What is the ideal image? Where does it dwell? Is it eternal?
The ideal image is imaginary. It is not real. It dwells in social consciousness, and in the behavior which corresponds to its delusions. It changes with the dominant forms of society, which it heightens to the ascendance of divine glory. But let us investigate the ideal, the divine, in its own presentation of itself, so that we may recognize it, and adjust the aim of our sights accordingly.
A child is drawing on a piece of paper. They decide to draw a person. They ask an adult, “What colors should I use?” The adult gives them, among others, a peach colored pencil, saying “Skin color.”
The point of life is to survive and procreate.
Men have sharper, blockier shapes in their body and thinner waists, while women have soft, curvy shapes in their bodies and thicker waists.
A group of women notice that another’s makeup does not appear “right.” They collectively laugh at the manner in which she has done her eyebrows.
“Unibrows are ugly.”
A supermarket’s shelves are stocked with skin lightening product. The shelves are nearly empty.
“My nose is far too big. It’s hideous.”
A rack of magazines stands in the city street, thin white women’s edited faces staring out.
The ideal image corresponds, to some extent, to moral “right.” It is more closely associated, however, with the deification of “normality.” What becomes “correct,” “good” in this realm of this image is, yes, based on something material, real. But it is not objective, and its standards tell one nothing except an indication of a certain mode of production and set of social relations being reified. Correctness and incorrectness are only objective when used to determine whether an idea is in accordance with reality. In no other case are they applicable in an objective manner.
Meaning and purpose, as concepts, rely on the assumption that there is an eternal, prevailing will behind all things which are claimed to hold them. We are told that the “purpose” of life is to procreate, or to enjoy yourself, or that the “meaning” of a book is that life is pain, and so on. Marxism, however, is atheistic, and is materialistic. Meaning and purpose do not exist except in the realm of consciousness.
“Meaning” is essentially a part of the perception created by sensation, which is the body’s intake of information from physical, objective bodies outside of the subject. Meaning is, in the internal realm, projected onto the external by the subject.
“Purpose” is essentially the intent a subject has behind this or that, or projects onto something.
They do not actually exist in the physical world, only in the subject’s imaginary version of this world. No biologist has ever found purpose hidden in the crevices of a cadaver. They find function in the physiology of the living and the interactions of the non-living, and the intercourse between them, yes. But function says nothing of intent, of “ought to,” “is meant to,” or “exists to,” it only speaks of “does” or “is.”
As Louis Althusser says in Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses:
“Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.”
But what are the “real conditions of existence” which create ideal images?
The example of apples is often used in philosophy classes to explain the distinction between the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle. It would benefit us to employ here.
The Platonic view, which is essentialist, and represents the ideal image, holds that there is the actual physical apple, and then there is the eternal “ideal” image of the apple in a “spiritual” realm which we access with our minds. Whether an apple is “good” or “bad” is evaluated according to its proximity to this “spiritual” realm apple.
The Aristotelian view, which is proto-materialist, and represents our position, holds that the ideal and physical apple overlaps, that the ideal image of the apple exists in our minds alone rather than a “spiritual” realm. The ideal image is created by an “averaging” of the characteristics of apples, with particular focus on those characteristics which serve the functions we are interested in putting the apple to use in. Namely, eating.
Both of these logics recognize that evaluation of something as “good” or “bad,” “better” or “worse,” is relative to a certain standard. The first sees it as being an eternal “goodness,” the second sees it as essentially to performing a particular function. The latter explains the evaluation of the former.
All evaluations are relative to something material, although they do not always recognize this. So, what are the real life evaluations which pretend to be relative to the ideal images actually relative to?
They are not simply objective, eternal evaluations of “good” or “bad.” They are formed of a dominant ideology. Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy:
“The same men who establish their social relations in conformity with the material productivity, produce also principles, ideas, and categories, in conformity with their social relations. Thus the ideas, these categories, are as little eternal as the relations they express. They are historical and transitory products. There is a continual movement of growth in productive forces, of destruction in social relations, of formation in ideas; the only immutable thing is the abstraction of movement — mors immortalis.”
The social relations being reified by these ideal images vary. They can be recognized, however, as holistic components of contemporary reality. This contemporary reality encompasses the legacy-marks and living realities of colonialism (particularly Euro-colonialism), imperialism, patriarchy (particularly Euro-patriarchy), and capitalism. The ideal forms which come into play in consciousness, behavior, and language in the everyday lives of people reify these social relations.
We see this reification in the realm of beauty particularly. Whoever first said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder was almost correct. Beauty is, rather, in the perception of the beholder, which is formed in combination of their direct sensations of something and perceptions which are shaped by their aggregate sensations. Their aggregate sensations, and how they perceive things, are determined directly by their place in a particular web of social relations. Their perception of “beauty” is molded in accordance to this, it reifies it.
Which traits in women are beautiful? According to the dominant ideology, it is light skin, thinness, availability to men, the “correct” performance of the gendered division of labor of each group of women. Even existing outside of this dominant ideal image is thrown into an ideal image of its own in the form of exoticism. Each of these is reifying and reproducing white supremacy, patriarchy, and the European system of gender.
Frantz Fanon deals in depth with the effect of this on the colonized in Black Skin, White Masks, with their state boiling to one where:
“At the climax of his anguish there remains only one solution for the miserable Negro: furnish proofs of his whiteness to others and above all to himself.”
One feels agony and self-hatred in proportion to their distance from the ideal image. In a world where Euro-colonialism has made European physical features (white skin, thin noses, thin lips, thin eyebrows, etc) and social-cultural practices the ideal image, those who are further and further from that ideal feel themselves to be in the depths of deprivation. They are not objectively “ugly,” “wrong,” only relative to the standards of white supremacy and Euro-patriarchy.
It has very frequently been recognized in progressive spaces that the dominant conception of gender is riddled with these ideal images. What is often taken at its word, however, is sex categorization. We will go beyond the basic assumption of penis = man and vagina = woman, which has been dealt with many times, into supplementary claims.
It is said that “male skeletons” always have more angular jaws, bigger shoulders, thinner hips, while “female” skeletons have bigger hips, softer jaws, smaller shoulders. This is wrong. It is said that the X-chromosome is the “female chromosome.” This is wrong. It is said that the physiques of men and women are inherently different, and that the gendered division of labor is thus a mere natural result of this. This is wrong. It is said that there are “female” and “male” brains. This is wrong.
The ideal image in this realm is granted validity to legitimize sex categorization based on sexual organs, and then to extrapolate this into the realm of other characteristics. With how varied these characteristics are, one could just about pick any group of them and create sexed categories out of them. So why does existing sex categorization accrete these seemingly random characteristics into realms with cores of sex organs?
Contrary to the deluded claims of many reactionaries, “transgender ideology” is not the dominant ideology. Instead, patriarchal ideology is. Specifically, Euro-patriarchy, which has become the globally dominant gender system through European colonialism and imperialism.
Patriarchy seeks to strictly categorize people into a system of genders, with those who challenge this categorization (people we today consider LGBT or gender nonconforming) are either attacked, or they are co-opted into the system. This is because the system must reproduce itself, and cannot allow peoples who problematize its logic.
Its system must ensure the confining of power to men, who overthrew matrilineal society in various historic patriarchal revolutions. It must also organize people in a manner which ensures reproduction of society, both literal sexual reproduction and reproduction of the conditions of productions. Without clear categorization, these functions are disrupted.
Leslie Feinberg gives an overview of the development behind this, and challenges its legitimacy, in Transgender Warriors:
“Biological determinism isn’t just a recognition that some people have vaginas and others have penises. It is a theoretical weapon used in a pseudo-scientific way to rationalize racism and sexism, the partitioning of the sexes, and behavior modification to make gender expression fit bodies[…] historical accounts suggest that although our ancestors knew who was born with a vagina, who was born with a penis, and whose genitals were more multi-faceted, they were not biological determinists.
And although women’s reproductive abilities contributed to a general division of labor, it was not a hard-and-fast boundary and it was not the only boundary[…]
Any look at the early division of labor in cooperative societies has to take into account the reports by hundreds of social scientists of ‘women’ in early cooperative societies who hunted and were accepted as men and ‘men’ who worked among the women and were accepted as women. Then why do anthropologists continue to refer to them as women hunters and men gatherers, particularly when this insistence on their ‘immutable’ biology flies in the face of the way these people were accepted by their own societies?
So although reproduction delineated a rough boundary of human labor, it was not decisive in determining sex/gender. Many communal societies accepted more than two sex/genders and allowed individuals to find their own place within that spectrum. The people we would call male-to-female transsexuals in these early societies ritually menstruated and wore ‘the leaves prescribed for women in their courses.’ That means that all the women had a relationship to fertility and birth — including those born with penises[…]
We need to combat the idea that a simple division of labor between women and men in communal societies has left us with today’s narrow sex and gender system. Much evidence exists that many pre-class societies respected many more paths of self-expression. It was the overthrow of communalism and the subsequent division of society into classes that mandated the partitioning of the sexes and outlawed any blurring of those ‘man-made’ boundaries.
And we are left with those arbitrary and anti-human restrictions today. Our histories as trans people and women are inextricably entwined. In the past, wherever women and trans people were honored, you can find cooperative, communal production. And societies that degrade women and trans people are already cleaved into classes, because those patriarchal divisions mandate a rigid categorization of sex and gender.”
For those whom this dominant ideal image does not serve, the path to liberation is a rejection of it. A mere positivist identification of reality is not the only step to resistance, however. There must also be a form of self-assertion. Not only a rejection, but a response.
One historic form which this has taken is the “Black is Beautiful” movement. It is not the creation of an upstart oppressive dominant ideal image, but a cry of “If we are to have ideal images at all, why can I not recognize my own characteristics as my own ideal image?” It challenges the very foundations of the dominant ideology itself.
We should not be so quick to criticize liberals for focusing on the struggle for representation. Yes, it is true that it is not the primary struggle. It is, nevertheless, very important for self-assertion.
This is not to say there are not limitations to this. As Fanon recognized in Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth, struggle for recognition is done for the eyes of the colonizer instead of for the eyes of the colonized. The image it presents of itself is thus often distorted to fit the tastes of the colonizer. As a Chicane mestize, I can attest to this myself with regards to Chicane nationalists presenting a fetishized view of the Aztec Empire, doing their best to live up to European standards of “civilization.”
Further, ideology is not the realm where ultimately determining change is enacted. A revolution in the superstructure, in consciousness, is, yes, desirable. However, it cannot be secured for the long term without a revolution in the base. Recognition and rejection of ideology does not destroy the base which continues to produce it. A stove does not turn off simply because the fire goes out, and can easily reignite. Catastrophically, if it is allowed to build up.
For the transformation of people in a decisive manner, there must also be a decisive transformation of the mode of production and corresponding social relations within which they enter. We will not destroy these ideal images until we destroy capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, and imperialism. This struggle must be part of a “real movement which abolishes the present state of things.” [Marx, The German Ideology]
