by Kari Rosenfeld

-->

No one seems to remember what Jo Freeman says in her essay, “The Tyranny of Structurelessness”, because the title alone, for anyone who’s been involved in non-hierarchical organizing, resonates enough to be considered proverbial. The essay responds to the efforts of early feminist “Consciousness Raising” groups to not repeat structural oppression through structuring their organizing. They denounced hierarchy and representation altogether, which Freeman saw as resulting in unaccountable leadership, as existing structurally oppressive dynamics permeated the groups’ attempts to challenge them.

-->

The section I facilitated at Field of Study was spent with texts defining and problematizing the distinctions between art, theory, and politics, focusing on J.M. Bernstein’s The Fate of Art. Praxis and truth become the fundamental questions within these categories. The importance of those terms highlights how, without relying on both action and an idea of truth, politics, theory, and art flail; they gesture only internally.

-->

“An academic culture in the United States still dominated by the privilege of the monograph only rarely affords occasions for critics to converse with each other in print. That may reflect conversation’s low place in the hierarchy of literary genres. Structurally determined by interruption, shifts in perspective, metonymic displacements, and the giving up of control, conversation complicates the prestige of autonomy and the fiction of authorial sovereignty by introducing the unpredictability of moving in relation to another.” Sex or the Unbearable, Berlant and Edelman.

-->

Bernstein also makes a case for non-truth-only-cognition. Truth as non-monotonic and cognition beyond truth requires the constant friction of bodies in exchange.

-->

There is a zealous liberal fantasy regarding what they call "discourse." Within the fantasy, the friction of the other is buffed down and smoothened out as "discourse" replaces confrontation, i.e. replaces violence and the threat of castration; and it is here that we find the Discourse Fetish. The Discourse Fetish-izer projects supernatural properties upon the “sharing of views” in contained spaces; the festish is found in the acts containment as the containment renders the meaningful speech act as neuter. The supernaturalness being that the act has impact and force beyond the space that contains it -- though the act itself becomes neuter by the very nature of the containment. The fetish is commonly found being indulged in the offices of curators and tiny houses at film festivals or during private phone calls outside of office hours. The fetishizer articulates their drive to replace the special missing penis as a desire for “understanding” which is more accurately understood as a desire for equal castration*. The dilemna present in the fantasy being that the fetishizer both understands unconsciously and takes pleasure in the act for its neutered quality while articulating the desire repressed in the fetish, which is of a speech act with consequence outside of the space of containment, creating a reaction formation. The fetish, which can be a productive extension of the drive when recognized as a festish, can have negative consequences when it transitions from a symptom of neurosis to a psychosis; where the fantasy of neutered discourse as supernaturally fertile is believed as a reality and the fetish is mistaken for a penis or political action.

-->

So often, our efforts toward non-hierarchical educational projects, while necessary to challenge forms, reject history and relinquish a praxis beyond flailing. So often, art, while necessary in expanding (political) praxis beyond what is already prescribed, takes on political language similar to the Discourse Fetishizer, and gestures a position into the void.