Women under capitalism

Silvia Federici, over pages 63 and 64 of Caliban and the Witch, lays out some premises:

1. The expropriation of European workers from their means of subsistence, and the enslavement of Native Americans and Africans to the mines and plantations of the "New World," were not the only means by which a world proletariat was formed and "accumulated."
   
   
2. This process required the transformation of the body into a work-machine, and the subjugation of women to the reproduction of the work-force. Most of all, it required the destruction of the power of women which, in Europe as in America, was achieved through the extermination of the "witches."
   
   
3. Primitive accumulation, then, was not simply an accumulation and concentration of exploitable workers and capital. It was also an accumulation of differences and divisions within the working class, whereby hierarchies built upon gender, as well as "race" and age, became constitutive of class rule and the formation of the modern proletariat.
   
   
4. We cannot, therefore, identify capitalist accumulation with the liberation of the worker, female or male, as many Marxists (among others) have done, or see the advent of capitalism as a moment of historical progress. On the contrary, capitalism has created more brutal and insidious forms of enslavement, as it has planted into the body of the proletariat deep divisions that have served to intensify and conceal exploitation. It is in great part because of these imposed divisions--especially those between women and men--that capitalist accumulation continues to devastate life in every corner of the planet.

Before I get started, I would like to point out that neither Federici nor anyone else is suggesting that the oppression of women--or even some of the specific forms of women's oppression as discussed here--is original to capitalism. Such an argument would be absurd. However, capitalism, as (so far) the most ravenously expansionist form that civilization has taken (exponentially more so than its immediate predecessor, feudalism), has intrinsically higher and different demands than previous forms, and as such its oppression of women has over the past several hundred years taken on newly specialized and in many cases more comprehensive forms. This is something that I will hopefully be covering in more detail in future posts. For now, this.

In I., Federici summarizes much of what she's discussed to this point in the book, which itself was in many ways a summary of the existing work done by post-Marxist* scholars on interpreting the "transition to capitalism." In this analysis, we can understand the "transition" as a deliberate series of actions by the powerful, not just in response to threats to their power but also in an effort to consolidate and increase that power: the use of the enclosure of the commons (and other methods of separating the peasantry from their land, as for example impressment) to weaken the ability of the commoners to resist and to force them into the new forms of labor; the colonization of Africa and the Americas. In other words, this analysis understands that capitalism cannot exist without colonies, that the riches of the capitalist depend not only on "visible" wage labor but on "invisible" non-wage labor, that the exploitation of the wage worker here-and-now depends on both the past violent theft of that class's means of subsistence and on the ongoing violent plunder of the colonies and the colonized. In other words,** this analysis dramatically expands, in both time and space, what is meant by "primitive accumulation"--it can now be understood as an ongoing process of what might in part be sardonically termed "outsourcing."

*I'm not using the term in any technical sense--I don't even know if post-Marxism has a technical definition or not, and I don't care to--because I have no patience for following scholarly leftist factionalism; it's one area where I revel in ignorance. I just mean researchers, writers, historians who have been influenced by Marxist analysis but feel that it is far from complete.
**And assuming I understand the terminology correctly, which I might not.

Having acknowledged this analysis, Federici presents the feminist argument that, though essential, the analysis is incomplete in so far as it overlooks the experiences of oppressed women and the role that this oppression plays in the maintenance of capitalism. Any analysis that ignores this and yet pretends to "universality" is woefully incomplete; even aside from the fact that, as I've mentioned before, women are half of the population, their oppression is every bit as foundational as (if not more so than) the other oppressions on which capitalism bases itself (not to mention that all of these oppressions are tangled together, and cannot be understood in isolation because they don't exist in isolation). Without the oppression of women, capitalism would be unable to function.

Federici lays out this argument (briefly, to be expanded upon throughout the rest of the book) in II. The phrase the transformation of the body into a work-machine is key. In the case of men, this means what we normally think of when we think of "work"--i.e., all aspects of our physical being had to be subsumed into the capitalist production process, and those that could not be thus subsumed had to be suppressed. It is the same in the case of women, but with them the focus is extremely different; it is this difference that Federici expresses as "the subjugation of women to the reproduction of the work-force." What does she mean by this?

She is using the term "reproduction" in two senses here, the Marxist and the biological.* Under capitalism, women are subjugated to reproduction in both senses. In Marxist terms,** the "reproduction of the work-force" refers to the effort required to renew the worker's ability to work, day after day. The cleaning of clothes, the care of the home, the preparation of food. If all of these tasks seem to belong together under a common heading other than "reproduction," it is because they are what make up housework. The (unpaid) work, that is, of the housewife: women's work. Without this work, the wage work of capitalist production would be impossible.***

*It may be more accurate to say that she is expanding the Marxist definition to include the biological, but for convenience I will talk about the two meanings separately.
**Again, if I'm understanding correctly; I'm no Marx expert, as you can probably tell. If I'm misunderstanding or misrepresenting, let me know. My feeling, however, is that even if I am misusing terms my overall points stand.
***There are several seemingly strong objections to this argument, some of which I will address towards the end of this post.

The other sense in which Federici is using the term "reproduction" is, as I mentioned before, the biological--i.e., having babies.* Capitalists rely on others to create wealth for them--they need workers--which put another way means: capitalism will always need people, lots of 'em. On the other hand, it doesn't want too many people, because the masses of people, in addition to being capitalism's greatest resource, are also its greatest threat. Thus, the population must be tightly controlled,** which of course means that birth must be tightly controlled. The upshot of this is, unavoidably, "the subjugation of women to the reproduction of the work-force." Women's control over their own bodies must be taken away from them--they must not be able to choose when to have children and when not to, because their own decisions may be at odds with the needs of capital.

*While I was away from the computer making myself lunch, Boorman apparently decided there should be a footnote here, and who am I to argue?
**As some book I read recently pointed out (I can't remember which, so I unfortunately can't credit--possibly it was James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State), it is no coincidence that capitalism and the science of demography are of approximately the same age.

There is much that I could write about what Federici says at the end of II., about the "extermination of the 'witches'" being the method by which women were subjugated for the purposes of capital, but since that is the primary topic of Federici's entire book, I think I will wait and discuss that in future posts.

In III., Federici summarizes and builds upon all of this, incidentally refuting the standard argument of those who say (usually in bad faith, though sometimes with good intentions) that it is feminists who create an artificial division between men and women. It is the power structures under which we live that create these divisions, and feminists who describe and attempt to counter them. The argument that they are created by feminists is similar to the position of those who say that calling out racism is in itself racist, which is to say, it is nonsensical, a form of (as discussed in my last Federici post) directing the blame downwards rather than upwards.

So it is in large part this "accumulation of differences and divisions within the working class" that makes capitalism its profits.* Not only this, but they also help the whole system to be self-policing. It is well understood, in some circles at least, that the system of racialized slavery served to divide the once largely united lower classes into two mutually antagonistic groups, with the relative power of lower class whites over blacks serving to help the lower class whites to identify with the upper classes and to focus their often justified anger at their own situations down the hierarchy rather than up it. A similar end is served by creating a division between men and women, and specifically a hierarchy in which men are superior to women. The patriarchal family is a reiteration of the patriarchal system at large, with the husband/father as the boss--the owner--and the wife and children as the proletariat. If every working man--every wage slave--is granted his own realm of absolute authority, his anger at his own exploitation can be blunted, redirected.

*It is very tempting, but probably meaningless, to make an analogy to physical systems in which an energy imbalance in two parts of the system is made to do work.

I suspect that there's not really anybody in my teensy readership who believes either in the orthodox Marxist claim that capitalism is a progressive improvement over previous systems or in capitalism's definition of itself as such, both refuted in IV. As such, I feel no particular need to discuss that point in detail. However, in this little corner of the internet I do frequently see objections to the feminist analysis which, to me, suggest a deep-down, more than likely unwitting, adherence to the Marxist view that the capitalist imposition of wage work is in a broad historical context a form of "progress." These are the seemingly sound objections I mentioned above, and the fact that I'm getting to them now is a sign that this behemoth post is almost over.

So, to go back to the point about the reproduction, in Marxist terms, of the workforce being the unpaid responsibility of women, one might (and many often do) object that, well, things might have been like that once, but nowadays women are in the paid work force just as much as men, so women aren't really housewives anymore--this specialized, foundational oppression of women is a thing of the past, now, and capitalism is still steamrolling along just fine. Or one might also object that the housewife, as an exclusive occupation, is a phenomenon of the white middle class only, that in recent history at least black and other poor women have always been wage workers. Both of these objections are true, to a point (the second in particular is an omission of which many feminists have notoriously been guilty). However, even leaving aside the fact that the employment situation of black women has always been different from that of black men to the point of being practically incomparable, and even leaving aside the fact that to this day women reliably make significantly less money for the same work as men while simultaneously having more expenses in both time and money as a prerequisite for having these jobs,* it is still the overwhelming pattern that women, even when working as many waged hours as men, are still responsible for the majority, if not the entirety, of the non-waged reproductive work.

*I am speaking here of the larger requirements women in our society must fulfill in order to present a "professional" appearance, in terms of makeup, hair care, clothing, etc.

This fact is the inevitable, and desired, result of the capitalist division of labor along sexual lines, but its day to day reality is, unlike many other aspects of the global capitalist machine, something we ourselves can directly and concretely change. We might not be able to do anything directly and immediately about women's lower wages or loss of reproductive freedom (or, for that matter, the violence directed at colonial subjects overseas, though we of course should always be doing the long-term work of fighting all these forms of oppression), but right now, today and every day, we can fight the personalized form of women's oppression.

Unlearning their history to learn ours

Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation pages 21-22:

A history of women and reproduction in the "transition to capitalism" must begin with the struggles that the medieval proletariat--small peasants, artisans, day laborers--waged against feudal power in all its forms. Only if we evoke these struggles, with their rich cargo of demands, social and political aspirations, and antagonistic practices, can we understand the role that women had in the crisis of feudalism, and why their power had to be destroyed for capitalism to develop, as it was by the three-century-long persecution of the witches. From the vantage point of this struggle, we can also see that capitalism was not the product of an evolutionary development bringing forth economic forces that were maturing in the womb of the old order. Capitalism was the response of the feudal lords, the patrician merchants, the bishops and popes, to a centuries-long social conflict that, in the end, shook their power, and truly gave "all the world a big jolt." Capitalism was the counter-revolution that destroyed the possibilities that had emerged from the anti-feudal struggle--possibilities which, if realized, might have spared us the immense destruction of lives and the natural environment that has marked the advance of capitalist relations worldwide. This much must be stressed, for the belief that capitalism "evolved" from feudalism and represents a higher form of social life has not yet been dispelled.

It is difficult to understand where we are today without also understanding our history--how we got here. The history most of us are taught, the history we receive passively (and some of us actively), is less than no help with this--even on those rare occasions when it isn't a pack of out-and-out lies.

There are three main methods that I can think of offhand that people use to lie about history without lying per se. Federici discusses two of them here (the third, which is to tell the truth about events but either to lie about or to not even mention reasons, she discusses implicitly throughout her book, and I might approach it more directly soon).

The first of these methods is to define history as exclusively the history of power, or the history of wealth, however you want to look at it. In this telling, the history of the "transition to capitalism" (a phrase Federici approaches skeptically, and I follow her example in using quotation marks around it) is the history only of kings and capitalists. We hear about others only as they appear to these kings and capitalists--as resources, as threats.

The second method is to treat what-happened as what-had-to-happen, to look at the past as inevitable. You do this partly via the first method: by ignoring everyone but the powerful, you ignore resistance to power, and therefore you ignore the alternatives, sometimes hypothetical, frequently (though usually briefly) concrete, that resistance offered.

Many people in our circles (the anarchists or whatever) have learned how to break down the walls built by these methods to different extents (and books like Zinn's People's History were a good first step to demolishing the first method), but most of us, myself as always emphatically included, have not learned this nearly enough. No matter how much we deny it, there usually remains a trace of the teleological in our approach to history, a sense of "this is the way things have to be, because that was the way things had to happen," which in its fundamental denial of the reality of how we got here leaves us unable to truly understand where we are, and how to get anywhere else. Similarly--and this is Federici's main but by no means only focus--many of us break through the narratives handed down by those in power to the hidden narratives of the relatively powerless--but only to a point. What many of us (mostly men, but some women too) miss is the role of women in our history, our shared history of resistance.

It is only when we knock down these barriers, not only the ones we've already demolished but the ones we don't yet realize are still standing, that we can move at all.

Enclosure, colonization, reproduction, and the subjugation of women

Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation, page 17:

This is what occurred in the 19th century, when the responses to the rise of socialism, the Paris Commune, and the accumulation crisis of 1873 were the "Scramble for Africa" and the simultaneous creation in Europe of the nuclear family, centered on the economic dependence of women to men--following the expulsion of women from the waged work-place. This is also what is happening today, as a new global expansion of the labor-market is attempting to set back the clock with respect to the anti-colonial struggle, and the struggles of other rebel subjects--students, feminists, blue collar workers--who, in the 1960s and 1970s, undermined the sexual and international division of labor.

It is not surprising, then, if large-scale violence and enslavement have been on the agenda, as they were in the period of the "transition," with the difference that today the conquistadors are the officers of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, who are still preaching the worth of a penny to the same populations which the dominant world powers have for centuries robbed and pauperized. Once again, much of the violence unleashed is directed against women, for in the age of the computer, the conquest of the female body is still a precondition for the accumulation of labor and wealth, as demonstrated by the institutional investment in the development of new reproductive technologies that, more than ever, reduce women to wombs.

One of the things Federici does nicely here is to emphasize the way that in a colonial power (like the contemporary United States or the European countries of the 19th century) repression at home and repression abroad, though they take different forms, are parts of the same system. As she described in the last quote I wrote about, the "primitive accumulation" of capital that occurred in Europe primarily around the 16th and 17th centuries--the enclosure of the commons, the destruction of traditional modes of knowledge, the attack on the power of women, and so on, all of which is Federici's primary subject matter in the book--all of this is occurring, right now, in extremely similar ways, in the so-called "third world," because once you've subjugated and stolen everything from your "own" people, the next step is to do it to other people. I'm reminded forcefully of Derrick Jensen's argument that civilization, based as it is in the degradation of one's own landbase until it is unable to support its populations, is inherently violent--it always needs to expand, because once you've taken everything "your" land and "your" people have to give, you have to look elsewhere for more.

Of course, I'm making it sound like a linear process--steal everything at home, then steal everything somewhere else, then steal everything somewhere else--when of course it is not. The attacks on the lower classes in Europe happened at the same time as the colonization of huge swathes of the rest of the world, including among other things genocide of unmatched scale in the Americas and the transformation of the people of Africa into property that could then be stolen en masse (and, of course, the genocide that inevitably accompanied this). And, again, as Federici points out, the processes of enclosure, colonization, and theft are ongoing today. Whether with explicit military invasion or the machinations of the IMF (or both or more), most of the world is directly subjugated to international capital.

And here (in the US, where I'm writing from, but to my knowledge this applies similarly to anywhere inside the walls), processes similar in shape if not in scale--the militarization of the police, the slaveries of debt and the wage (made possible by that not-so-long-ago enclosure of the commons)--are in play. Also in play: women's bodies, and the struggle over who controls them.

Embarrassingly, I thought once upon a time that the struggle over reproductive freedom, though real enough down here at the bottom with the rank and file of "pro-life" and "pro-choice" groups, at the top was "really" about the fact that Roe v. Wade rested on an expansion of the concept of the "right to privacy." In other words, I thought that powerful people smiled on attempts to criminalize abortion as a step in the creation of a surveillance state. (I also thought that, by thinking this, I was being more clear-sighted than most people.) What I didn't realize was that this idea rested on three incorrect assumptions: first, that people in power care about laws and judicial decisions in any capacity beyond PR when necessary; second, that the surveillance state is an end in itself rather than one part of a multi-tiered system of resource extraction; and third, that power's interest in controlling reproduction started and stopped with Roe v. Wade (and, therefore, incidentally was only concerned with abortion itself). My introduction to anarchist analysis wiped out the first assumption, my increasing knowledge of class struggle and the true nature of civilization itself wiped out the second, and, the past few years of chipping away at reproductive freedom in creative ways while leaving Roe nominally intact wiped out the third. I started to think--my god, is this actually a case of people in power objecting to something on purely moral grounds?

Well, of course it isn't. By thinking so, I was without realizing it still thinking in terms of the first faulty assumption. When power makes laws against a certain behavior, they don't do it to keep everyone from engaging in that behavior; they do it to keep the wrong people from engaging in it. Making laws that restrict reproductive freedom will never stop powerful people from controlling their own reproduction--but it does take the reproduction of the lower classes out of lower class women's hands.

And why does power care about this? It's because the exploitation of a class of people isn't a one-time thing; it's an ongoing process which requires the ongoing reproduction of that class. Of course it is in power's interest to take control over that reproduction away from the people responsible for it, the people who historically used to have control over it--women. When the ruling classes, as Federici puts it, "reduce women to wombs," they do it to make sure that people get born at the rate they need.

Of course, after all these words I'm still oversimplifying this, and there are all kinds of quibbles and caveats that could be made, not to mention the fact that I've only--so far--looked at one aspect, the directly biological, of what Marxist analysis calls the "reproduction of labor." But the overall point is honestly kind of a simple one: power faced a crisis in the 15th and 16th centuries; it faced another in the 19th century; and it faces another now,* and it is reacting in very similar ways. One of those ways, indeed one of the pillars that capitalist power rests upon, is the subjugation of women.

*That the first two crises were caused in large part by popular revolution and the current one is caused more by the fact that power is almost done burning through everything this planet was generous enough to give us, is of course extremely important, but not right now for the purposes of this discussion.

More coming; if you want to look at all of the quotes I pulled from Federici's extremely important book before I get around to discussing them, they're all on the Commonplace.

Stolen context

Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation, page 10:

By the end of 1986...I left Nigeria, in body if not in spirit. But the thought of the attacks launched on the Nigerian people never left me. Thus, the desire to restudy "the transition to capitalism" has been with me since my return. I had read the Nigerian events through the prism of 16th-century Europe. In the United States, it was the Nigerian proletariat that brought me back to the struggles over the commons and the capitalist disciplining of women, in and out of Europe. Upon my return, I also began to teach in an interdisciplinary program for undergraduates where I confronted a different type of "enclosure": the enclosure of knowledge, that is, the increasing loss, among the new generations, of the historical sense of our common past. This is why in Caliban and the Witch I reconstruct the anti-feudal struggles of the Middle Ages and the struggles by which the European proletariat resisted the advent of capitalism. My goal in doing so is not only to make available to non-specialists the evidence on which my analysis relies, but to revive among younger generations the memory of a long history of resistance that today is in danger of being erased. Saving this historical memory is crucial if we are to find an alternative to capitalism. For this possibility will depend on our capacity to hear the voices of those who have walked similar paths.

I quote this little bit of Federici's introduction because it brings up an extremely important point, what she refers to here as "the enclosure of knowledge," what I described a few hours ago in conversation with the Baronette and my parents as "our hidden shared history" and as "stolen context."

Most Americans, I imagine, if they think about capitalism at all, think of it as a pretty good thing--we've been trained pretty well to associate it with "freedom," whatever that is. In the even unlikelier, rarer situation where we think about it in relation to feudalism, the system that preceded it, we're most likely to think of it as an improvement. Feudalism, we feel, became untenable, its cruelties unbearable, and it was replaced by the more enlightened system of capitalism. We think this because the more accurate history, that capitalism was developed by the powerful in response to (for a time very successful) anti-feudal struggles on the part of the powerless--i.e., that capitalism was in fact created as a bloody, intercontinental counter-revolution--this history has been concealed from us.* Our knowledge of where today came from has been stolen. Without this context, most of us are utterly unable to figure out what the hell is happening.

*Not to mention that the counter-revolution is of course still actively ongoing today, part of which is what Federici is referring to when she talks about Nigeria. Without the context of our own past, it is harder to understand what is happening elsewhere in the world, and harder not just to feel but to recognize the urgency of solidarity.

The Baronette told me about an article she read (I don't have a link, but I'm sure if you throw a brick you'll hit an article like it) criticizing the rioters in England for looting "the commons." That businesses of any kind--and chain stores, no less!--can be referred to as "the commons" with a straight face is a sure sign of how completely they have disconnected us from our history. To me, "stealing" from a corporation is one of the most noble, not to mention pragmatic, acts available to us in our circumscribed lives. But I am only able to think this because I have been made aware that once upon a time--not that long ago, relatively--things were different. Once you're aware of that, you can realize that it is the corporations who have been stealing and continue to steal from us, not vice versa.

More on this, and on Federici, hopefully to come.

A question in a tangentially related context

As we enjoy the leisurely day off from work The Baronette has been granted in celebration of horrible screaming mass death, I'm also pondering this:

Which is more decadent: to be decadent and unaware of being so, or to be decadent and aware of it?

Crock Pot King

In general I have a hard time being interested in reading the crusty fathers of anarchism,* but I recently attempted to read Kropotkin's Mutual Aid, with the thought that, being a biology book with political implications rather than explicitly political, and being on a topic that hugely interests me, it would be, well, interesting.

*The mothers would be a different matter, if I would ever get around to them...

Not only was it not, it was also startlingly clear (and in retrospect, I should have expected this) that Kropotkin was a, y'know, European nobleman. Is all of his stuff like this? Why do people like him? It was just plain icky to read! I only made it about 75 pages in and called it quits.*

*After reading what I'm about to discuss, I found myself with little stomach for what would have been the next two sections, entitled "Mutual Aid Among Savages" and "Mutual Aid Among the Barbarians,"** which of course contrast with the shared title of the final chapters, "Mutual Aid Among Ourselves."
**No I don't know why barbarians get a definite article and savages don't.

Here's a bit from shortly before page 75:

All that natural selection can do in times of calamities is to spare the individuals endowed with the greatest endurance for privations of all kinds. So it does among the Siberian horses and cattle. They are enduring; they can feed upon the Polar birch in case of need; they resist cold and hunger. But no Siberian horse is capable of carrying half the weight which a European horse carries with ease; no Siberian cow gives half the amount given by a Jersey cow...

So we will note here that the "quality" of the animals under discussion is judged solely on the basis of their utility to humans, and not to the animals themselves. Eating Polar birch and resisting cold and hunger sounds like a pretty good life for a horse in Siberia! But since they can't carry as much as other horses, an ability totally lacking in any purpose for the horse itself, pragmatic or recreational, Kropotkin judges them evolutionarily inferior. I mean, !!?!?

Unfortunately he continues, removing as he does the "sub" from the scientific racism subtext:

...and no natives of uncivilized countries can bear a comparison with Europeans. They may better endure hunger and cold, but their physical force is very far below that of a well-fed European, and their intellectual progress is despairingly slow.

Ha ha ha! Hey, Kropotkin, let's drop you alone in an "uncivilized country" in the cold and see how your wealthy Russian gentleman's style of intellectual progress helps you have a good time. Here also, though he does not state it explicitly, he is still considering the beasts of the field in terms of their use to people like him; for with neither the physical force to perform endless slave labor nor the "intellectual progress" to participate in the mummery of western civ, your average native is just going to go to waste, living a life of their own choosing and maybe even enjoying it, shudder to think.

Then there's this on the next page. For context, he's talked about ants farming aphids before, and he just loves how they've tamed the wilderness they live in! They're almost as good as people!

Happily enough, competition is not the rule either in the animal world or in mankind. It is limited among animals to exceptional periods, and natural selection finds better fields for its activity. Better conditions are created by the elimination of competition by means of mutual aid and mutual support. In the great struggle for life--for the greatest possible fulness and intensity of life with the least waste of energy--natural selection continually seeks out the ways precisely for avoiding competition as much as possible. The ants combine in nests and nations; they pile up their stores, they rear their cattle--and thus avoid competition; and natural selection picks out of the ants' family the species which know best how to avoid competition, with its unavoidably deleterious consequences.

Note please that the aphids are completely left out of this consideration. (I should note before I go on that from what I understand of it, using the word "farming" is misleading in the case of ants and aphids, who seem to have a much more, OH HO!, mutual relationship than that, but within Kropotkin's text he approaches the phenomenon, though he doesn't put it in these terms, as being entirely exploitative.) Yes, the ants have it good, in Kropotkin's telling of it. They keep their stores of aphids around to supply them with all the sugary shit they want! Freed from the labor of gathering food, they get to relax and spend their time developing a life of the mind. They don't compete! They cooperate! Liberté, égalité, fraternité! And (again, in Kropotkin's skewed accounting of the ant/aphid relationship), as with the human bourgeoisie, it appears that it's equality for me and not for thee, and as a matter of fact thee hardly existeth. Kropotkin's interpretation of the ants and the aphids is remarkably similar to your average civilized man's attitude towards all of the labor we, especially since the 1600s or so, "outsource" to slaves and colonies and wage workers and women and immigrants and so on--remarkable perhaps especially in how equally unaware Kropotkin (like your average bourge) seems to be, for all his anarchism and supposed sympathy for the lower orders, of the injustice in both situations.

Serendipity

When I posted the other day about the word "pioneer" and the violence of "pioneering," BDR commented, pointing out that he had just posted some quotes at his place in honor of Pynchon's birthday and that one of them, from Mason & Dixon (which I haven't read yet) seemed relevant:

Does Britannia, when it sleeps, dream? Is America her dream? -- in which all that cannot pass in the metropolitan Wakefulness is allow'd Expression away in the restless Slumber of these Provinces, and on West-ward, wherever 'tis not yet mapp'd, nor written down, nor ever, by the majority of mankind, seen, -- serving as a very Rubbish-Tip for subjunctive Hopes, for all that may yet be true, -- Earthly Paradise, Fountain of Youth, Realms of Prester John, Christ's Kingdom, ever behind the sunset, safe till the next Territory to the West be seen and recorded, measur'd and tied back in, back to the Net-Work of Points already known, that slowly triangulates its Way into the Continent, changing all from subjunctive to declarative, reducing Possibilities to Simplicities that serve the ends of Governments, -- winning away from the realm of the Sacred, its Borderlands one by one, and assuming them unto the bare mortal World that is our home, and our Despair.

The same day, Aaron posted a lengthy essay (which I admit I've so far read very little of) about the problems of the narrative of the "uncontacted tribe," which certainly seems relevant as well.

And then today I started reading Ursula K. Le Guin's rendition of the Tao Te Ching, and in the second chapter (if that's the right word for the sections of the text) I came across these not-irrelevant words:

The things of this world
exist, they are;
you can't refuse them.

To bear and not to own;
to act and not lay claim;
to do the work and let it go:
for just letting it go
is what makes it stay.

A word I don't want to use anymore and the way in which I don't want to use it

Words mean a lot of things, depending on the social circumstances in which they're used. One of the really magical things about language is that it is such a complex, nuanced structure and yet we use it reflexively, without any thought. As we use these words and don't think about them, the complex system of meanings that they have can blend together in our minds--most of the time this is a wonderful thing, but there can often be a very negative side. I don't by any means suggest that language shapes thought in any kind of strongly deterministic sense, but tiny little subconscious cues from the language do tend to carry weight, especially with repetition--if we use a word in a positive sense in one context it can carry that sense over to another context where the use should be less positive, say.

When you begin to think about the words you use reflexively, you can sometimes spot ways that your thinking has been colonized by the needs of the dominant society. On a more prosaic, but probably concretely more important, level, you can also start to see ways that what you say might communicate different things than you intend, depending on who's listening and in what context. I've been thinking about this a lot recently, and thought it might be good to write about some of these words. This may or may not be a series. Should you be so inclined, let me know what you think--about this particular word, about other words, about this whole idea in general. So, the word:

Pioneer(ing)

If you're a fan of any kind of art that at whatever time or place has been considered "avant garde" you've come across this. People frequently use it to talk about, say, early electronic music--Delia Derbyshire or Wendy Carlos or Louis and Bebe Barron or whoever are "pioneers" of electronic music. When people say this, they mean that these artists did things that had never been done before--"went places," metaphorically, that no one had ever been before.

But that's not what a pioneer is. A pioneer is a colonist, a conqueror, a front liner in genocide. A pioneer claims to be the first to go where they go by virtue of redefining those who have already laid down the paths they bulldoze as insignificant, nonexistent in any meaningful sense. A pioneer "discovers" nothing, "invents" nothing; a pioneer is destructive, not creative.

Land is already there. Most of it has had human beings living on or near it for so long that, in terms that we can really feel, you might as well call it forever. Even that which hasn't is occupied--animals, plants, fungi, swarming bacteria, there's life everywhere*, and it's been exploring for a hell of a lot longer than we have--and without, I would venture to guess, this bizarre conceit that it's "discovering" anything.

*And even those places where there is no life--far enough below the Earth's surface, throughout most of the universe, whatever--those places exist, too, with their own perspectives, and have the right to be themselves.

Curiosity and even necessity need not partner with conquest. That we use the word "pioneering" to describe art that "pushes boundaries"--another deeply problematic formulation--reveals the extent to which we have been trained to view these things as inseparable. But the beautiful thing about art--and I use "art" just in the sense of any activity pursued for self-determined reasons--the beautiful thing about art is, or should be, that it's easy to be curious, easy to explore, without conquering anything.

Actual New York Times headline

Afghans Fear West May See Death as the End

There are at least two reasons it's hilarious, and I can't decide which is funnier.

Getting this out of the way

I finally get back to posting again, and right away they go and do this. I'm taking it personally.

A perfect symbol of how hard the fight is

I've got Al Jazeera English on. In general, their coverage is fantastic. The reporters are ecstatic. At one point, the anchor asked correspondent Ayman Mohyeldin to drop his journalistic remove for a moment and talk about his personal feelings at the moment as an Egyptian himself, and it was all he could do to keep himself from crying. Another correspondent, whose name I haven't caught, just said as I type that she keeps feeling like she's missing the party being a few floors up from Midan Tahrir, and all but said that she can't wait until she's off duty and can go down and join it.

And about half an hour ago, the anchor was on the phone interviewing a revolutionary who was down in Tahrir (I think it was Hossam el-Hamalawy ). He had just said "We got rid of Mubarak; now we have to get rid of the Mubarak dictatorship," and, emotionally, was halfway through another sentence when the anchor interrupted him because Catherine Margaret Ashton, Baroness Ashton of Upholland, PC, the High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy of the European Union, was available to be interviewed.

...yeah.

When the very, very, very best, most sympathetic media coverage that there is thinks that it needs to make the actual people who did this wait so that some fucking poobah can equivocate, instead of the other way around, that right there is a perfect symbol of how goddamn hard the fight is.

Sometimes one clause is enough to know you don't need to read any more

In this case, it's "Israel’s wars have evolved from existential to territorial over the last sixty years."

WARNING: Above link leads to Obsidian Wings. Brace yourself.

Oh, what the hell, I'll turn this into a liberal roundup.

Yglesias says "if WalMart manages to 'drive mom and pop stores out of business' by selling affordable groceries to under-served urban neighborhoods, that’s what I would call a triumph for human progress." Yeah, it's great, because then mom and pop can join the ranks of the "under-served," too. And, hey, maybe one day every single person in the country can be underpaid by the same company that's the only one they can afford to buy necessities from. Honestly, do people like him really think that some people are "under-served" and others aren't for just no reason at all?

Suzie posts on Echidne defending Clinton, the person, against those wikileaks revelations that her office spied on UN officials. And I like that blog in a lot of ways (the series on the so-called science of gender difference that Echidne herself wrote recently was great), but this, like an unfortunately high proportion of posts there, is liberal insanity of the first order.

Shakesville poster PortlyDyke follows up on McEwan's coding post (which we discussed here) with a post that's kinda-sorta interesting and kinda-sorta not-entirely misguided, but she also just casually throws off one of the howlingly inaccurate applications of the gender coding model that some of the commenters on my earlier post were concerned about: "Imperialism/Masculine Nationalism/Feminine."

Not too long ago in comments I promised bonobo an agonizingly sincere self-examination essay on why I'm so obsessed with the stupid things liberals say, and I promise it's coming. Those selfish Egyptians went and had themselves a revolution and distracted me.

James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State several excerpts

(Cross-posted from Commonplace)

Updated with one I forgot to include originally: To this point, I have been making a rather straightforward, even banal point about the simplification, abstraction, and standardization that are necessary for state officials' observations of the circumstances of some or all of the population. But I want to make a further claim, one analogous to that made for scientific forestry: the modern state, through its officials, attempts with varying success to create a terrain and a population with precisely those standardized characteristics that will be easiest to monitor, count, assess, and manage. The utopian, immanent, and continually frustrated goal of the modern state is to reduce the chaotic, disorderly, constantly changing social reality beneath it to something more closely resembling the administrative grid of observations.
pages 81-82

The image of coordination and authority aspired to here recalls that of mass exercises--thousands of bodies moving in perfect unison according to a meticulously rehearsed script. When such coordination is achieved, the spectacle may have several effects. The demonstration of mass coordination, its designers hope, will awe spectators and participants with its display of powerful cohesion. The awe is enhanced by the fact that, as in the Taylorist factory, only someone outside and above the display can fully appreciate it as a totality; the individual participants at ground level are small molecules within an organism whose brain is elsewhere. The image of a nation that might operate along these lines is enormously flattering to elites at the apex--and, of course, demeaning to a population whose role they thus reduce to that of ciphers. Beyond impressing observers, such displays may, in the short run at least, constitute a reassuring self-hypnosis which serves to reinforce the moral purpose and self-confidence of the elites.
page 254

A great many nations, some of them former colonies, have built entirely new capitals rather than compromise with an urban past that their leaders were determined to transcend; one thinks of Brazil, Pakistan, Turkey, Belize, Nigeria, the Ivory Coast, Malawi, and Tanzania.¹²⁰

120. One political advantage of a new capital is precisely that it does not belong to any existing community. Founding a new capital avoids certain delicate, if not explosive, choices that would otherwise have to be made. By the same logic, English became the national language of India because it was the only widely spoken language that did not belong exclusively to any particular traditional community. It did belong, however, to India's English-speaking intelligentsia, which was enormously privileged when its "dialect" became the national language. The United States and Australia, with no urban past to transcend, created planned capitals that represented a vision of progress and order and that were, not incidentally, in stark contrast to indigenous settlement practices.

page 259, note on page 413

It is worth emphasizing the degree to which oral cultures, as opposed to written cultures, may avoid the rigidity of orthodoxy. Because an oral culture has no textual reference point for marking deviations, traditions currently in circulation vary with the speaker, the audience, and local needs. Having no yardstick like a sacred text to measure the degree of drift from its Ur-tradition, such a culture can change greatly over time and simultaneously think of itself as remaining faithful to tradition.
page 332

A model

I'm not under the impression that any of what follows is some kind of revolution in thought. It's just useful to lay things out every once in a while. Suggestions for amendments also welcome.

At the start, people for the most part do what is needed for survival (obtaining and preparing food, finding and/or constructing shelter) themselves, individually or cooperatively as a community.

A point arrives where some minority, whether through luck or nasty genius or both, hits upon a way of getting other people to do these things for them--that is, a method of getting other people to use some of their time to provide necessities for them rather than for themselves and their actual community. This is great for the minority.

It does however create a problem in that such a system is naturally subject to a lot of resistance from the majority, who would rather use their time and labor for themselves and their communities than for a minority of people who don't do anything to help. The minority therefore have to devise methods to keep the majority working for them, whether through violent enforcement or the establishment of a system of beliefs, religious or otherwise, or the corruption of a pre-existing system, which will function to convince the majority to sacrifice portions of their own lives for the benefit of the minority.

The minority is no happier doing this work than they were doing the work of directly supporting their own lives, especially since by this point they've gotten used to not doing any work. So for their own convenience they create a new class, still a minority but a larger one than the now-ruling class, which will be responsible for managing the people who do the essential work: keeping up the belief system, performing violent enforcement, etc., in the service of keeping the necessities flowing from the class that still creates them.

Perhaps at first this intermediary class still spends some time producing necessities as well, but as their responsibilities grow more complex, this becomes increasingly impossible. So before long, there is a laboring majority, which does all of the actually necessary work, a ruling minority, which does none of the actual work itself, and a third group, intermediate in both size and power, which does all the work of keeping this situation viable but none of the genuinely essential work (in case it needs to be said, I and in all likelihood you are members of this class).

Of course, there is then a problem with keeping the intermediate group doing its job instead of rebelling, as it otherwise would tend to and indeed on occasion does. And so another intermediate class must be created. And so on, until, inevitably, the whole damn mess collapses, one way or another.

This pattern is observable on many different scales, from worldwide to a specific empire to a specific region to a specific town to a specific family.

Logic

Hillary Clinton on Meet the Press earlier:

I want the Egyptian people to have the chance to chart a new future. It needs to be an orderly, peaceful transition to real democracy, not faux democracy like the elections we saw in Iran two years ago, where you have one election 30 years ago and then the people just keep staying in power and become less and less responsive to their people. We want to see a real democracy that reflects the vibrancy of Egyptian society. And we believe that President Mubarak, his government, civil society, political activists, need to be part of a national dialogue to bring that about.

Via John Caruso at Distant Ocean.

It would be funny even if Mubarak weren't currently in exactly his thirtieth year in charge of Egypt, but man, that really pushes it over the top, right?

(Note please: a member of one of two families was president of the US for 20 consecutive years, and a member of one of those families is still currently in one of the most powerful positions in the government. I forget her name.)

I wanted to pair this with one of the many scenes from Caligula where Malcolm McDowell is very impressed with his own logic, but couldn't find any on youtube and didn't have the patience to put one up myself. Fortunately, this does almost as nicely.

Egypt catchup

Apparently at some point this morning (in my time zone, that is), Egypt shut down Al Jazeera's Egyptian bureau and revoked their licenses; their broadcasts in English and Arabic have been taken off the air within the country.

An hour ago my twitter stream lit up with people talking about low-flying fighter jets buzzing the protesters (150,000 according to some reports) gathered in Tahrir Square. No attacks as of yet. And the protesters didn't move an inch.

Should I keep using the word "protester" or should I switch to something more appropriate?

This AJE interview with PJ Crowley is near eight minutes long, but trust me, the time will fly by because it's one of the most entertaining things you'll ever see. The interviewer, Shihab Rattansi, is wonderful, and I want to send him a present. I would pick out a favorite moment ("That's interesting," perhaps), but really it's the momentum of it all, the blow after blow to Crowley's insipid metaphors and non-answers, that is so magical.



(Source)

Yasmin Hamidi on Twitter (via a retweet from Aaron Bady) says "Think colonialism is dead? Turn on @CNN & watch white men in suits debate wat role US shud play in deciding the fate of Egyptians."

UPDATE: It is of course entirely possible--likely, even--that I'm missing some subtleties here, but AJE is pissing me off with its attempts to organize this. They keep saying that the protesters need a "figurehead" or a "leader" to make their demands, and it's clear they want it to be ElBaradei (who is about to speak, apparently)--but, hello, this is what people making their demands looks like:



And then they keep saying that the protesters "need" the Muslim Brotherhood. At one point one reporter said that the Brotherhood can "organize people on the streets, and no one else can." But, hello, this is what people organizing themselves on the streets looks like:



The Muslim Brotherhood didn't do that. ElBaradei didn't do that. People did that.

UPDATE II: I don't find Fox News any more or less propagandistic than any of the other American networks, nor do I think their propaganda is in favor of anything different. I do, however, admire their methods, particularly their regular habit of "accidentally" mislabeling things:

Things remind me of things

Apologies for the lengthy quotations and dearth of commentary, but I find these quite valuable and they speak for themselves. All emphasis is mine.

This is from James C. Scott's beyond excellent Seeing Like a State:

It goes without saying that the farmer was familiar with each of several varieties of any crop, when to plant it, how deeply to sow it, how to prepare the soil, and how to tend and harvest it. This knowledge was place specific in the sense that the successful growing of any variety required local knowledge about rainfall and soils, down to and including the peculiarities of each plot the farmer cultivated. It was also place specific in the sense that much of this knowledge was stored in the collective memory of the locality: an oral archive of the techniques, seed varieties, and ecological information.

Once the farmer was moved, often to a vastly different ecological setting, his local knowledge was all but useless. As Jason Clay emphasizes, "Thus, when a farmer from the highlands is transported to settlement camps in areas like Gambella, he is instantly transformed from an agricultural expert into an unskilled, ignorant laborer, completely dependent for his survival on the central government." Resettlement was far more than a change in scenery. It took people from a setting in which they had the skills and resources to produce many of their own basic needs and hence the means of a reasonably self-sufficient independence. It then transferred them to a setting where these skills were of little or no avail. Only in such circumstances was it possible for camp officials to reduce migrants to mendicants whose obedience and labor could be exacted for subsistence rations.

Although the drought that coincided with forced migration in Ethiopia was real enough, much of the famine to which international aid agencies responded was a product of the massive resettlement. The destruction of social ties was almost as productive of famine as were the crop failures induced by poor planning and ignorance of the new agricultural environment. Communal ties, relations with kin and affines, networks of reciprocity and cooperation, local charity and dependence had been the principal means by which villagers had managed to survive periods of food shortage in the past. Stripped of these social resources by indiscriminate deportations, often separated from their immediate family and forbidden to leave, the settlers in the camps were far more vulnerable to starvation than they had been in their home regions.

It reminded me of these passages, spread out over about ten pages in Derrick Jensen's beyond excellent Endgame vol. 1: The Problem of Civilization:

Civilization has only been on this continent a few hundred years. There are many parts of this continent, such as where I live, that became subject to civilization far more recently. Yet in this extremely short time this culture has committed us and the landscape to this technologized path, in so doing shredding the natural fabric of this continent, enslaving, terrorizing, and/or eradicating its nonhuman inhabitants, and giving its human residents the choice of civilization or death. Another way to say this is that prior to the arrival of civilization humans lived on this continent for at the very least ten thousand years, and probably much longer, and could drink with confidence from rivers and streams everywhere. After this culture's short time here, not only has it toxified streams and groundwater, but even mother's breast milk. That's an extraordinary and extraordinarily quick commitment to this technologized way of being (or rather non-being). ...

Dependency. One of the advantages of not having to import resources is that you need depend on neither the resources' owners nor on the violence necessary to eradicate these owners and take what's theirs. One of the advantages of not owning slaves is that you need not depend on them for either your "comforts or elegancies" or even the necessaries of life. We have at this point become dependent on oil, on dammed rivers, on this exploitative way of being (or, once again, non-being). Without it many of us would die, most all of us would lose our identities. ...

To mask our powerlessness in the face of this destruction, many of us fall into the same pattern as those abused children... we turn the focus inward. We are the problem. I use toilet paper, so I am responsible for deforestation. I drive a car, so I am responsible for global warming. Never mind that I did not create the systems that cause these. I did not create industrial forestry. I did not create an oil economy... [W]e did not create the system [and] our choices have been systematically eliminated (those in power kill the great runs of salmon, and then we feel guilty when we buy food at the grocery store? How dumb is that?).

Egypt

Al Jazeera English has live coverage streaming here.

Also might be interesting, when there's a chance to go through them (which I haven't had yet), wikileaks just released a whole bunch of Cairo cables, indexed here.

UPDATE: Hillary Clinton: "People in the Middle East, like people everywhere, want to have a role in the decisions that will shape their lives." Meanwhile, the NDP headquarters are on fire.

UPDATE II: The moment PZ Myers posts something about how stupid Egyptians are for praying in the middle of a riot, I'll let you know.

UPDATE III: The NDP headquarters are still on fire, and were extensively looted already. Protesters are setting up makeshift barricades on the streets and, according to Al Jazeera's reporters, seem to still be pretty much in control of central Cairo at least.

UPDATE IV: Speaking as an American the idea that the police and the military might not be serving the same interests is very difficult for me to grasp. In comments Jack points out that the military is "booted up with conscripts," which seems like it might be significant, but I don't know nearly enough to understand the situation.

Right now reports seem to conflict. There is some indication that there have been gunfights between military and police. AJE is reporting in turns that the military was greeted with cheers as they rode through saluting the protesters or that the military actually fired on crowds of protesters; AJE themselves seem to be confused about it. It may be that different things are happening in different places.

As I write various people on AJE are talking about how the military "has been shielded from politics for at least thirty years," which I'm not quite sure what that means; mentioning also that they are significantly smaller than the internal police forces; and speculating about military leaders taking over if Mubarak steps down or is deposed; they also point out that the military has issued no statement about whether they're backing the government or the people.

I don't know anything about this aspect of the situation, absolutely zip, and am kind of at a loss of where to look to learn more.

UPDATE V: There has been some fear for the Egyptian Antiquities Museum, which is, if I understand correctly, pretty much right across the street from the NDP headquarters. At this point, protesters are apparently forming a human shield around it to prevent looting and to try to keep the fire from spreading to it. Which is damned impressive if you ask me.

UPDATE VI: A reporter on the street is showing a handful of live ammo shells she's been given by protesters, who picked them up off the street, so that seems to be confirmation that live ammo has been fired. She also says many people have pointed out to her the "MADE IN THE USA" stamps on the tear gas canisters fired on protesters.

UPDATE VII: Robert Gibbs's favorite word is "monitoring." He uses it whenever he would otherwise be required to answer a question.

UPDATE VIII: No word from or sign of Mubarak, no one seems to know where he is. Do we feel like he's fleeing?

UPDATE IX: Prominent businessmen have been "boarding private jets and leaving."

UPDATE X: One thing AJE keeps emphasizing is that there is no real leader of the protests, that it's the people themselves making themselves heard.

UPDATE XI: Hah! AJE tells me Reuters just reported that Egypt is in "Mubarak's safe hands," and then says "If this is what we're seeing, what does that say about Mubarak's safe hands?"

UPDATE XII: Mubarak has given an address on television, saying basically that the protests have suppressed people's desires for more of his rule, or whatever it is that he means when he says "democracy." He doesn't seem to think he's lost power.

Masculine military, feminine art: or, Ethan thinks out loud, talks out of ass

(I've been poking at this essay, off and on, for the past five days now. If it's a mess, it's because I'm just kind of aggregating it as ideas come to me. If it's really misguided, it's because I'm just thinking out loud, and not very carefully at that. Please, let me know! I want to refine these ideas and get a better understanding of things, and since I realized that wasn't happening with me just writing to myself, I decided to post this one raw.)

UPDATE: Here's Justin's response.
UPDATE II: See bottom of post.

This feminism 101 post by Melissa McEwan is (genuinely) interesting, and I imagine for many people it could actually be quite useful. Given that it's by McEwan, and thus written from her usual mainstream liberal feminist perspective, I have many disagreements with it, but regardless: interesting, useful.

I would like to, more respectfully than my usual, disagree with this aspect of its analysis in particular:

All of which happens inside an environment which is coded masculine to begin with—which is why corporate work is considered serious and important, while the arts, which are coded feminine, are considered unserious and superfluous.

Which, in turn, is why the National Endowment for the Arts (feminine) is constantly in threat of being defunded, but solemn discussion about reducing the budget for the Defense Department (masculine) is considered a hilarious suggestion

McEwan then goes off of a tangent about Democrats and Republicans, my objection to which I'm sure I don't need to state. But regarding the quoted section: I agree that "the arts" are generally coded feminine, while the military is coded masculine. But the straightforward cause and effect McEwan imputes (i.e., the gender coding is the reason for the difference in funding/support) is, at best, oversimplified.

My immediate reaction on reading it was to say to myself, "No, that's exactly backwards," but it's not. If I were to say that McEwan had it backwards, I'd be saying that the military is coded masculine so that it could be funded better, etc. Which is not the case. Rather, it's an example of the evolution of social norms under the pressures of power, as I've written about before*. McEwan's pairing of the military with the arts is a wonderful opportunity to point this out.

*Re-reading that post, hah, I certainly know more about Naomi Wolf now than I did then, yugh.

There are many ways to determine or define or describe the lineage of our current society, but however you do it, military activities have been coded masculine at pretty much every point in that lineage. The same cannot be said of the feminine coding of the arts; in fact, that coding is extremely recent (think of warrior poets, the machoism of the Romantics, etc.), and even at this point I would suggest that it is not nearly so pervasive as the masculine coding of the military--drumming or electric guitar playing, say, is coded extremely masculine, and think about how many of the last 100 movies you saw were directed by women.

What is the reason for this difference in the vintage and strength of the gender coding of these two pursuits?

Military pursuits are perhaps the most important function of civilization; if not, they are certainly the main mechanism by which civilization maintains itself. For a detailed explanation of this, pick up anything with the name "Derrick Jensen" on it, but briefly: civilization, being the organization of people into cities, means that large numbers of people live on land that cannot itself provide the resources that those people need to live; therefore, civilization must import resources from outside, which requires a constant process of expansion, which inevitably leads to violent conflict. So, for as long as there has been civilization, military activities have been essential for that civilization's survival. As long as there has been civilization, the masculine has been privileged (the reasons for this are hazy, as far as I know, and I'm sure it's not so linear as I'm making it sound, but for now let's accept it as a first principle), and so we see why the masculine coding of the military has been so long-lived and pervasive. And, considering that all of this stuff continues to be true for contemporary society and in addition we've now got the immensely profitable military-industrial complex goin' on, it's easy to see that the selective pressures on the society will keep its evolution proceeding along those lines for the foreseeable future.

Art, though. What's the deal with that? I'm not going to pretend like I know a lot about the history of art's social role, because my understanding is much more of a vague outlines thing than any kind of expert knowledge. So, frankly, I'm going to gloss over the long-view historic thing a bit by saying that, in various ways, for most of civilization's history art has played at best a neutral role as regards the interests of power, but more often and in general has served those interests more than not. Court patronage, nation-building culture, that sort of thing. To a large extent the same is true today.

But things have been changing, and, keeping in mind the admitted vagueness of my knowledge on this subject, I would tentatively place the beginning of the change with (what else?) the industrial revolution, gradual at first but with, as with everything associated with the industrial revolution, a kind of bewildering acceleration in the past hundred years or so. Art, to a certain extent, resists the commodification, the mass-production that comes along with industrial capitalism. Of course, to a much greater extent, it is subsumed within it, I'm not naïve enough to not see that, but at least in concept, the idea of the artist is the idea of the individual, the idea of the art-object is the idea of the idiosyncratic.

Or maybe it's not the difference between concept (artist as individual) versus common reality (artist as producer, or content provider) so much as the idea that art contains within it the possibility of resisting industrial capitalism. As the Situationists would not put it but to use their terms, art, stripped of its official structures, has in it the possibility of détournement--subversion--and of the dérive--spontaneity of a type unusable by power.

So, as capitalism advances, increasingly colonizing all areas of life and the world, art increasingly has to either rebel against it, in which case it is opposed to the interests of power, or serve it, which does not require a recalibration of priorities but does require a huge recalibration of methods (serving the power of a king's court is very different from serving the power of CEOs and part owners). In particular, art that serves the phase of capitalism we currently find ourselves in has to be amenable either to mass production, to marketing, to fashion, to being chintzy, planned-obsolescent, and interchangeable, or to being a trophy for rich people, reflecting back to them their best conception of themselves (in which case it is basically serving the old-fashioned purpose of art, but this is a niche in an expanding market).

At this point I think we can see why a feminine coding of art has been becoming more and more prevalent. On the one hand, art that actually is opposed to power's interests can be dismissed as irrational and meaningless, or even dangerously hysterical. On the other hand, art that serves the needs of production can be treated as subservient and submissive.

To be continued....? You decide.

UPDATE II: Picador says in comments what I think I was trying to say all along, and is hilarious to boot:

...Power can redefine activities and groups as masculine/feminine, thereby modulating their social status, depending on whether they serve or oppose the interests of Power.

E.g.: if the Pentagon were to determine that US military supremacy could only be assured by deploying legions of pregnant women dressed in pink leotards quoting Andrea Dworkin and blowing soap bubbles, 1) the Pentagon would deploy such forces, and 2) our culture would immediately redefine pregnant women in pink leotards quoting Andrea Dworkin and blowing soap bubbles as supremely masculine and kick-ass.

[Hilarious case-in-point examples elided; see comments.]

...it can be done deliberately, and selectively, by those who control the media discourse regardless of any inherent "masculine" or "feminine" traits of the target... It's not that Group A is demeaned because they are feminine; they are demeaned because they are a threat to power, and power demeans them by deliberately classifying them as feminine.

Belated

Barack Obama, recently:

From child labor laws to the Clean Air Act to our most recent strictures against hidden fees and penalties by credit card companies, we have, from time to time, embraced common sense rules of the road that strengthen our country without unduly interfering with the pursuit of progress and the growth of our economy.

It sure is a good thing that keeping (American) children out of factories didn't "unduly" hinder business, or else they'd still be right there fitting their little hands into the machines. Luckily, business could just get other children in other places.

His other examples are so ludicrous that I won't even mention them.