THE 'NEW REALISM' OF FEMINISM

 
It seems to me that the current rejection of feminism is increasingly based on a spurious rejection of its New Realism, and a desperate restoration of the symbolic orders of patriarchy.

If something characterizes current feminism since 2018 (both social and academic feminism), it would be the notion that there is a material and structural masculinism; that is, a masculinism which includes but is not limited to the performative order, nor to the order of signs, not even to the order of language or the much-loved appearances (as opposed to the essences) of patriarchy. 

 
Then we can talk of a true realistic turn in current feminism, taking off from the frequent accusations (mostly from the conservative reactionaries) of being only a ‘symbolic’ struggle.

Needless to say, accusations of ‘symbolic' or ‘culture’ struggles are eminently obtuse, since they understand culture as something separate from the real life... -Kind of Nature/Culture metaphysical dualism resucited in 21th century... Really? 
 
Yes it is: The New Realism of feminism is the ulcer on the kidney that metaphysical masculinism cannot digest. 
 
This is not to say that the micro-world of academia is leading feminism; more the contrary, feminism is the main force converging with the future. This is only to say that conservative reactionary arguments are millions miles away from any substantial effort to comprehend our present. 

Of course there was already a realism in feminism before; but an overreliance on discursive and performative orders would undoubtedly work against a true realization of feminism. That's why we must take into account or integrate, as I aim to do here, the advances that have occurred in the field of new realisms.  

Feminist Realism is the recognition that structural violences are not of fictitious or psychological origin, nor merely discursive, nor do they depend entirely on a certain order or social construct. Structural violence is what the sensorium knows without the need to translate or deconstruct it. Structural violence (whether gender, racial, class, or other) is inherently felt by those who experience it, but it is very difficult to explain in words, or even make it verificable in wordly experience. Because to be thrown into the realism of social violence is to confront a structure that surpasses us, it is to make contact with a sphere of reality that cannot be encompassed or controlled. This structural and material violence is a 'super reality', and as such is misunderstood by rationalist approaches to the world based on a subtractive self-image. Subtraction is what happens when we arbitrarily separate the part from the whole. A similar case to the mental mechanism that takes place in a human when confronted with the proofs of climate change: the immediate response is denial, followed by withdrawal into a safe and prudently disconnected individualism from collective interrelations.

 
What is denied is interrelation (the “me too”); and what is achieved is the restitution of a self-similar and impassive ideal subject on his altar –elevated above all things, the ideal subject of humanism believes it observes everything as an impartial and omniscient judge, safe from the corruptions of the matrix or matter.

This is the basic process of subtraction that constitutes the fatuous order of ‘I’ and ‘they’ (or ‘me’ and ‘she’). The consolidation of a personal space and safe limits, beyond which only chaos would be, forming a diorama of the world that can be sustained as long as its borders are not crossed: the same borders that separate the illusory from the real.

Now the real has crossing all borders: the climate turns against us, women take the streets uncontrollably, machines challenge all human domains... But also the new crusaders: breaking all boundaries of political balance, storming government buildings, trampling on scientific truth and democracy foundations... All of this is a parallel process that surely has more to do with the collapse of the historical subject as the privileged agent of creation (white, male and European, for more details) and that lifts the veil of supposed humanist values, revealing their iniquity and their reinforcement of inequalities. 

The realistic recognition of structural violence has to do with this implosion of the subject. Because by making all the connections, by assembling the complex circuits that feed back to us, the subject remains visible as nothing more than what it always was: a mess of cables and dirty plugs where the ‘I’ it is impossible to locate, much less isolate; a patchwork that entangles and interwines us, where the neoliberal 'individual' has an increasingly ridiculous and ineffective importance. 

Meanwhile, men continue to believe that the strategy of isolating themselves from women can save them. And the mechanism to achieve this is to trivialize or make feminism illusory, to turn it into a symbolic struggle, a ‘cultural war.’

But, as Ursula Le Guin would say: What if feminism turns out to be planetary issue, a more than human and more than political issue? Isn't this the same as saying that we should expand the struggle of feminism beyond 'gender politics' (i.e. identity politics), and grant it, in fairness, a substantial onto-politics of the other? This would be the vortex where new materialisms converge, but without neglecting the so-called 'cultural' struggles as if they were a secondary matter. 

The time of cultural wars has passed (it was called postmodernity). But, curiously, conservative theses now fill their mouths with ‘symbolic struggles.’ Curious? No. Reactionary response always goes several steps behind. The reactionary dude now wants to return to the symbolic orders that have already been mapped exhaustively by Marxist and Lacanian theories in the 20th century. Actually, the reactionary response has no real theory of its own, it is only a drive to maintain structural violence, and the crucial requirement for this is the delimitation of a Transcendental Subject: a historical/heroic agent, defined structurally and in contrast to their contingent Other. In the 20th century these heroic subjects wore black shirts in Europe and white hoods in the US. Today's fascism is the the only symbolic war, because it is based on an empty gesture of its own substraction (subtraction of global space, subtraction of cultural space, subtraction of sexual diversity space, etc). But, unlike them, we know that there is a very real continuity between the symbolic and the material. Fascism is the perpetual subtraction of this continuity, the perpetual subtraction from the universal to the particular; the flight from complex interrelations of the real to take refuge in unitary simplification (identitary and symbolic). There is not even dialectic method within it, but pure and simple suppression of its opposite (the other).

And we should not forget: Woman is the Transcendental Object that the Transcendental Subject needs. Woman is the ultimate Other where fall all the struggles in the sake of heroism, salvation, and restoration of a criminal human civilization (and will continue to fall).

Women, as the inhuman corrosive agent of this masculine 'civilization' based on individualism and subtraction, has crossed the screens and has left the threshold behind (and male subjects would do well to follow them). Maybe this is not anymore a Japanese horror movie. This is the return of the real.