THE SEXUAL IMPOTENCE OF THE PUERTO RICAN SOCIALIST PARTY
By Lyn Marcus [Lyndon LaRouche]
The Campaigner, Vol. 7, No. 1, Nov. 1973
Left politics in the Puerto Rican culture is a bitter, comic-opera farce. As expressed in the form of the pathetic Puerto Rican Socialist Party, it is a self-confessed farce; what else can be said of a Party membership which sees its own essence in such a buffoon as Juan Mari Bras? There is only one phenomenon to compare with such pitiful caricatures of socialist politics; that is the even more pathetic performance of the Latin-American “Macho” in the bedroom. In fact, the political life of the PSP is the principle of the sexual impotence of the “Machismo” extended into the domain of political commedia.
This is not strictly peculiar to Puerto Rico; all Latin politics is permeated with the same pathetic, self-defeating quality. The heroic but partly foolish figure of Fidel Castro speaks of the “Cuban model”: year after year, month after month, small bands of Latin American students move out into the countryside, with a handful of small arms and a possible complement of compassions and lumens, to be ritually butchered a few days or weeks later. Nor is the problem limited to Latin American culture; the Italian Left ranges from almost as miserable down to more wretched than the Spanish “Machismo.” To an equal or slightly lesser degree, the entire population of the capitalist world is infected with the same impotence, and the consequent tendency to make Left political life a thinly-disguised reflection of that same sexual impotence. We speak therefore of such impotence in “Macho” Left politics not to degrade the Latin revolutionaries, but to begin to rid them of this disease. To cure such a disease, especially such a disease of the mind, it is first necessary to identify the disease; to bring about the cure, it is first necessary to acknowledge the sickness.
As for the PSP itself. It has become obvious to us that the organization is not salvageable; there is no possibility that PSP members individually could become revolutionaries so long as they are attached to such a cult of opportunism. What we have to reveal here will perhaps bring about the collapse of that Party—what Latin will wish to advertise his sexual impotence by maintaining a connection to a cult which is itself the publicly-exposed essence of sexual impotence? Some Papers will rant and rave and shriek: “You are ‘counter-revolutionaries' engaged in destroying the Puerto Rican revolutionary movement!” On the contrary, by debunking the flatulent PSP we are making possible, and in the absolutely necessary way, the establishment of a revolutionary movement among Puerto Ricans. We help such trapped would-be revolutionaries to break with the PSP's cult of impotence, that they may assume their rightful, human, potent role as the active link between the North American and South American revolutionary struggles as a whole.
To accomplish our purpose—to make the truth clear to the readers throughout Latin America (especially)—we organize our presentation in the following main respects. Firstly, we shall identify the scientific basis for our analytical method at some length; we shall define sexual impotence and the general cause for this mental disease in bourgeois ideology and bourgeois family relations. Then, we shall document the impotence of the PSP as an organization. Throughout, we shall state the psychological truth which every Latin can recognize in his own private thoughts as the essence of “Machismo” as sexual impotence. In that setting, we shall show the direct, causal connection between this impotence and the extension of it into the domain of so-called Left politics.
Most important, since we are revolutionaries, not “psychoanalytical” commentators, we shall identify the cure of this disease, offering the first step toward relief to the would-be revolutionaries who refuse to tolerate another wretched night of impotence-ridden despair.
WHAT IS MALE IMPOTENCE?
The immediate objection of the hysterical Latin reader to our entire approach here will be, inevitably, “This is not objective politics! We are serious revolutionaries, who have no time to waste in anything but the objective struggle!”
There are two immediate replies to that pathological objection. Firstly, as we shall demonstrate, the insistence on “objective politics” is itself the infallible symptom of sexual and political impotence.
Secondly, besieged today by a world-wide food crisis, in which millions will starve to death this winter, and tens of millions more suffer bodily depletion—a food crisis caused not by lack of means for growing food, but by capitalist speculation in foodstuffs—what possible objective reason could permit any working-class person or farmer to tolerate the capitalist system another hour? If we are to have food, we must seize the means of production instantly, that we may immediately begin growing today the expanded production of food for tomorrow's survival! There is no objective alternative! Why, then, is it not the case that the world working class is not presently engaged in socialist revolution? Why will the capitalist system still exist tomorrow morning, when every working person and farmer has the most immediate and fundamental motive to be part of an overwhelming force obliterating capitalism today?
The answer, dear comrade, lies in the subjective realm! What is this self-defeating, self-destroying flaw seizing the minds of proletarians which prevents them from immediate total mobilization for socialist revolution? What are the chains of illusion which imprison them to capitalism with a force even greater than that of bombs and bayonets? What is this inner terror obviously so much more powerful a force of enslavement than the terror of external physical destructive force? Objective politics is therefore first of all fundamentally a subjective question. To ignore so obvious a fact is itself a kind of hysterical blindness, is evidence of sexual impotence rampant in political life.
The objector now falls back to a weaker, more rearward position of defense of his sexual impotence. He insists, “Hegel, Feuerbach, and Marx never preoccupied themselves with such questions; what has all this to do with Marx, with ‘Marxism-Leninism?' Here, dear comrade reader, you again display your impotence, your impotent reading of Hegel, Feuerbach, and Marx ... your impotent view of the potent Lenin. If you read Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind, Feuerbach's Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, and Marx's “Theses On Feuerbach” and “Feuerbach” section of The German Ideology from the standpoint of our “Beyond Psychoanalysis,” from the standpoint represented here, you will be shocked to discover that in what we say we do little more than go to the very essence of the German dialectic's development. We merely make empirical what is developed in a relatively theoretical, abstract form in our predecessors' works.
Hegel himself states the principle involved in the “Preface” to his Phenomenology:
While the new world makes its first appearance merely in general outline, merely as a whole lying concealed and hidden within a bare abstraction, the wealth of the bygone life, on the other hand, is still consciously present in recollection. Consciousness misses in the new form the detailed expanse of content; but still more the developed expression of form by which distinctions are definitely determined and arranged in their precise relations. Without this last feature science has no general intelligibility, and has the appearance of being the esoteric possession of a few individuals—an esoteric possession, because in the first instance it is only the essential principle or notion of science, only its inner nature, that is to be found; and a possession of a few individuals, because, at its first appearance, its content is not elaborated and expanded in detail, and thus its existence is turned into something particular. Only what is perfectly determinate in form is at the same time exoteric, comprehensible, and capable of being learned and possessed by everybody. Intelligibility Is the form in which science is offered to everyone, and is the open road to it made plain for all ... [emphasis added—pp. 76-77 of Harper edition]
Hegel's Contribution
Our most fundamental principle, and the most fundamental principle of sound clinical work, is set forth in essentials in the “Introduction” to the same Phenomenology. It is by applying this principle, as successively corrected by first Feuerbach and then Marx, that we have been able to advance beyond the bare concept as initially developed by Hegel to the elaboration of dialectics as an empirical science. Respecting the ostensibly subjective or psychoanalytical aspects of this empirical science, we have resorted to the correlation between general political behavior and clinical individual and group analysis, to make clear and comprehensible to many what was heretofore only the possession of a few. We have accomplished this necessary advance in the elaboration of science by the very means Hegel variously implicitly and explicitly prescribes: we make the science of dialectics comprehensible to you by demonstrating the psychological truth of dialectics in terms of what you have previously considered the terra incognita of your most private reflections. We rip aside the mask not only for what you imagine you are able to conceal about your private thoughts from public knowledge; we also rip aside the mask you employ to conceal the truth of your unconscious motivations and mental dynamics from yourself.
The fundamental principle of mental science, a principle readily given conclusive empirical demonstration in clinical work, is that the mind of the individual under bourgeois social and family relations is made up of three qualities of consciousness. First, simple consciousness, then simple self-consciousness, and finally what Freudians equate to “pre-consciousness.”
First, as Hegel emphasizes, there is the banal consciousness, the Ego-state. In this degree of consciousness, there is only the naive notion of the Ego's emotional relationship to objects outside it. This is the degree of awareness of self which is predominant in bourgeois ideology, in individual neurosis, and in sexual impotence. It is the pathetic banality of simple consciousness in which the individual is governed, indeed seized, by preoccupation with the “sincerity of his feelings.” In this pathological state of simple awareness, he is therefore the naive, clinically infantile victim of whatever moods, emotions, and so forth the devils within him elect to impose upon him. He is the pathetic prisoner of irrational motives.
Yet, that is not the limit of his awareness. The individual is also capable, as Hegel insists, of “going behind his own back,” to overlook the Ego-State of infantilism. He can reflect: “I am thinking this, feeling this, and so forth, for what I believe to be the following reasons. I can see the miserable tricks I play upon myself with my infantile feelings.” This is simple self-consciousness.
The Agony of Self-Consciousness
The difficulty most persons experience in being simply self-conscious is that self-consciousness sits like a helpless spectator at the bull-ring. In the arena, the Ego, the matador, passes through the customary, disgusting ritual of assassinating the bull—itself a practice coinciding with the bestiality of the Macho psychology, bull-fighting is a clinical correlative of male sexual impotence! The spectator sees all this but is unable to intervene to stop the recurring nightmare being performed.
Night after intervening night, the Macho beds his whore-wife with an inner sense of bloody violence and self-degradation. In the morning, this miserable existentialist arises from the bed of disgust and self- disgust. He looks with disgust at the sleeping figure of the woman with whom he has shared self-degradation, and trudges, bearing an awful load of anomie, back to the house where he lives with his madonna-wife and her children. He needs a drink so desperately, to seem to wash the wretched taste from his mouth, but the drink merely begins the cycle of the new day's recurring nightmare. Tonight, he will sleep beside his madonna-wife, after an evening of being patron to her children, and Friday night the homosexual, he will be back with his whore-wife again.
It is a nightmare of his pathetic Ego-state infantilism, which goes on until psychosomatic physiological impotence frees him from even the possibility of relief with his whore-wife. He sees all this, but finds all his self-conscious wish to end the commedia as impotent as he is.
Tell the Macho his type is often a schizoid, make this clear to him, show him his miserable childhood swarming with sadistic mother and sibling and other surrogate-mothers, and his self-consciousness will acknowledge all this to be the truth of the bloody, tiring matador of an Ego in the bull-ring below. Yet, he whimpers, becoming angered at the person who has afflicted him with such self-knowledge: “I am helpless but to behave so. Don't you see; I can act only on the ‘sincerity of my feelings?'”
He will confess more. His self-consciousness will confess more. He has never had a self-conscious sexual relation with an actual woman. When he is in bed with a woman, his sexual performance is under the control of a fantasy. What he has always demanded most of the woman is that she do nothing to interrupt his fantasy, lest he instantly lose his apparent physiological potency. Indeed, the more women he has bedded, the more acutely painful and real to him is the fact that he has never maintained a sexual relationship in which the woman was the conscious subject of his desire for her as she is.
He will also admit—his self-consciousness will admit—that it is the same with the women with whom he has shared such a bed of alienation. Too often, he has heard a woman's voice in the darkness, asking him, “Are you finished?” in either such plain words or words which mean the same to his self-consciousness.
Probe his unconscious processes more deeply, bringing up for him what he has barely concealed from himself for so long, and his self-consciousness will know that all these women, his madonna-wife and his whore-wives, are surrogates for his possessive, sadistic mother. It is merely necessary to connect his infantile feelings from the ages of between approximately two and five to his adolescent and adult fantasies, and he must shriek with agony of despair that this, too, has always been true.
He will also immediately understand that the preoccupation with the cult of the Virgin Mary is the cult of female sexual impotence, the cult of female sadism, and he will thereby also understand the feelings of bloody violence he has for all sexual acts, and the sense of rape he experiences in sharing the bed with his madonna-wife.
His self-consciousness can be made to know all such things, but it nonetheless sits the helpless spectator around the bull-ring, muttering, “But lam helpless. but to do the same again. I must respect the ‘sincerity of my feelings.'
This terror of truth, this terror of self-consciousness is close to the fundamental experience of male sexual impotence.
More deeply, it becomes a sense of psychological death. More deeply explored, the infantile love of the Macho for a woman is often reified hatred of his infantile, sadistically possessive mother. It is reified because infantile hatred toward the mother is associated with a powerful dependency, such that infantile love and infantile hate become thus mixed, confused. The need to love becomes also the need to destroy, to degrade; one can love only a degraded woman (the whore-wife) and one can love the madonna-wife (the mother of her children) only by sensing this to be an act of degrading the Virgin. His madonna-wife must be chaste (i.e., a certain kind of Virgin), so that she does not deprive him of the feeling of rape in her bed. The woman, especially the madonna-wife, is a pure sadist in bed—she lures and rejects, both as her labile, sadistic mother lured and rejected her, as her mother lured and rejected her father, and taught her thus the way of a madonna with men. The whore-wife artifices the madonna-wife as caricature, as parody; she is sadistic, but is always finally conquered, the payment of price the veiled homosexual's consummate act of degradation of both the man and herself, the payment of the “gift” to the mistress her certification as a whore. For the mistress, to discard the lover's gift is to destroy him totally—he never existed. He is merely an object, without inner life; he is dead.
Self-consciousness can be readily made to see such ugly truth, but it cannot so simply will itself to leap out of the spectator's stands and end the bull-ring farce. “The nightmare must go on. I must act on the ‘sincerity of my feelings.' ”
Out of the Agony
In Hegel, self-consciousness acts only non-sensuously, by abstracting itself and the Ego from the domain of actual sensuousness. Hence, Feuerbach's genius. (Hence, also, Feuerbach's impotence—as we shall see.)
In individual psychoanalysis, or the more powerful processes of competently-led group analysis, this impotence of self-consciousness is overcome, to a varying, greater or lesser, extent, by the substitution of social love from the individual analyst and members of the group for the dependency upon the internalized image of the mother within the victim of Ego-states. “Can't you see what you are doing to yourself?” from a member of the group is an address to the self-conscious self, and represents the fixing of emotion (the emotion of love between the self-conscious self and the speaker) to self-conscious knowledge. When this feeling of love for the self-conscious self is sufficiently strengthened, the self-conscious self develops the power to act in opposition to the “blind sincerity of feeling” associated with the simple state of Ego-consciousness. “Say this to ... ” and “Immediately perform this act,” become the arena-issue of a struggle between self-consciousness and the Ego-state. Provided that the specified act corresponds to an act against the negativity of the Ego-state infantile impulse, the person who thus acts for self-consciousness has to that limited extent freed himself (or herself) from being so entirely the helpless prisoner of blind, infantile emotion.
Such a step forward and potency are one and the same thing. To actually love another person is to use one's lovingness toward them to enable them to attach emotion to self-consciousness, under circumstances in which blind emotion is impelling them to either action or inactivity of a sort which is contrary to their self-consciousness. To love is to first awaken the other's self-consciousness, to enable that person to “see” the self-degrading fallacy of “sincere feelings;” that is the first step of potent love. The next step is to strengthen the mere self-conscious knowledge newly awakened by offering loving support for the individual's new wish to be able to escape the pathetic spectator status, to be able to end his or her imprisonment by self-degrading “sincere” feelings. For the loved person to act according to awakened self-consciousness, and to reciprocate by speaking or acting in a way which acknowledges the self-consciousness of the other, is potent love. To bring self-consciousness thus sensuously into communication with self-consciousness is potent love; the inability to accomplish this, the compulsion to react from blind emotion to another's blind emotion, is impotence.
The dialectical method is immediately, empirically, a change in the state of mind, in which control by “sincerity of feeling” is ended, and in which the self-consciousness of the individual comprehends the self-consciousness of others internally in a kind of internal dialogue between the “I” and the “Thou” (of Feuerbach's Principles ... ). The dialectician is the person who has overcome sexual impotence (e.g., “Machismo”) by locating the sensuous motivation of his or her actions not in blind “sincerity of feeling,” not in the Ego-state of infantilism, but has attached emotional force to self-consciousness, such that he (or she) characteristically acts against the “sincere feelings” or absence of feeling in the Ego-state of himself and others. He defines his relationship to others not merely in terms of his self-consciousness of their Ego-states, not as contemplation of their pathetic infantilism; he defines his relationship to others as one of addressing their self-consciousness, educating their self-consciousness to will to act contrary to their previously-existing “natural” inclinations of blind “sincerity of feeling.”
This state, a dialectical world-view, is thus a condition of acting according to self-consciousness of the self-consciousness of others. The relationship among two persons, each looking at the other from this dialectical point of view, yet each acting in common as a combined self-consciousness of the self-consciousness of third and fourth, etc., persons, is the emotion of love, of potent or self-conscious love.
A Fundamental Discovery
The subsumption of self-consciousness in many, in this fashion, by two or more persons in self-conscious relationship to one another, results in what must first appear to be an unending series of the following form: We are self-conscious of our mutual self-consciousness of the self-consciousness of others. The more others are subsumed by this self-consciousness, the greater the enumeration of self-consciousness of self-consciousness of self-consciousness, etc. Yet, this enumeration implies nothing but a “bad infinity” in the sense of that term as given variously by Hegel and the mathematician Georg Cantor. Cantor's notion of “bad infinities” and transfinite existences has, as mathematicians know, an immediate, “projective” correspondence to the Riemannian theory of manifolds. The following, several, interconnected primitive principles arise from such universe-shaking observations.
Firstly, in empirical clinical work, the states of self- conscious (or, dialectical) relationships results in a “tingling” awareness which recent German clinical experiences have identified as an “unheimlich,” approximately in English, “eerie,” “uncanny,” feeling of a higher state of awareness. In Freudian usages this “unheimlich” feeling corresponds dynamically to pre-consciousness and descriptively to the Superego. This is the most important of all clinical phenomena, to which we now turn more concentrated attention.
The effective psychoanalytical group leader depends upon the developed power to abstract Gestalts from the intra-group dynamics, Gestalts which correspond to potential images for the unconscious feeling-states of various group participants. Through knowledge of such Gestalts, the group-leader is able to force the participants to bring forth from unconscious processes corresponding conscious images of their unconscious states. This initial advance then results in the manifestation of new Gestalts, which, when identified, call forth the next layer of emotional imagery from the participant's unconscious processes as conscious images. The effect on the participant is as if the group leader were reading his unconscious mind, which, to a large degree is exactly what is occurring. As the group process advances, through closer interconnections among the unconscious processes of the participants in this way, the group leader is able to operate through the internalization (“within his head”) of a collection of Gestalts, each corresponding to the essential inner self of the participant associated with that image.
It is as if the group-leader had each participant's mind inside his own, to the extent that he is able to follow the unconscious thoughts of participants through two devices. Firstly, every bit of mime by a participant becomes immediately comprehensible to him; secondly, he is able to internally predict the internal reaction (unconscious reaction) of each participant to any new developments in the group process. At this point of development of the group process, the leader is situated to plunge certain of the participants down into the very depths of themselves in a strictly scientific fashion. (He is limited, most of all, by the extreme physiological drain on himself occasioned by the degree of concentration and effects on his ACTH dynamics of containing so much replication of so many others' profound emotion within himself.)
There is no voodoo or jiggery-pokery in this process. Everything can be empirically demonstrated.
The whole process begins as a kind of poking a stick into dark waters. Gradually, in the typical case, certain semi-amoeboid forms begin to be distinguishable as Gestalts. The analyst begins to make out the lawfulness of the way each individual's sense of social identity regulates his or her behavior, and to also sense similarly the determinants of this sense of identity—chiefly through identity-strengthening and depressing reactions.
Occasionally, he encounters such a “harder” shape, a potential psychosis. In such latter instances, the individual's physiological mental processes obviously include a parasitical entity, not in the sense of a tissue formation of the ordinary notion, but as a process- Gestalt. These entities, seizing upon the physiological processes of mentation of their victims, act as if they were independent intelligences, which must be trapped and otherwise outwitted if one is to free the victim of this parasite.
These “hard” parasitical formations are so definite that names can be given to them. “The witch” is a not-uncommon form of such a “Poltergeist,” in both men and women, since the more common potential psychoses and extreme manic-depressive “parasites” of this sort are modeled upon a parody of the mother- image. (The labile, possessive mother, or the “Schwaermerei” of a variety of surrogate mothers is a common basis for a “witch” image.) In no case is such an inferred image a mere construct; in all cases, discovery of such a Gestalt of a mental parasite-entity permits empirical demonstration of the existence of precisely such an entity. Indeed, the afflicted individual has often been aware of such a parasite within himself or herself long before, and in many cases the ingenuous appellation of the name of the parasitical entity has been made by close acquaintances (e.g., “she's a witch”) before then.
Only hysterical fools would imagine that competent psychoanalysis is not a rigorous, empirically-grounded science.
These discoveries of Gestalts are demonstrable in a variety of interconnected ways. Most obviously, by observing distinct personality-changes in the affected individuals, and more to the point by the group leader's ability to lawfully determine the succession of such personality changes. (For example, to recall the self- conscious person from under seeming total control by the personality of a parasite-entity.) Once these experiences of clinical settings are applied to the observation of behavior in life generally, the insights and powers of insight acquired in the clinical setting become most efficient insights into the behavior of everyday situations.
In general, the individual's sense of identity is associated with such images of definite “shape” and behavior within his or her mind. The inner mind of man contains a large hall, with benches running up the sides of the room, and a large arena-like area, flanked by such rising benches, before a podium. At the podium are usually found parodies of mother and father images, with the mother usually the most massive figure. Along the walls are seated a mass of other figures, sometimes seeming to be ordinary human images, but easily exposed as the sort of images one sees in the elder Breughel, Bosch, or the “dark period” of Goya. One knows, after a few entries in such halls within the mind of others (and oneself) whence Breughel, Bosch, and Goya secured the models of the monsters in their paintings. One sees the Ego standing in the pit, confronted mostly by the mother, looking with fear of the mother at the father, and sometimes at the semi-human monsters (sometimes turned into rats or gigantic insects) along the flanking benches. Above, self-consciousness watches this horrid trial of the Ego, and sees with tearful fascination the fashion in which the images in the hallway terrorize the individual ego into self- degrading acts of “sincerity of feeling.”
One plunges through the layer of mind in which fantasy is generated into the deeper regions in which the need for fantasy of so definite, characteristic a form is determined. At this point, nothing is secret; there is only blindness, which alone prevents all from plainly seeing what should be obvious enough.
At this point in the proceedings of group work, the leader's mind is subjected to a gross experience of the “unheimlich” feeling, the feeling of being always able to reach the next order of self-consciousness above that he presently experiences, and on and on. I self-consciously think this; I can be self-conscious of my thinking this. I can do so by projecting my present experience of self-consciousness to the others here and then, in turn, being self-conscious of my act of communicating that self-consciousness. The essence of this is already in Hegel's Phenomenology!
Now, we have met Hegel's Logos! It is identical with what Freud terms the Superego or the experience of pre-consciousness. It is a concrete state of mental awareness of the process of enumeration of higher degrees of simple self-consciousness of the self-consciousness of others. The group leader experiences this in terms of his internal mental dynamics respecting the “I”—‘Thou” relationship among his self-consciousness and that of the Gestalts of the others. His knowledge of his ability to communicate his experienced state of self-consciousness to the others becomes what is for Cantor a transfinite consciousness, a concretized comprehension of such a process of self-conscious relationships. Most important, this concrete form of transfinite consciousness can be replicated in others and thus itself experienced. This defines a new series of first-order transfinite self-consciousnesses, and ... ”unheimlich”! ... a new order of transfinite self-consciousness. Then ...”unheimlich”!
If one has understood that—actually comprehended it—then one has the bare conception of Hegel's Phenomenology!
The Discovery Elaborated
It is most useful, now, to introduce consideration of a common query from among critics of Hegel, et al. “How is it possible for the human mind to conceptualize totalities except as collections of definite object- images, discrete object-images?” This is no digression, but rather provides us an immediate access to the most fundamental conceptions to be comprehended.
The argument, obviously enough, abstracts from consciousness—from simple, Ego-state consciousness (Cf. Hegel, Phenomenology ... , “Introduction,” “Sense-Certainty”)—only the object-images of naive sense-certainty, and on such premises falsely argues that thought itself is limited to object-images. Hence, ignorant opinion vehemently insists, science must always begin with commonly-acknowledged definite (discrete) object-images as the primitive constituents of all human knowledge. That conceit is itself rigorous proof of sexual impotence in the credulous advocate of empiricism or existentialism, as we shall demonstrate.
Is it then possible to have thought without emotion? In certain instances of extreme sexual impotence, it might be reported (as by sexually-impotent pure mathematicians) that this is the case. However, clinical work demonstrates that the emotion exists, by virtue of elation and depression phenomena which can only be the results of emotional shifts of the most powerful sort. If the pure mathematician usually imagines that he dreams only in black and white (and the gifted musician in color), this is because the sexually-impotent mathematician has blocked recognition of color (emotion), and thus usually experiences (consciously) only depression, elation, and rage ... emotions!
Object-images exist for thought as subjects of emotion; they never exist without emotion, but always uniquely in a cathexized form. Pure object-images do not exist—contrary to sexually-impotent forms of algebraic and other formal logics. The discrete (the so-called primitive object-image of sense-certainty) does not exist except as a predicate of the continuous, emotion. Emotion, usefully linked to the proprioceptive, endocrinal disposition for action, is the intellectual experience of the pure continuum.
Returning from this particular aspect of the matter to the “transfinite,” the experience of the “unheimlich” state of self-consciousness, implicitly manifest as pre-consciousness, is associated with a definite quality of emotional state, corresponding most closely to what is otherwise known as self-conscious motives for potent sexual loving, as distinct from the usual infantile “loving.” The same emotional state is experienced characteristically in the outbursts of thought which can subsequently be “objectively” identified as great creative impulses for discovery and comprehension of new Gestalts. This, as we develop the case in “Beyond Psychoanalysis,” is the emotion of self-conscious love and of creative mentation.
It corresponds, as we can readily demonstrate through Cantor's notion of the “transfinite,” to a certain comprehension of the entire universe.
If we break from the notion that the universe is a fixed sort of Riemannian space, to the conception of the historical universe as a nest of successive Riemannian spaces of ever-higher order, then we have a conception of the universe which exactly corresponds to the “unheimlich” state concretized. This would mean a universe which at each historical moment was characterized by an invariant mode of determination of relationship among parts, but in which the quality of the invariant shifted as the next historical moment (next higher-order of space) evolved. The pattern of shifting values thus described would represent a true world-line for the historical universe.
This has several fundamental implications. Firstly, if the universe is merely of a fixed order of space (in the special sense employed here), then we are situated in a most perplexing state respecting the possibility of scientific knowledge of that universe. We are implicitly stuck in the continuous universe of simple identity of Joseph Schelling, a universe which is, as Hegel sardonically describes the matter, “a night in which all cows are black.” In such a universe as that it is impossible to simultaneously “reduce” the notion of the entire universe to a single, continuous comprehensive law and retain the actuality of necessary existence of definite object-states in the here and now! (The epistemological essence of the “generalized field problem.”) Only if the universe is organized not on the principle of simple energy (fixed quality of space in this special sense), but organized on a principle of universal negentropy, in the sense of the nest of successive historic orders of space, does there appear the possibility (the epistemological potentiality) of comprehending the elaborated universe as a single, continuous totality in terms of a single conception of universal law.
Yet, if the universe is of exactly the “nested” historical form of self-subsisting positive evolution thus implied by epistemological necessity, the form of possible degrees of self-consciousness of the human mind is in exact correspondence with such a universe, and thus the universe represents a totality which is in precise correspondence with the creative potentialities of the human mind.
This would signify, along the lines developed in “Beyond Psychoanalysis” and Dialectical Economics, that the emotion of self-conscious love, the affective state of creative mentation, the fundamental law of the universe, and the Marxian principle of historical materialism, are all “projective” equivalents of one another!
The Case of Marx
Admittedly, Marx himself does not go explicitly so far. We have dealt with the problem of Marx's limitations in Dialectical Economics. Marx reduces the issue of the dialectical form of the sensuous act and object to a practical question of revolutionizing human socialized practice, and thus evades as well as avoids the implied issue of the susceptibility of the laws of the physical universe to such revolutionizing. Yet, within that limitation, Marx's notion of historical, positive (self-subsisting) evolution of successive, historically-specific states of social-reproductive practice is nothing but a special case of what we have described above.
Where Marx himself is most definite, as in his Capital, Volume III treatment of “Freedom/Necessity,” is in his conception of expanded reproduction, as we have treated the relevant issues within the socialist movement in our “In Defense of Rosa Luxemburg.” The moment of actualization of the human quality of individual existence, the actualization of universal labor through cooperative labor, is not the simple productive act, but rather the revolutionizing of the mode of production as a whole, first approximated through technological advances which represent, in effect, higher states of negative entropy in terms of S/(C+V). Universal labor, expanded reproduction, and sexual potency are one and the same at root. All signify “elitism,” all signify the process of fundamentally altering the inner mind of others, and being positively altered in the same way, by creative mentation (universal labor).
As we indicated earlier in this, what we have done is to elaborate these conceptions beyond their bare form of conception, utilizing, the empirical evidence of the mind and the cited line of achievements of modern scientific knowledge (e.g., the line defined by Riemann and Cantor).
Sexual Impotence Per Se
Everyday rationalization limits the conception of sexual impotence to impairment of the individual's physiological capacity to perform sexual acts or, inclusively, impairment of the capacity for sexual “arousal.” In the final analysis, most of these acknowledged forms of psychosomatic impotence are to be regarded as consequences of the more fundamental and pervasive psychological impotence to which we refer here. Hence, the point is made most clear if we confine our attention to the cases of extreme sexual impotence in which there is little or no obvious physiological defect in the individual's ability to perform sexually. Indeed, the most revealing form is not given by the case of inability to maintain an erection, or ejaculatio praecox, etc., but rather by the impotent male (for example) who can perform credibly and almost indifferently with women, sheep, large dogs and other men.
The classical case is the sexually athletic Macho who regards himself as a successful performer in bed, the Macho who has much to say and think respecting his capacities for various modes of penetration and frequency and cubic centimeters of ejaculations. The ugly secret of the matter is that he is almost totally sexually impotent.
Firstly, his sexual relations are not relations at all, but are essentially sexual performances before an internalized audience. He is admittedly somewhat ambivalent about inviting a large audience to witness his performance with even a prostitute, which does not inhibit his homosexual impulse to recount his fantasy of the performance in the most painstaking detail (somewhat “improved” in the telling) before the first large audience he deems suitable for this purpose. His relationship to the woman is immediately a relationship of himself, as performer in a fantasy, to an audience for this fantasy.
Secondly, the woman with whom he is psychologically mating is seldom (if ever) the woman in bed with him; he is making love to a woman of pure fantasy. The actual woman's relationship to this fantasy is predominantly negative. She must, of course, suggest the woman of his fantasy to him, either by a resemblance to the fantasy-object or by the law of reaction-formation. Her essential duty to the performer is to play her part in such a way that she re-enforces and does not unmask the fantasy.
Hence, among the Macho's favorite prostitutes and mistresses, the art of playing various fantasy-supporting roles is the quality which the poor, impotent Macho finds most endearing. She, too, is merely giving a performance, and participating in the game in terms of her own fantasies.
Sometimes—often enough—her fantasy is not specifically sexual at all, but rather one of pure female sadism. With the (typically) frigid woman, the gratification of sexual performances originates in the sense of power over the male whom she sees as essentially pathetic.
Hence, the fabled “Latin Lover.” In public, he is of course the familiar Macho, a total fraud. In private, and the more pathetically so the closer the bedroom, the Latin, especially, turns into a whimpering child, begging for a little love. This pathetic (depressive) aspect of the Macho syndrome gives the sadistic woman the greatest pathological joy. Here she has the most suitable of victims, a wretched creature to torment with her “moods.” “Come here, Fido,” she grudgingly offers him in one moment, and in the next, “Sorry, Fido, I'm not in the mood. Let's discuss art, Fido. Down, Fido, don't you respect me at all!” What pure sadistic delight for her it is to be as impotently capricious as she chooses, to play cruelly with this helpless pet. He perhaps strikes her; she resents the blow, but delights in the evidence of the misery she has effected in him! Here is a man in whom she can evoke the most profound suffering. (Ergo, the attractiveness of the dog-like Latin Lover to the frigid Anglo female.)
No wonder, then, that one morning the man sits on the edge of his bed in profound depression. Sex no longer represents a satisfying illusion for him. Sex with this woman leaves him feeling even more empty than when he began the affair with her. In the need to escape such a relationship and yet, perhaps, his greater fear of leaving it, the man thus experiences the awful depressing sense of his essential sexual impotence. The more women he has bedded, the more insistently the truth of it all comes upon him and depresses him; in none of this did he love, nor in any of this was he loved. The physiological excitement of coitus, the anticipatory sensations of fore-play, were a gigantic fraud, a hoax. He is impotent.
As for the woman: one day, she too, tires of the monotony of tormenting her pet pathetic rapist, her husband. She becomes pregnant, and is now free to distance herself from her husband by exercising that form of more gratifying sadism she learned from her mother—the sadistic possession of her children. Through her sadism, her possessiveness, she turns her sons into Macho dogs like her husband before them, and her daughters into frigid pseudo-Virgin Marys, like herself. She and her husband meet as strangers, as hostile ambassadors from their respective worlds. He, from the homosexual world of his cronies and his whore-wives; she, from the world of the household, where she is the Virgin-Mother possessor of her victim- children.
Motherhood and Impotence
Think back to childhood. If you had a father, recall the hope of joy you often experienced when father came home in the evening. The stale, grey monotony of “life with mother” was suddenly relieved, the household became illuminated with color—at least, on the better evenings. “Company's arrived—it's father!” Think, then, of the wretchedness of emotional life in the household, Latin or U.S. black ghetto, in which there is no father to come home and bring light to the household, in which every wretched hour of life at home is only the grey, tasteless monotony of mother-mother- mother. Mother grows more oppressively gigantic as the years of childhood succeed one another. Get away from mother! Or, capitulate to mother. The child hangs between the two awful impulses; to get away from the only identity-giving figure he or she knows into the empty, strange world, or to stay and degrade oneself yet again in this dependency. It is a world of hateful—literally hate-filled, Blah, Blah, Blah and more Blah. It is the awful, terrifying sensation of impotence, the constant inner terror of being suspended half-way between life and looming death below.
To be the child of only a mother is to be the victim of sadism, no matter how much that mother may wish to love. The individual possessed by a single other person can experience only being fed and petted. He or she, the child, is the object for the mother's affectionate possession, and therefore only an object. The mother, in turn, is an alien for the child. It is slave-object (child) and master-object (mother). There is no mediating human love-relationship through which the child and the mother can share love as shared self-consciousness of the self-consciousness of another person.
By contrast:
“What are you doing, mother?”
“Baking a cake for father.”
“Can I help, mother?”
“Of course.”
“Will father like the cake?”
“Father likes this kind of cake very much.”
“Oh, he'll be happy when he finds it, won't he?”
“Yes, love, he will be.”
“We love father, don't we mother?”
“Yes, we love father very much.”
The child experiences thus love for the mother and the mother for the child. They are, in this small but not-unimportant way, sharing self-consciousness of the consciousness of a third person. The child is learning the power to love. This can even be self-consciousness of the father's self-consciousness, if it is implied in such a dialogue that father is often depressed (in an unhappy ego-state) when he returns home. They anticipate his enjoyment of the cake not merely as his sense of infantile sensual gratification, but as his self-consciousness of their self-conscious effort to make him self- conscious of their love. That is the way a child learns to love. He sees the mother and father as loving persons, and delights in its own capacity to share the love between his parents.
What, then, when the mother “distances” the father, implies that the father is a “failure,” that “men are no good,” that men “are always annoying women” as when they wish to sleep, and so forth? What agony for the child.
The possessive mother insists that the daughter is pretty and clever. The father agrees; yes, the daughter is so pretty, so clever. The daughter senses a plunging agony of rejection: father does not love her; he is merely taken in by the “outsidedness” her mother is seeking to impose upon her. It is only where the mother and father can self-consciously love another that their respective relationships to the children become coherent if different expressions of the same universality of loving for the child. Where there is no such love between the parents (especially during the critical first five years of the child's life), the likelihood that the child will ever know love—real love—is enormously diminished.
It is the child's sense of the father's love, especially beginning in the period of late infancy and early childhood, when the image of the father tends to be more clearly distinguished (unconsciously) from that of the mother, which awakens the notion of love in the child. The child, sensing the coherence of both the mother's and father's loving, is compelled to become self-conscious of their loving self-consciousness of him (or her). It takes at least three to communicate the notion of self-conscious love. No two people by themselves can love one another, except in an infantile, almost bestial way. Love begins as the shared self- consciousness of the self-consciousness of others; love is the self-consciousness of those whom we love together. Love between two is a shared loving toward the self-consciousness or hope of self-consciousness among others in the “outside” world.
Hence, a mother-child relationship, maintained against the “interference” of the father, etc., especially against the father, is inherently a sadistic relationship of mother to child, resulting inevitably in sexual impotence and selfishness in the adult outcome of such a childhood.
We can remedy such hideous outcomes of sadistic, possessive “anti-father” “mother-love” only by self-consciously recognizing and destroying the dependency of the adult to an internalized image of the “mother,” This can be accomplished by a general climate of comradely love, within which there is a self-conscious love-relationship to a single individual of the opposite sex who serves as a concrete universal, as the universal, constant reference point of self-conscious social identity in respect to all other human relationships.
Yet, apart from that remedy, which the revolutionary movement must afford first to its own members and through them to the working-class generally, one who has any knowledge of the Latin (or Italian) cult of motherhood, knows that from such monstrously depraved forms of the bourgeois family can emerge only generally such pathetic human wreckage as the Macho.
Admittedly, the problem is not absolutely this or that. In most Latin families, there must have been some small scent of loving by the father, by siblings, some small taste of loving from playmates of the “outer world,” from grandparents, and so forth. There are, happily, very few absolutely pure Machos; most Machos have some sense of what real love should be, a small grip on real humanity. It is essential to locate that, to use it as the source of strength to build upon in addressing the Machismo-system victim's self-consciousness, and in thus beginning to free him from his self-degradation.
Yet, for this very reason, it is even more essential that a high priority be given to recruiting Latin women to the movement, and in similarly freeing these women from the grip of their frigidity, their sadistic semi-bestiality and self-bestialization as potential “mothers.”
Relationship to Politics
The banal state of simple consciousness, the ego- state of “my sincere feelings,” is the reduction of the self—and other selves—to virtually unchangeable objects. “I have my nature.” The belief in magic, in astrology, or existentialism are thus infallible symptoms of bestialization of the impotent individual. “I cannot be changed.” “You must not try to change me.” “accept me as I am.” “I have my psychological needs.” “They have their psychological needs.” “We must not impose our ‘elitist' will on the workers.” “The workers, through their experience, are the only ones who could know what they really desire; we must not impose our values upon them, since we do not have their experience.” All of these and similar symptoms are evidence of sexual impotence and its political correlatives. Similarly, “Local control,” and “nationalism,” are also expressions of impotence in their appropriate symptomatic expressions as politics.
The will of the worker must become the will to do that which is in the historic interest of the world's working-class as a whole; nothing else. If the workers passionately cling to any contrary sentiment of imagined self-interest, that sentiment must be seized upon and ripped out of them. No human being has the right to believe or “feel” anything except that which impels him to act in the historic interest of the world's working-class as a whole.
This does not deprive him or her of individual rights; to act for the human race is to actively express a certain quality of self as capacity, as developed individual human powers. The political working-class properly demands that each of its members enjoy those individual rights, including leisure and material consumption, which are essential to the individual to develop his or her individual human powers to the “level” corresponding to what the individual must do for the working-class as a whole. The individual who fights ruthlessly for his family's consumption, their education, their leisure, to such historic ends, is not being “greedy,” but is being class-conscious. Yet, this very fact only more forcefully demonstrates that there is no rational basis for tolerating any beliefs or “feelings” in anyone which would impel that person to act contrary to the historic interests of the political class as a whole.
There exists no (heteronomic) individual, local, or “national” self-interest which is to be tolerated (as “legitimate”) if it conflicts in the least with the historic interests of the world-wide working-class as a whole.
To the extent that anyone is impelled by false belief or simple consciousness of irrational “feeling” to the contrary, that person's beliefs and “feelings” must be ripped out and replaced with appropriate human beliefs and “feelings.” To do just that is an act of potent loving; to avoid that, to fail to undertake just that task, is an act of sexual and social impotency.
“You don't understand my wife. She's a devout Catholic, like her mother.”
“Then, change her. Do not permit her to remain a degraded creature as her mother was. Love her; change her inside.”
Any politics which panders to “national” sentiments, to “localism,” to backwardness is the expression of sexual impotence in politics.
Let it be clear here: we are not speaking merely of parallels between sexual and political impotency. We insist that there is a direct, causal connection, such that sexual impotency is generally the causal root of Left political impotency.
Firstly, the search for a meaningful sexual relationship is the search for a concrete universal, a person of the opposite sex to whom one opens the entirety of oneself, and through that deep interconnection of shared self-consciousness one finds in that relationship something stronger, better than the earlier location of one's identity in being a child of one's parents. The search for this is the most profound and essential dynamic of all individual thought and behavior, a dynamic which is necessarily the basis for every form of social conduct of the individual. Hence, in what the individual expresses respecting the search for a concrete universal, we encounter more than a parallel for what he does in other aspects of life; we encounter in the search for such love the very essence of his behavior in all aspects of life.
As we laid the matter out in “Beyond Psychoanalysis,” the unique physiological premise of mentation in the hominid infant (not yet human) is merely the development of the Infant's power of self-development of his powers to exist. It is this integrating principle—this psychosomatic principle—which uniquely empowers him to develop Gestalts; perception, conception, recognition, to determine existent actualities in the form of Gestalts (object-images) from the continuity of experience. Yet, the problem he must solve in order to develop deliberative powers for his existence is the circumstance in which his existence depends upon power over the socialized processes which entirely mediate his individual relationship to nature generally. Consequently, he becomes human (rather than a mere hominid) as his individual powers become entirely social powers. He does not acquire individual (isolated animal) powers over nature per se, but rather powers over the forces of his society.
This process begins for him in this culture (in particular) in terms of the mother-image. It is his mother and her surrogates who ‘mediate his relationship to the world; thus, he must solve the problem of the mother-image, must learn deliberate control of the mother-image, as his initial development of socialized powers. Because he develops the power to recognize himself as the object for the behavior of another (the mother- image), he develops a conception of identity—social identity, not pure individual identity—and thus accomplishes the evolution from hominid to human being. (Theologians may consider the issue of infant baptism settled accordingly; only a bestial (e.g. feudal) society could tolerate infant baptism.)
Accordingly, there develops a cathexis between his primary psychosomatic emotion and the interconnected recognition of the images of his mother and his mother's object, himself. The approach of the mother-image becomes the opportunity to exercise his developing deliberative powers; his sense of identity is thus more strongly awakened. He is elated ... unless ...
“No, it is not the mother-image; it is some creature who does not respond as the mother-image does! It is a hateful image;” the sense of identity recedes, and the capacity for determinate thought (conception) is shrunk, overwhelmed by a Schwaermerei of half-digested images and other sensations.
We elaborated a bit of the process by which this infantile relationship to the mother-image is properly superseded in later infancy—the onset of childhood—by the emergence of actual self-consciousness, usually through relationships to the father, other siblings, grandparents, and so forth. Yet, the location of the sense of identity in the mother-image remains.
Increasingly, it becomes apparent to the systematic observer that the actual woman, the mother, and the child's internalized mother-image are not the same person. The mother-image is the product of the relationship of the mother to the child, and also mixed with the relationship of mother-surrogates to the child, for which relationships the mother-image is “blamed.” In later childhood, the internalized mother-image is modified, but the basic personality of this image remains that formed, with decreasing force of change, throughout the period up to about five years of age.
In later life, it becomes necessary for the individual to be psychologically weaned, to supersede the mother- image with (in the case of the male ex-child) another woman who performs for him as adult the same essential function as the mother-image in childhood. It is the concrete universal he seeks, the person to whom his inner self is entirely opened, the person whose existence is the internalized and externally actualized location of his sense of identity. His impotence, including his sexual impotence, is his inability to establish just such a relationship; yet, that impotence does not end his searching, but only intensifies the empty-feeling agony of his bad-infinity searching. This is both the concentrated essence of everything else he seeks in every aspect of social life and is the point of reference to which he refers every question from other aspects of personal social life. Inevitably so, since this search is a search for affirmation of his inner sense of identity.
What is thought? It is the judgment which is regulated by the increase or decrease of the sense of identity. One acts not merely to attain fixed objects, fixed sensuous acts, but to obtain those objects, actualize those thought-acts which mediate an increased sense of identity. In the pathological state, the force of judgment is regulated by an internalized babble of images, dominated usually by the mother-image. With small effort, one can bring up the mother-image either re-enforcing or reducing the sense of identity as an immediate regulator of “sincerity of feeling” in the adult. It is the same in politics.
In this sense, the neurotic adult must be systematically regarded as a pseudo-adult—either as the victim of individual neurosis or of that collective neurosis recognized as bourgeois ideology. His sense of identity is pathologically determined by childish fantasies, and not by self-consciousness of his positive basis for adult existence. By contrast, the revolutionary is essentially the only true adult by contrast with the pseudo-adult children about him. The neurotic loves his wife as a surrogate for his mother; the adult loves his mother and father not as internalized images, but as actual human beings, and loves his wife as an actual human being in her own right. He has put aside his mother and father, who becomes specially-loved peers on the outside of his identity, and locates his identity in the adult woman who has become the focus of his sense of identity.
The Macho, for example, is not a true adult man, but only an overgrown, neurotic “little man,” “his mother's little man.” The secret of the Macho, or of the kindred petit-bourgeois Italian Left intellectual with his citric Weltschmerz, his pathetic existentialism, is that he, relative to his “Northern” class brothers, is less civilized, less socialized. Latin culture is relatively a culture of uncivilized, barely-socialized children; remove the thin veneer of civilization from the infantile little beast of mother-love, and pure beast emerges—the beast of the bull-fight, the beast we see in the murderous, torturing juntas and the sadistic peasants who perform such hideous, bestial tortures.
It is, of course, true that the butchers of Latin America are the agents of the U.S. State Department, CIA, and international cartels. It is also true that in Latin America the CIA finds such excellent butchers for its purpose, and populations which not only tolerate such bestiality, but in which the Left itself has such a necrophiliac fascination with sado-masochistic submission to death by torture. The Macho Leftist is little concerned to wipe out the butchery; his image of the revolutionary is the sacrificial victim baring its chest to the bullet, the victim submitting to the ultimate homosexual masochistic fantasy of being sodomically raped to death. He is the most pathetic of Christians, especially when he deludes himself he is an atheist; the prototypical Macho revolutionary is the revolutionary priest reliving the Passion of Christ in submitting to the most degraded tortures and death, indeed almost begging to be sodomically raped in such a fashion. The Macho Left will then make gigantic bull-fight posters of the victim, eulogizing the “beauty” of this sodomic death-rape; they will parade pictures of the victim's mutilated body to the credulous Machos who dream of themselves achieving the same Passionate perfection of “being a true revolutionary.” The imagery of Macho Left poetry and painting is so painfully self-revealing—and disgustingly abominable!
It is time to end this nightmare, this recurring nightmare of infantile Macho Leftism, its abominable, self-degrading fascination with mutilated bodies—its homosexual fantasies respecting the sodomic death-rape of human bodies, fantasies which so often, not accidentally, pervade the Macho's sexual fantasies as such. It is time for childish Latin would-be revolutionaries to break free of such sadistic mother-love, such Machismo, and to become human adults.
Rats
The essence of Macho politics is the fear of rats. This is, of course, characteristic of all bourgeois culture, and is only intensified among Machos. “Honor,” “Manhood,” and so forth, the entire disgusting paraphernalia of “Latin courtesy,” reveal this. “Intrude upon my honor, my sense of manhood, and I will kill you!” “Try to psychoanalyze me and I will kill you!” The impotent Macho is trained by his pathetic culture to take the other person at the outward value that person seems to place upon himself; that is the condition for “being accepted.” Break “the code” and the entire peer group suddenly turns into a horde of rats, attacking “the violator of honor.”
What is “Honor”? What but the guilty knowledge that underneath the facade of outer pretenses the “inner person” is a worthless, degraded beast. Look beneath the surface and you have seen what no “honorable” person will endure to be revealed about himself; this guilty knowledge must be destroyed by destroying the person who possesses it.
Yet, revolution is nothing but the subjective activity of probing most deeply into the inner selves of others, in order to rip out self-degrading “sincerity of feelings,” to awaken self-consciousness, and to fundamentally change the other persons, into the adult, actually human beings they are capable of becoming. To respect “Honor,” “Manhood,” and so forth is to be impotent. To “respect the chastity of women” is to be impotent: sexually and politically. The Macho, who is not capable of being a real man or a revolutionary, does not know love, does not know humanity; he knows only either masochistic submission to the eternal chastity of the Holy Mother or rape, especially homosexual rape.
Macho Left politics is a pathetic mixture of “Latin courtesy,” “Latin posturing,” and unimaginative childish insults. Nothing is more typically pathetic on this count than the empty posturing of the PSP.
Hegel, Feuerbach, and Marx
There are three degrees of relative freedom from sexual and political impotence, respectively associated with the names of Hegel, Feuerbach, and Marx. What distinguishes these three—and those associated with their humanist faction—is their conception of the political organizing process as one in which self-consciousness defines itself by creating self-consciousness of the same quality and actualization in others. The respective ways in which Hegel, Feuerbach, and Marx propose to realize that human quality is their respective distinctions from one another.
In Hegel, self-consciousness is limited to the roles of the classroom educator or enlightened official. Reality exists for him only in the form of abstractions from reality, which he mistakes for the essence of reality. Actual, sensuous relations among actual persons do not exist in Hegel's system.
In Feuerbach, a great advance is made. Feuerbach exposes the great fraud of Hegel, the fraud of the abstract Logos. Feuerbach—in our adopted terms of clinical reference—insists on the psychoanalytical principle of cathexis: ideas do not exist detached from emotion; the abstract Logos of Hegel is the grey, lifeless abstraction from the universality of love = creative mentation. For Feuerbach, and this is the kernel of his genius, the thought exists as actualizable thought only as its determined object-image is the impulse for a sensuous act in the sensuous world.
Feuerbach's great flaw—his relative impotence—is that he cannot get beyond the role of the “explorer of nature.” His individual is able only to select sensuous acts from nature as given by nature. Feuerbach is thus a petit-bourgeois democrat where Hegel is an enlightened Prussian official. For example, to apply the petit- bourgeois principle of Feuerbach's relative impotence to Left politics, Feuerbachian impotence is exemplified by support of a specific, fixed objective, such as support of the specific objectives of a strike. When the strike is finished, won or lost, the mobilization of self-consciousness for continued class struggle is aborted—is revealed as impotent. Support of “national revolutionary” objectives is similarly a political expression of sexual impotence.
Marx, beginning with the first of his “Theses On Feuerbach,” cuts through sexual and political impotence.
The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism—that of Feuerbach included—is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as human sensuous activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence it happened that the active side, in contradistinction to materialism, was developed by idealism—but only abstractly, since, of course, idealism does not know real, sensuous activity as such. Feuerbach wants sensuous objects, really differentiated from the thought objects, but he does not conceive human activity itself as objective activity. Hence, in the Essence of Christianity, he regards the theoretical attitude as the only genuinely human attitude, which practice is conceived and fixed only in its dirty-judaical form of appearance. Hence, he does not grasp the significance of “revolutionary,” of “practical-critical” activity.
We cite that passage here because it has absolutely not been understood by any known philosophical critics or “Marxist-Leninist” babblers.
It signifies that, for Marx, the act, the sensuous object, exists in reality only as the mediation of self- consciousness, only as a connection between one degree of self-consciousness and a still-higher degree of self-consciousness. This identifies the semi-genius of Trotsky's conception of “permanent revolution”—semi-genius because Trotsky himself, to say nothing of his so-called followers, never fully understood the deeper implications of his half-discovery. The act must not be an end in itself, otherwise we are back at Feuerbachian “democratic” politics, back at Feuerbachian “dirty-judaical” preoccupation with possession of the fixed goal, back at Feuerbachian political—and sexual—impotence. The act must be only the necessary mediation through which higher states of self-consciousness for higher qualities of mediating sensuous practice are attained.
This Marxian principle is uniquely located in the principle of socialist expanded reproduction. The person who proposes a “socialist society” based on “equitable distribution” is ipso facto sexually and politically impotent. The person who proposes to “seize the factories” is also impotent. Expanded reproduction means the positive development of the self-subsisting form of the productive forces, through uniting the world-wide working-class into a single political unit and accomplishing the technological development of the productive forces at the most rapid rate, subject to the included development of the intellectual and productive powers of the working-class individuals.
This means to organize the working class forces (workers and their political allies) both against infantilism, against Ego-state “sincerity of feeling,” and for self-consciousness of the universal task of appropriating and developing the world's productive forces. It means, above all, to fundamentally change the inner self of the workers.
In contrast, that Left politics which proceeds from “existing realities,” from the appealing to the existing prejudices of workers, etc., from pandering to “nationalist” prejudices, from admiring the infantile sentimentalities of the “popular forces,” etc., is viciously anti-Marxian, viciously anti-dialectical, viciously sexual impotence in the domain of Left politics.
The most comi-tragic expression of this is the pathetic commedia called the PSP.
The PSP As A Phenomenon
Since its previous phylogenetical state of larval existence as the MPI, the PSP has always been distinguished unfavorably from most Left groupings by its notorious and most extraordinary degree of opportunism. This opportunism is most conspicuous inside the organization itself, where various bitter factions of self-styled “Marxist-Leninists” are set buttock to buttock with a varied assortment of “Puerto Rican Nationalists.” There is no principled basis in belief for most of the PSP members to be in the same organization with one another, except that principle which otherwise unites the prostitute briefly to her client. The only common essence binding such a varied assortment together in the Party is opportunism: the desire to have a “large organization.” It is Saturday night, and the PSP Macho wants the political equivalent of an impotent sexual embrace, so desperately that he does not look closely at the qualifications of those persons who consent to perform the desired service for him.
The essence of Papers' “politics” is simple: this Macho desires only a big movement of the “Puerto Rican Popular Forces.” This desire for the political equivalent of the Macho's sexual orgasm he identifies as the irrational feeling of being regarded (and self- regarded) as something exciting, something dangerous—a Rrrrrrrevolutionary! He wants to bring together a horde of the Puerto Rican Popular Forces, and then they will all share one big political orgasm, which is called “independence.”
Economic theory? He shrugs his shoulders; he is essentially a revolutionary of feeling; besides, since he regards Puerto Ricans as full of duende, and thus emotional rather than literate, it is not compatible to introduce such a gringo quality as “intellectuality” into the movement of the Popular Forces. How will this independent revolutionary island feed and clothe the people? He shrugs; he has a feeling that this will be no major problem. He argues: There is enough, if we have the feeling to seize it for the people. To impose a program of expanded socialist reproduction upon the people would be elitism; it is necessary to respect their feelings. It is necessary to regard the “ignorant people” as already possessing all the “natural,” “racial” intellectual and other qualities necessary for “revolutionary independence.”
“Culture”? He feels that the Puerto Rican people already have a culture, of which they must merely be proud. To him, the “natural culture” endemic to the people is already “Marxist,” and “revolutionary,” and hence axiomatically the struggle for this endemic culture (whatever that appears to be to him at the moment) is already self-evidently an anti-bourgeois culture, an anti-capitalist “liberating” culture.
He ignores the fact that the Puerto Rican people are deprived of any culture of their own. The comprador caste of educated and semi-educated Puerto Ricans (from which the PSP leadership is recruited) has a heritage chiefly of the reactionary side of Spanish culture, and a family and school cultivated link to the Spanish language and literature, as is the case with the Spanish upper classes and the cognate comprador classes throughout Latin America. The Puerto Rican people also have a heritage of peasant culture, of the idiocy and bestiality of rural life. The comprador classes have also a large dosage of Yanqui culture, the culture of Fomento, Coca-Cola, Rancheros, and similar autochthonous productions of the Puerto Rican people. Yet, the proletarian masses do not even have a language, neither Spanish nor English, nor a Puerto Rican syncretism of the two, but only argot, a Schwaermerei of a language which is neither quite Spanish nor English nor anything else, but only a slave-language, a lingua franca of the slaves.
The PSPer ignores the fact that the Puerto Rican masses are denied the right to a culture in which they can identify themselves as collectively contributing to the enrichment of the intellectual life of the world. Their “culture,” like most of their food, is whatever their semi-colonial master arranges to have imported from other places.
The picture of the PSPer respecting “Puerto Rican culture” is like that of the enlightened colonialist “cultural relativist” or slave-master who sees the oppressed subsisting on refuse. He says, “That is what they like. Do not impose alien values on them. Their preference for garbage from hotel kitchens is an outgrowth of their cultural experience, like their preference for the shacks of the barrio.” The colonialist, like the thinly-disguised comprador petit-bourgeois of the PSP leadership, always explains: “The slaves are happier to keep their own little ways.” He sees the masses deprived of culture, making a poor imitation culture of whatever refuse decaying Spanish heritage or Yanqui imports have discarded into the streets; the PSP petit- bourgeois smiles indulgently: “That is the people's culture.”
The wretched comprador petit-bourgeois mentality of the PSP leadership is in no way more pathetically displayed than in its ritual worshiping at the cult of “Island Independence.”
It is a fact: Puerto Rico cannot feed itself, and could not feed itself. Very well, independent Puerto Rico will import food. From whence, with what means of payment? From the proceeds of the Yanqui plants which are already running to the cheaper labor of the Dominican Republic Fomento? What if the Yanqui semi-colonialists close down their plants? What would “independent” Puerto Rico export merely to secure sufficient food for its people; it could export only its people! Indeed, it has been exporting its people for decades!
The PSP almost pretends that the recent electoral results did not occur. On the contrary, the Puerto Rican worker finds the present political status of the island advantageous to him because this status is part of the basis for the tax and other conditions which have made the island attractive to Yanqui employers running from the political (statehood) conditions of the mainland. The majority of voting Puerto Ricans reacted against the stupidity, not the “revolutionary extremism” of the independence parties in the elections.
The Puerto Rican who is so zealous in celebrating the purely religious idea of independence on weekend festivities has an opposite view of independence from his other, secular vantage-point in the real world of food, employment, housing, and so forth. He knows, from the labels on the imported food, from the names of the factories and other places where he is employed, that Puerto Rican material existence is possible only as an extension of the U.S. economy. In practice, outside the “churches” of the independence parties, and their rituals, he knows that his existence is located in a special political-economic arrangement for Puerto Rico within the U.S. economy, and he votes accordingly.
The popularity of the purely religious fantasy of “independence” for the same Puerto Rican who votes against political-economic independence, is a natural expression of slave-mentality. The slave exists by being a slave, and desires to continue being a slave because that, for him, is the only existent possibility for his material existence. Yet, he hates slavery nonetheless; he hates slavery in his dreams, his rituals, his purely unearthly occupations. He hates the Yanqui face, the Yanqui language, the Yanqui exploitation—with a deep, religious hatred. Just, as he hates the mental image of his sadistic, possessive mother, on whom the Macho is so fearfully dependent for his inner sense of identity. He hates his mother-image by devoutly worshiping it!
The Puerto Rican independence organizations thus function as special “religious” bodies, having little to do with the material actualities of this earth. Their function is not to change the world, but only to assist in creating those fantasies by which the oppressed mind seeks to preoccupy himself with the mere illusion of another world—that could never be. Accordingly, it is no miracle that the PSPer (and other independence factioneers) are so euphorically transported in their rhetoric when they speak of “Puerto Rican culture,” of “independence,” and the chiliastic “victory of Popular Forces.” They become pathetic, foolish, only when they make the pitiful blunder of attempting to bring their silly Heaven to Earth. To attempt to bring a wild fantasy into the real world of everyday practice is to make a pathetic mockery of that fantasy.
Similarly, the Macho is in transports of delightful fantasy when he thinks of the glories of coitus; it is when he attempts coitus with an actual woman that he becomes so pathetic, so obviously impotent. He is at liberty only with the loose woman, with the prostitute, with the mistress he secretly knows is “had” by other men. Thus, he conceals his homosexual impulses, his hatred of women, by degrading them in the name of love, and by thus performing the homosexual act of sharing coitus with a woman with another man.
(The prostitute, of course, at least unconsciously knows this secret of her Macho client. She does not object to this? Why should she? The prostitute thereby serves her own lesbian need to share the sexual act with the man's wife. The angered, sadistic woman revenges herself on a man by bedding another, by thus implicitly subjecting the hated lover to a homosexual relationship.)
The idea of “independence” is hence an unconscious act of self-degradation of the Puerto Rican peoples, akin in this respect to the popularity of “local control” among self-hating U.S. ghetto blacks. “Local control” of what? “Of our poverty, our slums, our degradation!” What is the ironic mythos of “self-help” prevalent in the U.S. black ghettoes since the 1950's? It is noting but the looting of one black neighbor—of clothing, TV sets, and so forth—to sell this loot to another, neighbor, sometimes in the same neighborhood within almost the very hour it was stolen: “self-help,” “local control.” The essential, unconscious notion involved: “We are so inferior that we can achieve a sense of equality only by separating ourselves from our superiors.” It is the profound, colonialism-induced poverty, ignorance, lack of culture, and so forth, of the oppressed Puerto Rican which induces him to believe that he would be equal only if cut off from all direct comparison (“competition”) with the higher-ranking species of man. By playing up to this belief in independence—this belief in inherent inferiority of the Puerto Ricans—this self-degrading mythos of “independence,” the PSPer, notably expresses his petit-bourgeois comprador's belief in the innate superiority of, Coca-Cola.
In this connection, it is most useful to compare the pervasive preoccupation with “Spanish culture” among Latin-Americans to the attitudes among democratic and socialist revolutionary Germans over a century ago. The revolutionary Germans, typified by Kant, Hegel, Marx, seized upon the more advanced culture of their immediate oppressors (Napoleon's French, the English), and made a gigantic advance in capitalist culture over the heads of those from whom they appropriated such things. By contrast, the Latin-American petit-bourgeois (e.g., from the comprador classes), seizes upon that which is most bathetically backward in the world; he claims his right to the rubbish of the world—as that which, alone, he considers peculiarly fit for the inferior Latin peoples. This “cultural relativist” seeks in Indian relics, in the misery of the mestizos, in the pathetic possessions of the backward, ignorant and oppressed, that which is peculiarly suited to the perpetuation of a culture of inferiority, of oppression.
The “Glories of Spain”?! Peron's friend, Francisco Franco, perhaps? That wretched, debased crew of present-day Spanish upper classes and bureaucrats who typify and subsist on the most backward culture of Western Europe, who could not “compete” in a world in which peasants and workers were not so miserably oppressed and debased as they are in Spain today!? The Spain of the Conquistadores? Bankrupt Spain of the sixteenth century, ignorant, priest-ridden, horse-ridden, almost bestial baboons of Conquistadores, raping, illiterate butchers? All to pay the debts of Charles V to Italian, German and Low Countries usurers? The Spain of the Inquisition?
Cervantes and other products of the Moorish-Latin heritages? Yes. Even the minor composer, Soler—yes. Goya? Absolutely! These are world-historical figures who rose above parched, miserable, hungry, priest-ridden, bull-baiting Spain with its Burgundian-Hapsburg bestialities.
These achievements of the great Spaniards are not what fascinate the Latin-American comprador.
Rather, he is fascinated by the wretched Spain, the cheap, inferior Spain, the only Western European culture (barring the wretched Portuguese) which is miserable enough to be within the price of the Yanqui's Latin slaves ... unless one considers also the most degraded existentialist, structuralist offal of decaying Parisian “culture,” which can be had for no price by anyone sufficiently lacking in respect for himself. The fascination with Spanish culture is primarily a preoccupation with the world of the Spanish-language ghetto, it is the self-image of the Latin comprador as an inferior person in the world.
Pathetic Lorca, imbecilic Neruda. The gifted Cortazar self-degraded into composing Parisian buffoonery. Marquez's genius slipping into pathetic existentialism. What is wanted is a true revolutionary spirit in Latin culture, which self-situates the best spokesmen of an oppressed people in the proper role of world-historical figures, leading not merely the “inferior” people of the vast Spanish-speaking ghetto of the world, but participating as equals in the remaking of the entire world. The world wants Latin Goethes, Hegels, Heines, and Marxes.
Of such human aspirations, such revolutionary aspirations, the petit-bourgeois comprador mentalities of the PSP leadership have absolutely no sensibility. Hence, their contempt for the human potentialities of the Puerto Rican people, and—not incidentally—the Macho's deep contempt for himself, in the pathetic cult of Puerto Rican “independence.”
Like everything else about the PSP, even the comprador pose of its leading strata is a pitiful parody of the Latin-American Left political farce in general.
In the major Spanish sectors of Latin America, the comprador families who rule the country for the Yanqui send their sons to the university. At the university, the sons and cousins of the leading families begin their roles as future Yanqui's satraps by political assortment. One son assumes the traditional political pose of “comprador orthodox politics”—caballero conservativism,—another becomes a future colonel, another becomes the fiery democrat, another becomes a populist publicist, another, or perhaps a cousin, becomes the family's “official Marxist-Leninist” firebrand. These sundry roles are, naturally, reviewed with suitable courtesies at all family gatherings. It is all a family affair—from extreme Right to extreme Left—every department of political life duly put under the supervision of some member of the comprador family. A guerrilla nephew may take a conservative uncle hostage: “Excuse me, uncle; this is merely political.” The uncle may, in turn, politically shoot the Leftist nephew and then weigh the delicacy of appearing at the family wake; or, the nephew may, after ending his term of temporary service to the family in the Left, be pensioned off as minister of education to his uncle's Popular Democratic government.
In certain poorer, rural-mentality-ridden sections of the U.S., it was once fashionable for young plebian ladies to join sororities based on the local public high school, in pitiable emulation of the university sororities to which their parents could ill afford to send them. On the same principle, the PSP leading strata attempt to pitifully emulate the comprador traditions of the political life of Venezuela, Colombia, etc. What contemptible little charades of a show of respect for the prestige of the other leader! What a picaresque charade! Poor, plebian, faceless PSPers attempting to play at the courtly manners of the comprador “aristocracy” of more auspicious Latin regions. One is astonished that the PSP's Claridad does not write of Don Juan Man Bras! Thus, the PSP of poor Puerto Rico parodies the comprador farce of other Latin regions.
CLARIDAD Attacks Casals
If one searches his knowledge for the name of a contemporary Spanish artist of present-day world-historical importance, the obvious choice he could unquestionably defend would be that of Pablo Casals. Casals was the world's great instrumentalist of the cello for several decades of this century, generally now more renowned more for his more significant musicianship. He was the guiding spirit of the world's greatest musical event of the past quarter-century, the Perpignan “Casals Festival.” He unquestionably ranks high both as a leading Spanish humanist and among the greatest figures of the Spanish artistic heritage, certainly the outstanding contemporary world-historical figure in Spanish art. Otherwise, up to his recent death he was the only notable person of genuine world-historical importance living in his adopted home of Puerto Rico.
It happens that with a good taste rarely exhibited among the dilettantes of the Puerto Rican comprador caste, Casals was the honored figure of a New York City “Fiesta Puerto Rico.” The pathetic, contemptible reaction of the PSP's Claridad weekly to Casals' participation in this concert is most revealing.
The weekly's June 24, 1973 editorial denounced the festival's inclusion of Casals as “Cultural Aggression,” denouncing in particular, “twenty-five thousand dollars stolen from the workers of Puerto Rico to sponsor a program which was not representative of what is our culture.”
The editorial continues, characterizing the concert in the following terms:
... clearly another attempt to force us into “another cultural bag.” The implication was clear: that part of the program which was termed “folkloric” was seen as being inferior; it was the classical part of the program which “saved” the event. But we no longer believe such fairy tales. As Puerto Ricans, but especially as revolutionaries struggling for a new society, a socialist society, we understand the importance and necessity of all peoples developing their cultures.
Our anger is not directed at the classical music of Europe, but at the attempt of the imperialists to force it upon us, and imply that our music is inferior to it ... It is the culmination of this genocidal process which will convert all Puerto Ricans, whether here or in Puerto Rico, into a national minority ...
What degrading, pathetic philistinism! “European” music? What of the Spanish language, which is also European? What of mathematics, textile manufacturing methods, modern types of vegetables and meat, the automobile, the airplane, etc., which are also presumably the efforts of the “imperialists” to impose a “culture” upon the native islanders?
Or, in a similar vein, is it “cultural aggression” upon Puerto Ricans that gringo “Rock” and “folk” fads are spreading through the island today; is the growing popularity of Mexican Macho ballads in the island to be construed as an example of Mexican “cultural aggression”? The following three examples of Mexican popular song lyrics are exemplary of the genre now sweeping the island.1
I.
Nada importa haller la muerte
en Ia reja de una ingrata,
o llevar en la conciencia
otra culpa por matar.
En los Altos es de machos
respetar la valentía
y su ley son unos ojos
que enamoran al mirar.
Tienen fama sus caballos
que los charros jinetean,
y sus chinas son luceros
de belleza sin igual.
Por sus besos van sus hombres
sin temor a la pelea,
entre sangre de sarapes
y cortadas de puñal.
II.
...
y los machos de Jalisco
afamados por entrones
por eso traen pantalones.
Vengo en busca de una ingrata
de una joven presumida
que se fue con mi querer,
traigo ganas de encontrarla
pa'eñsenarle que de un hombre
no se burla una mujer.
Se me vino de repente
dando pie pa'que la gente
murmurara porque sí,
porque a ver hoy que la encuentre
y quedemos frente a frente
que me va a decir a mi.
III.
!Ay Jalisco, Jalisco
tus hombres son machos,
y son cumplidores
valientes y ariscos
y sostenedores,
no admiten rivales ...
en cosas de amores.
!Ay Jalisco no te rajes!
...
Yo fui uno de aquellos
“dorados” de Villa
de los que no tienen
amor a Ia vida,
de los que a la guerra
llevamos nuestra hembra,
de los que morimos
amando y cantando,
yo soy de ese bando.[1]
The two cited examples of popular “folk culture” from Mexico illustrate not only what is so readily assimilable as Puerto Rican “folk culture,” but in that way we have illustrated two other points of general importance here. Firstly, considering the psychopathological content of these songs—and therefore the self-degradation of the persons to whom these songs appeal—we are illustrating the point that most so-called “folk art” of this sort is principally significant as clinical evidence of the self-debasement of an oppressed people. However, secondly, sometimes the very articulation of psychopathology in such “cultural” forms does attain to the status of art.
Some development of this latter point is relevant to the PSP attack on Casals.
In the case of the psychological portraits of the older Goya, the material displayed by the artist is nothing but the content of his own mind. Goya's chimerical figures are not sheer concoctions, not strictly fictions; they are what any qualified psychoanalyst would recognize as psychological truth, accurate representations of the horrible images one finds in the process of deeper probing of unconscious processes. Hence, in the case of these portraits (or, similarly, the psychologically important bull-fight sketches of Goya), or in the similar psychological revelations of Hieronymous Bosch, we have artistic works which are great art exactly because they exemplify the artist (and, implicitly, the audience) gaining self-conscious willful control over those hideous forces through which his society oppresses him, bestializes him internally.
Is the psychopathological behavior of the street-corner Macho therefore also “artistic” on such grounds? On the contrary, his performance, and the exemplary celebration of that self-degradation in Mexican ballads, is an act of strengthening and perpetuating the degradation expressed by this behavior. Art focuses on psychological truth, and hence often enough on portraying the hideousness within man, but to the effect of liberating man from that hideousness. Great art often “gets out” the representation of the hideousness within man to the either explicit or at least implicit end of enabling man to master, to conquer that self-degradation through self-consciousness.
The essential feature of great art is that it is a product of more or less direct and self-conscious recall and application of the special kind of emotion to which we refer in the concluding summary of this present article. It is the application of the emotion otherwise identified with creative mentation or with “oceanic” impulses of “non-erotic loving” to the effect of liberating the individual from the sort of banality of feeling expressed typically in vulgar “folk culture.”
However, this is not to brush aside all of what is sometimes termed “folk art.” Most of the great musicians of the past. Beethoven notably included, have seized upon so-called “folk songs” and other elements of popular music (dance-forms) as a point of departure for artistic production. In such instances, they do essentially what Goya did in his psychological portraits; they abstract, so to speak, from these “popular forms” of experience for the purpose of revealing a truth otherwise concealed behind the ordinary experience.
Sometimes, a naive, uncelebrated person, thus termed a “folk artist” because he lacks formal credentials in fine art, applies the same essential personal, less-developed gifts to some of his productions, lacking only the depth of training required to express the accomplishment in better than a clumsy fashion. Yet, despite the predominant banality of, for example, the resulting folk-song he produces, there is an offsetting element of “genius” in his work which enables it to serve an artistic purpose in the exertions of a gifted performer.
Hence, since there is only one set of standards for judging all art, the question of what should have been represented as the achievements of “Puerto Rican culture” at the New York “Fiesta” is a concrete issue. Is there, today, some outstanding Puerto Rican com poser whose work was ignored (i.e., suppressed)? Was there some particular song, etc., some group of musical works from Puerto Rican sources which was of equal merit to that featured in the Casals segment of the “Fiesta” program? If not, then all that could have been offered in decency was the best possible interpretative performance of great “European classical music” by the most gifted residents of Puerto Rico aided by their friends from all parts of the world.
Unless there is some work of unusual artistic merit buried in Puerto Rican popular musical entertainments, then the really oppressive feature of the “Fiesta” was the inclusion of the actually inferior “folkloric” trash. To hold up the pathetic “folkloric” works of Puerto Rico as exemplary of the human qualities of the Puerto Rican people is the most contemptible sort of imperialist patronizing. A comparison can be obtained from the tasteless wealthy dilettante father who arranges a major exhibition for the productions of an ungifted daughter who “paints” without a semblance of creative talent.
There can be no doubt that the editors of Claridad do express exactly such patronizing contempt for the Puerto Rican people. The attempt to contrast the “classical music of Europe” to a “native culture” of pathetic Macho ballads, etc., already says several things of decisive importance respecting those editors. Firstly, in terming the greatest music of the modern world “European” in this sense, they are insisting that Puerto Ricans are so inferior in mental and emotional potential that they are not a part of world culture, and could not possibly rise to such levels as to master Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven. When Claridad writes of the need of all peoples to develop their own native culture from the standpoint of the apotheosis of “native” trash such as the Mexican Macho songs we cited, it is the editors who are expressing the dominant philosophical world-outlook of the most reactionary imperialists.
Just as drunken capitalists used to go “slumming” in the U.S. black ghetto, and as white racists thus developed the myth that black people are “naturally good at” jazz, and have “soul” (i.e., have emotions, not intellectual competence), the post-war imperialists developed the reactionary fad in anthropology called “cultural relativism.” “Cultural relativism” is the groundless, racist theory that each people is genetically predisposed toward a certain kind of culture, that different national groups and races are merely different species of talking cattle, and therefore do not require the same quality of nutrition, housing, education, and rights as the wealthiest capitalist families. (“The happy-go-lucky slaves must be left to enjoy their own quaint customs.”)
It is the editors of Claridad who insist that Puerto Ricans are intellectually and emotionally inferior people. Claridad insists that a world-historical genius in music, Casals, could be understood only by wealthy, well-educated “Europeans.” Puerto Ricans, Claridad insists, are not capable of any higher intellectual and emotional level of “culture” than psychopathological ballads and quaint dances.
Notably, the “revolutionaries” of Claridad make no protest against the invasion of Puerto Rican cultural life by “Rock music,” a form of pseudo-music which celebrates and exacerbates the bestialization of intellect and emotion.
When the editors write that they are not attacking “classical music, “they are lying. It is precisely “classical music”—and all other serious forms of art and intellectual life—to which the obviously philistine, sexually-impotent moral cretins of the weekly are most violently opposed.
CLARIDAD On “Tango”
The exact form of the philistinism behind the PSP attack on Casals is revealed by a lengthy review of “Last Tango In Paris” appearing under the by-line of Carmen Vazquez Arce in the July 15, 1973 issue. (Notably, Claridad does not balk at the efforts of Arce to commit the “cultural aggression” of imposing Parasite existentialism upon the weekly's Puerto Rican readers.) Arce seizes upon everything in the film which expresses the most degraded form of bourgeois, bestial sexual relations and holds this up as a purgative “revolutionary” attack on bourgeois morality.
Existentialism, the point of view of the film, is both a professed “philosophy” and a psychopathology. The difference between the literary argument and the disease is located in the fact that many leading existentialists (notably Jean-Paul Sartre) are not entirely consistent exponents of the psychopathology which is otherwise the axiomatic kernel of their world-outlook in the writing; in writing, certain existentialists such as Sartre are “afflicted” by intellectual gifts and social conscience contrary to their otherwise prevailing mental illness, thus introducing into literary existentialism contradicting elements which preclude a simple equivalence between the philosophizing and a consistent exposition of the essential world-outlook expressed in the philosopher's axiomatic assumption.
There is nothing strained in any respect in our terming existentialism as a disease (“French disease”?). There is the development of R.D. Laing's cult out of Sartre's existentialist psychology and the parallels to this in the advocacy of insanity by such structuralists as Foucault and Althusser, as well as the advocacy of insanity (although in milder terms) in Sartre's psychological writings themselves. (A “structuralist” is an existentialist suffering from an overdose of grammar.)2
To make short of the point at hand in respect to the “Tango” review, in cultures in which the alienation of the individual is most extreme (France, Italy, Latin America, etc.), the sense of unreality of the self-conscious self is especially acute. For example, the case of the Macho, who is fanatically determined to conceal his “inner self” from all external access. As a result, the infantilism rampant in the culture is relatively more extreme in the form of a preoccupation with the individual sensual experience per se. The “strong feelings” of rage, fear, elation of object-possession, characteristic of the alienated (emotionally blocked) individual are perceived by the victim as purely-individual feelings demanding individual (heteronomic) sensual expression per se.
Correspondingly, just as in the Macho's “extracurricular” sexual relations there is absolutely nothing personal respecting the woman being used at the moment, the ideal of the existentialist lover is to “have” a woman without an exchange of names, to engage in a purely animal sensual relationship with the woman—without either of them knowing who the other is or incurring any other sense of a continuing social relationship—a “purely sensual” relationship, or, otherwise, a purely bestial sexual relationship a la D.H. Lawrence.
The bestialized person such as Carmen Vazquez Arce, imagines that because the existentialist sexual relationship is nominally “dirty” and “immoral” by bourgeois standards, that such a degraded form of sexual relationships is therefore somehow anti-capitalist and hence “revolutionary.” Arce overlooks the fact that “dirty” and “immoral” prostitution is already an honored bourgeois institution, especially In Latin American culture. (The Latin father introduces his son to a prostitute—a sort of Latin “bar mitzvah.” Later, the son, reared to sex in relationships to prostitutes, rapes his bride on their wedding night, a bride whose entire sexual education was probably at the hands of nuns. The Latin father is seldom offended by his son's “whoring around”; the Latin is offended only by treating |
