foucault – Becoming Human

Foucault, language and freedom: a simple introduction

Verified on Po.et

April 5th 2018, 15:17

(A pdf version of this post is also available)

In the thirty years since his death in 1984, the work of the French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault has moved solidly into the mainstream of methodology in the social sciences. This is a very good thing. Foucault teaches us to see the world in a fundamentally new and liberating way, and everyone needs to hear his message. Unfortunately, it is still shrouded in mystery for most people. Even the versions of “Foucault for dummies” I have found on line are way too complicated for normal folk. However, I am not an academic, and normal folk are the bread and butter of my daily interactions. I think Foucault is really important and I need to explain to them why, in terms they can understand. So what follows is my attempt to do this.

First a disclaimer. I have read quite a bit of Foucault, much of it in the original French, and some secondary literature, and I think I have enough of a general background in philosophy and social theory to understand his thought, but I don’t claim to be an expert and this is definitely my spin on what I think the importance of his thought is today, in the contemporary environment we face in the West. It makes no claims to be exhaustive and indeed on some points I will disagree with him and present my own thoughts, while of course making clear when this is the case. This text is also not meant as an introduction to reading Foucault himself, except in a very general sense: I paraphrase him liberally without much concern to anchor my comments in his own terminology or in specific references to the texts. For those who need it, a decent introduction which is more scholarly in its intent is the anthology edited by Dianna Taylor, Michel Foucault: Key Concepts (Acumen: Durham UK, 2011), especially the introduction and chapters 4 through 7 and 12, to which I am indebted in what follows.

So who was Michel Foucault?

In the popular imagination, Foucault is often lumped together with his contemporaries, French post-structuralist philosophers such as Jean-François Lyotard and Jacques Derrida. So the first thing to be said is that this assimilation is completely mistaken. Lyotard, Derrida and company are notoriously impenetrable thinkers who seem (to me) to revel in obscurity. Foucault’s thought, subject matter and style have little in common with that of these contemporaries. While technical at times, and not always a model of clarity, Foucault always remains readable and engaged with problems the importance of which is perfectly obvious. I could attempt further to situate him in the history of thought, but I think this is unnecessary for present purposes. What is important to understand is that Foucault is an extremely original thinker directly concerned with social issues and justice and who should be approached on his own merits. Foucault can be more usefully compared with another contemporary, less well-known outside France but still extremely influential, Pierre Bourdieu – but I’ll save that for another time.

How society and culture, through language, makes us who we are

This is the key question that Foucault sets out to answer. To do so, he needs to show us that ideas, institutions and even bodily sensations that we take for granted and assume to be “real” are in fact generated by our environment: they find their origin in culture, serve as vehicles to perpetuate power structures within society, and we enforce them ourselves. While this might seem obvious enough from anthropological studies which look at how ideas function in very different societies to our own (a synchronic or horizontal approach), Foucault’s method is diachronic/vertical, in other words historical: he takes us on a tour through our own history, showing the function that ideas played in the past and the changes to which they have been subject over time. This allows us to disidentify with these ideas and subject them to critical re-evaluation.

The issues with which Foucault engaged in depth include the prison system, mental health and sexuality, but his approach has been used to study many other social institutions, whether tangible (schools, the military, the legal system…), normative (age and gender related norms, monogamy…) or purely conceptual (concepts such as patriotism, honor, self-sacrifice…). Actually it’s quite possible that several of those studies haven’t been done yet. But all of them definitely should be.

Let’s take an example. To illustrate the concept, it is necessary to talk about some things you probably believe really do exist and may well be shocked to hear do not – at least in the sense you had assumed they did. This is going especially to be the case if the terms in question are central to your self-identification. This is a question I have discussed before in relation to sexual labels. Even if you may be indifferent to some of the concepts, it is pretty certain there will be at least one or two which you are going to struggle to let go of, or to think differently about. There is a good reason for this. We think using the categories we have learnt. Unless we redefine them or come up with new ones, it is difficult to think differently. We also act on the basis of the same categories. If, for example, society works with simple binary oppositions like gay/straight, male/female or Madonna/whore – and it does – it really may matter little how you would personally like to nuance where you think you belong; you will frequently find yourself being assigned to one or other category anyway, and the best you can do may be to go for the one which is least bad. Of course, ‘bad’ is itself an undefined concept – some people will choose based on where they perceive their own self-interest to lie, whilst others will choose on grounds of principle. Given the ‘stickiness’ of these concepts, they are hard to change – but over time they do change, and whilst Foucault doesn’t tell us much about how or why they change – because this very much depends on the concept in question – he does show us that these concepts have been culturally constructed, and for this very reason can be culturally deconstructed.

So let me try “heterosexual”. This will hit enough people’s self-identification, does have a basis in Foucault’s own work (although I develop it liberally), and illustrates the general idea as well as being “familiar” enough to most people that pretty well everyone thinks they know what it means (even if they may themselves find the term unsatisfactory). But I could go with “autistic”, “disabled”, “monogamous”, “feminist”, “democratic”, “just”…. I could go with pretty well anything, and not just adjectives either. For example you may think you know what “jealousy” is, you may think it’s something biological and innate, and you may even be uncritical of episodes of it which you encounter. But it is almost certain that this is a composite emotion constructed out of the need to maintain monogamy and the power structures of sexual scarcity on which it is based. It is not that you don’t experience it, but what “it” is, as well as the purpose it serves, is way less clear than you probably think. But for more on that example, see here.

Every word has a history, and “heterosexual” is no different. Most people think that words “discover” the nature of things; that they label pre-existing realities. At the risk of simplifying, some words do seem to do this, and the more concrete the word, the more likely that this is the case, which is why we are accustomed to thinking like this. For example, we can imagine a world in which the metal “magnesium” exists, but has not yet been recognized as a distinct entity. Perhaps it is frequently thought just to be a form of aluminum. As we discover specific properties of magnesium which allow us to tell it apart from aluminum, we realize there is something distinct, and we give it a name. Henceforth we can talk about it with much greater ease than we could before.

This appears to be a straightforward case of linguistic “progress”. However, it is more the exception than the rule, and for most words we should be on our guard against this simplistic assumption. Here, Foucault is building on solid ground; this fact has been well known since Wittgenstein. Words have a history, and they often do not refer to “things out there”; their meaning also shifts over time and is not constant either across groups or from one writer to another, even at a given point in time. The meaning of a word is only ever an approximation, and the less it refers to something which exists and is distinct in an obvious sense, the more it is better thought of as a cloud of related meanings rather than a precise label.

The word “heterosexual” came into use in connection with the word “homosexual”. It basically denoted “not homosexual” and therefore was the antonym of “homosexual” within a schema which divided the world into two camps, homosexual and heterosexual (since then, the language used for sexual orientation has developed further, of course; I am not ignoring this fact, but I want to get at the meaning as originally conceived, also because, even if there are now other labels, “heterosexual” is still generally thought of as denoting “not homosexual”, most of the other groups who use different labels being anyway invisible in public discourse).

Words which split the word up into two camps are inherently suspicious, because there are not many of them which seem to correspond to a more or less objective reality. Perhaps male/female would be a fair counterexample, but most words do not have or need opposites if they refer to something in the real world. For example, there is no word which means “not magnesium”. Most classes of things in the world which can be broken down into distinct categories also manifest more than two such categories: for example solid/liquid/gas, types of mineral, continents etc.

When we encounter this type of binary opposition, it is very typical that one of the pair of terms is “unmarked” and the other “marked”. This means that there is a general assumption that people (or other classes, but let’s stick to people) fall under one of the terms, and only by exception do they fall under the other. If nothing is said, the “default”, unmarked term is the one that applies. In this case, “homosexual” is the marked category and “heterosexual” the unmarked one. It is not just that most people are “heterosexual”; society itself is heterosexual in that it is predicated on heterosexuality and mostly takes it for granted. Homosexuals will frequently have awkwardly to explain themselves, to make special arrangements, to correct their interlocutor: heterosexuals will not. This mechanism of marking is not purely probabilistic: it is not neutral. It is not a fair assumption simply because it applies in most cases. Rather, it is part of a linguistic apparatus which functions to perpetuate certain cultural values (resistance to these values usually entails adopting the marked category voluntarily and endeavoring to undermine its connotations from within; as I discussed in relation to feminism here).

In fact, “heterosexual” is not a term which correctly and neutrally denotes something which applies to the majority of the population at all, except in the very trivial sense of being the opposite of a term which applies to a minority. Rather, the term erases many differences amongst members of the class it signifies, and enforces cultural values of its own, focusing on sexual attraction and behavior to the exclusion of other forms of interpersonal behavior (same-sex intimacy, even non-sexual) inconsistent with its core assumptions as well as non-sexual determinants of social behavior between the sexes.

As we have established that the term “heterosexual” simply means “not homosexual”, let me for simplicity continue by discussing the term “homosexual” itself. If this term does not designate something that objectively exists “out there”, what is the relationship of it to actual facts, and how has it changed those facts or the social dialogue surrounding them?

Foucault does not argue that terms such as this are deprived of any anchor in the real world at all. On the contrary, some such anchor is usually required. Terms, however, operate a selection which could (in principle at least) have been made in another way, and divide the world up in ways which may prevent us from seeing alternative configurations. They are usually also conveniently vague. In the case of “homosexual”, it is not clear whether it refers simply to a preferential tendency (nor the extent to which this tendency may or may not be exclusive) to engage in sexual behavior with persons of the same biological sex, or whether it also encompasses “romantic attraction” to members of that same sex (whatever “romantic attraction” itself may be).

This ambiguity is fundamental to the social function that the term performs. It ghettoizes, or at least constitutes a threat of ghettoization in respect of, all persons who deviate from the enforced (heterosexual) social norm. It therefore does not simply name a pre-existing class, but allows for raising suspicions as to the belonging to the dominant heterosexual class of any person who in any way may go beyond, in terms of same-sex intimacy (whether social or sexual), whatever any member of that dominant class may, for whatever reason, at any point in time consider should constitute a useful limit on the behavior of others around them. In other words, it is essentially a socially sanctioned tool for arbitrarily ostracizing anyone who may constitute a threat to the established order. It is a tool of power, available for anyone to wield (though be careful it does not return to haunt you). Even increasing acceptance of gay rights in society has so far not fundamentally altered, it seems to me, this basic function.

Homosexual behavior and preferences have of course always existed, but they have not always been stigmatized or even viewed as exceptional, and when they have been this has taken very different forms. In some societies, such behavior even applies generally (at least to males) in certain contexts, and it constituted the highest form of love for the ancient Greeks (or at least for Plato and some of his contemporaries: although whether or not this love should be chaste was a major cultural sticking point – as Foucault analyses in depth in Volume II of his History of Sexuality). Homosexual behavior existed, in combination with other forms of behavior, without any need to name it or, when naming it, by employing very different concepts which “cut up” the world in different ways.

I will not get into the circumstances which led to the formation of the concept of “homosexual”, but I would like to focus on its effects. Foucault predicts that these will often be ambivalent.

Firstly, it should be obvious by now that the main function of the term “homosexual” is not to denote the behavior (or any other relevant characteristic) of the group it apparently names. Homosexuals themselves did not invent the term in search for some label of identity; it was invented by those to whom it was designed not to pertain. The term therefore polices the sexual (and even non-sexual) behavior of the majority; it constitutes merely the mirror image of behavior elevated into a social norm, and by being the mirror image, it conveniently disguises its true function. It does not of course (and could not) do so out of nothing – attitudes to same-sex intimacy have rarely, if ever, been neutral. Nevertheless, it is important to notice that it codifies these attitudes in a way which is innovatory. By accepting the labels and the binary division it proposes – and the temptation to do so is as great as is the potential individual utility of the concept in games of power – members of society cooperate in the creation of new norms of behavior, thereby undermining their own freedom. The term “homosexual”, and its more or less derogatory colloquial equivalents, will be used in school playgrounds and in later adult life to ostracize and construct hierarchies (Ellen Feder refers to this as “a panoptic apparatus that operates to ensure properly gendered subjects” and notes its ability to revert behavior to the social norm notwithstanding parental deviations from it [1]).

In this way the individual is problematized and called to order, whilst the social practice escapes scrutiny. Heterosexuality becomes self-policing, even in contexts where overt homosexual behavior is in fact commonplace (but still surrounded by shame). Society does not really care what homosexuals do; it cares what heterosexuals do. This is why the use of the term “heterosexual” (as opposed to what it merely denotes) almost always contains within it at least a latent homophobia, a prohibition on any form of same-sex intimacy which the individual typically unquestioningly accepts. The neologism does not reflect reality – it creates it.

It is worth, I think, pausing to note at this point that this mechanism is not maladaptive or sinister per se. It is simply the way in which, in pre-agricultural times, tribal coherence was maintained and mechanisms of culture could be capitalized and passed from generation to generation. The same mechanism doubtless operates in many cases in the contemporary world in a manner which is desirable. Nor is it incapable of innovation, even if it certainly manifests a conservative bias. Indeed, it is only through such a mechanism that social innovation can be spread and made effective at all. Its all-pervading, “panoptic” character also reflects the conditions of tribal life, in which privacy and self-realization are foreign concepts. The mechanism itself is therefore not at fault, but rather (aspects of) the social capital which it transmits as the latter has been accumulated and shaped over the course of history in response to contingent external factors, attempts by entitled groups at maintaining hegemonic social control and corresponding attempts at resistance, which Foucault suggests are at least to some degree inevitable owing to an innate bodily insubordination [2], by those disadvantaged by the dominant discourse.

Language and power

Power, therefore, resides for Foucault in language as a repository of social norms, and exercises its effects in a way which is diffuse and self-enforcing; it does not emanate from a single source of authority as was generally supposed in the past. In the past, it may perhaps have been enough to forbid certain egregious forms of behavior which represented an obvious threat to the sovereign or the church (though I am not sure that Foucault is fully right about this); modern societies, on the other hand, require techniques which actually generate behavior of a certain sort, even of a novel sort. This process, almost by definition, works to the benefit of the dominating social classes and to the detriment of everyone else.

At least in the short term: because Foucault sees language as productive of new social forms which contain within themselves the seeds of their own destruction and enable the problematization of conflicts latent in earlier times. This process has endless ripples and iterations and is subject to a law of unintended effect. Because we have the notion of “homosexual”, homosexuals, by which I mean all those whose behavior assigns them to the group or who voluntarily adhere to it (but no-one else: “heterosexual” is no rallying-cry) have the possibility to find each other, to group together, to create a subculture with its own forms of thought, in relative isolation moreover from contamination by the dominant culture since its members, being already disfavored, have less to lose. This subculture is able to think about sexuality and about sexual behavior, and indeed form actual bonds, with a freedom which “heterosexuals” often envy. Inevitably, at least as long as it is not violently repressed, this constitutes a laboratory to incubate new attitudes in the wider society in the longer term.

In the absence of any controlling “mastermind”, linguistic innovations of this kind are inherently unable to imagine and to plan for these long-run effects. Essentially they amount to the recognition of a threat and a short-term response to it (along the lines of divide et impera – divide and rule), at the expense of greater threats later on. In this way, even what appear to be repressive institutions may in fact serve social progress over the longer run.

So language is not neutral; it is a battlefield of competing interests and an arena within which conflicts are played out.

Resistance

This brings us on to what Foucault has to say, or implies, for successful strategies of resistance to domination. To continue our example, it may be that being forced to adopt the label of “heterosexual” I have lost some freedom, not only externally in terms of how I interact with society, but even in terms of how I am able to conceive of myself and the identity I (or if not I, then at least most people) unquestioningly adopt. Is there, at the same time, something I have gained?

As I have just explained, the mise en quarantaine of a group with which I share certain characteristics (be it directly in terms of my own sexual or emotional proclivities, or more tangentially in terms, perhaps, of similarly aspiring to a greater freedom in forming and structuring relationships) brings into being a forum in which a certain amount of experimentation may take place which would not be tolerated within the mainstream society of which I am a part. I may appeal to the experience of that community in support of my own demands for greater freedom. I will argue, “if they can do it, why not I?” This strategy was not available to me when the prohibition on my conduct was more latent or indirect.

I may also engage battle on the linguistic battlefield itself, although at the risk, omnipresent, of further fragmenting my natural base of allies, that is the class of the dominated generally (and of course I am aware that I dominate at the same time as being dominated). Foucault argues that the concept of sexuality itself is a recent neologism with no clear meaning (but quite a clear function). The concept of “homosexual” may seem, in hindsight, to have been a naïve attempt to regulate what is an increasingly chaotic linguistic minefield. I am certainly unaccepting of the term “heterosexual”, even if I recognize that I am going to be assigned to it anyway (because the alternative term is clearly descriptively inaccurate). At whatever opportunity, I will grasp for better language. The whole category of “queer” represents what has been a perhaps surprisingly successful attempt to spawn approaches which rest on the pure and simple rejection of confining categorizations, albeit one which has so far failed to gain much traction on the part of the gender-conforming “heterosexual” population.

My purpose here is certainly not to suggest a degree of historical inevitability in the move towards greater liberty. Foucault himself does not seem to have been tempted by such a conclusion. It is, however, to point to possibilities and to the inevitability that any linguistic state of the world is fluid and will, over time, change. This change is the work of social actors responding to the circumstances in which they find themselves.

Foucault’s ethical stance

So whilst there may be no guarantee of success, strategies of resistance are at least available to us. But why should we resist, and what goals should that resistance pursue? If, as Foucault argues, my sense of myself is constituted together with language, and my possibilities are limited by it, with no possibility of real escape or of fundamental rupture, and if any future sense of myself will similarly be constituted, am I at complete liberty to imagine anything and call it into being, and if so, how might I recruit enough others to my cause?

In my opinion, Foucault is at his least convincing in responding to this question. Whilst he holds to a view of constrained or “situated” freedom [3], his prescriptions amount to a restatement of existentialist precepts a la Heidegger or Sartre. Foucault takes as given that we should pursue “truth” but wishes to break from what he considers the Faustian bargain whereby it is available only by submitting to power: by taking ones allotted place in a society which dispenses truth only through approved institutional mechanisms. Rather than play this game, Foucault appeals for a resurrection of what he considers to be the ethical basis of classical Greek and Latin philosophy. This he refers to as “care of the self”. Essentially, the argument is that one should actively seek to throw off the chains of conditioning which have come to one as a member of society. What precisely one might find looking beyond, however, is not clear. Like Sartre, Foucault seems to view this as essentially a creative act, and how the creative act of the individual eventually impacts upon society more widely is left unexplained. The whole “back-to-the-future” nature of this manoeuver is unsatisfying: even if the self is to be constructed rather than discovered (and so its “truth” does not exist), one is being prescribed, it would seem, a heroic romanticism which has the character of a sublimation.

Foucault therefore comes across, to me at least, as espousing a relatively severe form of asceticism, based on a thoroughgoing sceptical attitude of refusal (a la Hume or Descartes), a position of which his own analysis seems to undermine the possibility.

This stance certainly captures something of what I would also view as a correct ethical orientation towards the fact of our conceptual co-creation of the world. I agree with Foucault that “freedom is not simply a matter of being left alone but also a matter of re-making ourselves into what we would like to be” [4]. But in my view, Foucault’s prescription is also missing something, indeed a great deal. What I take from it is a concern to engage battle strategically there where the instruments of domination actually operate, which is within the structure of thought. Philosophy, however, is not the sole tool of so doing – thankfully. The actual manifestation in the world of alternative models seems to have at least as much importance and power as expounding these philosophically.

As my readers will know, I am not attracted by Foucault’s ascetic prescriptions, which like any ascesis seem to me inevitably to buttress the ego and thereby to go astray. There also seems to me something inconsistent in determining that the mechanisms of power play within interpersonal space, and nevertheless proposing to modify them in a way which is solipsistic. There is little doubt that Foucault himself has been successful in doing this, but that his approach is generalizable or sufficient is much less evident, and in any case the correspondence between what is enduringly important in his life’s work and his preoccupation with “care of the self” is open to discussion. I personally believe that interpersonal mechanisms need to be found and prescriptions adopted which go beyond the purely conceptual into reshaping core institutions of society, according to a battle plan which recognizes where the greatest vulnerabilities and potential for impact lie [5].

Notes

[1] in Taylor (ed., 2011), pp. 59f.

[2] See Oksala, in op.cit., p. 93

[3] May, in op.cit., p. 82

[4] May, in op.cit., p. 79

[5] My own focus has been on uncovering the structure of patriarchy and the key patriarchal institution of monogamy: see here and here. There are of course many other potential avenues.

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 18^th and 19^th 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 sense 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)

The twin errors of “Sex at Dusk”

For those who do not know it, “Sex at Dusk” is a book by Lynn Saxon which purports to “debunk” Sex at Dawn. Everyone seems to be agreed that Saxon has a lot of science at her fingertips and that this unreadable book nevertheless makes a number of valid points.

What people are missing in this debate is, however, fundamental. It seems to me that Saxon commits an error of method, epistemological in nature, and an error of genre.

The question in which the readers of Sex at Dawn are interested is what is the most plausible account of evolved human sexuality given the balance of the evidence. This question is not answered by pointing out errors and misinterpretations in the book. Even if couched in scientific terms, this comes pretty close to an ad hominem attack. On the contrary, given all the obvious societal interests vested in the “standard narrative”, it is the scientific underpinning of that narrative regarding which we should be particularly attentive and skeptical. This is clear from Kuhn, Popper, Bourdieu, and any number of other philosophers and sociologists of science. If you have to choose a null hypothesis, it would be better to go with S@D and not with the standard narrative because this would at least counterbalance to some extent almost everyone’s internalized biases. This would be good and correct scientific method, just as it is the church that should have had to prove the terracentric view of the universe and not Galileo the heliocentric one, once 51% of the evidence was on Galileo’s side. What evidence is there that S@D’s conclusions are wrong, not just that the authors made some errors getting there? The conclusions can only be wrong (in the normal sense of this word within the social sciences) if there are other conclusions which are more plausible. What are these conclusions? A vision of a more “polyamorous” ancestral environment is not scientifically suspect just because the Church Fathers have indoctrinated us with the idea that it is morally suspect. This is an epistemological error which I personally find inexcusable on the part of a contemporary social scientist.

This brings me to the error of genre. S@D is a work of popular science. The intention of the authors is demonstrably to affect the terms of the broader, and hugely important, social debates which sexuality feeds into. They do this by presenting science, but they are allowed, and even required, to be selective given how biased much of the “evidence” is. They are even allowed (thank you, Seneca) to make mistakes. It is a book with an agenda (as all books have an agenda, for, as Derrida famously observed, “there is no text without context”). That is why Saxon’s book can only be an ad hominem attack. Her choice of method condemns her to this. If Saxon believes the balance of evidence points towards monogamy then that is the book she should write. This would, however, be surprising as I think one of the criticisms one might make of S@D is that the “standard narrative” is not actually a standard narrative from a scientific perspective. What it is, is a socially standard narrative (something very different) which is a hidden bias in much scientific writing, especially the more distant the theme of that writing is from actually investigation into evolved human sexuality. Saxon’s book, less excusably given its subject matter, inadvertently proves the point. Barash and Lipton (The Myth of Monogamy, 2001) do the same when they show that we are not naturally monogamous and then claim that we “should” be anyway.

The point is that what we “should” be is up for grabs. We no longer have to take Plato’s word on it. This emancipation from the patriarchal bias in classical moral thought around sexuality, so brilliantly analyzed by Foucault (The Use of Pleasure, 1984), is what S@D sought to achieve, and what it has achieved. S@D has been justly successful in reaching its goals because it is engaging, humanistic, humorous, optimistic, and entertaining. This is how you change the world, if you are courageous enough not merely to analyze it, and particularly in ways that have an unrecognized bias towards the status quo. Wanting to change the world is not illegitimate and the fact that so many in the scientific community seem to think it is shows, I think, something of the power relations between vested social interests and the scientific establishment.

I am not saying that S@D is the last word on the subject, or even that it is a Copernican moment (and the authors are very quick to disown such an idea, as witnessed by Chris Ryan’s comment on one of my earlier articles). There are elements in the conclusions which I myself have argued are incomplete. In a way, in places it’s an engaging caricature. Perhaps this is a moral failing on my part, but I find it hard to be appalled by that. I think what it nevertheless is, is a brilliant popularization of the relevant science combined with true wisdom and compassion for the human condition. This makes it, as I think its short history has shown, a defining moment in the Kuhnian process (which is to be interpreted in a post-structuralist sense given the nature of “truth” in the social sciences(*)) by which one scientific paradigm is replaced by another. The authors achieve this by undermining the forces which maintain the status quo. They manage to dissipate some of the fear inculcated in us by established social discourses according to which we have to hang on for dear life to the disintegrating institution of monogamy because of the imagined catastrophic social consequences of giving it up; rather, we can trust our biology and imagine better ways of ordering our affairs than those which served Roman and later European militaristic expansion so well, and therefore survived that “evolutionary” race, but perhaps are not relevant to life on the planet in the 21st century.

Note

* Cf V. Romania (2013), Pragmatist Epistemology and the Post-Structural Turn of the Social Sciences, in Philosophy Today, Summer 2013 (link).

PS: Before anyone is tempted to conclude anything from the ratings of Saxon’s book on Amazon, do recall selection bias and confirmation bias…