Performance lecture at The New Centre for Research & Practice - Money, Desire & the Body: Economic exchange & perversion. Devil, what a clitoris!, Sabine Wedege, 2023
Devil, what a clitoris! – gossip about capitalist witches
The woman as a witch disguised as a fairy tale character. How she became the centerpiece of a capitalist system in the witch-hunt era in Europe (Scandinavia). Was it because the patriarchy acted perversely – wanted to see a tired up helpless woman in a capitalist society, burning and eaten up in a sadomasochistic bonfire – just like the main goal of totalitarianism = total domination.
Hannah Arendt makes a reference to the 'Pavlov's dogs' in the attempt to identify a more fundamental understanding of totalitarianism. Ivan Pavlov was a physiologist and the man behind the theory of conditioned reflexes. In an experiment on dogs' digestion, he discovered that the dogs began to salivate as soon as the technician who fed them appeared.
This led to a series of experiments in which Pavlov established a relationship between the dog's food and a neutral stimulant, for example a bell. By ringing a bell when the dogs were fed, a certain reaction pattern was created where just by ringing the bell you could make the animals salivate. It made perfect sense for Pavlov to describe dog saliva as a 'psychic secretion'. Pavlov's behavioral scientific points resonate with Arendt's theory of totalitarianism.
Arendt says that it’s like a "political, social and economic events in time have entered into a secret conspiracy with the totalitarian tools that can be used to make people redundant".
Totalitarianism is - at the same time a temptation and a warning. The historical disasters are a warning as clear as any. The human view that lay behind it, is, on the other hand, an eternal temptation - the temptation to think exclusively about people, as Pavlov thought about his dogs.
The patriarchy created a dictatorship that banned the woman, the witch, and her body. Capitalized her body as we also see today in the progressive abortion laws. Disguised as good and evil - God and Satan. The desire for domination. A burden to take the shape as a male demon to having intercourse with a sleeping woman to make a witch – almost how men turned women into witches. Exaggeration may occur. But this violence against women was a necessary for capitalism.
In Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Federici she tells the story of the body's discipline during the transition to capitalism. In this, she shows how witch persecutions and privatization of land in the Middle Ages must be understood as coherent expressions of a capitalist discipline that leads to the death of collective property relations, and which includes control over the reproduction of labor power through the discipline of women's bodies.
You had the land in exchange for a share of its crops, then home was work, men and women worked together. But in capitalism, waged laborers have to work outside the home, which means someone else needs to be at home all the time, doing the unpaid work. Gender roles, and the subjugation of women, became necessary.
Early feudal Europe enclosed public land, rendering it private and controllable, and patriarchy enclosed women in private marriages, imposing on them the reproductive servitude of bearing men’s children and the emotional labor of caring for men’s needs. Pregnancy and childbirth became a job that women did for their husband. Witches were the women who who kept childbirth and pregnancy in female hands. They were killed to cement patriarchal power and create the subjugated, domestic labor class necessary for capitalism. The loss of women’s control over their bodies.
Shiva refers in her book to Ecofeminism as Politics: Nature, Marx and the Postmodern, Ariel Salleh says this embodied materialism as: the attribution of historical significance to the othered labor and thus to the unnamed class of practical workers who catalyze natural processes and thus enable life on earth to flourish. Unless a radical policy is based on the experiences of this global working majority... it will only strengthen the instrumental culture that treats the earth and its people as an unlimited economic resource.
Every time economies are destroyed, and societies are monetized, women loose power. That makes it not surprisingly, the development of capitalism has always been accompanied by a massive expansion of prostitution and by the rising of violence against women.
Here Klossowski says: “Starting in the last century, erotic enjoyment has come to be seen as the most vital human need. And so “utopian socialism” decided to extend the “communization” of all goods to the living objects of voluptuous desire.”
And Nietzsche: “No one wants her for free, so she has to sell herself!”
In Federicis book Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Woman she writes 297 witch trials were held over a period of just eight years (1617-1625) in Denmark, where witch straw dolls are still burned on bonfires when enjoying Midsummer celebrations. This is the highest concentration of any country in Europe. We must read Federici to remember and pay tribute to the rebellious women who resisted the attempts of capitalism to control the body and who were burned to death for it.
Again, the urge to dominate, a paradoxical labour, dig-your-own-grave kind of feeling, where women labour in Scandinavia was making rope and spinning thread, the same rope used for the witch trails. Here the rope as an object becomes control in a physical form: for witch trails, for shibari, for the viking ship, for walking the Pavlovs dogs?
"Now, just a representation of venality becomes an increase in the assessed value of the fantasy: it's not poverty that pushes people to sell themselves; on the contrary it is their own abundant wealth that forces them to. An so in The New Justine, Nouvelle Justine, Verneuil notices an anatomical particularity of Ms. d'Esterval's, ensuring her lewd proclivities, which in his eyes is priceless - but he does not want to give himself over to that bright new experience unless his partner accepts to be remunerated: an objectifying act of pricing which causes her to have an immediate orgasm. The numeraire here serves an obvious function of transubstantiation - with no other utility beyond serving that function: a purely game-related operation. So Juliette variously appraises the value of her body's charms: she is not, or is no longer a professional concubine, but a well-behaved woman; she is the widow (deliberately) of the Count of Lorsange, and thus a risk-taker, having been morally corrupted - and all that figures in to the subtle nature of the fantasy Juliette lends herself to concretizing. And nevertheless the fortune she had accumulated in this way throws Juliette into an endlessly repeated expropriation of her body; she can never fulfill the fantasy, and her only satisfaction is that she never helped relieve human poverty. How can an unappraisable fantasy be appraised relative to a numeraire? Where does it's numeraire value come from if not the simultaneous privation that it implies?"
(Klossowski refers to the followeing exchange: "Devil, what a clitoris!" exclaims Verneuil to Dorotheé d'Esterval; "You are more man than woman, I have no illusions in that regard; you don't need to hide anything" (454). Dorotheé consequently plays the role of the man in the ensuing orgy))
Pierre Klossowski, Living Currency (UK: Bloomsbury Academic, 1970)
“Pavlov’s dog, the human specimen reduced to the most elementary reactions, the bundle of reactions that can always be liquidated and replaced by other bundles of reactions that behave in exactly the same way, is the model ‘citizen’ of a totalitarian state.”
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (US: Schocken Books, 1951)
“The body has been for women in capitalist society what the factory has been for male waged workers”
Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch (US/Italy: Autonomedia, 2004)
“According to patriarchal economic models, production in and for the home is considered non-production. The transformation of value into non-value, work into non-work, knowledge into non-knowledge is achieved through very powerful constructs - the production boundary and the creation boundary.”
Vandana Shiva, Oikonomia: Bringing back the economy back to the Earth (2019)
Tips for the body to escape capitalism and to trick totalitarianism: On Hell, Johanna Hedva
Spell for Nietzsche’s horse
hold me with tender
soft thing
we are all becoming feminine
who can say what man is
on this nano level
your ears are terrible furred lips
‘successor of the dead god’
safe in my crude opening
good girl
Rebecca Tamás, WITCH (UK: Penned in the Margins, 2019)
Sources:
Pierre Klossowski, Living Currency (UK: Bloomsbury Academic, 1970)
Marquis de Sade, Justine (France: 1791)
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (US: Schocken Books, 1951)
Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch (US/Italy: Autonomedia, 2004)
Vandana Shiva, Oikonomia: Bringing back the economy back to the Earth (2019)
Ariel Salleh, Ecofeminism as Politics: Nature, Marx and the Postmodern (UK: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017)
Johanna Hedva, On Hell (US: Sator Press, 2018)
Rebecca Tamás, WITCH (UK: Penned in the Margins, 2019)