Problems of Relativism of Non-Postmodern Varieties

[Mark Jones]

Under the guise of abandoning the neurosis, guilt and parsimony
of the patriarchal personality, which was a principal social
invention of 19th century capitalism, and stimulated by the mass
conscription of women into the labour-force, capital
attempts to deconstruct the family as a residual instance of
solidarity against capital, and to pull away the psychic supports of
a personality-template organised around a psychic centre of
sacrifice, heterosexual gender identity, sexual control and
repression of the feminine. In its place we are witnessing the
creation of a new personality-type adequate to global capital
which has subordinated the family as well as the nation,
commoditising their functions and liquidating the arsenal of
atavistic symbols of community, mystery, sacrifice and other-
directed struggle, seen as no longer required to legitimise
bourgeois hegemony and objectively now only the rags of archaic
value-system, absorbed by the deceitful misogynies of the New
Right and no more than a menace to Neo-liberalism.

The new ludic, androgynous personality, playful, self-regarding,
narcissistic perhaps, is meant to be incapable of solidarity or
commitment; post-modern feminism has made of the great
feminist issues a study in misanthropic self-glorification and
gender-hatred. Conceiving of emancipation as freedom from
biology (universally misunderstood as 'sociobiology' by writers
like Judith Butler, Teresa de Lauretis, Kaja Silverman, whose
followers amplify their own profound ignorance of real science),
they wilfully reject any notion of genetic determination of the
personality or gender-identity.

Only a dramatic social crisis, removing many social support-
systems and throwing individuals back on their own resources, is
likely to revive collective forms of activity which in any case are
likely to seem contradictory, anachronistic and ineffective, even
ludicrously so. The introjection of capitalist-spectacle has
overwhelmed forms of mass resistance even in semi-colonial
peripheries where people have far less to gain from collusion;
nevertheless the symbolic power of capital and its self-
aggrandising brand name-imagery and its pervasive suasion of
self-provision, even in circumstances where no form of self-help
makes any sense, has swept all before it.

Mark Jones
http://netcomuk.co.uk/~jones_m/index