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NEWS & LETTERS, December 2002
Woman as Reason Column
Rich's revolutionary arts
by Terry Moon ARTS OF THE POSSIBLE by Adrienne Rich (W.W. Norton &
Company, New York: 2001) ARTS OF THE POSSIBLE takes us on a journey of
self-development unseparated from, indeed by necessity vitally connected to, the
revolutionary and counter-revolutionary lived history of the past 30 years. In a
Foreword and 12 essays arranged in chronological order from 1971 to 2000, we
move from the early days of a creative, transformative Women's Liberation
Movement through the retrogression that followed on its heels, to our
reactionary present. This is no "personal narrative." From beginning
to end, Rich rails against "private solutions" as "devoid of
political context or content." Not only does capitalism grab onto the
personal and market it, but no personal retreat or expose will move us and
literature forward. Rich insists that the answer has to be found in the social:
"The relationship of the individual to a community, to social power, and to
the great upheavals of collective human experience will always be the richest
and most complex of questions." It is Rich's complex questions that drive her
self-development and give this work its universality. She asks "Must a
radical social imagination clothe itself in a language worn thin by usage or
debased by marketing, promotion, and the will to power?"; she questioned
"the inevitable shortcomings" of the U.S. feminist movement;
questioned how her own history of whiteness led to discovering "the history
of the dispossessed....the only history on which, both as a woman and as a poet,
I could find any grounding in at all"; she asked, where does the
"obsession with origins lead us in the present?" THE POLITICS OF LANGUAGE The subject of political or liberatory literature runs
throughout the collection. To those of us not used to thinking of words and
language the way poets must, ARTS educates us in the politics of language--what
it means when it is distorted by lies, misused, made meaningless; also the power
of language, literature, poetry, when it reveals the truth, and when it is
connected to a community fighting for social transformation. Rich divides the essays into two groups, the first four
essays being "background, indicating certain directions in my
thinking." They bring to life the early Women's Liberation Movement in a
way that took me back to that time of "awakening consciousness" when
we believed that all things were possible and that our project and destiny was
the creation of a new, truly human world. Included in these four essays is also
Rich's and the Movement's hostility to Marx, seeing an unquestioned dogmatism in
much leftist politics that often trampled honesty. "Such," Rich wrote
in 1975, "is the deadendedness--for women---of Marxism in our time." Rich's continuing awareness of the contradictions within
the Women's Liberation Movement compelled her to think again about Marx. Two
women who seemed to point her towards a different Marx were Raya Dunayevskaya,
who developed the philosophy of Marxist-Humanism, and the socialist lesbian poet
Muriel Rukeyser. Rich calls them the "stonecutter-architects I met,"
and they are the only women with essays devoted to them. "Raya
Dunayevskaya's Marx" begins the second section of essays, and from then on,
Marxism as a theory of liberation--in Dunayevskaya's sense--becomes integral to
Rich's critique of society. Rukeyser and Dunayevskaya have in common lives where
thought and activity were not in two separate realms. With Rukeyser, Rich
encountered a woman "who was a full actor and creator." A core theme
of Dunayevskaya's writing and life was "the inseparability of experience
and revolutionary thinking, the falseness of the opposition between philosophy
and 'actuality.'" DUNAYEVSKAYA'S MARX: TURNING POINT Dunayevskaya's mission, "to rescue Marx's Marxism from
the theoretical and organizational systems attributed to him," was embraced
by Rich. After reading Rich's critiques of the feminist movement, and the Left,
it is as if Dunayevskaya helped answer some of Rich's, and the movement's,
questions: how do we have a new unity of theory and practice? How do we discover
the meaning of people's struggles for dignity, bread and freedom and make that
part of theoretic preparation for revolution? What philosophy can help us with
"the inevitable shortcomings"--what Dunayevskaya called "the
unfinished tasks"--of the Women's Liberation Movement? The most trenchant example of Marx's importance in Rich's
thought is the last essay, "Arts of the Possible," a lecture given at
Amherst College in 1997. Here Rich goes against the grain of so many today who
dismiss Marx, and shows in passionate and deeply descriptive prose the
decrepitude of U.S. capitalist society: "[C]apitalism represents itself as
a law of history or, rather, a law beyond history, beneath which history now
lies, corroding like the TITANIC." This essay mourns as it documents the "devaluation of
language, this flattening of images...Language itself collapses into
shallowness." She counterposes this to the vitality of the early Women's
Liberation Movement. But even here the movement does not escape her critique:
"the basic facts of inequality and power in North America cannot be
addressed in gender terms only." We must, she concludes, "become less afraid to ask the
still-unanswered questions posed by Marxism, socialism and communism." Rich
not only attacks the manifestations of capitalism, she attacks capital directly:
"How can we move from a production system in which human labor is merely a
disposable means to a process that depends on and expands connective
relationships, mutual respect, the dignity of work, the fullest possible
development of the human subject?" That question takes her to the
practicality of revolution, to Marx's concept of "revolution in
permanence." In the end, despite a brutally realistic look at the inhumanity of the world we live in, the damage done to masses of people whom Rich insists that we see as individuals, she is adamant that "We are not caged within a narrowing corridor at 'the end of history.'...we do have choices." In this book of profound questions she ends with one that points to what it means to be human: "For what are we, anyway, at our best, but one small, persistent cluster in a great ferment of human activity--still and forever turning toward, tuned for, the possible, the unrealized and irrepressible design?" |
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