This post is about ideological state apparatuses. Carles confronts a series of synchronic power differentials deployed contemporaneously in the same education problematic.
Driven by asymmetrical power relations on the perpendicular co-ordinate axis of gender, Melinda Dennehy, the teacher involved in the incident Carles subjects to his probing analysis, manifested herself at the overdetermined point at which the axes of gender, age, state power, monopoly power, and technological development along capitalist lines converge. If she didn't exist, as the saying goes, perhaps Carles would have had to invent her. But with gender issues in play in the idling of a youth labor front, how does that affect institutionalized masculinity? Are we witnessing the crisis of phallologocentrism as it is impacted by spatio-visual technologies of communication -- "If a man sent cock shots of his peen to a girl, would he be more of a ‘perv’?" That is, is it more of a "violation" of gender normativity when males leverage the ageist power differential, or does it constitute a complementary hegemonic enterprise, grounding hierarchical prerogatives in homologous bases? Is becoming "more of a 'perv'" a matter of the perversion of power, or is the apotheosis of power itself?
The role of the institution of schools in a late capitalist or monopoly capitalist social formation is to delay the entry of young, redundant workers into the workforce and allow to constituting a stagnant puddle of reserve labor to be mobilized at a moment's notice (online) at capital's behest while depressing wage growth for the currently employed. Fruitless sexual relations mediated by technology within the institutional educational space is one strategy in the campaign to disperse the productive energies of young people: "Is sexting just part of growing up in the modern world?" Carles asks, trusting we will intuit the inescapable conclusion.
Thus a relation between teacher and student violates the fundamental underlying economic necessities that involve forestalling the students' assumption of maturity and the responsibilities and expectations that go along with that rite of passage in terms of the field of autonomy in which they may operate. The docile bodies of their instructors are not intended to be on that discursive field but transcend it, structure it. Dispersed sexual relations are supposed negate youth with youth, not elevate youth into burgeoning field of affective labor among adults, particularly adults already tenured in the workforce. "Should tweens be given the same rights as grownups to sext?" Carles wonders. If the dialectical development of the relation between students and teachers, unemployed and employed, unskilled and skilled, will thereby take a pre-post-industrial turn and eradicate the use of these dichotomies components of a striated strategy by which discrimination can be safely operated, then perhaps technology itself must be blamed and the course of innovation diverted. "Does love have an age? Is age just a number?" Are the categories of quantification dangerously close to becoming qualities, thus reversing the principles behind the double-entry bookkeeping of souls that capitalism require to manage and reproduce itself and allow for accumulation?
The crisis of phallologocentrism is of course paralleled, as Carles has demonstrated, by the serial crises of accumulation under late capitalism, and would seem to call for a gender panic in order to ameliorate displaced ideological tensions: "Is this story only compelling because she’s a ‘cougar’?" Carles asks in his hallmark trope of interrogatory misdirection. He does not mean to ask a question but propose a philosophical thesis: namely, the idea of "cougars" -- a vulgar term for adult females whose sexual drive is not safely atrophying in dormancy -- are a prerequisite for the telling of "compelling" cultural stories given existing social relations. The estrual libidinous forces are sublimated into the elaboration of minute points of differentiation of the continuums of power. As these stories are becoming more compulsory, future liberation movements will be seeking the liberation from sexuality. Carles traces this line of compulsion, the fall from agape to eros to apathetic narcissism: "Sorta wish i had a teacher who had fallen in love with me when I was 14, or at least a teacher who would have ‘tugged me off’…." This is a cutting, incisive comment on the future role of education, no longer to delay and to pacify but to teach us a modality of pleasure in a restricted libidinal economy. Soon, Carles warns us, the evaporation of our constructed desires in meaningless bursts of orgasmic pleasure will be the only thing that our teachers will be structurally capable of teaching us. They can't impregnate our minds; they can only "tug us off" for a fleeting moment of intellectual relief.
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