Postmodernism, cont. [hurriedly written]

Much postmodern culture focuses on sex and gender, categories that I usually prefer to forget about. And one of the most confusing trends for me is the attempt to dissolve the ‘binary’ of man / woman, boy / girl into a spectrum of possible gender ‘identities.’ Here is a sample of possible identities, going in alphabetical order:

Agender: A person who does not identify themselves with or experience any gender. Agender people are also called null-gender, genderless, gendervoid, or neutral gender.

Abimegender: Associated with being profound, deep, and infinite. The term abimegender may be used alone or in combination with other genders.

Adamas gender: A gender that is indefinable or indomitable. People identifying with this gender refuse to be categorized in any particular gender identity.

Aerogender: Also called evaisgender, this gender identity changes according to one’s surroundings.

Aesthetigender: Also called aesthetgender, it is a type of gender identity derived from aesthetics.

Affectugender: This is based on the person’s mood swings or fluctuations.

Agenderflux: A person with this gender identity is mostly agender with brief shifts of belonging to other gender types.

Alexigender: The person has a fluid gender identity between more than one type of gender although they cannot name the genders they feel fluid in.

Aliusgender: This gender identity stands apart from existing social gender constructs. It means having a strong specific gender identity that is neither male nor female.

Amaregender: Having a gender identity that changes depending on the person one is emotionally attached to.

Ambigender: Having two specific gender identities simultaneously without any fluidity or fluctuations.

Ambonec: The person identifies themselves as both man and woman and yet does not belong to either.

Amicagender: A gender-fluid identity where a person changes their gender depending on the friends they have.

Androgyne: A person feels a combination of feminine and masculine genders.

Anesigender: The person feels close to a specific type of gender despite being more comfortable in closely identifying themselves with another gender.

Angenital: The person desires to be without any primary sexual characteristics although they do not identify themselves as genderless.

Anogender: The gender identity fades in and out in intensity but always comes back to the same gendered feeling.

Anongender: The person has a gender identity but does not label it or would prefer to not have a label.

Antegender: A protean gender that can be anything but is formless and motionless.

Anxiegender: This gender identity has anxiety as its prominent characteristic.

Apagender: The person has apathy or a lack of feelings toward one's gender identity.

Apconsugender: It means knowing what are not the characteristics of gender but not knowing what are its characteristics. Thus, a person hides its primary characteristics from the individual.

Astergender: The person has a bright and celestial gender identity.

Astral gender: Having a gender identity that feels to be related to space.

Autigender: Having a gender identity that feels to be closely related to being autistic.

Autogender: Having a gender experience that is deeply connected and personal to oneself.

Axigender: A gender identity that is between the two extremes of agender and any other type of gender. Both the genders are experienced one at a time without any overlapping. The two genders are described as on the opposite ends of an axis.

Bigender: Having two gender identities at the same or different times.

Biogender: Having a gender that is closely related to nature.

Blurgender: Also called gender fuss, blurgender means having more than one gender identities that blur into each other so that no particular type of gender identity is clear.

Boyflux: The person identifies themselves as male, but they experience varying degrees of male identity. This may range from feeling agender to completely male.

 

 

 

 There seems to be a lot of overlap, with the common theme being: ‘I am not a man or a woman, strictly speaking.’ The underlying assumption seems to be: sex (arguably) and gender (certainly) are “social constructs,” not natural phenomena. Nature is not normative here. Reality doesn’t tell us how to think or act here. Rather, how we think, feel, and act has been determined by social power: the power of men over women, of heterosexual people over homosexual people, etc. Rejecting the traditional ascriptions of sex/gender gets associated with an act of liberation from these repressive social structures that are perpetuated ‘on automatic’ so to speak by language and its ‘binary oppositions’ and ‘hierarchies’ among such concepts.   

 

   What sense can I make of this? Growing up, I never questioned the idea that nature divided humanity into two sexes, male and female. The connection to reproducing the species seemed obvious at some point: my father didn’t give birth to me or nurse me; my mother did. That seemed a rather fundamental difference. As did the fact that I could not give birth and that I could get a woman pregnant. Indeed, getting women pregnant and becoming a father have been the most impactful events in my life. Reflecting more generally, the central role of sex and birth in human life (along with death), it certainly makes sense to me. It is a bridge between all human cultures: we are born of woman, we are born into a world that was there before us and will be there after us, and we are mortal.

  Are the ‘binary’ sexes, male and female, natural? Depends on what you mean by natural. What is the difference between a human mother who loves and cares for her children and a mother cat or bear? If we think of ‘natural’ as what is exemplified by the mother cat or bear, then the human mother transcends ‘nature.’ The cat and bear abandon and apparently forget their offspring after they can fend for themselves. They only “love” their offspring in a radically attenuated sense. They don’t tell stories about mothers' love – or violations of that love; about the meaning of motherhood. We can’t imagine the mother cat suffering remorse if something happens to a kitten while she is distracted by other things. Their souls can’t be wounded by evil done to a child or the grief of losing a child. We mark the difference between human meanings and animal instincts in all kinds of ways. Humans imbue the nature we share with cats and bears with meanings, within a world (Welt, not just Um-Welt). But inhabiting a realm of meaning is natural for us; it is how we are. Natural is relative to the being in question: what is natural for us is not necessarily natural for a cat, though many overlaps obviously exist. For a cat, human motherhood can only be super-natural. But our meanings are not radically cut off from nature as expressed in the lives of cats; they emerge from that matrix to become something that transcends it.

     The dominant experience between the ‘binary’ of man and woman is related to sexual reproduction and the meanings it has within our different worlds. We can imagine a world – an ‘unnatural’ world- in which sexual reproduction and its associated human meanings did not have this importance. For instance, in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, motherhood and reproduction are fundamentally restructured to align with the World State’s highly controlled society. Natural reproduction is entirely eliminated; instead, human embryos are artificially created through the Bokanovsky Process, which produces large numbers of identical individuals from a single egg. These embryos are then conditioned and socialized to fit into their designated roles within the societal hierarchy. Traditional family structures, including motherhood, are abolished, with the concept of family being deemed outdated and unnecessary. Citizens are conditioned from birth to accept and value their roles in society, with emotional detachment from natural processes and familial bonds being promoted. Hatcheries and Conditioning Centers play crucial roles in producing and preparing citizens, ensuring uniformity and control. This system erodes personal connections and individual identity, focusing instead on maintaining a stable, compliant population through technological means rather than human relationships. That world is more imaginable today than it was at the time Huxley wrote the novel.

    In George Orwell’s 1984, attempts were made to radically reengineer the natural-worldly meanings of sex and sexual relations. The Party exerts extensive control over sexual identities and behavior as part of its broader strategy to dominate every aspect of life. The Party suppresses sexual desire and personal pleasure by promoting policies that view sex merely as a means of procreation for producing loyal Party members, rather than as a source of personal fulfillment. Techniques such as promoting chastity through organizations like the Junior Anti-Sex League, and viewing any deviation from Party-approved sexual behavior as "thoughtcrime," are employed to eliminate personal pleasure and emotional bonds. The Party’s pervasive surveillance extends to private activities, including sexual behavior, to prevent dissent and maintain control. By destroying intimate relationships and emotional connections, the Party aims to ensure that all loyalty and emotional energy are directed solely toward Big Brother and the state. Through propaganda and indoctrination, the Party enforces its ideological control, eradicating personal and romantic fulfillment to prevent any challenges to its authority.

     In the human world, which is natural for us, the forces of nature at work in the mother cat are weaker; they don’t force a particular set of meanings on a given form of life. At the level of gender, depending on the form of life, there are many ways to be (not just perform!) a girl or a woman, a boy or a man. I have raised a daughter. I tried to make her aware of how capitalism reduces the being of women – through entertainment, advertising, and fashion industries – attempts to construct a female type such that the human worth of a woman is a function of her sexiness. I always admired athletic women – “Tomboys” – who dared to buck the system in that respect. But although I understood that there were different ways to be a woman – some better than others – I never questioned the fact that there were women and men. The same applies to being a man. I never thought that to be a “real man” you had to be like John Wayne.

    I think how we think, act, and feel as men and women depends on what makes sense in a form of life, or as a rejection of a particular form of life. My critique of both masculinity and femininity in capitalism was based on my belief that capitalism alienated men and women from one another, constructing in ways that violated our reality in order to perpetuate itself as the dominant economic form. Again, I never questioned the reality of masculinity and femininity themselves.

The radical break with human nature as I have been trying to understand it – becoming conscious of yourself within a realm of meanings and interpretations emerging from the natural forces at work in cats and bears and being interwoven within a form of life interacting with other forms of life – occurs with ‘Modernity,’ of the regime of Science-Technology-Capitalism. Galileo’s crime was not providing definitive evidence and knock-down arguments for a more scientifically accurate model of the solar system; it was reducing all of physical reality – nature – to fit his mechanical physics, alienating not only human meanings from the universe but the attenuated love of the mother cat as well. This paralleled an analogous movement in capitalism, which reduced all of nature (including human nature) to raw materials to be exploited for profit. We always demean and devalue that which we intend to violate and exploit.  The product of this was the transformation of the natural rhythms of birth and death for a society in which technology has become our ‘nature’ and a society that has made traditional male-female roles – and the gender conceptions associated with them – increasingly irrelevant. We are somewhere between traditional economies that had to live within the natural limits of their places and Huxley’s Brave New World. Confusion is the result.

    My great-grandparents are the best example of a marriage I have known. They both farmed a piece of land they loved and cared for. It was – together with raising their children – a common project, a common love. They divided the labor. It made more sense for my great-grandfather to plow the fields with the horses and my great-grandmother to tend the garden and the chickens, for example. Both that was not alienation. All jobs that were necessary to the life of the farm were valuable and valued. My great-grandmother was not demeaned by tending the garden rather than plowing the fields, strong woman though she was. She gave birth to their three children at home and nursed them. Neighbors helped pick up the slack, for the farm was embedded in a farming community in which self-help networks were essential. Both loved their children, but as a mother who carried each of the children in her body, gave birth to each in pain, and nursed each her relationship to the children was naturally different. Now in that farming community, having 72 genders or doing away with men and women in favor of a spectrum of identities would have made no sense at all.

   But it is not nonsensical in the urban metropolises generated by Science-Technology-Capitalism (now global). What roles there are have become largely interchangeable. I am a teacher. My masculinity is not essential for my teaching. I live together with my sons: I cook and do all the tasks my grandmother did. There are no fields for me to plow. Not even a garden to tend to. Men and women have been disconnected from the kinds of social and economic functions that made sense in pre-industrial economies. Carrying over the norms and concepts that made perfect sense to metropolitan Berlin in 2024 makes no sense. Neither do the virtues that both great-grandparents had to have to a high degree to be a competent member of their agricultural community. Success in capitalist Berlin demands a whole different set of qualities – not virtues but the ability to present yourself in a certain way, to manipulate others into believing what you need them to believe, etc.

   What I am suggesting is that postmodernism does belong to a certain form of life – contemporary global, urban capitalism, with its social atoms and masses. And I am also suggesting that this form of life – if you want to call it a form at all – is the setting for the 72 genders and the dissolution of the natural (in a human way natural) categories of man and woman. For Science-Technology-Capitalism is premised on the denial of nature – or replacing our human ideas of nature with the reductive form embraced by Galileo, Descartes, Newton as well as Rockefeller and Bill Gates.

     In place of trying to live by conforming our minds with nature (in the broad sense), we have taken over the lore of ‘autonomy’ – which also fits perfected into urban capitalist cities populated by isolated individuals and their acquaintances. I don’t see any difference between Modern and Postmodern in this respect: both posit the self as the source of meaning and value. Nature is cookie dough to be cut up by the autonomous self. Or the identity-group. Or the powers-that-be. The idea of nurturing mothers and fathers as a response to the human reality of birth and child-rearing gets thrown out with the rest.  I am not saying that every woman has a vocation of being a mother or every man the vocation of being a father. Some clearly do not and that is fine. I am saying that a form of life that cannot honor being a nurturing mother or father – a form of life cut off from human nature – is destructive.

    The metaphysical system of Nominalism that underpins Science-Technology-Capitalism also only makes sense within that regime (or in the minds of people who affirm that regime). Reality transcends our conceptualizations and classifications of it. To take the well-know example: we have one word to refer to ‘snow’; the Inuit have a more complex vocabulary:

• kanevvluk: 'fine snow'
• qanikcaq: 'snow on ground'
• muruaneq: 'soft deep snow'
• nutaryuk: 'fresh snow'

 

The net of their language is more compact, captures more of reality than ours because their form of life required that at some point in their history. Meaning in both cases does have a referent, a referent that transcends language and can be classified and conceptualized in different ways – even as a poem can be translated in different ways. All the possible ways of classifying and conceptualizing ‘snow’ would be its reality even as all the possible plausible translations and readings of a poem might be thought to constitute its meaning, its reality. But making sense depends on who we are, where we are, and when we are. We are finite. Motherhood has been important in different ways because it has been important to us, necessary to us. In my world, it had been embedded in a language of love. That limits what can make sense.

    Nominalism abstracts from this. Anthropomorphic readings are subjective, prejudiced, ideological (as they indeed often are), socially constructed. But even a shadow is a shadow of something real. Even a distortion distorts some reality that could be seen more clearly. Nominalism denies nature. It posits that reality is cookie dough, and the mind can carve it up in any way it likes – ways that imply power over others or liberation from that power. From that fact that no one system of meaning (classification, conceptualization) can be THE TRUTH, it concludes that all possible systems of meaning are arbitrary. And that matches the experience of the alienated city-dweller caught in the web of capitalist life very well. It becomes logically a matter of taste whether I am a man, woman, or one of the other identities. And if there is no reality to violate, if I or my group can cut it up any way we like, then someone who wants to undermine my meanings and values and force his on me is just a naked attempt to dominate me. Nominalism makes sense in the context of Science-Technology-Capitalism.

    And if, as I believe on the basis of the reasoning provided by Christopher Lasch and others as well as my own experience of life, this regime generates various form of narcissistic personality types (disorders) as it main character, then ‘autonomy’ and ‘Nominalism’ become even more commonsensical. For the narcissist desires above all to remove all limits to its needs and desires, and reality is by definition a limit. If doing x violates the being of an animal or a person, then the animal or person limits my will. Nature is a limit. Love – from the outside of love – is a limit. The self or the identity as a source of meaning and value is the denial of nature or reality as a source of meaning and value. And this is the necessary prerequisite for Science-Technology-Capitalism: if I need to deforest the upper peninsula of Michigan for profit, then I must treat it as raw material. If I want to technologically intervene in my body to change it, I must view it as raw material, as property. If I want to extract stem cells from the aborted fetus, I must view it as raw material. I must demean and devalue everything, which means I must exclude it from the language of love, indeed from the realm of meaning. This is not true philosophy; this is the anthropology of a particular regime: Science-Technology-Capitalism.

   Aspects of so-called postmodernism push against this. I am sympathetic to them. Other aspects attempt to embody its logic more perfectly. I am opposed to them.

   I believe we have a nature – not the same kind as the cat; not one that forces one interpretation on us. Nature is like a poem. There are many possible readings of the poem; there are fewer possible profound readings. We are limited by our finite perspective. We are fallible: especially to the extent we remained locked into narcissism. But the poem – nature – talks back to us and we need to listen. Science-Technology-Capitalism is deaf, blind, and mute.