Queer Theory and the Struggle for a New Humanism

by Peter Wermuth

• The following contribution is developed from a section of a talk given to the 1998 Convention of News and Letters Committees, entitled "Concretizing Marxist-Humanism's Unique Contributions in Today's Freedom Movements and Battle of Ideas." Those interested in seeing the full talk, with its discussion of the challenges posed by our work on a new collection of Raya Dunayevskaya, The Power of Negativity, can find it in Post-Convention Discussion Bulletin no. 1, published by News and Letters Committees in September 1998

Our work in issuing a new collection of writings by Raya Dunayevskaya--entitled The Power of Negativity: Selected Writings on the Dialectic in Hegel, Marx, and Today--comes at an especially critical moment for queer activists and thinkers. The brutal murder of Matthew Shepard in Wyoming last month has reminded everyone of the daily violence, discrimination, and abuse meted out to gays, lesbians, and transgendered people in this country. Despite the contention of some, like Andrew Sullivan, that the significant gains made over the past three decades in recognizing gay lifestyles means that American society has become "amenable" to queer subjectivity, the facts of everyday life show that queers are still very much part of the "Other" of this system. A society as debased, as inhuman, as concerned for the self-improvement of things at the expense of individuals as this one has no basis to claim that it provides a basis for the flowering of a liberated sexuality. So long as there is one individual insulted, assaulted, or throttled because of their sexuality, that is as long as the power of negativity needs to be brought to bear on this stinking corpse of a system. That power of negativity clearly comes from within, because the avengers of Matthew Shepard's death are everywhere--everywhere that is, in that there is not one nook and cranny of this land in which queers are not to be found.

The question confronting us now, in 1998, is will our response to the conditions of depravity which stalk the objective terrain of this country be both consciously revolutionary and humanist? It is not a question that can be resolved simply through abstract and idle speculation. Humanity, Marx once wrote, "must prove the truth, i.e., the reality and power, the this-worldliness of his thinking in practice." That did not mean for Marx a turning away from the toilsome terrain of theory, but rather its intermergence with what he called practical-critical activity. This underlines the objectivity of our present effort to initiate an exploration of dialectics of negativity in relation to queer subjectivity. We wish to neither turn away from staring the barbarism of this system in the face, as if to do so is to implicate ourselves in that which is not our own, nor become so immersed in it that we end up becoming its mirror image. To oppose the full weight of what is, and still come out more human than before the endeavor, is the mark of being truly revolutionary. Wherein then, lies the theoretical ground that can lead to the development of a humanist expression of the subjectivity and creativity which inheres within the queer dimension? What is our starting point for embarking on an endeavor that seems to already have so long a history, and yet at the same time seems so very new?

We need to begin, not surprisingly, by being negative. This is not simply for the sake of undermining the pretensions of those who in looking for the silver lining save themselves the trouble of ever having to dig too deeply into anything. Rather, it is because because there are many alternatives out there in the freedom struggles and world of ideas which may seem attractive, but which in the end take us far from the Marx's concept of a new society. As Raya Dunayevskaya put it in her Notes on Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind, which will be published as part of The Power of Negativity, "In the struggle to realize freedom, we confront various attitudes of mind that sound heroic, but are in fact adaptations to one or another form of servitude." Without in any way implicating ourselves in the trap which Hegel identifies in the skeptical attitude, namely, being negative about all except its own negativism, our approach to the issues must be as profoundly critical as our thirst for a new beginning itself.

Take for instance Andrew Parker's all-too-influential essay, "Unthinking Sex: Marx, Engels and the Scene of Writing," published in 1993 in Fear of a Queer Planet. Though Parker feigns to provide his readers with a critique of Marx and Marxism, the real gist of his argument consists of a sharp critique of Engels for heterosexism, especially as expressed in a June 22, 1869 letter to Marx. In the letter Engels viciously attacked Karl Ulrichs, author of one of the first books advocating a repeal of anti-sodomy laws. Ulrichs was an associate of Johann von Schweitzer, leader of the Lassalleans, who of course was detested by both Marx and Engels for his advocacy of the politics of the man whom Marx called, with good reason, "the workers' dictator." The reason that Schweitzer enters into Parker's picture is that he was gay and attacked as such by Engels. Though there is little in Marx's writings to suggest the virulent opposition to homosexuality expressed in Engels' letter, there is also no proof that Marx objected to Engels' views; in fact Marx made some heterosexist comments of his own, referring to Ulrich in a later letter as "pederast." The critical question for today is not whether Marx personally supported homosexual rights, but whether his body of thought taken as a whole can account for gay subjectivity. Parker thinks it cannot. He argues through a rather superficial reading of one text by Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, that Marx's disdain for Bonaparte's theatricism showed that his emphasis on subjectivities shaped by production relations prevented him from displaying sensitivity and understanding toward questions of gender and sexuality. Parker, like many others, thinks that because Marx propagated a productivist theory, he was unable to deal with relations invoked by the world of play.

Recently, an effort to answer Parker has been made by Miranda Joseph, in "The Performance of Production and Consumption" (Social Text 54, Spring 1998). She writes, "There is a line of argument running from the Frankfurt School to some recent queer theory that attempts to account for the diversity of social movements, the diversity of axes of antagonism, by positing an exterior to production; these critiques posit production as creating a 'one dimensional,' rationalized, homogenized, and hegemonized society...[in contrast] the unproductive, equated with the heterogeneous, is celebrated as having a liberatory potential." In opposition to this trend, she argues that Marx had a broader notion of production than do most Marxists, which does speak to issues of gender and sexuality. She quotes Marx from The German Ideology: "Production must not be considered simply as the reproduction of the physical existence of the individuals. Rather, it is a definite form of expressing their life. As individuals express their life, so they are." This broader notion of production, she says, can speak to how gays and lesbians produce and reproduce their social reality. Those like Parker who break from Marx because of his emphasis on production relations, she argues, throw out the baby with the bath water, in that they dismiss the importance of Marx's critique of the specificity of capitalist production, which is responsible for the repression of subversive sexualities in the first place.

Interesting though it is, Joseph's approach has many problems. One is that she fails to show that Marx's view of production was based on a critique of human relations, which explains why he was also able to speak so profoundly to relations outside of production, such as the man/woman relation. Instead of defending Marx on the basis of his humanism, she argues that while Marx was right to focus on production, he still limited to analysis to what happens in the factory. To correct this, she argues, we need to amend Marx with insights derived from anti-humanists such as Michel Foucault and Judith Butler who focus on forms of domination occurring outside the factory. What it all means is that Joseph focuses not the subjectivity of gays and lesbians, but rather on the forms of domination which oppress them.

Joseph's failure to catch Marx's humanism shows that she skips over the dialectic of negativity. In his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 Marx issued a ruthless critique of capitalist production, culture, and science. In one of its most important essays, "Private Property and Communism," he called the man/woman relation the "most fundamental" in society and the measure as to whether it is really free. Many have tried to argue that this reveals Marx's tendency to naturalize heterosexual relations, but the critique curiously falls into precisely the trap that characterized the thinker whom Marx is often wrongly ascribed to be paraphrasing--Fourier. Marx certainly had a high regard for Fourier and often referred to him in a most favorable light. Yet as Simone de Beauvoir pointed out in The Second Sex, "Fourier confused the emancipation of women with the rehabilitation of the flesh, demanding for every individual the right to yield to the call of passion and wishing to replace marriage with love; he considered women not as a person but only in her amorous function." Despite the similarity in Marx's phrase of the man/woman relation as the "measure" of society with some of Fourier's comments, his concept was radically different from Fourier's. Marx is not discussing the man/woman relation simply in sexual terms. He is viewing it as a social relation, one which is the "measure" of all other relations in society.

The question to be asked then, is how did Marx manage to reach this profound understanding of man/woman relations when his main concern was the alienation of labor at the point of production? It isn't as if there was a mass women's liberation movement at the time, even though there was the tremendous work of Flora Tristan, whom Marx certainly knew of and supported. So how did Marx manage to catch the importance of the man/woman relation? The answer was his deep-rootedness in the dialectic of negativity. That helped him see that the workers' struggle against alienated production relations cannot stop at the first negation, the elimination of the personifications of capital, but had to continue in permanence until new human relations were created at the point of production. Without getting to the negation, not just of property and class relations, but of "the negation of the negation," the creation of a new humanism, no revolution, Marx held, could truly flower. That emphasis on second negativity in turn provided Marx with the ears to hear the quest for new human relations on the part of women. His deep-rootedness in the dialectic of absolute negativity, a dialectic which he drew from Hegel though not without a relentless critique of him, enabled him to see the connection between two seemingly unconnected struggles--the workers' battle at the point of production and the efforts of women to oppose sexism in intrapersonal relations.

This integrality is carried through and developed further by the philosophy of Marxist-Humanism. It can especially be seen in Dunayevskaya's book Women's Liberation and the Dialectics of Revolution. Its Introduction/Overview says that to grasp the newness of the women's movement we must situate it in the context of the new stage of cognition born from the 1949-50 miners' general strike. That strike, in raising the question of "what kind of labor should man do," gave new concreteness to Marx's emphasis on human relations. The workers were not simply opposing the immediate objects of oppression, inequities of property and income. They were addressing questions which Marx identified as the object of the second negation, such as the nature of work in society and how it can be totally transformed. In focusing on how to transform human relations in production, the workers were reaching for a fuller expression of the Idea of freedom. Though it may not have seemed directly connected to women's liberation, that was not the case for Dunayevskaya. By no accident, the second chapter of Women's Liberation and the Dialectics of Revolution is a 1950 essay entitled "The Miners' Wives." Though no one at the time pinpointed the central role played by women in that strike as the harbinger of a new kind of feminist movement, Dunayevskaya was catching the emergence of something very new that was in the air. It took on new and much more explicit life a decade later, with the women's liberation movement. Women were now opposing male chauvinism, not just in general, but within the Left itself. They were not going to wait until after the revolution to have their voice be heard. They were thereby, without any direct consciousness of it, positing, in their critique, the kind of standpoint which Marx characterized as "second negativity." For Dunayevskaya, it meant that women were not just force, but Reason of revolution.

Raya was able to catch the meaning of these developments because she measured the revolts by the explicit philosophic projection of Marx's Humanism. As she put it in a 1985 essay in The Power of Negativity on "Dialectics of Revolution and Women's Liberation," "Marx was not exclusively a feminist but a 'new Humanist.' The fact that feminism is part of Humanism and not the other way around does not mean that women's liberation becomes subordinate. It only means that philosophy will not again be separated from revolution, or Reason separated from force. Even Absolute Method becomes only the 'road to' Absolute Idea, Absolute Mind."

Women's Liberation and the Dialectics of Revolution is not a work about the gay and lesbian dimension. Yet its methodology of comprehending the subjectivity of a particular force in the context of a philosophy which makes explicit the underlying humanism of today's struggles very much speaks to ongoing developments in queer theory. It is true that gays and lesbians have been questioning conventional society for well over a century. But at the same time, it is no accident that an openly gay movement first arose in the post- World War II era. Did not the posing of such questions as what kind of labor, and what kind of relations between men and woman, create the humus for an actual movement to emerge questioning the nature of sexuality in modern society? If that is so, then does not the methodology by which Dunayevskaya put together Women's Liberation and the Dialectics of Revolution illuminate how to articulate queer subjectivity today? Concretizing that methodology can allow us to unfurl a humanist banner against both the growing rightist attacks on gays and lesbians as well as the tendency of many queer theorists to denigrate humanism in favor of an emphasis on theories of domination.

The denigration of humanism in queer theory has a long history, and no one should be fooled into denying that this does not remain the predominant tendency within it. The origins of and reasons for this are many, but they are especially striking in one of the most important works written on queer theory, Guy Hocquenghem's Homosexual Desire (first published in France in 1972). Basing himself on a critical reading of Freud, Lacan, and Deleuze- Guattari, Hocquenghem sought to articulate a revolutionary basis of queer subjectivity. He writes, 'Practicing' homosexuals are, in a sense, people who have failed their sublimation; they are 'incapable of fully assembling the demands which nature and culture impose on individuals.' To fail one's sublimation is in fact merely to conceive social relations in a different way." In this sense, he argues, "The gay movement is a wildcat movement, because it is not the signifier of what might become a new form of 'social organization,' a new stage of civilized humanity, but a crack in what Fourier calls 'the system of the falsity of civilized loves'; it demonstrates that civilization is the trap into which desire keeps falling." Yet though his initial effort to theorize the revolutionary potential of the gay movement in light of such ongoing struggles as the wildcat strikes of workers seems promising, it quickly becomes clear that Hocquenghem's real concern is not so much the articulation of revolutionary subjectivity as much as providing an explanation of the social and psychic factors which shape its emergence. In other words, he too ends up articulating a theory of domination. As Michael Moon said in his Introduction to the English edition, "Althusser's theorization of the interpellation of the subject of ideology...is also an indispensable context for this book."

One need not revert to the criticism leveled at Hocquenghem by Marxists such as Henri Lefebvre--who called his work "the belated theorization of a version of 'leftism' that has run aground on the politicalization of this or that real but peripheral issue (prison, drugs, insanity, etc.) and has then sunk back into a negation of the political"--to see its limitations. Because Hocquenghem's focus is forms of domination which shape different subjectivities, in the end he gives up the effort to articulate any inter-connections between them. After all, the social factors which shape labor power into a commodity at the point of production are quite different from those which shape sexual identity. He therefore concludes, "The gay movement does not start as the traditional workers' movement would like, from a strategy based on general political theories....It is therefore no use trying to work out the relationships between these movements in rational or strategic terms." With that as his standpoint, it is no wonder that he ends by attacking humanism: "The sexualization of the world heralded by the gay movement pushes capitalist decoding to the limit and corresponds to the dissolution of the human; from this point of view, the gay movement undertakes the necessary dehumanization."

Though Hocquenghem was trying to project a position opposed to capitalist social relations in all its forms, once the humanist dimension was spirited away what too easily rushed in to fill the void left by it was an avowal of specific sexual practices as what defines one's revolutionary subjectivity. The problem with that approach, of course, is that it underestimates the extent to which any specific sexual practice can, given certain conditions, become integrated into capitalism's logic of commodification. There is no specific kind of act or standpoint which capitalism has not found a way to coopt, commodify, or pervert in some form. What capitalism has much more trouble dealing with, however--precisely because it runs counter to the very nature of commodification itself--are relations of reciprocity, respect and humanism that are attained through the struggle for liberated human relations. Decency is the one thing that cannot be commodified.

Here, once again, is where "measuring every particular reality by the Idea," as Marx once put it, takes on tremendous importance. In one of her last writings, Raya said she wrote the Introduction/ Overview to Women's Liberation and the Dialectics of Revolution because "I decided that if it is true, as I think it is, that 'Not by Practice Alone' was not fully grasped, it certainly will not be seen in women's liberation" ("July 1984 to June 1987," Supplement to the Raya Dunayevskaya Collection, #10983). She therefore decided to make explicit what "would not be obvious" -- namely, that each writing came out of "the projection of Marxist-Humanism." She added, "This led to the conclusion that Marxist-Humanism is the Absolute Idea of our age" ("1987's relationship to 1953," Supplement to the RDC, #10969). This, it seems to me, establishes the ground and direction for what we do in all areas of our work.

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