The cult(ivation) of self

 

The following video was recently shared by Glen Brauer of Philosophy Dinners. I think it is a good synthesis of mindfulness, philosophical enquiry and the state of knowledge in the neuroscience of emotions, and so it is a good starting point for an exploration of the limits of some pervasive concepts in the world of what is often called self-development.

Now obviously I have nothing against self-development per se, or I wouldn’t be writing this blog. And I think Chade-Meng Tan sets the idea of self-awareness out, in the video, in a contemporary manner which already avoids some of the traps, even if he is still constrained to some extent by language. Thus it is obvious that what he means by “mindfulness” is not an awareness only of the mind or of cerebral processes, but also, to the extent possible, of somatic processes and in particular of emotion. This idea (“bodyfulness”) in itself already takes us beyond the mind/body split which we inherit from Hellenistic philosophy, and I think it is very valuable. He also indicates that the result of self-awareness should be an increased flexibility in ones mental range of action: that the ego becomes a tool and not a driving force. So far I agree. However, before zeroing in on what seem to me still to be some limitations in this paradigm, a brief excursus is required.

The Socratic exhortation to self-knowledge is historically inseparable from an exhortation to self-discipline, as Plato’s development of it, and its political economy, make clear. Socrates in no way was advocating a truly open-ended spirit of self-enquiry. Plato and Aristotle assume all number of things about the universe, none of which is founded in sensory data. In my opinion, there is nothing in the Western philosophical tradition before modern times which encourages or even allows for a phenomenologically based calling into question of social institutions. The dictates of logos, imagined to be self-evident, apparently led everyone to conclusions which are now mostly incompatible with major swathes of scientific knowledge about the human condition. The exhortation to follow the promptings of conscience was in reality an exhortation to conform, and one which led to no revolutionary insights at all, and no degree of authentic being.

There have been, of course, dissenting voices to the Socratic tradition, even if they have been marginalized by history: the Epicureans, the Cynics, Boethius…. But each of these has (of understandable necessity) sought a consolation compatible with the established order, even as they rejected it. The French Revolution was doubtless the first time that philosophy played any sort of a role in a mass political uprising, and it was hardly in the driving seat.

I know next to nothing about the history of Zen Buddhism, but the question arises of whether the particular form of the movement and its characteristic doctrines do not represent a similar accommodation. To ask this question, I would argue, is to answer it. Therefore, we should be on our guard for likely omissions in the doctrine which would have rendered it marginalized or existentially endangered, and thus have not survived to this day or are, like liberation theology, only in the process of formulation.

Primitive societies would struggle to understand our concept of self-awareness. To them it would be utterly alien to imagine that not only could an “I” exist separate from the tribe but that it could be so much an object of attention and cultivation that the tribe disappears almost entirely from view. At times it might seem like the whole spiritual tradition of “civilized” societies is a roundabout, almost absurd means to rediscover and enter into an unio mystica which to a hunter-gatherer is so immanent as to be self-evident. The hunter-gatherer, whose senses are already honed to perfection to his/her environment and peers, has no need of a doctrine of self. Perhaps we only privilege it because we have lost all else?

This view is more radical than I am able to be right now. However, it affords a neat perspective against which to evaluate some of the claims of even a progressive theology of mindfulness, and especially its equation with self-awareness. Tan’s presentation seems to draw on models of the emotions within neuroscience which embody an implicit limitation in the scope of knowledge to the self, at least de facto. This seems to pit self-awareness against other-awareness in a manner which betrays significant cultural bias and I am not sure survives a phenomenological audit. Tan seeks in this way to obtain “mastery” over experience. But who is it, in this case, that masters, and in the name of what? What scope does this leave for rapture and for the numinous? To give just one example, but which is telling, is one seeking to “master” the sexual act? Is this the mode of experience of it which is most authentic and most felicitous? Intuitively it seems not. And when we are “honest” about our limitations, are we as aware as we should be that what we really lack is a not a self-audit, but a critical perspective on society?

I think Tan is at least guilty (judging only on the basis of this presentation) of allowing his audience to persist in cultural biases which he might have helped them to overcome. If that cultural bias predisposes to individually and collectively unhappy outcomes, which I believe in the aggregate it does, his disciples can listen to their bodies and emotions all they like, they will still be zombies walking a path to global ruin.

It may be objected, of course, that we have nothing else than sense-data, and hence that Tan’s position is a tautology. I do not dispute this; but everything is in how matters are framed. I could quote Bourdieu at this juncture, but I will content myself with Rumi, whose precocious prefiguration of social constructivism is breathtaking. “Speak a new language, so that the world will be a new world.

The emergence of the spiritual

This merits a much longer piece, but I want to get the idea out there.

In Les Regles de l’Art, Pierre Bourdieu describes the emergence in the 19th century of a concept of autonomy in the sphere of cultural production, whereby progressively artists shook off the constraints of the need to conform to sanctioned norms and/or to  communicate a “message”, in favor of “art for art’s sake”. To be an artist was to be someone whose duty of truth to him- or herself took absolute precedence over any other consideration.

This, I see, merely prefigured a wider emancipation of humanity which is still only at its early stages today, and not yet widely recognized as such.

The concern to live a good life has for a long time been the preserve of philosophers and theologians, figures who occupied a consecrated position within the hierarchy of social power. Even the artist’s freedom to create has not always meant a freedom in personal life, an ars vivendi (neither has the philosopher’s souci de soi).

As the social institutions of religion have collapsed in Western society, new religious movements have stepped in to occupy the space vacated. These movements have sometimes been of a mass nature, but also sometimes are little more than a clan. The easy availability of information in the internet age has also had a profound effect on these dynamics, rendering them both more ephemeral and more centripetal. But almost all of these new movements, to this day, seek to do exactly what religion has always sought to do, that is to respond to the human need for community by building social systems in which degree of initiation determines place in the hierarchy and ideas are turned into doctrines and dogmas, falsely dehistoricized to become foundational myths. However, in the modern world it is very hard to monopolize habitus and many forces militate against ever recreating the religious empires of the past.

The discipline of inquiry taught us by the philosophers potentially contains a grain of truth, but since Plato until modern times it is certainly thought of wrongly: as a search for what is “out there”, can be uncovered by reason and accordingly should guide our behavior. As I have argued before, this project in reality (the tyranny of reason) seeks only to control us in the service of a possibly (once) imperative social goal, but not one we have freely chosen or even, frequently, questioned.

Although most of us recognize that there is no “truth” in art, we are still highly conditioned to believe that there is truth in life; a meaning which is external, which some have found and which we can emulate by following in their footsteps.

In my opinion, our relationship to our spiritual forbears should be no different to the relationship of the artist to hers. Spiritual creation is a work of art, which may uncover something of the structure of the universe but which simultaneously embodies what Zola called “the particular language of a soul”, specific to time and place. It is a universality without universalism, and utterly contingent on this impossible paradox.

Is there evidence that this spiritual field, in Bourdieu’s sense, is emancipating itself from religion and coming into an autonomous state of being?

I have of course not done any historical study and it is very much my impression that almost no-one yet understands or espouses this understanding clearly, although there are clearly echoes of it already in systems both ancient and modern. Driven by economic factors, ego, habit or expectations, most spiritual teachers try to keep their disciples on the hook, and many aspire to found their own dynasties.

I say, spiritual truth can only be communicated as art, and the spiritual teacher must have the attitude of an artist and should be thought of in this way; indeed, the attitude of an artist is incumbent upon all of us, for we are all artists of our own life. There is no possible way that the student can emulate the teacher; the student can only express her own essence. As (even) Jesus said, unless the seed falls into the earth and dies, it cannot bring forth fruit.

It is very hard for those of us who seek truth to understand that it does not matter where we look for it; to understand that, in fact, “truth” is not a very good word. We all tend to think that if one person has truth, another does not; that is the nature of positivistic truth and we are accustomed to thinking it is also true of spiritual truth. But it is not. Spiritual truth, like artistic “truth”, is inborn, in our cells and in our consciousness; no-one can transmit it to us, all anyone can ever do is wake us up to it within ourselves, and to do this they are never more than instrumental. The environment around us most propitious to our spiritual awakening is not a problem we need to solve, it is much more an emanation of what is already inside.

We need to cease the search and become artists of our own lives, surrounding ourselves with and attracting other artists, certainly, but purely for the joy of sharing in their beauty.

Sex-positive feminism

Orgasm is the body’s natural call to feminist politics” – Naomi Wolf (*).

Many feminists take a dim view of the use made of images of women in advertising and in pornography. They argue that such images almost invariably involve an objectification of women, a reduction of them to little more than a collection of sexual attributes, devoid of personhood and without agency, confined in a role dictated to them by patriarchal society and arrayed for consumption by the male sexual appetite.

This argument is partly tautological (in the sense that images are necessarily objects), and often modified in practice by free speech considerations as well as the argument by some that consensual fantasy, even if it depicts scenarios which draw on patriarchy for their erotic value, does not necessarily reinforce patriarchal values themselves (even if it leaves them unchallenged) and should be embraced as a safer outlet for fantasies which it would be more prejudicial to pursue in the real world. Nevertheless, feminist objections to female iconography betray an underlying preference on the part of many women, unsure as to what a “depatriarchalized” female sexuality actually would look like, to choose to behave in such a way as to avoid being branded a slut, which is perceived as, and indeed is, effectively a form of social ostracization. This choice is understandable, but it is not neutral or necessarily pro-feminist.

The desire to be taken seriously has historically often required women in different walks of life to forego visual strategies of seduction and those women who pursue a different track – including so-called “sex-positive feminists” – are often suspect outsiders in the feminist community. At best, they may be viewed as serving up a form of feminism designed to appeal to men’s nature or patriarchally conditioned preferences, and thereby denatured ipso facto.

There is no denying that employing those visual elements most often associated with the objectification of women, whether as part of a feminist counteroffensive, or simply because that is what one wants to do, is a tactic fraught with danger and not the best choice for everyone. But in choosing their strategies of resistance, women need to be lucidly conscious of the fact that they are caught in the type of double-bind which typically characterizes symbolic oppression. Either they claim positions in society entirely analogous to those occupied by men, thereby ratifying the patriarchal order, or they align themselves with a socially despised underclass, attracting opprobrium from men and women alike: that is, from all members of that multitude, regardless of their gender, who continue to think, whether or not despite themselves, in patriarchal categories.

For patriarchy, sex is a male drive, and some women are assigned the role of gratifying that drive. This assignment is not willy-nilly of course; it follows a very structured course which allows the drive to be adequately gratified while at the same time ensuring the reproduction of a social system in which all males have a sufficient stake in the status quo to defend it by political and military means. Patriarchy thus has always used the lever of access to women’s bodies in order to achieve its prime historical purpose, which is to control men (although the control of women per se has also become important over the last century and a half as women have gained in societal power). The conditions of expression of sexuality by men are a major theme of patriarchy, but male sexuality itself is not problematized; women’s sexuality on the other hand is assumed either not to exist or, in complete contrast, to be insatiable and dangerous.

Patriarchy, in other words, is neutral towards male sexual expression; but it is not neutral towards love. For the (male) guests at Plato’s Symposium, the idea that one could love a woman with comparable passion to how one might love a man was simply unthinkable. Loving a woman was socially subversive in classical Greece, the stuff perhaps of Gods and heroes in times past but not of free, land owning men today. For them, free women were objects of symbolic trade (and slave women of monetized trade); sentiment could not be allowed to disrupt that economy.

For us moderns, many of whom probably believe we have experienced something which we feel to be biologically innate and which we call “falling in love” (but which may be merely limerence), Plato’s conception of eros seems a surprising drive diversion. And evolutionary considerations would suggest it is. Nevertheless, the strangeness of the Greek romantic imagination should not allow us naively to imagine that our own conception is purely a biological restoration. On the contrary, the conditions under which we are allowed to fall in love are tightly controlled by society. Absent these conditions, it is not simply that we are condemned to fail in our amorous endeavors; in fact we are little more likely than the ancients to notice or acknowledge our feelings at all. For this reason, we have little idea what the experience we call “falling in love” would have looked or felt like in the ancestral environment, even if I would not exclude that a phenomenological or anthropological enquiry might tell us something (of which I might be ignorant).

So, the kind of feminism I would like to see might better be termed “love-positive” than “sex-positive”; that women adopt a positive attitude towards the biological capacity for physical pleasure with which they are born seems like something that should be able to be taken for granted. It would be good if feminism were to insist on our capacity as a species to love and nurture, including, but not limited to, heart-based, non-exclusive sexuality. Nevertheless, I fear that a “love-positive feminism” would quickly be assimilated to a desexualized one because of the sublimination of sexuality we are all conditioned to operate.

The conversion of the female body into an object of consumption is indeed an artefact of patriarchy. Nevertheless, the role of female iconography in contemporary society also differs vastly from that in Antiquity. Although clothing has a longer history, techniques of mass visual reproduction are very recent. Even the depiction of the female nude in painting only really took off with the Renaissance, and it was a radical break with earlier Byzantine norms (even if, it seems, rapidly embraced by the Papacy…).

Of course, this Renaissance artistic movement was no resurrection of Hellenistic esthetics, but a creation which drew on Greek and Roman archetypes for its own purposes. Representation of men was far more common than that of women in Hellenistic art, and female representations are essentially unknown in the classical period; in Renaissance art this proportion was completely reversed, with the female body, and erotic scenes featuring it, clear themes of predilection. The purpose of this can scarcely have been anything other than male titillation, but the bringing of the female form out of the whorehouse and into courtly palaces represents a concession to its erotic power which must have been profoundly disturbing to indentured wives, daughters and maidservants, and probably to many men within courtly families also. This development, I believe, can hardly be seen as a further reinforcement of patriarchy, hypothetically confident enough to bring into the light those practices which previously had been reserved for the shadows; rather, these inanimate forms, fantasy women created by men for men, represent to my mind the first stages of the crumbling of patriarchy under the weight of its biological, and increasingly social, contradictions: a process which continues to this day and is, of course, still far from complete.

Over the course of history, patriarchy has effected a constitutive bifurcation of women into two antagonistic groups, imposing monoandry on, and denying sexual agency to, the one (essentially those women engendered within patriarchal clans), whilst making the second (slaves and outcasts) available for the use of the males of the society as a whole. Almost all of the portrayal of women in art from the Renaissance onwards has been of courtesans and concubines, or of figures adopting their attributes. The allegedly higher status, but desexualised, class of women qualifying as wives is absent from the collective imagination. This bifurcation, which doubtless stretches back into remote antiquity, gave rise to what Freud called the Madonna-Whore complex. This is certainly a hypocritical double standard. But it is also inherent to the intersection of male sexual drives and patriarchy.

What is new with the Renaissance is that the courtesan is celebrated in art rather than despised. It is important, indeed, to note that these two archetypes are not equal alternatives. The Madonna archetype enjoys superior (if still limited) social status and is unmarked; the whore archetype is stigmatized, including by the madonna herself, and is marked. The subordination by patriarchy of the whore to the madonna has fundamental consequences for thinking through strategies of symbolic resistance.

The patriarchally assigned bifurcation of the female, in fact, has been subject to constant erosion over the last ten centuries of Western history as properties of the courtesan have been transferred to the sought object of legitimate romantic passion, bringing love into the matchmaking paradigm and subverting more strictly patriarchal norms of arranged marriage. Courtly love was the first manifestation of this slow cultural earthquake, in which for the first time romantic passion was admitted into the public arena, provided that it did not interfere with matrimonial arrangements and was sublimated. The right of women – or men – to marry for love, however, took a long time to be established, at least in courtly and developing bourgeois circles, and is not, indeed, even fully acquired in Europe today (never mind, of course, the rest of the world). Its acceptance has been at the price of the assimilation of marriage-for-love to marriage-by-arrangement, with which, however, it shares little in common (and compared to which it is notoriously less stable).

The whorehouse was an accepted and inevitable institution within the social economy of arranged marriage. The position of the whore-as-archetype, became, however, problematic for proponents of marriage for love. By this I mean (though here I may be speculating) that well-born women, having experienced sexual passion in the context of romantic love, came to view it as their birthright, but were nevertheless still constrained by the patriarchal order of marriage – as Flaubert’s Emma Bovary found to her cost. To this we should add, as Michel Foucault has pointed out in La Volonté de Savoir, the increasing importance placed upon sexual exclusivity within marriage within the developing bourgeois ambitions of the 18th and 19th centuries, essentially in order to safeguard the blood line and the accumulation of family wealth.

These social developments, which here I can only evoke briefly, resulted in what has become, today, almost a fusion, and frequently an unbearable one, of the expectations associated with the Madonna and Whore archetypes. Women are asked, in the first instance by women’s media themselves, to be both – even though the combination is well-nigh impossible and in any case unlikely to procure any durable advantage. This continuing demand for both archetypes is certainly an indication of the malleability of patriarchy to changed social circumstances to which Bourdieu refers in Masculine Domination. Nevertheless, it is not necessarily indicative of its perennity; it seems to me that patriarchy is really underpinned by militarism and plutocracy and it is shifts in these social variables which will undermine (or are needed to undermine) its ongoing vitality. What feminism needs to do is to unleash the inherent contradictions in patriarchy which have been visible throughout history and harness other forces in our psyche.

By rejecting sexual empowerment, women reject only one side of the bifurcated patriarchal feminine in favor of the only other of the binary choice of options socially prepared for them. It is very difficult to bring into existence alternative archetypal paradigms, and almost impossible as long as the existing paradigms retain their force and serve their purpose. Choice ratifies and strengthens the bifurcation itself, whilst having no effect on the net exploitation of women, as the patriarchal economic order is left untouched by it, and this order can always create the supply of “whores” which it desires. The only subversive choice – the one made, in his way, by Michel Foucault – is not to choose. But this choice is only subjectively available: not choosing will result in social assignation to women of the “whore” label anyway – because sexual shame structures the entire patriarchal system. In the same way as Foucault was socially assigned to the marked category of gay, though he never made that identification.

It is clearly unfair – in fact it is an oppressive manoeuver – simply to dismiss women as their own worst enemies. Society cannot indoctrinate women with patriarchal views and then complain that they exhibit patriarchal attitudes. By far the most likely reason women engage in slut-shaming is to convince patriarchal males of their own chastity and to reinforce the Madonna-norm to which they have chosen to submit since, having made that choice, they are invested in it. We all know, and feminists better than anyone, that women are in part the vehicles of their own oppression, but that is because the odds are stacked against them by the system within which they are constrained to operate.

There is no Archimedean point outside of the structures of symbolic domination which can be used to bring the whole thing crashing down – we are condemned to work within it and this is what makes the whole enterprise so painstaking slow. Nevertheless, so-called sex-positive feminism, while there is plenty to debate and criticize within it, is not a watered down version of the real thing, designed to avoid the latter’s full social consequences: it is in fact the most subversive form of feminism yet devised precisely because it appeals to men on an instinctual level which bypasses, however temporarily, some part of their patriarchal conditioning. It is a power which merely needs to be self-aware.

“Sex-positive feminists” and “slutwalkers” may be vilified for allowing themselves to be objectified but in fact they do not “allow” this at all, they are merely subject to it because of attitudes embedded in patriarchy – attitudes which need to be challenged and changed. As long as patriarchy prevails, women are likely to be oppressed by one or other of the symbolic categories of oppression, madonna or whore, which constitute the two poles, both socially constructed, of the patriarchal bifurcation of the female. There is no choice which renders neither calumny applicable. The core patriarchal oppression, however, is embodied in the figure of the madonna, not in that of the whore. The whore archetype is a secondary manifestation, structurally dependent for its existence and its power on the primary strategy of denying female agency – of denying, in fact, female humanity. Given this, slut-shaming is a counterproductive response by women, and one which is moreover inoperant since the supply of whores and that of madonnas will always attain a patriarchal equilibrium as long as madonnas themselves continue to exist. If an individual is not sexually empowered, the whole system remains in place; but if all women chose the whore over the madonna, neither would be any more.

Notes

(*) “Feminist Fatale: a reply to Camille Paglia”, The New Republic, March 16, 1992

Sexual labels

These days it seems there is an ever increasing list of terms that people use to refer to their sexuality. As Dan Savage humorously put it in reply to a polyamorous letter writer, who was asking to join the LGBT acronym, “We are no longer the LGBT community. We are the LGBTQLFTSQIA community, aka the lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, leather/fetish, two-spirit, questioning, intersex, and asexual community/communities. I don’t see why [not…]?“.

What’s going on here? Are we uncovering ever finer detail of the deep structure of the human psyche by successive iterations? Obviously not.

When a new term is coined, there are people who adopt it because they feel it avoids some of the connotations of existing terms with which they were uncomfortable. If, however, they are already invested in the existing term, they may do this only with reluctance or not at all. This is because new terms have their origin in a sense of dissatisfaction with the assumptions about oneself inherent in existing terms, but once they are coined they become an element of identity. The search for identity by means of the adoption of labels sounds a lot like it is a quest for personal meaning, but in fact it is something else: labels are an instrument of social structuration and our predilection for them derives its origins from our tribal nature. We use labels – sexual or otherwise – because we find them to be a key to unlock social doors; to pre-identify as “one of us” and thereby lower the barriers to acceptance, perhaps even claim a right to inclusion.

It is common to say that, these days, we live in a world of overlapping identities. What this means in essence, and this is probably a better way of putting it, is that each of us is simultaneously a member of multiple tribes, some quite local and, in this, more resembling ancestral tribes, others quite open-ended imagined communities (a term Benedict Anderson first applied to the social construction of nation states). These multiple loyalties may coexist peacefully, but also may come into painful conflict.

When one points these simple – and widely recognized – facts out to persons who strongly identify with one or other label, often one gets into very hot water. But what were queer people before the word “queer” was invented? What were “relationship anarchists” before that expression was created? The history of language shows that there will be more words created that suddenly people will cling to as “the” word that captures who they are. These words are social constructions, strategies in a struggle against symbolic domination.

To understand the meaning of words, as philosophers and sociologists have argued ever since Wittgenstein’s symbolic revolution in the theory of language, we need to look at the uses made of them. People are inclined to imagine that words such as “heterosexual” or “straight” describe something that has existed since time immemorial. This is far from the truth: they are neologisms (“heterosexual” first attested in 1892, in common use only since the 1960’s; “straight” in this meaning first attested in 1941; source: etymonline.com). These words have come into the language and are used exclusively in opposition to oppressed categories of thought and behavior, first and foremost within oneself. Critical social thought has to identify hidden motivations in the structure of discourse. All of us have many deep seated fears. Biologically, everyone can enjoy same-sex intimate touch. Those who choose to exclude it categorically do so, ultimately, and whatever their rationalization, out of fear.

The war of words is fundamental to social progress or, conversely, social regression (as so well illustrated in Orwell’s 1984). Nevertheless, the only coherent attitude is one of non-identification. Although a universal strategy, it really makes no senseMagrittePipe to identify with labels, because a label is a word, and each of us is a living being. In the same way as Magritte’s painting of a pipe is not a pipe: it is a painting, a signifier and not what is signified. There is nothing wrong with labels, obviously: we need them to carry on a discussion. There is only something wrong with how we think about language: it does necessarily name preexisting “things out there. There is such a thing as a lemon, arguably, but there is no such “thing” as polyamory, it is just a word, used by people to try to communicate their values and lifestyle in opposition to perceived social norms, It is a term those people have chosen, and it means what they want it to mean, i.e. different things for different people. Any one person’s meaning of it evolves over their lifetime, and it may be that at some point they will find another label that better describes them as they then are. Throughout the process, it is not only unnecessary, but it is illogical, to identify with the label. But this is difficult because labels create tribes, and people naturally love their tribe.

This is not to say that there are no “things” at all, no biological or physical basis for the terms we use, no logical distinctions at all: merely that these “things” are not coextensive with the label. Thus being same sex attracted may be a birth condition, but it isn’t necessarily, and so, as Foucault has shown, “homosexual” is a social construction, not a thing in itself. Indeed, everything about sexuality is socially constructed. The very word “sexuality” is a social construction, which has been used with its current meaning only since the 1980’s. The sexual trajectory of some persons who identify as “homosexual” may encompass (or have encompassed) members of the opposite sex at some point, even if in most cases it seems that it may never. Whatever the reasons for our sexuality we have a right to express it (consensually of course). But one should not choose a label and then preclude self-development for fear of exclusion from the tribe which it names and to which it is assumed to belong.

For those of us who think of ourselves as being on a spiritual path, it should be evident that we cannot simply decide that something we are now is what we will be for the rest of our life, we have to stay open to change: because being on a spiritual path, a path of inner inquiry, is the same thing as recognizing that we do not yet know ourselves fully.

So why are many people so virulent when it comes to anything perceived as calling into question their labels, even when there is no question of adopting a repressive stance towards the behavior which they name? I think for two reasons. Firstly, because it is such a relief to have a term which affirms an aspect of ones personality which had been unnamed and in all likelihood repressed. Finding a term means that giving up on repressive social norms does not mean, as it otherwise might, exclusion from society; it can be used to find others whose worldview does not depend on the norm in question; perhaps it can change society itself. But in the same way the virulence also betrays insecurity: insecurity as to the acquired status of the legitimacy of the behavior in question, but also as to the adequacy of the definition we have found. Is this really me? Or am I once again only finding myself to lose myself again?

We are accustomed to think of the act of “coming out” as one of moral courage, and indeed it often is; but Foucault’s unwillingness to do so surprises us all the more for a moral courage which is even greater, no denial of his nature but a willingness to live unnamed. For someone so aware of how language shapes thought, and in turn behavior and society, this was perhaps the only coherent choice.

(Some related articles: Sexual orientation, Mononormativity, A cultural critique of polyamory)