Imperial Ellen and the Army of Enlightenment

by grandhotelabyss

An Ellen Willis revival would appear to be underway, for reasons that are somewhat unclear to me.  A less cerebral Susan Sontag, a less scholarly Eve Sedgwick, a less witty Katha Pollitt, a less learned Marshall Berman, a less journalistic Naomi Klein, a less clever Laura Kipnis, a less psychedelic Howard Hampton…that’s how Willis always struck me back in the days when I eagerly read leftist polemic and pop-culture criticism.  If we restrict our comparison to today’s left-liberal feminist luminaries, such as Sady Doyle or Laurie Penny, then of course Willis is going to be ennobled by the juxtaposition, if only because she was actually literate, but since we are happily not restricted to Doyle’s wall of sarcasm or Penny’s Gaiman-to-Rowling repertoire of cultural allusions, I don’t honestly see why we should read Willis at all.

But there may be one against-the-grain reason, which is her imperial honesty.  Willis’s main polemical contribution to the feminism of her time was a psychoanalytic insistence on the foundational importance of sexual desire.  This was radical, I gather, in the milieu of journalistic and activist feminism, which retained the second wave’s Wollstonecraftian anti-sex stance even as academic third-wave feminism quickly appropriated and then, under the tutelage of Foucault, abandoned the idea that eros was at the core of human experience.  Richard Beck sums up Willis’s sex-radicalism by citing her collaborator Shulamith Firestone:

Maybe Shulamith Firestone—co-founder of Redstockings—put it best. In The Dialectic of Sex, she called Freudianism “the misguided feminism.” While Firestone disagreed with many of Freud’s conclusions (and premises and methods and attitudes), she recognized the real genius of his founding insight: “Freudianism is so charged, so impossible to repudiate, because Freud grasped the crucial problem of modern life: Sexuality. Freudianism and Feminism grew from the same soil.” But Freud and feminism diverged when it came to the family. Freud accepted the family as a given, the fixed foundation of modern life. Radical feminism, however, pushed past it, and tried to image other ways in which small groups of people might arrange themselves. Expanding on the work of Wilhelm Reich, Willis argued that children were damaged by parental condemnation of their earliest genital desires, and that these early humiliations caused not just personal but widespread social misery. Real sexual liberation, then, would entail liberation from the family as well, and it would also lead to widespread social upheaval. By extension, feminism cannot only work for economic and political equality (although it obviously must work for those things). It must also work to transform the whole fabric of social relations and personal experience. These are the truly radical, truly utopian ideas to which Willis devoted her life.

For Willis the origin of all social ills is the interdiction of desire.  All impulses to transcend the body are stigmatized as fearful false (un)consciousness by this theory, and moreover any pedagogy that urges such transcendence is implicitly labelled abusive.  It’s really difficult to see how this is anything other than the ethics appropriate to a consumer class living on other people’s labor while moralistically tut-tutting the violent means used to coerce that labor.  Why?  Because somebody sometime has to transcend desire if anything anywhere is to be achieved, for good or ill. This doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t have all the sex they want; it just means recognizing that assembling a piece of technology, learning a language, composing a symphony, defending a territory, or generating a theory are not necessarily much like having sex.  Desire is one part of life–a very fine part–but it does desire no dishonor to say that it’s not the whole.  Or even to say that it’s capable of sublimation or sublation into something transcendent.

Willis’s sex radicalism is Puritanism’s opposite face rather than its rational negation: both attitudes are obsessively fixated on desire, both expect too much from sex (the collapse of the social order on the one hand, and its secular redemption on the other).  Both sides are incapable of ever enjoying sex or recognizing its aesthetic or spiritual dimensions because both so need to politicize it by make it the absolute model, whether positive or negative, for all collective existence.

But give Willis credit for one thing: she was not naive about the consequences her politics entailed.  A politics that seeks to extirpate all obstacles to desire seeks to extirpate all obstacles to desire.  Let Willis herself say it, in a post-9/11 article bracingly titled “Why I’m Not for Peace” (.pdf):

My frustration, in other words, is not that we took action in Afghanistan but that we have not done enough.We should have fought the ground war and occupied Kabul; organized an international force to disarm the warlords, protect ordinary citizens, and oversee the distribution of aid; demanded that secularists be included in the negotiations for a new government and that basic women’s rights be built into a new structure of law. If this is “imperialism”—in the promiscuous contemporary usage of that term—I am for it: I believe it is the prerequisite of a stable peace.

Call me promiscuous, but I do believe that occupying a country, taking over its government, and rewriting its laws qualifies as “imperialism.”  And this is not to speak of extracting its resources or the labor of its citizenry, as Willis does not.  But isn’t imperialism justified if it means lifting populations out of theocracy and patriarchy?  If it is, then it’s going to rely on the movement of armies, the production of wealth by the empire’s populace to support its military, and the training of men and women to transcend not only their sexual desires, but even their very empathetic instinct not to squeeze a trigger.  (Willis had an answer to this objection, but it’s alarmingly vague and ultimately naive.)

All of which is to say that Willis’s sexual utopia is not for everyone: it’s not for the producers, who must generate the means to arm the war machine, and it’s not for that machine’s human constituents, who must be schooled not in the art of love but rather in the art of death, and it’s certainly not for that machine’s victims, who are like truants being herded by force into the school of desire.  Willis promiscuously uses the belligerent liberal internationalist’s favorite pronoun, “we,” but there will be no genuine “we” (no mutual lovers in the utopia of desire) until after the global revolution.  How will we know when the revolution is complete?  When the army of enlightenment has overrun the earth and leveled it to a flat, smooth plane on which desire can slide freely from object to object.

Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote very beautifully about such a revolution in his great poem Prometheus Unbound, and he didn’t shy from the verb “to colonize” or the noun “empire.”  In the following passage, a chorus of spirits rejoices at the destruction of all traditional authority:

Our spoil is won,
Our task is done,
We are free to dive, or soar, or run;
Beyond and around,
Or within the bound
Which clips the world with darkness round.

We’ll pass the eyes
Of the starry skies
Into the hoar deep to colonize;
Death, Chaos and Night,
From the sound of our flight,
Shall flee, like mist from a tempest’s might.

The “hoar deep” for Shelley can plausibly be read as an allegory of the unconscious from which all fear of unfettered desire proceeds.  “To colonize” it is to bring it into the light of rationality, which, given Shelley’s Platonism, is supposed to be the master of the soul, the rider in the chariot.  The superiority of Shelley (and, indeed, Freud) over Willis is their properly poetic sense that this is an inward journey before all else.  Shelley is a fine psychologist and a great poet, but thankfully no politician–and we have his second wife to thank for pointing out the dangerous dimension of his politics in Frankenstein.  Locating the “hoar deep” on the world map in order “to colonize” it with enlightenment’s army is a kind of category error, but one that may be endemic to all desire-based politics.  Imperial Ellen, in any event, is not a trustworthy guide to this territory.