| von Dennis Graemer |
There is hardly a movie that has been as present this year as Greta Gerwig’s „Barbie“. Hated by some, celebrated by others, the question remains as to whether the film can withstand a materialistic analysis – or whether the message is not ultimately a rather pessimistic one.
Everyone seems to agree that the message of Barbie (2023) is a progressive one. The movie is, to its essence, feminist. We had to witness another one of Ben Shapiro’s mental breakdowns: Triggered by “the most woke” of movies, the right’s favorite manchild felt the need to publicly burn a Barbie doll. It is as of yet unclear whether he will recover from this overdose of cringe. So-called liberals, on the other hand, praise Barbie as “a film by women, about women, for women” and “a feminist fable”. Thereby, Barbie is seamlessly integrated into the logic of the Culture War. Barbie feminism, feminism good. Barbie feminism, feminism bad.
All of this suggests that no one watched the actual movie.
I
„There is no interracial redemption. There is no Afrocentric redemption. Redemption is the narrative inheritance of humans. There is no denouement to social death.“
Frank B. Wilderson III, Afropessimism
The term „Afropessimism“ refers to a doctrine that describes the oppression of Black people as an indispensable part of the constitution of non-Black identities. It characterizes the struggle of other subjugated groups as a struggle to claim their inherent humanity, which necessarily presupposes the exclusion of Blackness. Afropessimists believe that the destruction of Black lives is fundamentally inscribed in the very fabric of human civilization.
The theory relies on the (post-)structuralist notion of binary opposition. Concepts receive their meaning not by referring to the outside world, but solely through their relationship to other concepts. Specifically, concepts need an opposite to function; „warm“ only means something because it is not „cold“. This must then also be true for the concept of humanity, which serves as the legitimizing foundation for all emancipatory projects. Being human can only have meaning against the backdrop of something that is not human. In this sense, Blackness serves as a necessary foil to the humanity of everyone else. Humans, which associate themselves with agency, can only exist in contrast to passive Blacks.
Non-black women, workers, immigrants, gays, lesbians et cetera fight in order to be admitted into the realm of humanity. Their struggles can, at least theoretically, be successfully concluded. Humanistic universalism is the answer to sexism, class antagonism, and sexual identity, and at the same time necessarily reliant on the exclusion of Blackness.
Black suffering is therefore „a problem that has no solution“. When we think about the question of Blackness, we are faced with „a problem in which everyone is complicit and for which no sentence can be written that would explain how to remedy it“. Racism against blacks is not a historical relic and also not a contingent condition that could be eliminated by way of political interventions; it is encoded in the very essence of Blacks and non-Blacks.
This Afropessimism is just one of the most recent and extreme versions of a broader intellectual phenomenon. Earlier movements such as Black Nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and Négritude may rely on arguments which differ from the structuralist that the exclusion of Blacks is necessary to give meaning to “human”, but they arrive at the same conclusion: Overcoming racism is impossible. There can be no equality between Black and non-Black people. Any „multi-racial“ society is doomed to reproduce the oppression of Blacks.
II
Barbie expresses a world view that can be described as Gynopessimism, a concept coined by Jodi Dean. Radical feminism asserts that women and men are fundamentally the same, and that alleged differences in personality and aptitude are products, not causes of patriarchy. Butler’s theory of performativity likewise opposes essentialism, arguing that gender is created and reproduced though speech and action. As we will see, Barbie vehemently contradicts those currents of feminism. In the end, even the now more popular trans feminism is shelved: the film revolves around questions of biological reproduction and ends with Barbie’s visit to a gynecological practice. Despite the inclusion of a transgender Barbie, the final scene more heavily implies that having a vagina is essential to womanhood. Apparently, more than one trans person „walked out of the movie in a dysphoria spiral“.
In the world of „Barbie“, men and women are inherently different. They naturally aspire to two different forms of existence: women want to live in Barbieland, while men are intuitively drawn to patriarchy. On one side, the rosy world of girls‘ nights out and niceties, on the other, Wall Street, weight training, and George Washington. Each of these realities must necessarily exclude half the population because women and men come from different dimensions.
As soon as he comes into our world, Ken is intuitively attracted by its patriarchal nature. He’s fascinated by the masculine energy of horse-riding cowboys, by the testosterone-charged rituals of packed gym bros, by powerful businessmen. Once he manages to return to Barbieland, Ken brings patriarchal ideas with him, replacing Barbieland with the Kendom. Girl’s Night is gone, the new order is one marked by copious amounts of beer, cowboy aesthetics, and machismo. The Kens love it, and the Barbies happily play along.
The desire to oppress women, the movie argues, is not a result of acquired gender roles. It is a natural tendency of men, an inherent drive. Even a man that has never been exposed to patriarchal ideas harbours a will to dominate and oppress women. Sexism is therefore not an ideology that can be overcome, not a social structure that can be abolished. It is the result of man’s essence, of his very nature.
The world that men want to create is inherently incompatible with femininity and the well-being of women. And vice versa. Once the Barbies manage to overthrow the Kendom – not with guns and bayonets, of course, but in a stereotypically feminine manner – matriarchy is restored. The Kens lose everything; they will not even be allowed to appoint a single Justice to the Supreme Court. That is only logical. A world where Barbies thrive can’t take Kens into consideration. Just like the Kens can only be truly happy at the expense of Barbies.
After her victory as leader of the revolution, our heroine („Stereotypical Barbie“) decides to live in patriarchy.
III
The film’s Gynopessimism is an expression of our current discursive constitution. Like Afropessimism, Gynopessimism reflects the intuition that the universalism of the Enlightenment, still alive in the ideas of Martin Luther King and Simone de Beauvoir, has failed.
While this corresponds to a general disappointment in Modernism, that is far from the whole story. The fact of the matter is that we don’t know what to do about issues of discrimination. In most liberal democracies, legal equality is achieved; Slavery has been abolished, segregation is dead. Women have the right to vote, they do not need the permission of their husband to get a credit card. Western countries have female chancellors and black presidents.
Nevertheless, sexism and racism persist. Movements such as MeToo and Black Lives Matter made this fact painfully obvious. Current discourse is obsessed with the notion of bigotry and the fact that we are, after all, still not the same. This, however, does not mean that real progress has not been made. It seems like the more equal society becomes, the less equal it feels; only total equality could produce something like an impression of victory.
Anti-racism and feminism suffer because they see a problem that they don’t know how to solve. In this sense, even socialists have it better. They can point to a series of concrete actions that would suffice to fulfill their program: expropriation of all private enterprises, social control over the means of production, maybe the establishment of a council republic. Such tangible demands are not readily available to feminism and anti-racism. After the victories of the last century, the problems these movements deal with are non-legal, non structural in nature. Bigotry cannot be abolished through a change in laws, a change in the relations of production.
As a result, feminism and anti-racism become increasingly moralistic and repressive. But the aggressive demand that men and white people change their harmful attitudes can only be taken so far. Soon, a more bleak perspective arises. No wonder Afropessimism and Gynopessimism are gaining popularity.
IV
Luckily, all of this might be irrelevant in the long ran. The true force behind the liberation of women and ethnic minorities has always been … capital. In its thirst for accumulation, it must assimilate and incorporate the totality of social reality. Why should capital refrain from making use of the intellectual and physical powers of the majority? Why should it remain confined to white men, when it can exploit the labour power of everyone, sell its products to everyone? Capital has no gender, no race, and no identity. It is only value creating value creating value, or machines making machines making machines.
The process of universal subsumption under the abstract logic of capital is, of course, already ongoing. It has been ongoing for over a century. It has liberated countless people from traditional gender roles and parochial ethnic collectivities. It has created an urbanized society of free individuals. Our contemporary discourse around “race” and gender might simply be an expression of this tendency, the background noise of objective necessity grinding its way out, burrowing through layers of established garbage.
Humankind is not a concept that must be defined through the exlusion of others. It is a by-product of bourgeois civilisation. If there is hope, it lies not in the conscious efforts of feminists and anti-racists, but in the inhuman, humanity-producing process of historical development.
The emergence of defeatist ideas such as Afropessimism and Gynopessimism may seem unfortunate. However we can find solace in the possibility that they may not matter after all.