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MIM received some letters spinning off the Kristeva discussion. The most pointed letters asked about the difference between self-criticism and Catholic confession. We also opened up some discussion on style, which Kristeva says each individual has a biologically-given one.
Dear MIM:Another comment we received was: "you shouldn't pick on people who have only the image to live by." People stuck in style and pornography are to be seen as "deprived" our critic says and "not everyone can afford to be" in the world of real relationships. We will make some more comments on style and the concept of deprivation people feel MIM is asking for after we talk further about self-criticism.
I don't know why self crit makes me feel like I'm meant to beg like a dog. I don't beg. MIM ought to post self crit information more prominently. I did a quick search on MIM and found no general guide to self criticism and doubt I would find one on IRTR. Prove me wrong. MIM needs to post a prominent SC guide. SC is too close to psycho-analysis to be able to be done effectively without a guide. It will inevitably be poisoned by catholic confessional guilt and protestant/jewish psycho-analysis unless active steps are taken to stop that with a prominent maoist materialist guide. I did not find that in the top 30-40 results for a search of self criticism on the MIM website.Without something as fundamental as "on contradiction" discussing the nature of self criticism, how and why to do it -- I might as well be going to a catholic confessional ("oh I am so guilty! I am such a bad maoist! Forgive me! Forgive me!") or a Freudian psychoanalytical protestant-jewish Weberian duet ("Well, you see, X, has a confict between the maoist superego and his own id") or better still, Reich ("X has broken out of his body armor, and none of you have! no wonder you want to repress her!). I am not joking. I am entirely serious. No maoist guide to s.c. = watered down and regurgitated catholic psychoanalysis.
We are still taking discussion and comments on the Kristeva paper till October 1 when we will finalize it.
The most common Western reference point for Maoist style self-criticism is still the priest/rabbi/reverend. A Maoist prison warden is supposed to be helpful in self-criticism for the inmates the way we imagine a Catholic priest taking confession.
Nonetheless, there are important differences between self-criticism and Catholic confession, differences that are especially important in moving beyond advanced capitalism.
A. Question of authority
There is no authority in Maoist self-criticism. Criticism and self-criticism are not correct because the party mandated them or someone you admire did so. Self- criticism is correct or not correct for ideological and scientific reasons, scientific reasons having precedence.
The belief in authority including the party is only an approximation, a helpful starting place. Going beyond advanced capitalism requires that increasing portions of society are able to function self-critically without authority.
If you "don't have time," you may want to consider the likelihood that the party or someone else would be right and you should follow what they are saying to save time and still advance together with the international proletariat.
There are also people "with time" but without sufficient drive to function very well apart from a hard-driving vanguard party. These sorts of people are apt to innovate toward the petty-bourgeois definition of "sectarianism." It also stands to reason that a party is going to do a better job, based on more investigation, concerning questions of sorting out friends and enemies.
None of this means there is no authority in society or one's party. Believing that we can leap from self-criticism to life as a whole is connected to the questions of sub-reformism and pornography--questions at the center of the rejection of Lenin's contributions to scientific communism. We Maoists do not believe that just because there is no role for authority in self-criticism and criticism except dictated by narrow needs, that that means there is no authority in proletarian organizations or society. Our criticism and self-criticism do not eliminate authority in society at large. See below.
B. Question of power
In the Cultural Revolution in China, there was perhaps the largest experiment with criticism and self-criticism in connection to politics. By 1968, Mao concluded it was not possible to simply tell people to go out and criticize and self-criticize bourgeois ideology. What ended up happening was "revolutionizing others" and "not ourselves." Public self-criticism also tended to water down political criticisms of the top power-holders on the capitalist-road. People ended up flailing themselves and neighbors while the overall capitalist leaders went scott-free.
Public criticism and self-criticism can be initial starting points--reference points. As part of MIM's criticism of sub-reformism, we have supported the line that says internal self-criticism is the goal, not public criticism followed by self-criticism for all people. Public criticism needs to focus on the enemy class and overall structure of society. The problem with public criticism and self-criticism, especially in China was that it blurred class. One moment we would be criticizing a peasant and the next minute the top capitalist-roader in the country.
In imperialist countries we have a different problem. Being exploiter populations, the imperialist country peoples do deserve public criticism. However, inevitably what actually happens is a distraction.
Public criticism and self-criticism may be great examples to start the kettle boiling. Once the kettle is boiling in each of us, we should just keep it going inside our own heads without public criticism and self-criticism.
C. Question of progress
For Maoists, we do self-criticism to improve in this lifetime. Catholics do not necessarily know if they improve with confession. They are told just to repent their sins. For Catholics, the humyn stays weak and apt to sin in ways the individual is not even capable of understanding the whole life long.
We Maoists attempt to improve, not just ourselves but our surrounding environment. Our self-criticism has objectives in this world.
D. Self-criticism vs. pc
Maoist self-criticism often gathers analogies to "political correctness" culture as understood today. Again, as with Catholic confession, there is overlap. The problem is that while some of the agenda of issues covered may be the same, pc is a schematization, while self-criticism is part of a scientific production process that pc does not care about.
The cauldron of self-criticism should be boiling hot at all times until the day the species faces no mortal threats. This has many implications for pc. For example, people have varying levels of self-criticalness in their persynality. The Maoist should be at the high end. For this, we CAN take a common "Dianetics" cult test on the street to see how self-critical we are; although the Hubbard cult will tell us that self-criticism is a flaw!
The trouble occurs in relations where others may not share the self-critical assumption. For example, someone may be a 10 on the self-critical scale and a 7 on the critical scale, but the 7 may still be too much for someone used to a 3. So we Maoists can come across the wrong way. We may seem to be "revolutionizing others and not ourselves" when in fact we just have boiling cauldrons all the time that would be too hot for many other people to touch in any fashion. This is another reason that if we can go to a system of non-public self-criticism that would be better and then not criticize others except in regard to political leaders.
Inevitably, that is the ideal that we fail to meet. For example, at some point there has to be purges. Rotten wood accumulates and has to be purged. Sometimes we have to make judgments regarding people who are not necessarily the greatest political obstacles unfortunately.
So anyway, someone who is a 10 in self-criticism and a 7 in criticism will still come across as "aggressive toward wimmin" that the pc wants to protect from criticism. In fact, the pc culture has invented a whole ideology of "self- esteem" for wimmin that Maoists do not agree with.
The same is true of nationality. Stalin said scientific criticism across nationality should not be attempted; although in practice, he certainly carried out the most in his day. So this is a sticking point in our theory.
For someone who is already a Maoist, there should be no problem taking criticism from rich, male KKK members. We take it in from everywhere and sift through it all. It does not mean we accept the criticism, but we do not reject something strictly because our feelings are hurt or because the criticism did not conform to a pc code. We don't say "you're just saying that because you are anti-X chauvinists." That can be a big cop out.
Our self-division on this question is how to handle people who are not already Maoists with a boiling cauldron inside. Inevitably we do some of both: try to convince people that their standards adopted from pc are wrong and at the same time criticize in practice.
Even if someone is a 7 in self-criticism and a 10 in criticism, we need to protect criticism at least enough to prevent its being thrown out just for identity reasons. Kristeva said our whole movement would inevitably boil down to identity, and we have to give her credit considering what happened in the late 1980s and 1990s, but we are fighting that fate that she predicts.
At the same time we should not underestimate others' self-critical abilities. To take action in this society for communism means a self-critical getting off of the butt. If we see action on behalf of revolutionary communism, we should probably assume that it comes from self-criticism, because it is easier to coast in spontaneous bourgeois comfort than to take proletarian action.
E. Self-criticism vs. pornography
A common complaint about pornography is that it does not involve "real wimmin," which means both extremes of body type and that it takes the relationship out of gender interactions. Here we do not mean the verbal baggage as some men would put it in contrast with sexual acts themselves. Two people having sex are having a relationship at that moment, in terms of this use of the word "relationship."
Some kinds of pornography appear to remove relationships, by putting the focus on one consumer and a mere picture. In Catholic confession, there is nothing wrong about speaking of third parties. In Maoist self-criticism there may be two things wrong with involving third parties: 1) it may be an attempt to escape criticism and self-criticism; 2) it may be attempting pornographic enjoyment of the third party. When three or more parties are reduced to two or one, there is the danger that the image is being substituted for the relationship being cut out of the picture. If a member of the flock told her priest she wanted to have sex with him and did so during confession, that is directly relational and not a major concern via pornography, unless she does so to mock the priest via third parties.
Inevitably, some of MIM's writing offends people and borders on pornography. In some cases it may come from actual persynal experience. In most cases, people feel that MIM is talking about them when MIM does not even know them. At the same time, MIM writing is highly anonymous, so the pornographic element is further reduced--another plus for anonymous writing.
As Foucault pointed out, when a persyn confesses sexual sin involving a third persyn to a priest, the more complete the confession in concrete detail the more pornographic it is. Why? We always have to be careful about the third persyn. It is the structure of Catholic confession that makes it inherently pornographic. It is not a confession in the presence of third parties involved. It is a confession turning at least two relationships into one. For some, this will indicate the futility of opposing pornography. For others, it will force recollection of society without individualism, and the problem Mao had with the ultra-left in the Cultural Revolution.
As an opposite but equally pornographic response, we get the anarchist who believes that everything sexual should be public right now. Inevitably, because we still have private property, this attempt also fails and only mass produces pornography even faster than the Catholic Church can.
Many from Asian cultures may be yet incapable of theoretical discussion, but they have strong prohibitions or taboos against third party discussion--a public sense of the "erotic" as Kristeva would call it. To these people, Westerners may appear very undisciplined about something we would call pornography.
So, in the guise of doing something moral, we paint a picture for the enjoyment of a second party we have a relationship with, in this case a Catholic priest. To do so means to compress the relationship of another into a package consumable by others--the essence of pornography.
MIM has often talked about the difficulties of raising children responsibly. The child is another question of a third party usually between a man and womyn. The child is a third party in her own right and should not be subordinated to a relationship between two people. Especially men should not think, "it's up to her." Likewise, wimmin should not accept the idea that what she wants is necessarily good for the child.
In the short-run, there is no escaping all pornography, but we should be aware of the difficulty. At the margin, if we can stay out of involving third parties in our public self-criticism, we should do so. One of the reasons that people turn to art and literature is that is may be possible to express something from persynal experience without pornographically violating a relationship. Oddly, heterosexual wimmin are often turning to these outlets to talk about men indirectly for fear of violating men pornographically.
MIM would not complain about wimmin's involvement in art and literature if not for the lack of theory in the feminist movement. At the same time, Western womyn retains a sense of pornography as defined here being bad for both men and wimmin. It's just that the edge and practice to this sense is being lost. MIM needs to popularize a certain sense of pornography and then struggle against it.
Pornography as an entertainment dynamic compressing relationships out of life is important to our entire political thrust in the imperialist countries. It has to do with why we watch TV instead of living our own reality TV series or doing our own sports instead of spectating. Satisfaction with the image in imperialist country conditions has its own logic destructive of the revolution.
Asking for self-criticism from others can also be part of combating pornography. If we ask someone we know something about to make self-criticism, that is on account of a relationship we have. At the same time, again, during the Cultural Revolution, the decision came forward that it's not generally how we hope things to occur. The goal itself is not to ask others for self-criticisms. We should do so when we believe someone is getting off the Maoist road or making a major choice going down the wrong road.
We've had a discussion of style with ex-Soviet bloc people and Asians in connection to Kristeva.
There are those who agree with Kristeva straight-up, including that individuals each have their own biologically-given style, much the way we often hear that the best musicians or composers have god-given talents or math-like abilities connected to beauty. From there it follows that some people have "taste" and others do not or there is a hierarchy in style-matters.
MIM has responded that beliefs about style hierarchies stem from the class structure of society. So broadly-speaking we have those who are Western oriented modernizers--people who in Russia, Poland, China etc. where the question of economic development is on the agenda. In such places, there tends to be a strong belief that there is a style hierarchy, and one of the great unspoken mysteries of our time for these people is why when they visit the united $tates, young and affluent people seem not to have style. For example, "Grunge" is taken as particularly perverse, a sort of "pretending to be poor" in the eyes of those who cannot find any reference point for Nirvana or Pearl Jam. Meanwhile, for more than one comrade from differing Asian countries, wimmin being their proper selves will wear high heels to the beach or hiking in the mountains and imagine that that is what having the good life is.
People who are able to articulate this set of questions from countries that are not majority exploiter like the united $tates are actually unconscious gender bureaucrats. The belief that each individual has a style is historical idealism, a bourgeois ideology disguised only for being in style matters and not matters of direct economics.
In a strange way, the Taliban obliterates the wimmin's clothing style hierarchy in its own way; although, we hear that even with the burka businesspeople try to come up with some fine matters of appearance difference and so not all burkas are exactly the same. At the opposite end from the Taliban in the class exploiter spectrum is the rich white womyn who embraces pornography. Here we speak of Britney Spears, Madonna etc.
Imperialist country man has transitioned to pornographic style in a fully conscious manner. He will give a certain number of dollars or popularity contest votes to Britney Spears, Madonna and J Lo etc. J Lo may be the real killer example, where when imperialist country man does not care where a womyn comes from as long as she "looks like J Lo." J Lo has her "own style" recognized as not in conformity with what we expect of the rich or sexy. Yet her approach is successful, because we do have long-standing democracy and shopping for the middle-classes. There is no real gain in knocking down J Lo's style in reference to previous style. So there is this message that it is not really class and nation anymore: it's straight-up gender questions, questions of the entertainment dynamic in imperialist countries. Even J Lo can just show up and decide what style should be.
In this sphere it is the female that tries desperately to defend the class structure with clothing style obsession. It was not always so and the change in pattern historically is important. 200 years or more ago, a Western man could establish his class through purchase of expensive clothing. Even having a coat could be an indication in many circumstances. His clothing would also reflect on his daughter. Most people in the world still believe this is true, but the pattern has broken in the imperialist countries. Now it is womyn who tries to cling to class through clothing, mainly as part of an exchange with men. Some wimmin continue to believe there is a way to "trick" men with style. She hopes to exchange style for favorable conditions of sexual interaction.
Wimmin now account for the vast majority of clothing shopping. The varieties of style and "choice" are a camouflage for gender oppression. Distracted by arguments of style, many wimmin fail to notice the overall historical trends and patterns. It's like MIM says: "choice" in the case of incest is indeed choice, but the whole U.$. abortion debate misses what is really important there, the underlying problem of incest. It seems that the debates all occur at one level, unconnected to the real questions of oppression. That is the nature of capitalism--to conceal oppression in questions of exchange and choice.
Of course, we are not in communism yet, so there is still an effect of class and national background on gender style in the imperialist countries. Yet influence of class is diminishing in certain areas within the imperialist countries and leaving gender in its place.
When we see Britney Spears, she has millions. She spends it on her wardrobe but at the same time, pieces of her wardrobe are found at the "Gap," where everyone shops. In fact, it is in the interest of Britney Spears to wear clothing that she endorses and can be bought in the "Gap," because that is where the biggest endorsement deals lie. There are stores such as "St. Johns" where it is possible to spend thousands per dress, but on the whole, few can see any advantages in such a competition, when the clothes often look the same as those at 2% of the cost. So despite their millions, it comes down to "exposing what they've got" for Britney Spears, J Lo etc. When she lost her star husband Brad Pitt, TV "Friends" star Jennifer Aniston did a magazine cover posing nude with just denim shorts on to signal her comeback from supposed depression and inactivity. There is nothing in her millions that really helps her, except of course to eat well, exercise and not work too hard. When it comes to her "style," there was nothing that her millions helped her do for that photo. Likewise, Britney Spears can spend as much as she wants but she will be remembered for her miniskirt, not really something about clothing style as conceived by those who are the true believers of such style.
It would be tempting for the ideologists of style to say that Jennifer Aniston lives a different life away from the magazine covers and TV appearances where she has an upper-class style. That would be wishful thinking. It is the richest of the best-looking of our Hollywood stars who have brought democracy and shopping to style, and therefore killed the pretensions of style. There is only a small residual of a style hierarchy left, gradually fading out.
The last frontier of the style hierarchy is kiddy porn, which is another reason why the anorexic look appears. Spanish reformists just succeeded as we write this in banning models below a certain weight for height ratio. So even this last refuge of style hierarchy is under global attack.
There is no longer a severe class contradiction within the oppressor nations, but there is a newly arising gender oppressor. The last prop of style hierarchy says that we basically need wimmin who look like children--skinny and frail-looking, the way children are also light and physically immature. Then if we model clothing for such people, there is a hierarchy, the last one possible to impose. Everyone else can be told to wear clothing to cover their "defects," which amount to size. The link to kiddy porn is reinforced by the bourgeois ethic of "trying harder," the will to diet as an indicator of a persyn's spiritual worth, and likely value as an employee.
This even works, because imperialist country females struggle desperately to defend the class order in style matters. Men do not prefer Kate Moss above others, but there is no doubting the hierarchy she or her promoters promote.
Others will propose their styles and propose that those who do not conform have their own different so-called defects. Each style proposed has in common the underlying defense of a style hierarchy. The nit-pickers of style will argue endlessly with each other while sharing the underlying premise.
In countries where only 10% enjoy a u.$. standard of living, everyone remains as mystified as ever by style questions. For them, the u.$. class structure makes no sense in a style and culture sort of way. Devastating criticism along these lines can be found in a book called, Class: A Guide Through the American Status System by Paul Fussell. Our migrants and recent immigrants will find this book most devastating, because it explains internally what Amerikkkans are really doing in their lifestyles.
In some countries, it is possible to be rich and have no democracy. Places such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia spring to mind. The shopping there is possible, but the view of equality in participation has not come into focus yet.
In India, there is democracy, but no widespread shopping to end all shopping. It is still possible to confuse style with class there, because money will be a big factor in many gender questions and competitions.
Where there is democracy and effective shopping by a petty-bourgeoisie, the ultimate work of all style consultants, designers etc. is to end up in pornography. All efforts of artists, reviewers, aesthetes--all end up culminating in the taste of Britney Spears.
In retort, our ideologues of style, the gender bureaucrats will say Amerikans need to be taught style. Yet here again, our ideologue exposes himself. Where do wimmin in the world have more education than in the united $tates? So how is it that as people become better educated they have less appreciation for style that supposedly has a basis for it akin to math or music imitating math? Again, the educated have chosen Britney Spears. She has reached her zenith and the whole trend to pornography has reached its height just as females became more educated than ever. We will recognize this or hand over reality to Islam, which is happy to point out the facts.
Had it not been for economic change, it would be more difficult to show that style is actually rooted in economics, not god-given appreciation of symmetry, proportion, music and math. When the clothing of the upper-classes was out of reach of the paupers, the style hierarchy had the class system defending it. Once super-profits enriched hundreds of millions and created a culture based on that, style hierarchy in its original form fell. Now those who are sexy and pornographic tell us what style is--J Lo for example. It's a transition from class to gender hierarchy--within the oppressor nation willing to accept and consume tokens of oppressed nations.
Yet as the imperialist country female has less appreciation of sex for its own sake, she defends her 'ho status by obsessive interest in style. I recently visited a mall with 70 shops for wimmin's clothing, fully 30 of which were shoes only. The 30 shoe stores are actually along with Kate Moss, another sign of the desperation of the style hierarchy.
In actual fact, men do not give their greatest attention to wimmin's shoes. As likely as not, the whole shoe question will annoy men. Yet the shoe obsession is as far as the 'ho is willing to go to abandon the interests of men. She is not willing to give up shopping for style.
Shopping for wimmin's clothing is now about pornography, showing off what we have. If we do not, we simply will not get attention and others will. When we feel like revolting against questions of dress size, we can buy shoes as a refuge from more direct pornography. Nonetheless, we stay in bounds of the system by getting those shoes.
The imperialist country female continues to prefer to believe that style competition is bound up with class competition. If that is not conscious, then it is unconscious in believing that style is tied up with competing for men. But the real logic of such style in this day is ultimately pornography. Pornography is a style, even if many who defend style hierarchy will not recognize it as such.
Monogamy also plays a negative role in the style conflict of the shopping mall. Where the objective is to rope a man for life, interest in style intensifies, with the hope that it fools men into opposing their own wandering sexual interests. The need for supposed uniqueness spurs on the need for more shopping choice and more time spent at the mall. Nonetheless, MIM does not oppose monogamy, because while monogamy props up the class system, we cannot be rid of it till after we are rid of the class system.
Opposition to the interchangeability of people in romantic relations is also a kind of individualism, a metaphysical one. Yet opposing it is as wrong as trying to say we should just adjust our attitude toward theft while living in the capitalist system. It's missing the point.
Concern with style and shopping fetishism can be fighting pornography with pornography. What is important is that it did not work: that's how we know this is not a discussion of theory for its own sake. The expansion of shopping rights for hundreds of millions and the growth of clothing corporation competition led inexorably to the state of pornography we live in now. That factual pattern is important, not whether MIM's theories make people feel good or not.
The myth of the individual's so-called style and shopping choice are not only not bases to oppose pornography: they are props of pornography. Instead of putting focus on what is wrong with the relationship between men and wimmin globally, we had an elite go shopping. So as "Code Pink" said at various anti-Iraq-War demonstrations, "we're wimmin; we're marching and we're not shopping!"
When parents argue with teenage boys, the boys say, "you let me have Michael Jordan posters on the wall. So what's wrong with porn star Jenna Jameson? You are just being prudes." The correct answer is, "yes, we were just being prudes. So now we will oppose the Michael Jordan poster too. We oppose all iconic individualism and we want you to have an active role in life of your own and worship your own achievements instead of consuming the images of others for fun." The video game is a step up from television, because the player takes an active role. When we are able to criticize a video game politically we are on our way to having a relationship with society again, and not the domination of the image.
The second part of the answer about "prudes" is that open sexuality is not beneficial to most people in the world. This is not about just a teenage boy in an imperialist country who is in no way threatened by sexuality. It is about people in large parts of the world who are indeed threatened by sexuality, including people literally traded as sex slaves. We don't want to burden the imperialist country teenager too much with becoming a "normal adult." At the same time, this struggle is the same as all other struggles with the exploiter-oppressor populations in general: the full answer requires internationalism. We cannot expect the Amerikan teenager to know anything about the world as a whole. We must bring that knowledge of reality from the outside, the job of the vanguard party.
Style for its own sake, music and art for their own sakes--these are tied up with sex for its own sake. Consistent feminism opposes them all and inevitably earns the label of "Stalinist" from the bourgeoisie. For many this will seem like we are "kill-joys." Yet in the last moments of the last of the movie series called "Lord of the Rings," the most crazed pursuer of the ring symbolizing power grabs the ring only to hold it and look at it. As Sméagol falls into the fire, he is still happy. He was so crazed by the power system for so long that all that remained was a fetishized pursuit of power, so he never actually put the ring on; even though, that is what brings power. He found joy in the ring and was able to save Frodo from Frodo's relationship to the ring, because he himself did not really have a relationship to power anymore. Even stuck in the lava flow, Sméagol still reached up happily for the ring. So it is with style. What we find pleasing today is a vestige of power hierarchy. The vestige is pornography.
Conscious men and gender bureaucracy do take pleasure in sex for its own sake and they will resist revolution. Yet even their resistance will be nothing again compared with the resistance of those who actually live the pornographic life of the image and not anything real. To them it will seem we Maoists take away everything that is worth living for. They forget that in the "Lord of the Rings," the ring symbolized both power and style, but a cooperative effort still occurred to destroy it. The trees themselves took sides in the war that led to the destruction of the ring. When the heroes destroyed the ring, they had only 10,000 years of mythology to guess what would happen next; still, they took the chance. Perhaps our style-obsessed should consider what they think of Sméagol.
Another movie relevant to Kristeva and style is Schwarzenegger's "Conan: the Barbarian." At the end, Conan confronts the snake-man who killed his mother and father. The snake-man leader of a cult asks Conan, if he is not now his father, "the lifespring from which you flow." After all, the snake-man had motivated Conan all these years and even taught Conan "the riddle of steel." Conan paused momentarily with this question of the nature of the father, and then killed the snake-man. Then a cult of thousands with its own dress and religious codes lost interest in what they were doing and disbanded. There were many reactionary contexts in that movie, but Conan still killed off the father-figure. The essential question boils down to what we imagine happens to the cult followers after the death of the father. Perhaps it is true in some sense that the cult-followers lost all that is good to them. They even had a relationship with this father figure, because he did speak before them from time to time. Yet we would say that those people can still go on to something else better and without a father-figure. Better relationships are possible.
Kristeva would say that our quest for communist revolution can only come from a totalitarian urge, a homosexual brotherhood capable of killing off the father and sharing out his former powers. In other words, people who bring about equality destroy the power to judge. Their preferred sexuality centers on the unisex anus and the style of the revolutionary comes from an identity of equals hostile to the father. We are stating the exact same thing when we say that communist revolutionaries destroy style by killing the authority that discerns it. In this, we at MIM see a desperate 'ho-dom in Kristeva's case, an irrational fear of loss of style and a denial that the masses can achieve a united judgment or scientific ability with more rational benefits than strong leadership by even the greatest of scientists. These are concrete questions each. In answer to these questions, even the reactionary "Lord of the Rings" is more progressive along these lines than Kristeva.
Kristeva took the progressive side in almost all gender struggles but she abandoned only the struggle against pornography. From there, everything else unravelled. She could only see an impossible struggle with a reference to a primal horde at the core of the struggle against pornography. Now she accepts Liberal arguments about the inherent limits of wimmin's liberation. She failed to be moved by the fact that wimmin and children cannot benefit from sex for its own sake, except for privileged minorities we call "gender aristocracy," people promoted to being men despite biology. Instead, Kristeva offers us never-ending gender conflict of an ambiguous sort as a superior kind of Liberalism.
MIM seeks to extend many people's intuitive sense of pornography to society more generally. The idea that there is a problem of relating to an image instead of a persyn goes far beyond just gender relations as narrowly defined. The problem of satisfaction with images instead of relationships extends to all leisure-time pursuits--what MIM calls the dynamics of gender. We also have not given up on the goal of gender liberation, despite the existence of individualism and widespread pornography.
Note:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/newsenglish/witn/2006/09/060913_models.shtml