Of Carpenter's Squares, Property, and Love in the Time of the Great Derangement[1]

 For your entertainment (and edification) this month, we've been asked to weigh in on the institution of the modern family: what might this curious phenomenon look like? What do we understand by 'normal' in the 21st century? 

Before attempting to think-write my way through the first part of this editorial prompt, I have to deconstruct the second part of it, because what is 'normal' anyway?

Semiotics demonstrates, convincingly to my mind, that there is no such thing as absolute meaning; all meaning is contextual, and endlessly deferred besides (every word you read alters your understanding of what preceded it). What therefore, I ask in a second rhetorical flourish, is 'normal'? A dictionary definition might suggest that it means conforming to a standard; encountering only the expected. If you trace its etymology, you'll see that it was derived from the Latin for 'norma', a carpenter's square, in the 17th century. I like this. A carpenter's square; a measure of sorts, to establish right angles. Nothing uncommon, untoward or acute about 'normal' then.

However, I put to you that 'normal' is a relative measure, not an absolute one - more a band, really - and it is an entirely contextual construct, prone to change. Slavery was once 'normal' lest we forget, as was the idea that the earth was squarely (hah) the centre of the known universe; burning women at the stake for practicing 'witchcraft' and infant-marriage have been the norm too. Change has almost always come from a challenging of the normative, not compliance with it.

With that out of the way, I can now focus my attention on the other part of the editorial prompt: who or what is/makes a modern family? Setting aside the 'modern' for a moment, let's decode 'family' first: families are the building blocks (the kind delineated with a carpenter's square so that they're just 'right')  societies are made of. The historian in me cringes at playing so fast and loose with 'broad-stroke' tellings, but it wouldn't be entirely inaccurate to trace back the institution we call 'family' to the beginnings of settled communities practicing agriculture, and the concept of 'ownership' which seems to have come with this development. In The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Friedrich Engles holds that the monogamous family "is founded on male supremacy for the pronounced purpose of breeding children of indisputable paternal lineage...(which) is required, because these children shall later on inherit the fortune of their father. The monogamous family is distinguished from the pairing family by the far greater durability of wedlock, which can no longer be dissolved at the pleasure of either party. As a rule, it is only the man who can still dissolve it and cast off his wife," (1908, 76). For this society to perpetuate itself, heterosexual monogamous coupling has to be the norm. And this is almost certainly one of the most important reasons why any sort of challenge to this creed - whether from the women's movement or from the LGBTQIA space - has been rabidly lampooned and dismissed. Here: have a neat little 'vintage'  poster that ties in misogyny, homophobia and general all-round bigotry in equal parts. Never say I give you nothing.

  

(Source: http://www.revelist.com/feminism/anti-feminist-posters/1246)

Not to sound like too much of a wet blanket, but to me, the modern family looks a whole lot like its predecessor, the one rooted in power relations which place the patriarch squarely at the heart of its structure, with this structure itself serving as just another brick in the wall that capitalism and consumer culture have together built around us all. But what of the gains made by the LGBTQIA movement you ask? The legalisation of same sex marriage in America (and a host of other countries) or the recognition of same sex civil unions elsewhere? Sure, this is a victory that cannot - should not - be understated. However, it comes at a time when fewer people are getting married at all (and divorce rates are higher among the people who do)[2], suggesting to my mind, a last-ditch effort to raise flagging numbers for a system of societal organisation which is finding less takers than it ever has within its historically traditional demographic (read: heterosexual couples).

What bearing marriage has - and will continue to have - on the societal building block we call the family, only time will tell. In the meantime, more power to them each and all, who seek to design the size, shape and origin story for their choices and couplings; for their ability to create communities premised on love, understanding, compassion and the possibility of happiness in a world intent on destroying itself whole. Family, to me, is what you make. Family, to me, is what you choose to be a part of. So much more powerful than the double-bind of blood (birth) and ownership (right), no?     

      

   

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[1] See last month's post on climate change for more on what Amitav Ghosh calls the 'Great Derangement'.

[2] See the 2016 OECD report on Marriage and Divorce Rates for more details: https://www.oecd.org/els/family/SF_3_1_Marriage_and_divorce_rates.pdf

It's all over now, baby blue (take it up with Dylan, why don't you?)

I woke up on the morning of the 9th, anxious. A weird sensation coursed through me whole; an unease which I couldn't shake. I reached for my phone to see what havoc the night had wrought, and learned that Donald Trump was leading Hillary Clinton in all the projections news portals were casting/constantly revising in real-time. Not by much, initially, but leading he was. Even as we read the numbers coming in, no one wanted to believe what they seemed to be saying. This couldn't possibly be. Trump might have the lead on Clinton, but surely it would dissipate soon? Surely, when it came to it, people were going to vote for the admittedly uninspiring status-quoist who embodied the establishment they had declaimed loudly - and repeatedly - they despised, right? Because what real option did they have? A misogynistic and racist sociopath whose candidacy almost everyone had failed to counter seriously because they had dismissed it as a joke? Surely voters were going to go with the known evil; the warmonger over the loose cannon?

Some of you may have deduced from my tone that I'm not exactly an enthusiastic Hillary Clinton supporter. Well done. I'm not. Let me spell out why. I identify as feminist: to my core. This has been the one constant non-negotiable tenet of faith around which all my experiments with truth, identity, sexuality - being, in a word - have long unfolded. It angered me endlessly that sections of the media held that not getting behind Clinton's candidacy somehow 'dented' anyone's feminist credentials. Er. No. Because it is precisely feminism that does not allow me to look away from the right royal mess and godawful loss of life in Syria, Iraq, Libya, and anywhere else the US has persisted in pushing its pathetically self-serving (neo-imperialist) foreign policy. Then there's the painful fact that even if we recognise that capital is nameless and faceless, if you squint a little bit, it begins to look a little like the Clinton Foundation and others of its ilk. Paid speeches to the goons on Wall Street? It's hard to curry favour with the 99% after something like that, think you not?

And this is why calling this election has been so bloody complicated: there is clearly a serious amount of misogyny powering how these results have panned out. For anyone looking, this much is clear from even continents away: there was no way America was about to vote a woman into power. But this wasn't just any woman: this was a woman who was an adept player of the 'game' that animates Washington DC. This was a woman who had an 'emic' or insider's perspective when it came to the workings of power and the close nexus between politics and capital. 

Were the Democratic party less invested in maintaining status quo itself, it would have known that fielding Clinton - and pushing her candidacy over Sanders in as obviously partisan a way as they did - was a terrible idea. The call that had gone out was a loud and clear one: the people had made it known that it was 'change' they were after: enough of the establishment, and whoever they thought embodied it. This is why, as I've been saying all year through, Trump and Sanders needed to be read, at least structurally, as companion pieces; alike in more ways than we countenanced. Whether they were or not (for I hold that Trump is the farthest thing from anti-establishment in one sense; more on that soon), they were both perceived as outsiders who would mount a challenge to the power structures that exert and perpetuate hegemony.

I remember being astounded by the numbers Sanders' rallies were drawing nation-wide when I was in America over the summer. So many people I spoke to were convinced he was the 'change' candidate America needed. What struck me then was how, much like with Corbyn in the UK, sections of the media attempted to malign Sanders by making out that he leaned far Left. How ludicrous a world do we have to live in for this to be considered an insult? More, how far Right of Centre has political discourse shifted when a Social Democrat, to most ears, begins to sound like someone on the Radical Left? 

And this is where, in the end, the beginning: Trump and his wealth are products of the same structures of inequity and foul-play that people say they want no more of, without being able to name precisely what it is that ails us. We are living through the death-throes of capitalism. We saw this with Brexit, and I said then that this was a very scary moment to live through because world over, people are increasingly frustrated with the smallness of their lives; of what they imagine it is possible to do with them. There is angst, there is frustration which often plays itself out in myriad forms of violence. In India, our response was to elect a fascist strongman who promised "development" at all cost. In England, the Leave campaign leveraged just the right amount of paranoia and hatred of the 'other' to carry the day. This is what Trump has managed to tap into, because discontent - especially the kind we cannot adequately name or identify the source or shape of - is an engraved invitation to the strongman (and it has, almost unflinchingly always been a 'man') to seize the reins of a flailing polity. Modi did it by saying he had a 56" chest that he would use to protect India from whatever was coming at us. The irony of a man who has benefitted from (and continues to be a supporter of) free markets suddenly tapping into a protectionist and hypernationalist discourse as he plays up the insularity which has long been a hallmark of large parts of America cannot and should not be lost upon us. There's a Chinese benediction which goes something like this: may you live in uninteresting times. Clearly, these are not those times.