialism, which was his (and Chantal Mouffe’s) basic intellectual project known as radical democracy, which bases itself as a series of contingencies that need constant resolution within the theory that the proletariat in a modern sense may no longer be the revolutionary class, that a multitude of political actors can make up the populist movements that progress history forward towards societal change within the confines of liberal democracy. Remember, Lenin clarifies in ‘The State and Revolution’ that the ‘withering away’ of the state only refers to the proletarian semi-state, and that in the case of a capitalist system of government, the state must be “smashed” or overthrown, and that the proletarian semi-state is to be built in its ashes. The ‘withering away’ of the proletarian semi-state however, has not shown to be an objective law of historical development, and as a result Marxists such as Slavoj Zizek have gone as far as to call themselves “closet Fukuyamaists”. This is almost what Laclau and Mouffe are concerned with in their theory of populism and radical democracy, and what Murray Bookchin understood as the need for the theory and praxis of libertarian municipalism and social ecology.

What do Bookchin’s and Laclau’s respective intellectual projects tell us about the state of historiography? What may be less (or more) controversial is the need for a “people’s history” but a thorough study of any people’s history will show us that ‘class struggle’ is the primary contradiction of any capitalist society and struggles such as feminism and anti-racism fall within economic struggles. A look at state university curriculum in areas of study such as political science and economics in the United States already reveals the privileging of a certain body of thought, namely positivism, or the neoliberal consensus, over that of critical theory; with education as only one form of hegemony, a meta-analysis of university curriculum proves that at least in academia, hegemony is a political force that is alive and well within our institutions. By choosing which information (along with the mass media) is taught and which isn’t, privileging one localized narrative over another, shows the hegemony of one body of thought over another, that dominates capitalism and puts forward a capitalist ideology instead of a socialist one; that as Althusser understood the function of ‘ideology’ to be, “the reproduction of the means of production”. Labor produces the commodity, but ideology as the “reproduction of the means of the production” acts as a literal “material force” showing the collective conscious as exhibiting not only hegemony, but arriving at a “point de caption” (i.e. Capitalism and Schizophrenia) of universality so that the established order (i.e. the status quo) is reproduced unconsciously such as professors deciding which information will be disseminated, and which will be ignored, establishing hegemony. And the university system is among the most not least “free” institutions in capitalist society. But what must be grasped if we are to arrive at a transcendental materialist understanding is that due to the conditions of the economy and the specific relationship of the individual to labor and commodities, we see the true meaning of the difference between “formal freedom” and “actual freedom”, and some freedoms such as the freedom to sell one’s labor on the open marketplace (or starve), must be specifically rejected if we are to create a society that is “actually free”, for “actual freedom” is the freedom from labor, from coercion, and from exploitation.