'The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance' & Masculinity
This is a slightly rewritten version of my intervention from an early episode of The Lack on 'The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance' and the theme of 'masculinity'.
The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors’, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment’. It has drowned out the most heavenly ecstacies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom -- Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
Marx paints no cosy resolution in ridding society of the so called ‘patriarchy’. Conveniently for capital, the world before its own rise was not too rosy either.
The irony - that Marx doesn’t point to in the above passage of the Manifesto - is that the capitalist ideological fantasy is not so different from the ‘religious and political illusions’ of yore.
In some ways, illusions today are less tenable because reason has exploded the notion of an almighty in the sky and a heaven or hell in the afterlife. But after this ‘death of god’ at the level of reason, we have been left with god’s festering remains, fossilised beliefs that are in fact more intractable, precisely because they operate at a level beyond reason.
God, as Lacan tells us, is - in our atheistic age - unconscious.
Relations, unfortunately, did not become intolerable when they became intolerable. Utopic fantasies and the level of the unconscious make the (visible) naked exploitation endurable in a way more tenable than under past order of things.
Today, the ways in which experientially intolerable relations are rendered ‘idyllic’ are numerous. One is commodity fetishism. Two more are temporal fantasies related to the obliteration of contradiction at the level of the social - busy imaginings about dynamics in the future and the past, necessarily out of our grasp. They are imaginings that sustain toxic antagonisms in the present.
‘Communism is the dream of capitalism,’ I believe Žižek says somewhere.
Marx may well be right that capitalism is a necessary stage before a socialist future, but even if he ends up being right, he is wrong in his prediction: ‘the owl of minerva flies at dusk’. He sows the illogical seeds for totalitarians of all kinds.
The certainty that the antagonisms of capitalism can be obliterated in a future order precisely undergirds the dynamic that sustains what is toxic within capitalism.
Instead of tarrying with the complexities and contradictions of the present (conflict), we sustain here a state of ‘war’. We render contradiction contingent on opponents (real and imaginary), often looking to clearer manifestations of unpleasant things in past orders to convince ourselves - soothingly - that we have facile agency in abating suffering in the present.
If we can just rid ourselves of the cultural issues that beset past orders, we imagine - those dying embers that still operate, it is fashionable to say, ‘structurally’ or ‘subconsciously’ - we can blot out all in every incidence of suffering in our contemporary world.
But this notion, prevalent as it is, is another fantasy. It misses the subtle concealed reality of how the toxicity of capitalism actually functions.
Just as with the religious dynamics of past orders, capitalist fantasy suggests that a utopian world can be earned and that suffering in the here and now can be excused. Ideology claims that if only pesky, contingent annoyances - the dominance of ‘men’, for example - could be expunged, if only an individual, group or social order could be blanched and purified, then contradiction would forever be resolved.
But contradiction is inexorable, irresolvable. To repress it is to have it return as toxicity, exploitation, alienation, something even worse. To embrace it, knowing that it is generative of all that is ordinarily ‘transcendent’ in the world, is to lower the stakes on its returned repressed.
Fantasy operates on a promise for the future. But in the words of Belinda Carlisle, ‘Heaven is a place on Earth’. Not at a distance in time or place, but in the always-broken present. (Heaven is only heaven insofar as it precisely isn’t…).
Capitalist fantasy prevents us from doing the difficult work of encountering the emancipatory present. Instead, it allows us to tolerate an intolerable world, rendering the intolerable conveniently contingent on dynamics beyond our control. We do this because not tolerating it would lead us down the very uncomfortable - but ultimately liberating - path of traversing the fantasy, experiencing the freedom of revolving around our fantasy, not being governed by its denied phantom, haunted by its ghost.
Marx’s introduction to The Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right is as appropriate to capitalist fantasy as it would have been to the ideology of promise as it manifested itself in past orders of things - in the fantastical dynamics of canonical religions, used, as they were, as veils for imperialistic expropriation and feudal exploitation.
Fantasy acts as ‘the flowers on the chains of our true oppression’ and…
Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain, not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower.
There is a world apart from the egregious oppression of our age. The solution is not to close our eyes to it and imagine fantastical flowers. Rather, by exposing oppression to the light of day, by viewing it and truly understanding it - contradictions and all - we can step away from it and see that there is a present where living flowers do actually exist.
To understand the functionings of our social order and the oppression that it engenders requires reason. To be reasonable is difficult particularly given the highly obfuscating nature and the magical promise of the market system.
To be reasonable requires us to grapple with the nature of subjectivity, of desire and therefore the unconscious. It requires us - as the Hegelian Marx knew - to come to terms with the intractable role of contradiction, to live in a world that is ‘heavenly’ only insofar as it is riven with contradiction. To shift our gaze from an impossible, utopian future (the bad infinite) and to revolve around the dialectical nature of subjectivity and desire in the present (the good).
Like all good drama, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance handles contradiction well. It elucidates the contradictory nature of violence and justice - what is condoned and what is outlawed. It shows that social order is required, but that the choice of who we elect and whose acts of violence we condone is not neutral.
The violence of Liberty Valance is blatantly bad. It prevents the solidification of civilization in this part of the West. His violence terrorises the populace. The impotent Marshal Appleyard can do nothing to stop him. The violence of the learned Ranse Stoddart is lauded. He is educated and intelligent. The majority of the film establishes justification for his ‘act’. He is seen as a hero. And the legend of his bravery sees him elected senator.
Tom Doniphon, the outsider, unwilling - for example - to take on a political role, is the one to actually kill Liberty Valance. His act of violence is conveniently overlooked. He is not celebrated, at least within the world of the film. He dies in obscurity.
The rule of law is required to allow society to flourish, but the acceptance of the instigation of the rule of law - and also of unjustified violence by certain figures and not others - is ideological. The role of law and order, here, isn't black and white.
The same goes for the film's ambivalent treatment of the question of ‘patriarchy’.
‘Patriarchy’ today seems to be taken to mean a secret network of men's accumulated disdain for women and a hidden intention to keep them down at all costs. In the film, we see that the reality of these old forms of societal organisation are more mixed. ‘Patriarchy’ here also means paternalism, protection and relief.
As Marx states, ‘patriarchal relations have been replaced by naked self interest and callous cash payments’. Through the erosion of manifest justifications of exploitation towards unconscious, more ideological, ‘meaningless’ justifications (for example, blaming everything on ‘the patriarchy’), we are left feeling anxious, alienated, depressed and confused.
This is not to say that we should deliberately reinstate patriarchal male leaders - ‘enforced monogamy’ à la Peterson - or that we should condone ‘feudal’ ties and noblesse oblige, but rather that societal symptoms say something about unresolved antagonisms in the present, sustained by scapegoated effigies - imagined ‘powerful’ figures in the present who once had authority in the past.
And we do need systems to help us grapple with the chaosmos into which we are all collectively thrown without choice.
We don't need paternalism, patriarchy, or perhaps even parentalism, but we can't do without ways of protecting ourselves from the worst ravages of things. We need release from the onslaught of rampant individualism and the ever-greater exposure to exploitation that we constantly face. We need community, we need structure, we need relief. And we need these things to be built politically from a place of dialectical reason, the kind of ambivalent reason of which the best drama is capable, so that we don't fall into the hypnotising sway of the obfuscating market system and make our predicament - through the promise of purity - actually even worse.