In memory of Cassia Siqueira, a brilliant young researcher whose promising career was tragically abbreviated… Her work, featured in the 2023 volume Model Is the Message published by &&&, showcased her exceptional talent and innovative approach to research. Her dedication, intellectual curiosity, and vibrant spirit left an indelible mark on colleagues and the scientific community. Siqueira’s legacy will continue to inspire future generations of researchers. We honor her memory and extend our deepest condolences to her family and friends during this difficult time.
This text introduces the sex class system as a constitutive—though contingent—feature of culture and points to a project in which it is designed as a trap. Following Shulamith Firestone’s analysis of the aesthetic/technological dialectics of cultural history,1 conjoined with an infrastructural treatment of grammar as embedded in the logical-material concept of forms of life, I approach gender abolition and the end of culture as we know it as a neorationalist project, aligned with a thorough critique of the human’s transcendental structures.
Sex is a techno-conceptual artifact, and as such, it has embedded within itself a set of parameters that define it as a system of categorization. Because our access to reality is mediated by various sorts of symbolic frameworks, it is imprudent to suppose that sex pertains strictly to a biological context that is pure and unaltered by these other frameworks, inasmuch as we can recognize such context as biological. Not having an unambiguous and exclusive biological import, sex is nevertheless described on a social level as gender. Gender is the byproduct of this transposition that endows biological features with social significance, meaning, and value from the standpoint of reproduction and the behaviors that serve to guarantee its occurrence.
Radical feminism must be understood as that which seeks to dismantle the structures responsible for producing gender. However, the liberation from a natural sex division necessarily involves inventing other hierarchical dynamics that will exert power over the institutions and mechanisms responsible for sustaining gender as a product of this class division that claims to be natural. The unreflected distrust of hierarchy and the strict emphasis on negative freedom—that is, being free from something rather than being free to do something (positive freedom)—have been injecting some allegedly emancipatory movements with an individualistic and idle form of discourse that is easily corrupted by culture as we know it. To jailbreak culture is to jailbreak sex, and to jailbreak sex is to jailbreak culture; to do away with culture is to fully inhabit the rough ground in which it is formed and perceived, through a pedagogy of abolition.
Firestone’s radical feminist ethos essentially consists of acting in accordance with—i.e., upholding a commitment along with its intrinsic and extrinsic inferential ramifications—a constant questioning of the organization of culture and that of nature. To see nature as nature, it is necessary to possess a logical-cognitive apparatus that makes this recognition possible. Since cognition as the dimension of logic and recognition as that of ethics coincide as two sides of the same coin, the attitude towards what is natural will be self-conscious and sensitive to ideological intrusion only to the extent that these apparatuses are adequately grasped and explicated. A certain degree of artificiality and technique is thus necessarily required for nature to acquire a perceptible reality as such, for those who are able to refer to it as nature.
As long as the sex division of cultural categories insists on predicating nature upon women and artificiality upon men, the true aspirations of both empiricism and forms of idealism remain blocked due to the hegemony of a fixed grid of asymmetrical power relations.2 Domination and mastery should be very carefully examined throughout this project in their subtle nuances and differences so as not to underestimate the value and importance of both collective agency and individual actions in transforming nature, but also to stress the danger of tyranny and exploitation that might be justified as the former. The class division of sexes, the basic engine of gender-production, must be approached as a trap.
Accessing and realizing the design of these kinds of traps, in an extended sense, is the prerequisite for the collective and articulated construction of a life free from the psychic, social, political, and economic sufferings that instantiate a favorable ground for the perpetuation of systems of oppression. To probe the mechanisms responsible for maintaining these forms of suffering requires work whose realization demands increasingly dynamic formal and conceptual schemes, so that they can account for the complexity of such mechanisms, as well as make visible their blind spots and escape routes. This is the main point at which feminism and rationalism must coincide; otherwise, we are left with feminist movements and positions that will hardly or never achieve any significant goal towards radical emancipation and rationalist movements and positions that leave untouched the ideological constructs responsible for sustaining a Western, white cis male image of reason and rationality.
Thus, it is possible to infer that we only emancipate ourselves from our submission to and enslavement by all prevailing systems of coercion and oppression to the extent that we are able to construct models of our agency within them, only then to glimpse possible ways out. In “Maximum Jailbreak”, Benedict Singleton offers a conceptual image or scheme of the trap: the effective escape from any trap, be it concrete or abstract, must necessarily pass through a fine and active understanding of its design.3 In Reza Negarestani’s Intelligence and Spirit, the critique of the transcendental structure of the human, taking as a starting point a big toy model (or set of models) of its current state as manifested in the biological species homo sapiens—together with all the social, political, economic, and cultural factors interwoven throughout its history—can be seen as the schematic reconstruction of a trap.4 To unmask the coercive forces produced by this pervasive framework that entraps us into images of biological determinism and reinforced behavioral patterns. To question the sex-class system and act according to this suspicion is tantamount to advocating, on the cultural side—Firestone tells us—for the end of “culture” itself. I read the end of culture proposed by Firestone in comparison with the abandonment of the concept of “culture” and adoption of “forms of life” by Wittgenstein, and the post-revolution state in a Firestonian sense is understood here as a replacement of culture by forms of life altogether.
The distinction between culture and forms of life is often overlooked and misunderstood. Their conflation can be understood as a symptom of the lack of imagination and explication capacities reinforced by homogeneous (and hegemonic) grammars. To surpass the difficulties that arise from this conflation, it is useful to understand why Wittgenstein stopped using the term Kultur and adopted Lebensformen in its place. This substitution reflects a turn from a way of conceiving the sets of values and correctness criteria—as states of affairs with considerably higher degrees of stability than they actually have, and allegedly grounded in nature (law, religion, morals, certain art traditions)—to another, more open to transformations: a logical infrastructural space that is responsible for building bottom-up the most disparate grammars. This is a logical dimension that nevertheless depends upon material conditions for it to be accessed, both neurophysiological and those derived from ostensive training and the acquisition of behavioral dispositions through learning/teaching interactions. The background stability required for the fully-fledged mutability of current language-games and the generation of new ones pertains not to culture, but to the teacher-learner interactive feature that is inherent to language use, and that makes possible to build passages and shortcuts between the space of causes and the space of reasons. Stability is only held as a pursuable value as long as it concerns the base materials and logical resources required to effect change in functional hierarchies. As such, sexual difference as it is instituted is dependent upon a framework in which it is primordial to assign stable roles to each of the sexes so as to “keep humanity going.” The cost of conceiving reproduction as a fundamental and irreplaceable value is to negate and ignore the polymorphism of desire and its mediations, which are some of the consequences of entering the space of reasons.
What would permanently inhabiting this space entail? It would be to conceive of such an infra-grammatical dimension in a way in which the very definition of a symbolic order is at play, a space in which solidifications of constraints are kept at a minimum, in favor of an unprecedented experimentation with human institutions, our relation to what we take to be natural, and the concept of human itself. Since culture depends on a stable normative reproduction (continuity of species in time + conservative social pedagogy) of its practices, it must be predicated in a way in which reproduction itself is overtly considered as an unquestionable value. To abolish gender, whatever the specific routes this might take, is tantamount to unlearning (and ultimately destroying) any given correspondence between sex and a preexisting set of behaviors, social relations, aesthetic traits, or, to put it bluntly, a destiny shaped according to misguidedly anticipated needs of the future. In other words, it is to block the way for any sex to constitute a class.