Tag: sexual

Foucault, language and freedom: a simple introduction

(A pdf version of this post is also available)

200px-Michel_Foucault

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.

Myths of forgiveness

In this article I will summarize a recent piece appearing on netzwerkb.org, a german language network for victims of sexualized violence. I understand from the comments that Barbara Rogers, author of the unmissable resource “Screams from Childhood“, intends to publish a full translation so in the meantime these are just highlights (under my own responsibility).

The author argues that it is inappropriate to pursue or encourage, in a therapeutic context, forgiveness of the perpetrator, and identifies in this context three myths.

The first myth is that forgiveness, processing and reconciliation vis-à-vis the perpetrator might have a healing effect on adults who suffered violence in childhood. To do so amounts to taking away the voice of the abused child which it is only in the process of recovering. This is especially dangerous if the perpetrator remains a person with whom the victim is likely to be in contact. Forgiveness may result in a certain feeling of release from the feeling of guilt the victim may feeling as a result of the social pressure to forgive which the victim cannot attain. This ability to process is portrayed as a virtue. However, it is really an act of fear which restores the relationship of power between perpetrator and victim and may well lead to retraumatization.

The second myth is that forgiveness, processing and reconciliation makes the world a better place. This finds its roots in religious traditions, which idealize masochism. Religion needs this myth as a foundation for the existing world order of repression, whereby victims continue to provide resources to political elites. This makes the world a worse, not better place.

The third myth is that forgiveness reduces anger, hatred and the desire for revenge. Forgiveness is identical to repression of these feelings which also the child could not express. Forgiveness doesn’t reduce these feelings but only perpetuates the cycle by shifting them to the next generation.

In the comments, the point is somewhere made that what the author is talking about is not in fact real “forgiveness”. I think that’s in some sense true. When forgiveness equates to compassion it is certainly a final stage of liberation. However, the word is so laden with patriarchal values and power to manipulate through the superego that this is a sense it assumes almost never in practice. Therefore I fully agree with the authors that first we must reconnect with our anger, hatred and sadness and the call to forgive is, in this context, both in a true sense impossible and as a practical matter utterly misguided and inappropriate.

Conscious, embodied anger is one of the most powerful phenomena to observe in a person – it’s beautiful, breathtaking and can be extremely erotic. By contrast, fawned forgiveness elicits in others a natural reaction of repulsion. This is because we know inside that the angry person is right, and is possessed of extraordinary power to change and bring healing. With this we instantly identify. The “forgiving” person, on the other hand, seems to invite us to continue to feel shame about our own burning sense of injustice in order to live a quiet but insipid life. This is really just an extension of the social control which has kept our anger buried and allowed manipulation and abuse to continue. The “forgiving” person is therefore on “their” side; the angry person, ours.

Bisexuality

I wrote about this in a previous post, but on the basis of my further reading, thought and self-examination,  I am going to stick my neck out (as it were).

It seems to me that all human beings naturally enjoy a degree of same-sex play. All categorical rejections of it are a reflection of internalized homophobia. Same sex erotic response characterizes all plural sexual situations, masturbation and, in men, the widespread interest in pornography featuring transsexuals. These days, when I encounter males troubling to identify as “100% hetero” it raises, I suspect rightly, a red flag.

This being so, it becomes useless to apply either the term bisexual or the term heterosexual to persons whose primary attraction is to the other sex. It similarly becomes useless to apply the term homosexual in the contrary case. This is because neither what we term homosexuality nor what we term heterosexuality is actually about sexual behaviour or narrow erotic/genital response. These terms in fact mistakenly take sexual behavior for the whole of something of which it is simply a part, that is, human bonding behavior, and with which it is also not exclusively associated.

I would question whether the term “heterosexual”, as employed in common parlance, usefully refers to anything at all, beyond signalling latent (or not so latent) homophobia. Bonding behavior between the sexes is the norm in our species. When something is the norm, does it need a name other than in specialized contexts? We recognize the existence of albinos without a corresponding term for “non-albinos” (unless that was it). Similarly, while there are certainly antonyms to blind, deaf, handicapped etc., these are not usually emphasized ad nauseam in a person’s self-description, unless the context requires it. Neither should gays or anyone else have to accept that their bonding behavior is conflated with their sexual behavior and the two are codetermined. A perfectly reasonable alternative with improved etymological purity is, moreover, available: the statistically dominant tendency could be termed “heterotropic” and the other tendencies “homotropic” and “bitropic”.

In any case I think we owe it to true bisexuals to stop using the same word to apply to their bonding behavior and to the normal sexual behavior of heterotropic adults. We also do not need this term for heterotropic adults, because all it vectors for them in most cases is shame and meaningless identity crisis. If you are heterotropic but you sometimes enjoy elements of same-sex play, you are not bisexual, you are just more at ease with your basic nature than most of your peers.

Sex, pain, and the death instinct, revisited

As I mentioned in a previous post, I have been reading a book by Joachim Bauer entitled Warum ich fuehle, was du fuehlst (“Why I feel what you feel”), which is basically a mixture of science and conjecture about the function of the human mirror neuron system. It turns out that the same neurons fire when we perform an act ourselves and when we see it performed by someone else, and this, it is argued, lies at the basis of our ability to experience empathy and to intuitively read the emotional state and intentions of the other.

A leitmotiv of the book is the idea that social interaction performs an essential role in neurobiological development. Famously, though probably apocryphally, Frederick II is said to have conducted an experiment whereby children were raised without hearing human language; deprived of this stimulus, they are said to have died. Perhaps more believably, controversial experiments on macaque monkeys have shown that, deprived of social contact, they develop psychosis. This conclusion is not new, but it appears we are starting to uncover some of its neurobiological foundation.

Controlled scientific experiments cited by Bauer in the book show that social exclusion can generate pain in the same centers that register physical pain. We have for some time known that the perception of physical pain is not a simple function of external stimulus, but also factors in, and fundamentally, psychological aspects – what that pain means, or is thought or feared to mean, to the perceiver. Now further we know, and this is backed up in a 2005 paper by Naomi Eisenberger and Matthew Liebermann, entitled Why It Hurts to Be Left Out, that purely social factors can induce pain which is similar in all respects to “physiological” pain (indeed, it is physiological pain).

Interjecting a couple of points of my own here: firstly, pain is something we are wired to avoid. Indeed, we avoid it instinctively, even if we are consciously prepared to confront it knowing it has certain benefits (or more accurately, is a by-product of processes which have such benefits). The greater the pain we experience, the more we privilege its avoidance over any rational assessment of the benefits to ourselves of enduring it. Secondly, what is already true for physiogenic pain is true, of course, a fortiori for psychogenic pain (or perhaps I should call it “sociogenic pain”), namely the pain we actually experience is a function of our psychological state at the moment of the stimulus. There are common features, perhaps, but there is no standard human response to life events which modify our social constellation such as bereavement, loss of ones job, retirement and so on. Just as touch, which might otherwise procure pleasure, will feel painful when applied at a point where we have open wounds, so also the same life event will be experienced by some even pleasurably whereas it might have the most excruciating effect on others. In medicine this is called hyperalgesia.

Indeed, this is true to such an extent that it leads to a necessary qualitative distinction in any discussion of psychogenic versus physiogenic pain. Certain life events, such as bereavement, are probably universally painful in at least some degree, and therefore comparable to fractures, burns, stings and so on. In other words they signal to us a real and universal need to bring the healing resources of the body to bear on the wound inflicted. The vast majority of situations and events which cause psychogenic pain, however, are not like this at all – our reaction to them is intensely personal and someone else’s reaction to the same events could be totally different.

As I am in the business of giving personal development suggestions in this blog, and not just describing things, allow me then to say that it is extremely important to make this distinction. There are many things in the world in relation to which vast swathes of the population are in a neurotic state. It is thus statistically common to observe a similar reaction to these things in many people. Nonetheless, this does not make these things natural or inevitable sources of pain. They may even be natural sources of pleasure.

This is likely the case in many instances where many people – men and women – experience sexual jealousy. There are many grounds to suspect that observing ones partner and other people one loves being sexually intimate with others, or to learn about it or hear of it, is in fact naturally pleasurable, and was experienced as such in our Urwelt. Just to cite a few: there is the vicarious experience of pleasure which I mentioned before; the social bonds which it creates to the new sexual partner; the prospect of half-siblings improving the life chances of ones own offspring; the prospect of ones own enhanced sexual gratification as a result; and so on. Perhaps most convincingly, there are people who enjoy it. There are not many who enjoy objective sources of physical pain.

Nonetheless, many people experience this as pain. What to do? It is easy enough to say that one should stick out the pain and eventually it will die down and be replaced by pleasure. However, as any sufferer from chronic pain will tell you, this is not even necessarily true, much less is it a sufficient motivation to endure a potentially long and painful journey to a seemingly uncertain destination.

I do not have a simple answer either, but I think some reflection on what causes this hyperalgesia may point the way. Already when it is understood that the person suffering from jealousy experiences physical pain, it becomes clearer than it might otherwise have been that their reaction to this experience is, to a significant degree, outside of their control. Anger or recriminations in relation to it are pointless. Indeed, worse than pointless – such a reaction invites the sufferer to feel guilty, deny their pain, or submit to the other, refreezing and reinforcing the factors which led to the experience of jealousy in the first place.

Jealousy is felt as alienation – a withdrawal behind the defenses of the ego and a loss of the sense of contact with the world, a sense which was clearly tenuous to begin with. Alienation in childhood becomes self-fulfilling prophecy in adulthood. The cycle can only be broken by showing empathy and connection – not by withdrawing it and leaving yet another victim abandoned carelessly on life’s highway.

And this really brings me back to the essentiality of social contact, of touch and of sexual expression also. It appears that there is nothing in humanity’s basic repertoire of interaction which is merely “nice to have”, which we can ignore or neglect without fear of consequences. The idea of freedom without community – cultivated the world over as a spiritual value – is in fact a nonsense, or at best something which is only possible on the basis of a very strong foundation of community in the past.

Bauer tells familiar stories and some less so. That the passage into retirement is an explanatory variable for mortality rates. How couples seem so often to die in close proximity to each other. But also of how persons condemned for their crimes by the community to expulsion, voluntarily take on themselves the duty to die. The biological stress engendered by social exclusion is a self-destruction program, eerily like (though Bauer does not make the connection), Freud’s posited death instinct (Reich’s response to which I discussed here). And I guess this makes some sense, both because there does, after all, appear to be such an instinct in the animal kingdom* (though this certainly does not mean that Freud’s treatment of it was correct) and because it is something that many character types may intuitively understand – not only masochists.

Persons experiencing jealousy have an injured sense of connection to the world, such that they need to hold on to symbols of that connection and turn particular people (often partners, but also kids) into such symbols. They respond to perceived threats to those symbols – perceived through a magnifying lens of paranoia – with self-destructive behavior, just like those on whom the tribal shaman has pronounced a curse.

All too often, fearful of the intensity of this reaction – which is truly akin to a reaction to a life-threatening situation – and burdened anyway with their own sense of shame and guilt, their partners will apologize, try to reassure, try to salvage the fragile trust which existed, or seemed to, before. It is in the nature of things that this is not possible. This type of connection to the world is too tenuous and artificial to be anything more than a band-aid on a gaping wound. What the jealous partner needs in such moments is empathy, grounding, and connection – not desperate attempts to re-become a shattered symbol, but the shattering of the symbolic and its replacement by the real.

Genies do not go back into bottles. In such moments we can meet as demons to each other, or both decide to meet as humans. Almost everything in life that generates emotional pain has great potential for healing, but it is a potential which almost always goes unexploited because the insecurities are not just on one side, but on both. When we decide to meet as vulnerable, hurting beings it may just be that we finally realize we are not, and cannot be, alone.

Notes

* Illustrated at cellular level by the process of apoptosis, and also observed in many cases of post-traumatic stress disorder where the underlying monotrauma results from a direct human agent.

Passion

I am just back from a weekend at the Humaniversity. It’s always a pleasure to go there, for the feeling of community and the sense of making a difference in the world, one life at a time*.

The theme was “passion” and we explored it from different angles, all of which was very worthwhile, but in hindsight I realize that, surprisingly, the theme of sexual passion was not evoked. Were we just unwilling to go there? And what is the relationship between sexual passion and passion for life and its pursuits and pleasures more generally?

I definitely suspect that (unsurprisingly) there was a good deal of sublimation going on. And in art as in life. The reluctance or oubli of even a relatively enlightened public to talk about sexual passion mirrors what we do when we throw all our energies into projects of manifold kind, but neglect our inner fire.

And believe me, this is a problem. Because it is that inner fire we are asking to fuel our projects. But only, just so. Only to the extent we and society find convenient. We like a little fire in our fireplace, but we are afraid of the big fire that consumes all.

Sexual passion is about surrender. Surrender to the moment, to our partner, to our own body; surrender to any consequences, beyond our fears. And although many cannot genuinely surrender to it, even occasionally, sexual passion is our birthright.

It is popularly supposed, including in esteemed circles, that only unhappy people can be geniuses, creative artists, world leaders in different fields…. and this is a troubling problem, because we can all think of plenty of examples that seem to confirm it. We can also think of examples of people who seem to be happy, but because of this are much less driven to change things in their environment, much less active on the public stage. Many of us think that, as Cicero suspected, only the thirst for power, status or personal gain motivates a position in public life. With rare exceptions, happy people attend only to problems on the margin of society, mitigate its discontents, but do not challenge the embedded violence at its core. We are also accepting of “negative” personality traits in our leaders – at least up to a certain point. We imagine only a psychopath can truly lead us, or want to. So much for the philosopher-king.

Sexual passion, frequently, leaves us feeling happy, even beatific, but if it drives us to anything at all, then it is to only one thing: to possess (impossibly) the object of that passion, to place it beyond the fear of loss, to tame it in order to ensure its continued availability. Lovers have gone to legendary lengths to ensnare the object of their love. They have sometimes abdicated power, status and security to do so. Only very rarely have they have gone on, as a result thereof, based upon this passion, to lead the world.

What is the answer to this apparent dilemma? Well, we should first note, I think, that if sexual passion were such a universal narcotic, wouldn’t it be more tolerated, even embraced, by established power structures? That exactly the opposite is true should be a clue. If male sexual drives (but not true passion) are indeed tolerated, the real heart of passion in the body of the woman is not. We have tried since time immemorial to stamp it out, and we continue today. Is it only because of the threat to family structures and property, or do we also have an inkling of a deeper threat, a threat not only specific, to particular families and property, but general, to the whole capitalist, patriarchal worldview and the power structures based upon it?

Happiness, indubitably, placates us, reconciles us to the circumstances of our life, dulls the need for change. Happy people are not usually behind those social forces clamoring for change. These are rather angry people – with every right, of course, to be angry.

This, I believe, is true however only up to a point. The appearance of truth tells us in reality only something about the rarety of the state of bliss we nonetheless imagine to form part of our experience. If experienced at all, it is fleeting only, sensed – and immediately retreated from. No one is surrendering to it. We are all ruled by fear.

Happiness is a state we need to cultivate and get used to. If we experience it only intermittently, we are always caught in a desperate search for more. Once we fully surrender to our natural passion, however, when we learn, as the Vigyan Bhairav tantra exhorts, to stay with the fire and avoid the embers, we are happy, but we are also charged. The experience of sexual passion then ignites us to an understanding of the natural state of the world, and the extent to which we have strayed from it. Then passion becomes truly omnipresent, but only with unsublimated goals. It incites us to bring justice, beauty and joy into the world. To give voice to anger, perhaps, but not to discontent. Rather, to be the living embodiment of another way of being. Sexual release may dull us temporarily, but sexual satisfaction is only a myth. The experience of ecstasy leads us invariably to compassion, and empowers us for change.

Note:
* Please note that, while I have a lot of respect for the therapists and their work, this should not be read as a blanket endorsement. Discover your needs and find what works for you.