I have tried to show how the history of culture mirrors the sex dichotomy in its very organization and development. Culture develops not only out of the underlying economic dialectic, but also out of the deeper sex dialectic. Thus, there is not only a horizontal dynamic, but a vertical one as well: each of these three strata forms one more story of the dialectics of history based on the biological dualism. At present we have reached the final stages of Patriarchalism, Capitalism (corporate capital — I ism), and of the Two Cultures at once. We shall soon have a triplicate set of preconditions for revolution, the
absence of which is responsible for the failure of revolu-l tions of the past.
The difference between what is almost possible amj what exists is generating revolutionary forces.[22] We are nearing—I believe we shall have, perhaps within a century, if the snowball of empirical knowledge doesn’t smash first of its own velocity—a cultural revolution, as well as a sexual and economic one. The cultural revolu — tion, like the economic revolution, must be predicated on the elimination of the (sex) dualism at the origins not only of class, but also of cultural division.
What might this cultural revolution look like? Unlike “cultural revolutions” of the past, it would not be merely a quantitative escalation, more and better culture, in the sense that the Renaissance was a high point of the Aesthetic Mode, or that the present technological breakthrough is the accumulation of centuries of practical knowledge about the real world. Great as they were, neither the Aesthetic nor the Technological culture, even at their respective peaks, ever achieved universality—either it was wholistic but divorced from the real world, or it “achieved progress,” at the price of cultural schizophrenia, and the falseness and dryness of “objectivity.” What we shall have in the next cultural revolution is the reintegration of the Male (Technological Mode) with the Female (Aesthetic Mode), to create an androgynous culture surpassing the highs of either cultural stream, or even of the sum of their integrations. More than a marriage, rather an abolition of the cultural categories themselves, a mutual cancellation—a matter-antimatter explosion, ending with a poof! culture itself.
We shall not miss it We shall no longer need it: by then humanity will have mastered nature totally, will have realized in actuality its dreams. With the full achievement of the conceivable in the actual, the surrogate of culture will no longer be necessary. The sublimation process, a detour to wish fulfillment, will give way to direct satisfao — fion in experience, as felt now only by children, or adults on drugs.* (Though normal adults "play” to varying degrees, the example that illustrates more immediately to almost everyone the intense level of this future experience, ranking zero on a scale of accomplishment— “nothing to show for it”—but nevertheless somehow always worth everyone’s while, is lovemaking.) Control and delay of “id” satisfaction by the “ego” will be unnecessary; the id can live free. Enjoyment will spring directly from being and acting itself, the process of experience, rather than from the quality of achievement. When thei male Technological Mode can at last produce in actuality what the female Aesthetic Mode had envisioned, we shall have eliminated the need for either.
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