Leonor Silvestri.
www.leomiau76.blogspot.com. leocatlove@gmail.com
To my parents, without whom none of this would have been possible
Para Laura.
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.
Philip Larkin - This Be The Verse
Spare the rod and spoil the child, I’m your father, It is the best for you, Silence, Don’t make any noise, Don’t lie, Don’t steal, Respect religion, the headmaster and your parents, Don’t question, Just obey… This is how children are taught in that myth called "the family". To be precise, the etymology of the word “family” goes back to famulus (in Latin, servant, slave), and familia refers to a set of slaves. In our civilization children are born, brought up and reared within an atmosphere of constant disapproval of their vitality. Family is then the omnipresent look on our lives that reduces everything to victim vs. victimizer, an institution where abuse is only acknowledged in terms of criminal offence, making invisible all the other abuses – especially that of the parent/child bond.
Thus we are writing to all those whose families often tried, and usually managed, to make children handicapped, to annul them in terms of love, to cripple them with hate, for all those whose fathers called them whores, sluts in heat, faggots, whose mothers competed with and looked down on them, for all those whose parents never provided them with the tools to self-manage a pleasurable sexuality of their own coinage which might enable them to resist the tyranny of sex. We write for the survivors of the family so that we can counteract its effects, in order to begin to think from an anarchist epistemological starting point about our life as children. We are beginning to speak as anarchists beyond the hypocrite family portrait on the mantelpiece, self-exiled from our families, and beyond what the Law enables us to see and recognize.
Freedom is far from home
Unruly boys
Who will not grow up
Must be taken in hand
Unruly girls
Who will not settle down
They must be taken in hand
A crack on the head
Is what you get for not asking
And a crack on the head
Is what you get for asking
A crack on the head
Is just what you get
WHY ? Because of who you are !
And a crack on the head
Is just what you get
WHY ? Because of what you are !
A crack on the head
Because of :
Those things you said
Things you said
The things you did
Morrisey
If we are talking about anarchism it is important to elicit some of the positions that some inspiring anarchists have had on this matter. For instance, Bakunin stated that children are not the property of anybody, they only “belong to their future freedom”; a freedom awaiting its full realization based on our own dignity and on respect for the freedom and dignity of others. Moreover, La Questione Sociale, an anarchist magazine issued in Argentina from 1885, in its second number, published anonymously: “…it is obvious that man has convinced his family to grant his supremacy over woman, and in order to transmit his property to his descendants on his death. Therefore, the family has been declared indissoluble. Based on interest, and not on love, it is evident we need force and punishment to avoid its disaggregation under the strain of its internal clashes of interest.” Likewise, the anarcho-feminist Emma Goldman affirmed: “Woman no longer wants to be a party to the production of a race of sickly, feeble, decrepit, wretched human beings, who have neither the strength nor moral courage to throw off the yoke of poverty and slavery." (1911: 233-245.) Also, the anarcho-syndicalist Errico Malatesta added: “Some say the remedy will be found in the radical abolition of the family, the monogamous sexual partnership, and love will be reduced to a physical act, and the sexual union will become similar to friendship, a feeling that will recognize multiplication, variety, and simultaneity of affects. And the children? Children of all.” (2004) Or Giovanni Rossi, the anarchist journalist for La Comuna Socialista at the end of the nineteenth century and founder of the free love commune Colonia Cecilia in Brazil, ranted: “We can change the names and the rituals as much as we want but as long as we have a man, a woman, some children and a house we will have a family, i.e. a small authoritarian society, jealous of its prerogatives”. As we see, some anarchists were not at ease with the concept of family. They were looking for new ways, interconnected with gender, feminism, and the emergence of a new sexuality.
We are a happy family, meet mum and daddy
However, the child we are invited to free from invisible abuse by family/humanity is already the product of a deeper submission -- assujetissement, the principle according to which a subject is created. Becoming a subject depends on a profound control which Judith Butler, following Althusser, calls interpellation: the process by which an individual becomes an intelligible element of society.
We could add that there exists a tendency to confuse power with its display. To view power as something external that exerts a pressure on us, and subordinates us. This ignores the way that power also forms us, and in doing so provides us with conditions for our intelligible existence. Hence power -- and it is quite obvious that this is so in the kinship called family -- preserves us as the beings we are, as long as we are the beings we should be. And thus we end up internalising its conditions (silently and unconsciously).
Once we recognise that submitting to power consists of a fundamental dependence on a discourse that allows us an existence, we are able to analyse forms of child submission other than the explicit sexual abuse which the law acknowledges as a criminal offence. Our target is a previous abuse, immanent and inseparable from the family. At the same time, the family -- defined as a sophisticated disciplinary coercive device, striving to protect (i.e. control, manage) children and their sexual integrity from a threat considered external, can enable and might indeed produce a set of abhorrent sexual behaviors. For instance, asserting a right of exclusive possession over their children’s genitals, parents may warn: "no one should touch your private parts -- except for mummy and daddy." This phenomenon can be defined as the abuse of a passionate bond which exists between the adults and an inferior being who needs their psychic, physical and spiritual care as a condition sine qua non.
In order to be -- as Spinoza would say, to persist in existence -- we need to accept and internalise the interpellation that produces us as subjects, i.e. as subordinates, since subordination, according to this analysis, provides the child with their possibility of intelligibility. Therefore, this drive to persist in existence is highly exploitable at the level of the psyche. Thus the entry-point of power, as Judith Butler explains: "The insistence that a subject is passionately attached to his or her own subordination has been invoked cynically by those who seek to debunk the claims of the subordinated. If a subject can be shown to pursue or sustain his or her subordinated status, the reasoning goes, then perhaps final responsibility for that subordination resides with the subject. Over and against this view, I would maintain that the attachment to subjection is produced through the workings of power, and that part of the operation of power is made clear in this psychic effect, one of the most insidious of its productions." (1997: 6)
In a Stockholm syndrome of the family, children are deprived of the capacity to abominate their parents and made unable to break away from them. We agree with Butler when she says: “…It is not simply that a sexuality is unilaterally imposed by the adult, nor that a sexuality is unilaterally fantasised by the child, but that the child’s love, a love that is necessary for its existence, is exploited and a passionate attachment abused’(op. cit. : 7-8). The desire for the norm and for subordination is the desire for social existence exploited by the regulative power of parents: “Where social categories guarantee a recognizable and enduring social existence, the embrace of such categories, even as they work in the service of subjection, is often preferred to no social existence at all.” (op. cit.: 30). And this regulative power not only determines which types of love are possible, but also which types of hate are taboo: for instance, the taboo on hating one's own parents.
She’s leaving home, bye, bye
The spontaneous or progressive
destruction of the monogamous family prepares the ground of triumph for our ideal
Giovanni Rossi
However, we would go beyond Butler's analysis of sexual abuse, beyond the penal code, to comprehend the foundational but invisible abuse immanent to the family. This abuse is only perceptible in its effects - the scars and marks which it leaves on the psyche. Given that it shapes and forms certain types of subjects, with certain behaviors and sexual practices, we assert that the abuse of the passionate bond is already, before any characterisation by criminal law, a form of sexual abuse. And given that the family is a contingent institution created under certain historical conditions, in which the subject is fundamentally produced as a subordinate within relations of possession and dependence, there can be no family in which such abuse does not take place.
In order to break through what has become fixed knowledge and reality, we postulate a primordial anarchist ethical demand against any form of domination. A new relationship with that vulnerability which is immanent to any being, and to any affective connection. And since no individual on its own can dismantle a given institution, let's be clear that it is futile to struggle for a resignification of the family as an anarchist ideal.
We desire to move towards friendship, affinity and affection, a kinship that is not based on partners, marriage or families, in order to transcend the naturalized limits of these mechanisms of control. We desire to oppose resistance to assimilation, to become affinity packs, in order to destroy domination with the same passion with which we have been abused. No more children of Laius. Let’s get away from myth and embark on a familiar migration to joy.
1-“La mujer, el matrimonio y la familia”http://www.marxists.org/espanol/bakunin/derechosmujer.htm
2- http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_archives/goldman/aando/marriageandlove.html
3- http://www.nodo50.org/ekintza/article.php3?id_article=90
4- subiectum, sujet, i.e., no person, or the person who is talked about but does not talk, from sub iaceo, in Latin, cast below
5- Against the statistics which show that most occurrences of child abuse are carried out by close relatives, and most of all by the father himself.
Bibliography
Baigorria, O. El Amor Libre, Eros y Anarquía. Buenos Aires. Utopía Libertaria. 2004
Butler, J. Undoing Gender. Routledge. N.Y. 2004
------------ Psychic Life or Power. Standford University Press. California. 1997
Corominas, J. Diccionario Etimológico de la lengua Castellana. Madrid. Gredos. 1998.
Deleuze, G & Guattari, F. El Antiedipo. Paidós. Barcelona. 1995
Deleuze, G. Posdata sobre las sociedades de control, in Christian Ferrer (Comp.) El lenguaje literario. Montevideo. Nordan. 1991.
Foucault, M. La verdad y las formas jurídicas. Barcelona. Gedisa. 2003.
Goldman, E. Anarchism and Other Essays. New York & London. Mother Earth Publishing Association. 1911.
Malatesta, E. Amor y anarquía, in Ekintza Zuzena N° 31, Bilbao, 2004.
Neill, A. A. Summerhill, a radical approach to child rearing. N.Y. Hart Publishing Company. 1951.
Sófocles. Edipo Rey. Madrid. Gredos. 2000.
www.pidoperdonzine.blogspot.com
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