Dear Friends, Patriarchy blues

“To be honest, when I found out the patriarchy wasn’t about horses, I lost interest anyway.”

Ken

I may be getting a bit carried away here, but … when Ken says these words towards the end of the Barbie movie it’s wildly funny. Also, though, to me at least it’s very moving. And then, this is the getting carried away bit, I think it’s a truly profound intuition. That is: patriarchy is deeply unsatisfying to the patriarchs themselves. So why do they keep at it? Well, it seems like a pretty good gig on the face of it. Absolute sovereign power, your will is law, you own the women, children and servants. It's good to be king and all that. Wouldn’t you be a chump to give it all up? Worse, it would be so unmanly! Where’s your pride? Where’s your rugged rectitude? Where’s your duty to be a good masculine role model?

So then, why the dissatisfaction? Why the frustration? Why, dare one say it, the alienation? Well, first of all, because it’s not about horses. Don’t let the horses become metaphorical. I don’t know how to put it, but horses matter here! They are just so, well, horsey in their sensuous materiality. And that’s just what the experience of patriarchy for the patriarchs is not. Yes, patriarchy allows the patriarch all sorts of sensuous and material experiences, it's good to be king, but only at his command and so they can never truly be his own.

My experiences must happen to me, if I command them they are not truly mine, nor are they truly experiences.

Kings never touch doors. Francis Ponge’s statement comprehends the entirety of power from monarch to patriarch, and all possible variants. Patriarchs (and kings) live in a state of continual and absolute sensory deprivation, not only because of the things that they do not touch, but because even all their touching is not their own.

Patriarchy is not only not about horses, it’s not really about anything other than having sovereign power. Being the single and sovereign source of power means that you are alone; even though there are other patriarchs you can never be friends with them, because you are always potentially at war with them – Schmitt’s friend/enemy distinction certainly applies here, except that the patriarch has no friends, and indeed that’s always the necessary endpoint of the distinction. The Christian God is the loneliest entity in the universe. No amount of power changes that.

Sovereign power is boring; horses are never boring.

Love and solidarity,

Bobby