Introducing Radical Notion Remixes
An on-going cluster of Radical Notion call-backs in more portable & snazzier formats like summaries, infographics, & discussion podcasts.
A frequent post on Medusa Rising will be our Radical Notion Remix where we'll re-present articles and essays from THE RADICAL NOTION. Lots of work in that magazine was designed to lay out a framework for radical materialist feminism. No matter how much we aimed to take some high theory, political philosophy, and feminist history and make it accessible, those articles were often long and quite dense compared to other offerings. We knew this. That's one reason the magazine was a print project. That kind of reading takes t-i-m-e and print formats lend themselves to the necessary slowness and flow of grocking heavy, complex analysis.
So, Medusa Rising wants to re-imagine some of that heavy fare into lighter but still excellent street food, something you can enjoy on the go, even hands free, in more portable formats like summaries, infographics, and discussion podcasts. Think Blinkist, but for radical materialist feminism.
No online project can match the richness and care in design that went into the six-course tasting menus of THE RADICAL NOTION, so when we remix an article we'll link the PDF at theradicalnotion.org so you can take in with all its color and texture if so inspired. TRN made all its issues free to access as PDFs from now until the lights go out forever because we always thought of that project as part of a gift economy.
I want Medusa Rising to help make sure all that powerful women's art and writing keeps getting the attention and consideration it deserves. I want the writers and artist who shared their work with us to be able to show off and brag on themselves. That way, they'll find even more community of women and readers who value the world feminists building. I hope these remixes work like a reading group – a source with/against which to develop your own RadMatFem.
For this same reason, I'm taking one of my pieces on Irigaray, since we're waiting for the new archive site to go live as I'm writing this, I figured better to start this project of learning in public by experimenting with my own stuff.
Remix | Re-Framing Radical Feminism - Irigaray's Couple, Difference, Mucous | from Issue 11 of TRN.
(will link when the archive goes live)
Living (and working) relationally across differences is a fundamental value for RadMatFem. We are beings embedded in a world that evolved us, our bodyminds in constant feedback with everything and every creature around us. This is belonging writ large. We are inter-beings, permeable, open. That's why the figures in the image above are distinct, but open to the space around them. All living beings are vulnerable because they are relational. This relationally is only a weakness – infact, vulnerability is one of our most common synonyms for weakness – in a domination system that weaponizes vulnerability to serve power. Nature is not a domination system. It is a system of vitality and violence – everything eats, everything dies. But that process is not about 'winning' or 'power' so much as a dynamic equilibrium and cycle of death and renewal. In this the couple in sexual (or any) difference is a miniature dynamic seeking belonging and thriving.
Domination fucks all that up. Domination tries to freeze in place, to idealize, reify, solidify, exploit, extract. It is is unnatural, that is why its violence is not necessary but sadistic, deliberately alienating.
Instead of that domination, RadMatFem would have us relent and tune into this other energy in the interval. The double helix above represents that generative interval. This GIF below focuses on the complexity of that dynamic space of becoming. Instead of pining for a perfection without vulnerability, suffering, and death, RadMatFem takes those for inevitable factors that should trigger our care and mutual nourishing wherever possible (not preferable, not advantageous, ... possible). One of Irigaray's metaphors for that interval is the body's mucous, the fluid membranes of exchange that protect and enable all the wild chemistry of our permeable membranes. No permeability, no metabolism, no life.
In Irigaray's theory of sexual difference, two subjects understand themselves to be permeable and interconnected. That is, they are grounded in material reality. The idea of the self-enclosed, autonomous, sovereign subject is already a fantasy, a projection and compensation that Man cooked up to cope with being a slow, soft animal in a wild and dangerous world. Instead of competing for power/security, responding to actions/energy with defense and attack, the subject tend to those flows, take responsibility for them, and attend to how the other receives them.
That's an important dimension of the mucous-interval in Irigaray's thought. It's the between-space of those flows, doing the work mucous does in the body: protecting the integrity of permeable membranes. It is also a space of pleasure, nourishment, and uncertainty. Whether two people or two powers on the world stage or two classes of people or subjects in history that differ from each other, the couple is Irigaray's figure for difference made creative. Rather than competing for existing resources, these couples build world. The energy or action sent out will probably encounter other forces and flows that change it, even remake it completely before it reaches its intended. Hence the need for attention to the flow's reception. This is the meaning of reciprocity in RadMatFem. Not that we exchange same for same, but that we attend to the qualities of our offerings and how they are received by our other/s. We do not just catapult projections while expecting to be seen ourselves.
The Default Male Subject pretends he is real and she (barely even a woman) is a screen for the projection of his fear-desire-fear of inter-relation and vulnerability.
These arrows are looped to show how misunderstood his own desire really is. And they refract and bounce off of her to show how this projection makes any relation to her (or her to him) impossible. This projection is a huge part of any othering. It's a fundamental psychological operation in all dominance systems. He imagines himself solid, impenetrable, and acts to maintain dominance. He imagines her a insubstantial, malleable, penetrable, and incapable of her own solidity. That very amorphousness also makes her enormously dangerous, untrustworthy, engulfing, a powerful magnet for his lust/rage. Personal, political, cultural – this complex plays itself out. All the action and energy is painful, confused, and deflected. Always potenially violent because never reciprocated. Reciprocity is impossible. Alienation rules all interaction. This is very good for consumer capitalism. Connection is replaced with power, with the force applied to demand compliance. This is the 'relation' allowed by traditional gender socialization. This is what Irigaray, as a radical feminist, wants us all to let go of.
What I have always admired in her work is that she does not just say Let That Go, but takes the next riskier step of suggesting What To Build Instead. So building is a major theme for Medusa Rising. Our hope is that you'll send us your work about building and making change as much as about the problems feminists want to build our way out of.
