McCormickFall2016
Fall 2016 - Heroes and Simulation
Berardi, Butler, and Crises of Masculinity
Dan McCormick
“…white, black, old, young, rich, poor, but only males, no women at all – who knows why?”1 This is how Franco Berardi describes the people who commit the deadly rampages he analyzes in Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide. This book is a study of the economic conditions underlying the recent proliferation of randomized, publicly-directed violence. Berardi traces the phenomenon from Columbine to Aurora, and he remarks that “the current becoming of the world could be better understood if observed through this kind of horrible madness, rather than through the polite madness of economists and politicians.” His analysis foregrounds the relationship between violence and contemporary capitalist society (what he calls semiocapitalism) while acknowledging, but not pursuing directly, the triangulated relationship between violence, semiocapitalism, and contemporary forms of masculinity.
How might we further, and complicate, Berardi’s analysis by pursuing this gender-oriented thread left dangling from his project? Relying on Judith Butler’s foundational work of queer critique Gender Trouble, I argue here that Berardi’s account of the embodied effects produced under semiocapitalist conditions includes a specific form of masculine identity centered around heterosexual competition and conquest.
Semiocapitalism, for Berardi, means the economic condition in which capitalist abstraction of surplus value has grown to such an extent that value is now created through the exchange of signs divorced from any physical entities, so that wealth can only be accumulated through violent, nihilist competition.2 He goes on to argue that the men considered in Heroes correctly perceive this economic condition—but, rather than resisting it, they accept this violence on its own terms as the “natural” state of things. What drives the mass murderer, then, is not revenge or spite against the socio-economic order but rather the desire to participate more fully in it, such that “[h]is only credo is the cult of the strong individual, the lonely winner: the financial agent and the gunman.”3 While it’s obvious that there is a gendered aspect to this “strong individual,” I want to examine more closely the implications, for gender, of this violent, masculine image.
In the excerpts that Berardi considers from these men’s journals, manifestos, and online writing, there is an insistent motif of hetero-masculine angst. More specifically, there is an anxiety over failure to hold together one’s hetero-masculine integrity, either due to perceived failure as a sexual actor or due to domination by and submission to another masculine force. From the journal of Eric Harris, one of the two Columbine killers: “That’s where a lot of my hate grows from. The fact that I have practically no self-esteem. Especially concerning girls and looks and such. Therefore people make fun of me…constantly…therefore I get no respect and therefore I get fucking PISSED.”4 Glossing over the entire economy of heterosexual relations with the words “girls and looks and such,” Harris draws from this gesture an astonishingly quick series of conclusions: “no self-esteem,” therefore he is made fun of, therefore “no respect,” therefore anger (and therefore murder). As Berardi points out, Harris’s logic can be described as a decision to become “a winner for a moment,”5 but what I want to foreground here is Harris’s premise that respect and self-esteem are won and lost through “girls and looks and such.” This makes sense, considering Berardi’s assertion that competition (indeed competitive violence and domination) is “the utmost law” of contemporary social life; we can assume he includes sexuality within this formulation.6
Looking further at excerpts from manifestos written by Seung-Hui Cho and Anders Breivik chosen by Berardi, we can see that this anxious logic extends beyond Harris’s writing. Berardi quotes Cho, who killed thirty-one people at Virginia Tech in 2007: “Raping my soul wasn’t enough for you. Committing emotional sodomy on me wasn’t enough for you.”7 And Berardi, commenting on Breivik, who killed seventy-seven people in Norway in 2011, remarks that his writing exhibits an obsessional fear of “the feminization of Western culture, but also, more broadly, the feminization of pretty much anything.”8 Like Cho, Breivik frames a perceived failure of masculinity (on the part of Christian Europe due to its infiltration and domination by Islam) as a rape that penetrates and ruins masculine integrity: “Femininity is penetrating pretty much everywhere, and the feminization of European culture is nearly completed. Europe is a woman who would prefer to be raped [by Islam] than to risk serious injuries while resisting.”9 This perceived sexual violation relates to Harris’s expression of heterosexual anxiety in the sense that both indicate a threat to, or a disruption of, the internal coherence of hetero-masculine identity.
In terms of Butler’s work on gender, then, I argue that these extreme, violent responses to perceived failures/violations of masculinity are attempts to re-assert the “natural” integrity of maleness—as potently heterosexual, as dominating, as self-evident. Butler focuses her critique on the self-sustaining, self-naturalizing function of a dominant binary “gender ontology,” which insists that maleness/masculinity and femaleness/femininity are real, substantive, and prior to any law of social production.10 One basis for this critique is her assertion that a stable and unified gender identity (unifying, that is, biological sex, cultural gender, and sexual desire) can occur “only when sex can be understood in some sense to necessitate gender—where gender is a psychic and/or cultural designation of the self—and desire—where desire is heterosexual and therefore differentiates itself through an oppositional relation to that other gender it desires.”11 Important for my purposes here is that, within this system of “gender ontology,” masculine gender identity, bodily maleness, and heterosexual desire for women are all co-extensive and co-constitutive of a coherent identity as a man. And because (as the book’s most famous argument goes) gender is constituted performatively,12 men must act out (as it were) maleness moment by moment, most significantly “through the practices of heterosexual desire.”13 We can understand hetero-masculine gender identity, then, as a fragile yet supposedly natural and stable constellation of desires and embodied actions representing and confirming those desires.14
Butler, of course, denies that this gender identity is natural, denies that it is stable or coherent, and indeed denies that it is possible for a body to adequately fulfill its enactment. In the cases of Harris, Cho, and Breivik, then, the crisis of masculinity, its perceived failure and/or violation, is internal to the structure of masculine gender identity, not the result of an external force or obstacle. So rather than understanding these men’s violent actions simply as responses to emasculating economic conditions, we ought to understand them as violent mobilizations of a specifically masculine instability, increasingly revealed and provoked by competition-focused, semiocapitalist economics. When Berardi argues that semiocapitalism leads to “a continual return of the past in the shape of national identities, ethnic identities, sexual identities, and so on,” he identifies just such a provocation of violent, hetero-masculine anxiety.15 This violence is not a result of simple economic conditions nor a product of harmful gender norms; rather it is of an ugly cocktail of semiocapitalist competitive spirit and masculinity’s constant crisis.
Both Berardi and Butler, then, critique the “return” of/to a supposedly-original identity as a response to psychosocial instability (whether gender-derived or economically-derived). Their suggestions for political practice diverge, however. While Butler maintains, based on her figuration of gender as performative, that “[t]here is only a taking up of the tools where they lie,”16 Berardi suggests a strategy of “ironic autonomy”: “Do not take part in the game, do not expect any solution from politics, do not be attached to things, do not hope.”17 I think we can make sense of this divergence by recognizing that, while each theorist’s account makes use of Michel Foucault’s notion of power as producing desire while obscuring that production, Butler holds a strong read of this notion and insists that power cannot be refused or abandoned, and Berardi, conversely, does suggest that power (in these specific, semiocapitalist forms) can and ought to be abandoned. Taking up Felix Guattari’s notion of chaosmosis,18 he calls for “reactivation of the body of social solidarity” and “reactivation of imagination.”19 Considering Butler’s adamant critique of feminist calls for a return to an originary (un-formed-by-law) body or sexuality, it’s safe to say that she would balk at this suggestion of recourse to the body, even one structured by language and affect, as figured in Heroes.20 It’s not clear to me how Berardi might respond. Perhaps the fault line is simply between the politico-theoretical orientations of Butler’s early gender-focused work and Berardi’s current Marxist-biopolitical work. I suspect, though, that biopolitics and post-Fordist Marxism will find that gender/sex differentiation extends even to the economic and juridical body. It’s important to consider, then, how such analyses of subjection might take into account the production of the body as gendered.
_______________________________________________
Berardi Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide. London: Verso, 2015. 2.
Berardi 89-92.
Berardi 34.
Berardi 51.
Berardi 50.
Berardi 76.
Berardi 62.
Berardi 105.
Berardi 106.
Butler, Gender Trouble. 1990. New York: Routledge. 1999. 45-46.
Butler 30.
Butler 191-193.
Butler 32.
“In other words, acts and gestures, articulated and enacted desires create the illusion of an interior and organizing gender core, an illusion discursively maintained for the purposes of the regulation of sexuality within the obligatory frame of reproductive heterosexuality” (185-186).
Berardi 124.
Berardi 199.
Berardi 225.
Berardi 218-23.
Berardi 222.
Butler 102-106.