Intimacy (A Critical Inquiry Book) [1 ed.] 0226384438, 9780226384436

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UREN BERLANT

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INTIMACY

Intimacy Edited by Lauren Berlant

THE

UNIVERSITY CHICAGO PRESS

Chicago ezLondon

OF

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

04 03 02 01 00

54321

© 2000 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2000 Printed in the United States of America

“A Dialogue on Love” is © 1998 by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Intimacy / edited by Lauren Berlant. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-226-38441-1—ISBN 0-226-38443-8 (pbk.)

1. Intimacy (Psychology) I. Berlant, Lauren Gail, 1957BF575.15 157 2000 302—dc21

99-089754

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984

Contents

Lauren Berlant

Intimacy: A Special Issue

Adultery

Laura Kipnis

Candace Vogler

48

Mary Poovey

86

Dagmar Herzog

Sex and Talk in America “Pleasure, Sex, and Politics

Belong Together”: PostHolocaust Memory and the Sexual Revolution in West Germany Steven Feld

165

“They Repeatedly Lick Their

Own Things” Michael Hanchard

193

Jody

Joel Snyder and

218

Coupling

Svetlana Boym

226

On Diasporic Intimacy: Ilya Kabakov’s Installations and Immigrant Homes

Elizabeth A. Povinelli

203

The State of Shame: Australian Multiculturalism and the Crisis of

Laura Letinsky

Indigenous Citizenship Deborah R. Grayson

289

Mediating Intimacy: Black Mothers and the Law

Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

alee

Sex in Public

Faro.| A Dialogue on Love

Annamarie Jagose

O02

First Wife, Second Wife: Sexual Perversion and the Problem of Precedence in Rebecca

Eli Zaretsky

378

Charisma or Rationalization? Domesticity and Psychoanalysis in

the U.S. in the 1950s Kathleen Stewart

405

Sull Life

CRITICAL RESPONSES

421

John Frow and Meaghan Morris

426

Elizabeth A. Povinelli

433

Letters to the Editor of Harper’s Magazine in response to Laura Kipnis

On the cover:

Worker

434

Laura Kipnis

435

Maureen McLane

443

Index

installing

hand-painted

billboard

movie, Seoul. From Allan Sekula, Fish Story, 1995.

for American

Intimacy: A Special Issue

Lauren Berlant

“T didn’t think it would turn out this way” is the secret epitaph of intimacy. To intimate is to communicate with the sparest of signs and gestures, and at its root intimacy has the quality of eloquence and brevity. But intimacy also involves an aspiration for a narrative about something shared, a story about both oneself and others that will turn out in a particular way. Usually, this story is set within zones of familiarity and comfort: friendship, the couple, and the family form, animated by expressive and emancipating kinds of love. Yet the inwardness of the intimate is met by a corresponding publicness. People consent to trust their desire for “a life” to institutions of intimacy; and it is hoped that the relations formed within those frames will turn out beautifully, lasting over the long duration, perhaps across generations. This view of “a life” that unfolds intact within the intimate sphere represses, of course, another fact about it: the unavoidable troubles, the

distractions and disruptions that make things turn out in unpredicted scenarios. Romance and friendship inevitably meet the instabilities of sexuality, money, expectation, and exhaustion, producing, at the extreme,

moral dramas of estrangement and betrayal, along with terrible spectacles of neglect and violence even where desire, perhaps, endures. Since the early twentieth century these strong ambivalences within the intimate sphere have been recorded by proliferating forms of therapeutic publicity. At present, in the U.S., therapy saturates the scene of intimacy, from psychoanalysis and twelve-step groups to girl talk, talk shows, and other witnessing genres. Jurisprudence has also taken on a therapeutic function in this domain, notably as it radically recasts interpretations of responsibility in cases of marital and child abuse. But it is sexual harassment that remains 1

y

Lauren Berlant

the most controversial of these changes. The emergence of sexual harassment

law as a remedy

for the unwanted

sexualization

of institutional

spaces starkly marks the amnesia around which desire’s optimism and its ruthlessness converge. Again and again, we see how hard it is to adjudicate the norms of a public world when it is also an intimate one, especially where the mixed-up instrumental and affective relations of collegiality are concerned. These relations between desire and therapy, which have become internal to the modern, mass-mediated sense of intimacy, tell us something else about it: intimacy builds worlds; it creates spaces and usurps places meant for other kinds of relation. Its potential failure to stabilize closeness always haunts its persistent activity, making the very attachments deemed to buttress “a life” seem in a state of constant if latent vulnerability. Even from this small cluster of examples and scenes it becomes clear that virtually no one knows how to do intimacy; that everyone feels expert

about it (at least about other people’s disasters); and that mass fascination with the aggression, incoherence, vulnerability, and ambivalence at the scene of desire somehow escalates the demand for the traditional promise of intimate happiness to be fulfilled in everyone’s everyday life.

The intensities of these multiple domains indeed designate intimacy as a special issue. This book, which originated as a special issue of Critical Inquiry, takes on as a problem how to articulate the ways the utopian, optimism-sustaining versions of intimacy meet the normative

practices,

fantasies, institutions, and ideologies that organize people’s worlds. The essays gathered here, whose cases traverse many disciplines and domains, vary widely in the critical and rhetorical registers in which they represent the continuities and discontinuities within the intimate field, looking at their particular impacts on the categorization of experience and subjectivity. They seek to understand the pedagogies that encourage people to identify having a life with having an intimate life. They track the processes by which intimate lives absorb and repel the rhetorics, laws, ethics,

and ideologies of the hegemonic public sphere, but also personalize the effects of the public sphere and reproduce a fantasy that private life is the real in contrast to collective life: the surreal, the elsewhere, the fallen, the

irrelevant. How can we think about the ways attachments make people public, producing transpersonal identities and subjectivities, when those attachments come from within spaces as varied as those of domestic inti-

Lauren Berlant, a coeditor of Critical Inquiry, teaches English at the University of Chicago. She is the author of The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (1997) and The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life (1991).

Intimacy: A Special Issue

2

macy, state policy, and mass-mediated experiences of intensely disruptive crises? And what have these formative encounters to do with the effects of other, less institutionalized events, which might take place on the street, on the phone, in fantasy, at work, but rarely register as anything but residue? Intimacy names the enigma of this range of attachments, and more; and it poses a question of scale that links the instability of individual lives to the trajectories of the collective. A related aim of this reframing of intimacy is thus to engage and disable a prevalent U.S. discourse on the proper relation between public and private, spaces traditionally associated with the gendered division of labor. These categories are considered by many scholars to be archaic formations, legacies of a Victorian fantasy that the world can be divided into a controllable space (the private-affective) and an uncontrollable one (the public-instrumental). Fantasy, however, may underdescribe the continuing attraction of the attachment to this division because the discourse world described by the public and the private has, historically, organized and justified other legally and conventionally based forms of social division (male and female, work and family, colonizer and colonized, friend and lover, hetero and homo, “unmarked” personhood versus racial-, eth-

nic-, and class-marked identities). A simple boundary can reverberate and make the world intelligible; the taken-for-grantedness of spatial taxonomies like public and private makes this cluster of taxonomic associations into facts within ordinary subjectivity as well. This chain of disassociations provides one way of conceiving why so many institutions not usually associated with feeling can be read as institutions of intimacy. There is a history to the advent of intimacy as a public mode of identification and self-development, to which I can allude only briefly here. Jiirgen Habermas has argued that the bourgeois idea of a public sphere relied on the emergence of amode ofcritical public discourse that formulated and represented a public’s interests within civil society against the state.! The development of critical publicness depended on the expansion of class-mixed semiformal institutions like the salon and the café, circulating print media, and industrial capitalism; the notion of the dem-

ocratic public sphere thus made collective intimacy a public and social ideal, one of fundamental political interest. Without it the public’s role as critic could not be established. Persons were to be prepared for their critical social function in what Habermas calls the intimate spheres of domesticity, where they would learn (say, from novels and newspapers) to experience their internal lives theatrically, as though oriented toward an audience. This is to say that

liberal society was founded on the migration of intimacy expectations 1. See Jiirgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass., 1989).

4

Lauren Berlant

between the public and the domestic. But if the emergence and expansion of institutions that generated an intimacy in which people participated actively were seen to be crucial to the democratic polity, institutions that produced collective experience, like cinema and other entertainment forms, came to mix the critical demands of democratic culture

with the desire for entertainment taken for pleasure. Since the nonrational and noninstitutionally indexed aspects of the intimate had been (theoretically) banished from legitimate democratic publicness, pleasureknowledge creates problems for the notional rationality with which collective critical consciousness is supposed to proceed. This development, along with the expansion of minoritized publics that resist or are denied universalist collective intimacy expectations, has much complicated the possibility of (and even the ethics of the desire for) a general masscritical public sphere deemed to be culturally and politically intimate with itself.” For intimacy refers to more than that which takes place within the purview of institutions, the state, and an ideal of publicness. What if we

saw it emerge from much more mobile processes of attachment? While the fantasies associated with intimacy usually end up occupying the space of convention, in practice the drive toward it is a kind of wild thing that is not necessarily organized that way, or any way.® It can be portable, unat-

tached to a concrete space: a drive that creates spaces around it through practices. The kinds of connections that impact on people, and on which they depend for living (if not “a life”), do not always respect the predictable forms:

nations and citizens, churches

and the faithful, workers

at

work, writers and readers, memorizers of songs, people who walk dogs or swim at the same time each day, fetishists and their objects, teachers and students, serial lovers, sports lovers, listeners to voices who explain

things manageably (on the radio, at conferences, on television screens, on line, in therapy), fans and celebrities—I (or you) could go on.* These spaces are produced relationally; people and/in institutions can return 2. See Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, trans. Peter Labanyl, Jamie Daniel, and Assenka

Oksiloff (Minneapolis, 1993). See also Miriam Hansen, forward to Negt and Kluge, Public

Sphere and Experience, pp. ix-xli and Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, Mass., 1991). For a powerful meditation on the contradiction between the unconscious drive toward omnipotence and the project of democracy, see Joel Whitebook,

Perversion and Utopia: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory (Cambridge, Mass., 1995). 3. Foucault’s work on recognizing the multiplicity of relations engendered at every moment by sexuality has been central to this project. See, for example, Michel Foucault, “Friendship as a Way of Life” and “Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity,” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York, 1997), pp. 135-40, 163-73.

4. Many of these thoughts about the circulation of intimacy through stories and encounters that have impact emerged in conversations with Katie Stewart. See Kathleen Stewart, A Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an “Other” America (Princeton, N.J., 1996).

Intimacy: A Special Issue

5

repeatedly to them and produce something, though frequently not history in its ordinary, memorable, or valorized sense, and not always “something” of positive value.° Intimacy seen in this spreading way does generate an aesthetic, an aesthetic of attachment, but no inevitable forms or feelings are attached to it.° This is where normative ideologies come in, when certain “expressive” relations are promoted across public and private domains—love, community, patriotism—while other relations, motivated, say, by the “appetites,” are discredited or simply neglected. Contradictory desires mark the intimacy of daily life: people want to be both overwhelmed and omnipotent, caring and aggressive, known and incognito. These polar energies get played out in the intimate zones of everyday life and can be recognized in psychoanalysis, yet mainly they are seen not as intimacy but as a danger to it. Likewise, desires for intimacy that bypass the couple or the life narrative it generates have no alternative plots, let alone few laws and stable spaces of culture in which to clarify and to cultivate them. What happens to the energy of attachment when it has no designated place?’ To the glances, gestures, encounters, collaborations, or fantasies that have no canon? As with minor literatures, minor intimacies have

been forced to develop aesthetics of the extreme to push these spaces into being by way of small and grand gestures;* the wish for normalcy everywhere heard these days, voiced by minoritized subjects, often expresses a wish not to have to push so hard in order to have “a life.” To live as if threatening contexts are merely elsewhere might well neutralize the ghostly image of one’s own social negativity; and the constant energy of public self-protectiveness can be sublimated into personal relations of 5. On the transformational possibilities of the something that holds a place open for unforeseen changes, see Lauren Berlant, “’68, or Something,” Critical Inquiry 21 (Fall 1994): 124-55. For more on some official and popular contexts of contemporary U.S. intimacy politics, see Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham,

N.C., 1997) and “Feminism

and the Institutions of Intumacy,” in The Politics of

Research, ed. E. Ann Kaplan and George Levine (New Brunswick, N.J., 1997), pp. 143-61. 6. I have learned to think about the antiformalist tendencies of the intimate from reading Jacqueline Rose, whose work since Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London, 1986) has explored the uneven circulation of desire through language in many domains—cinema, sexuality, psychoanalysis, literature, family, and nations. She shows how the linguistic instability in which fantasy is couched leads to an inevitable failure to stabilize desire in identity, a countervailing desire by dominating structures to disavow or demonize that instability, and, nonetheless, the ongoing career of desire that pushes apart the very frames that organize it. See especially Rose, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (Cambridge, Mass., 1991) and States of Fantasy (New York, 1996). 7. For an elaborate answer to this question, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “A Poem Is Being Written,” Tendencies (Durham, 1993), pp. 177-214.

8. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “What Is a Minor Literature?” trans. Dana Polan, in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, ed. Russell Ferguson et al. (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), pp. 59-69. See also Berlant, “68, or Something.”

6

Lauren Berlant

passion, care, and good intention.® There are good reasons for this aspiration. Domestic privacy can feel like a controllable space, a world of potential unconflictedness (even for five minutes a day): a world built for you. It may seem of a manageable scale and pacing; at best, it makes visible the effects of one’s agency, consciousness, and intention. This leads

to another reason the couple form and its spinoffs so effectively siphon off critical thought about the personal and the political: to refuse the maturational narrative of “a life” would require a confrontation with another idea, that social forces and problems of living that seem not about the private “you” are, nonetheless, central to the shape of your story.'°

I learned to think about these questions in the contexts of feminist/ queer pedagogy; and how many times have I asked my own students to

explain why, when there are so many people, only one plot counts as “life” (first comes love, then . . . )? Those who dont or can't find their way

in that story—the queers, the single, the something else—can become so easily unimaginable, even often to themselves. Yet it is hard not to see lying about everywhere the detritus and the amputations that come from attempts to fit into the fold; meanwhile, a lot of world-building energy

atrophies. Rethinking intimacy calls out not only for redescription but for transformative analyses of the rhetorical and material conditions that enable hegemonic fantasies to thrive in the minds and on the bodies of subjects while, at the same time, attachments are developing that might

redirect the different routes taken by history and biography. To rethink intimacy is to appraise how we have been and how we live and how we might imagine lives that make more sense than the ones so many are living. For intimacy only rarely makes sense of things. People talk about the desire for it and the fear of it, but is the “it” simply commitment? In its instantiation as desire, it destabilizes the very things that institutions of intimacy are created to stabilize; and people are constantly surprised about this. This basic disavowal is supported by the centrality of intimation to intimacy. Conventionally, in its expression through language, intimacy relies heavily on the shifting registers of unspoken ambivalence. It is interfered with by metadiscourse (relationship talk) and prefers the calm of internal pressure, the taken-for-grantedness of the feeling that there would be a flowing reiteration where the intimate is. Thus when friends or lovers want to talk about “the relationship”; when citizens feel

that the nation’s consented-to qualities are shifting away; when newsread9. For a strong reading of the ways “the extimate” (the rejected, projected out but never fully lost objects of self-identity) can take on narrative shape and intensity, see Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), pp. 117-39. 10. For a mode of social theory that rhetorically and analytically links the possibility of concrete justice to a radical understanding of the ways people are politically (dis)possessed by stories, see Patricia J. Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor (Cambridge, Mass., 1991).

Intimacy: A Special Issue

7

ers or hosts of television shows bow out of their agreement to recast the world in comforting ways; when people of apparently different races and classes find themselves in slow, crowded elevators; or when students and

analysands feel suddenly mistrustful of the contexts into which they have entered in order to change, but not traumatically, intimacy reveals itself to be a relation associated with tacit fantasies, tacit rules, and tacit obligations to remain unproblematic. We notice it when something about it takes on a charge, so that the intimacy becomes something else, an “issue”—something that requires analytic eloquence. It becomes harder to see the presumption or even the desire for stable tacitness itself as a problem that reproduces panic in the intimate field. These crises are not just personal. When states, populations, or persons

sense

that their definition

of the real is under

threat; when

the

normative relays between personal and collective ethics become frayed and exposed; and when traditional sites of pleasure and profit seem to get “taken away” by the political actions of subordinated groups, a sense of anxiety will be pervasively felt about how to determine responsibility for the disruption of hegemonic comfort. This unease unsettles social and political relations between, within, and among many people, nations, and populations, especially formerly sovereign ones. Various kinds of hate crime, bitterness, and “comedic” satire frequently ensue.

In particular, across the globe challenges to the public/private taxonomy

from feminist, antihomophobic,

antiracist, and antipoverty move-

ments have been experienced as an irruption of the most sacred and rational forms of intimate intelligibility, a cancelling out of individual and collective destinies, an impediment to narrativity and the future itself. What kinds of (collective, personal) authority, expertise, entailment, and

memory can be supposed, and what kind of (collective, personal) future can be imagined if, for example, sexuality is no longer bound to its narrative, does not lead to stabilizing something, something institutional (like patriarchal families or other kinds of reproduction that prop up the future of persons and nations); if citizens and workers are no longer created by families and the institutions of loco parentis, namely, schools and religions; if (because of AIDS, globally high mortality rates among national minorities, environmental toxins, virulent transnational exploitation, on-

going military and starvation genocides, and other ongoing sources of destruction) a generation is no longer defined by procreational chronology, but marked by trauma and death? The immediacy of trauma is always sensual, but it is as likely to be a mass-mediated event, an event of

hearsay and post facto witnessing, as it is to be a direct blow to the body; and we can see from trauma’s current prevalence as an occasion for testimony how shocking it is when an intimate relation is animated by sheer devastation. Intimacy was supposed to be about optimism, remember? But it is also formed around threats to the image of the world it seeks to sustain.

8

Lauren Berlant

This collection of essays seeks to further ongoing conversations in the humanities and humanistic social sciences about the modes of attachment that make persons public and collective and that make collective scenes intimate spaces. The essays to follow begin to catalog some of intimacy’s norms, forms, and crimes: how public institutions use issues of

intimate life to normalize particular forms of knowledge and practice and to create compliant subjects (Poovey, Grayson, Povinelli, Warner and Berlant); how discourses of sexual suffering or trauma have so magnetized crises in a whole set of related fields that stories of the intimate have become inseparable from, for example, stories about citizenship, capitalism, aesthetic forms, political violence, and the writing of history (Hanchard, Boym, Zaretsky, Herzog, Kipnis, Poovey, Jagose, Vogler, Povinelli, Stewart, Warner and Berlant); how people become surprised by the ways ordi-

nary

exchanges

become

intensified

performances

of mutuality

and

grounded by the centrality of ritualized language for intimacy (Sedgwick, Feld, Vogler, Kipnis); how memory works to create portable scenes that remind one of past intimacies and perform their strange reappearance in unusual spaces (Boym, Herzog, Povinelli, Sedgwick, Feld) and usual

ones (Stewart, Snyder and Letinsky).

.

The work of this “special issue” is not finished, not by a long shot.

The vicissitudes of editing and deadlines leave me longing for more cases, more narratives, more attempts to bring to expression the ways attachments make worlds and world-changing fantasies, bribe people to live what should be unlivable relations of domination and violence, and so on. There is insufficient analysis of prisons, the academy, and other relatively closed institutional worlds; nor is there work on television, video, cyberspace, or less globalized media, like stamps or zines. There is a tendency

toward presentness and normativity that future work needs to obviate. But I should stop here. Introductions are captions to the image a text makes, and like Joel Snyder, who curated Laura Letinsky’s photos but

wanted to caption them only minimally, I wanted to chart the project for you without overinterpreting the work that follows. In any case, let me

thank my hard-working authors and producers here; the editors of Critical Inquiry who reviewed many essays with me; the friends, authors, and colleagues who read the introduction (Bill Brown, Laura Kipnis, Beth Povinelli, Roger Rouse, Katie Stewart, Candace Vogler, Michael Warner, Lisa Wedeen); and Jay Williams, Aeron Hunt, Jennifer Peterson, Zarena Aslami, Neda Ulaby, Robert Huddleston, and Marisa O’Connor, who did the hard editorial work of actually putting the issue together. Thanks also to Allan Sekula for permission to use his image on the cover. Finally,

should any readers be interested in submitting to CI work related to this intimacy project, they should flag it as such. Then, perhaps, we can look

forward to clusters of intimacy in future issues.

Adultery

Laura Kipnis

A spectre is haunting the nation—the spectre of adultery.

Lying Down on the Job “Would you like to dance?” You’ve mustered all the studied casualness you can, momentarily convincing yourself (self-deception being the sine qua non of moments such as these) that your heart is as pure as the gold of your wedding band, your virtue as thick as your mortgage payment booklet. The rest of the crowd is flailing around wildly with such graceless pseudoabandon that it gives the phrase “repressive desublimation” a whole new meaning.' (What’s that joke about the academic body being a badly designed life-support system for an overweening cerebral cortex?) Your torpid married body now pressed nervously against this person who’s been casting winsome glances in your direction all night, a muffled but familiar feeling seems to be stirring deep within you, a distant rumbling getting louder and louder, like a herd of elephants massing on the bushveld—oh

God, it’s your libido, once a noted freedom fighter, now a

My gratitude to Lauren Berlant for sage editorship and many insights (plus collaboration and hilarity), and to Michael Bérubé, who very kindly read and conferred over successive drafts of this essay. Thanks also to Bill Brown, Nancy Fraser, and Eli Zaretsky for comments and discussion, and to Aeron Hunt for copyediting with panache. 1. The term repressive desublimation, meaning sexual liberation in the service of social control, is Herbert Marcuse’s. See Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideol-

ogy ofAdvanced Industrial Society (Boston, 1964), pp. 72-78. See also Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston, 1955), pp. 197-221. This essay leans heavily on Marcuse’s general critique of social domination and the reduction of life to work.

My,

10

Laura Kipnis

sorry, shriveled thing, from sixties outlaw to nineties upstanding citizen, Janis Joplin to Tipper Gore in just a few short decades; successfully sublimated

into

career

and

family

life,

pledged

to

your

marriage

as community property, still summoned occasionally to perform those increasingly predictable conjugal interchanges, but with—let’s face it— somewhat flagging ardor, a gradually drooping interest. (When did sex

get so boring? When did it turn into this thing you’re supposed to “work at”? Embarrassing isn’t it, how long you can go without it if you don't remember to have it, and how much more inviting a good night’s sleep can seem compared to those overrehearsed acts. Even though it used to be pretty good—if memory serves—before there was all that sarcasm. Or disappointment. Or children. Or history.) So here you are, bopping to the beat (you hope), awash in an exotic sensation. Is it enjoyment? A long time since someone looked at you with that kind of interest, isn’t it? Various bodily and mental parts are stirred to attention by this close encounter with a body not your spouse’s, who’s

conveniently out of town, or didn’t feel like coming, or maybe you're conveniently out of town and... Quash that thought, quickly. That is, if you can call what’s going

through your mind thinking.

'

Will all the adulterers in the room please stand up? This means all you cheating wives and philandering husbands, past, present, and future. While adultery’s paradigmatic form requires the context of a statesanctioned marriage, any long-term public couple arrangement based on the assumption of sexual fidelity will do for our purposes: gay or straight, anywhere the commitment to monogamy reigns, adultery will provide its structural transgression, and you can commit it with any sex or gender your psyche can manage to organize its desire around (which may not always be the same one that shapes your public commitments).? Those who have fantasized about it a lot, please rise also. So may those who have ever played supporting roles in the adultery melodrama: “other man”; “other woman”; suspicious spouse or marital detective (“T called your office at 3 and they said you'd left!”); or, least fun of all, the miserable cuckold or cuckoldess. Which, of course, you may be without—at least consciously— 2. The point that adultery is a structural transgression of marriage is made by Tony Tanner in Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression (Baltimore, 1979), pp. 3-11.

Laura Kipnis teaches in the department of radio, television, and film at Northwestern University. She is the author of Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America (1996) and Ecstasy Unlimited: On Sex, Capital, Gender, and Aesthetics (1993).

Adultery

11

knowing you are. Feel free to take a second to mull this over, or just to make a quick call home: “Hi hon, just checking in!” Those in happy marriages can leave now: this essay is not for you, for whom

marriage is a site of optimism,

not anesthesia;

intensity, not

resignation. No one here means to impugn, not for a second, the delights of marital fidelity, the rewards of long-term intimacies. But before you rush the exits, a point of clarification: a happy marriage would mean having—and wanting to have—sex with your spouse on something more than a quarterly basis. It would mean inhabiting a structure of feeling in which monogamy wasn’t giving something up (your “freedom,” in the vernacular), because such cost-benefit calculations just don’t compute. It would require a domestic sphere in which monogamy wasn't proactively secured

through

routine

interrogations

(“Who

was

that on the phone,

dear?”), surveillance (“Do you think I didn’t notice how much time you spent talkmg to X at the reception?”), or impromptu search and seizure. A “happy” state of monogamy would be defined as a state you don't have to work at maintaining. Yes, we all know that Good Marriages Take Work. But, then, work takes work, too. Wage labor, intimacy labor—are you ever not on the

clock? If you’re working at monogamy, you've already entered a system of exchange: an economy of intimacy governed—as such economies are—by scarcity, threat, and internalized prohibitions; secured ideologically—as such economies are—by incessant assurances that there are no viable alternatives. When monogamy becomes work, when desire is organized contractually, with accounts kept and fidelity extracted like labor from employees, with marriage a domestic factory policed by means of rigid shop-floor discipline designed to keep the wives and husbands of the world choke-chained to the reproduction machinery—this is a somewhat different state of affairs than Happy Marriage. It requires a different terminology. This mode of intimacy organization we will designate—with a nostalgic tip of the hat to secular liberation theologian Herbert Marcuse, from whom we inherit the concept of “surplusrepression” —surplus monogamy.°

Maybe it wasn’t a party; it was a conference, an airplane, your health club—or, for those who like living on the edge, office hours. ‘The venue doesn’t matter; what does is finding yourself so voluptuously hurtled into a state of possibility, a might-be-the-start-of-something kind of moment. You felt transformed: suddenly so charming, so attractive, awakened from emotional deadness, and dumbstruck with all the stabbing desire 3. Marcuse distinguishes “surplus-repression” from “basic repression,” that being “the ‘modifications’ of the instincts necessary for the perpetuation of the human race in civilization” (Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, p. 35).

12

Laura Kipnis

you thought you’d long outgrown. Then there was that first nervous phone call, coffee or a drink, and that incredible

marathon

conversa-

tion—it’s been so long since someone really listened to you like that. And laughed at your jokes, and looked wistfully into your eyes. And fascinated you. So long since you fascinated yourself. When

you touch, “acciden-

tally,’ an ache of longing lodges itself in mind and groin, replacing an emptiness you hadn't quite acknowledged was there (or had become accustomed to self-medicating with all the usual palliatives). Somehow things quickly get a little more serious than you’d anticipated, which you secretly (all right, desperately) wanted, and now emotions are involved, vulnerabilities are involved—emotions you didn’t intend on having, vulnerability that thrills you to the core, and you shouldn't be feeling any of this, but you’re also weirdly . . . is it elated?

Hard on the heels of that elation is a cold fusion of numbing anxiety and gnawing guilt. You seem to be sweating constantly, an unpleasant, clammy sweat. And, Christ, is that a cold sore? Your stomach’s going haywire; your conscience feels like an inflamed appendix, paining you, about

to burst open with bile and blame. Are you really the kind of person who does this sort of thing? It’s all quite proleptic, this self-punishment, because you haven't really “done anything” yet, but you hate yourself any-

way. You decide to talk it out with the new love object, make the graceful exit. “I just can’t,” you explain mournfully, while realizing that, actually,

you can. No reliable statistics are available on the average time lapse between

the utterance

“I just can't” and the commencement

of foreplay,

but psycholinguists should consider investigating the phrase’s peculiar aphrodisiacal power. And, anyway, guilt is good homeopathic medicine:

it reassures you that you’re really not a bad person. A bad person wouldn't be feeling guilty. So here you are, poised on the threshold ofa major commandment

infraction, about to be inducted into the secret underground guild of marital saboteurs, clogging up the social machinery with their errant desires. You have no clue what you’re doing. All your theory, all your degrees wont help you here. Consider what follows a handbook, if you like. Or a manifesto—even though this may not yet be the time for adulterers to openly and in the face of the world publish their views, or unite to throw off their chains, to paraphrase a classic of the genre. Or just a footnote to the literature of workplace radicalism.

“People Will Get Hurt,” or Keywords of Adultery IdioticIknow, but can't stop thinking about you. (My distraction has not gone unnoticed.) Just a quick email, horribly late already but wanted this to be waitmg, for you when you wake up. Hoping like crazy I can get away later as promised...

Adultery

15

This essay, as should be clear to adultery cognoscenti, is not about

the one-night stand: not about your transient conference sex, halfremembered drunken fumblings, or any of the other casual opportunities for bodies to collide in relatively impersonal ways available in the American late-capitalist landscapes of desire, simultaneously hypersexualized and puritanical. Statistics on the percentage of the married who have strayed at least once vary from 20 to 70 percent; apparently taking an occasional walk on the wild side while still wholeheartedly pledged to monogamous marriage isn’t necessarily an earthshaking contradiction.‘ Many of us manage to summon merciful self-explanations (“Shouldn't drink on an empty stomach”) as required, or have learned over the years to deploy the strategic exception (“Out of town doesn’t count”; “Oral sex doesn’t count”). This essay though, is not about “arrangements” with either self

or spouse, or open marriages, or instances when adultery is no big thing. This essay, rather, is about the affair: exchanges of intimacy, reawakened passion, confession, and idealization—along with books, childhood stories, marital complaints, and self—often requiring agonized consultation with close friends, because one or both parties are married or com-

mitted to long-term monogamy with someone else; all this merging and ardor taking place in nervous, hard-won secrecy and turning your world upside down. This is about finding yourself in the interesting circumstance of having elected to live a life from which you now plot intricate and meticulous escapes,

a Houdini of the home front, with domesticity a

custom-designed straitjacket whose secret combination is and undetectable excuses you concoct to explain your sences. When defenses are down, this turn of events may fundamental questions about what sort of affective world inhabit

and

what

fulfillments

you’re entitled

the ingenious mounting abactually raise you aspire to

to. (Alternatively,

forego

hard questions and just up the Prozac prescription, which will probably take care of that resurgent libido problem, too.) This essay is also about the public face of adultery in America at this moment in history, when 4. Sexual self-reporting is notoriously unreliable; the statistics on adultery are simply all over the place. Kinsey’s reports famously pegged male adultery at 50 percent in 1948 and female adultery at 26 percent in 1953. The numbers currently in common usage, based on a 1994 survey by the National Opinion Research Center, are quite low by comparison (21 percent for men, 11 percent for women), but suspicion has been cast on the method for arriving at these figures and the data collection method itself (the interviewers were predominantly white, middle-aged women, for example). One problem is that men seem to overreport and women to underreport sexual activity. In the raw numbers gathered for this survey, apparently 64 percent of male sexual contacts can’t be accounted

for—or, rather,

they could if in a pool of thirty-five hundred responses, ten different women each had two thousand partners they didn’t report. Researchers thus routinely “adjust” their data by eliminating the high-end male responses, even though it seems unclear why the assumption would be that men misreport upward more than women downward. See David L. Wheeler, “Explaining the Discrepancies in Sex Surveys,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 27 Oct. 1993, p. A9. The relation of any of this data to actual practices seems problematic, to say the least.

14

Laura Kipnis

adultery has become the favored metonym for all broken promises, intimate and national, a transparent sign for tawdriness and bad behavior.

It’s about adultery as a cover story. (“In outrage than it did a few decades ago.”)’ puts things at risk: from the organization fabric of the nation. To define our terms: the language of work will stand in as the modal feeling

the ’90s, infidelity sparks more It’s about the fear that adultery of daily life to the very moral

work and the condition of overof the discontented marriage.

After all, the demand for fidelity beyond the duration of desire feels like work—or work as currently constituted: routinized, unfulfilling, dead-

ened. The workplace vocabulary (and the language of its critique) at least offers an idiom with which to reshape adultery from the object of a predictable moral/ethical response into—we hope—a more open and difficult question. Perhaps in the analogy of workplace protest we may find an idiom, like communism

as theorized by Marx

and Engels, through

which to think about adultery as a form of social articulation, a way of organizing grievances about existing conditions into a collectively imagined form, and one which offers a vehicle for optimism about other, bet-

ter possibilities.® At least it leaves behind the privatizing languages of psychology and neurosis, or ethics, or autobiography, as well as the pseudo-objectivity of sociology—all those conventional idioms typically employed to wrestle this seamy object into rectitude. Yes, of course adulterers behave badly; deception rules this land. Not

knowing what you’re doing risks bad faith and an invariable presentism, with sodden emotional disasters eventually strewn behind. Note, though,

the phraseology of the charges typically leveled against the adulterer: “immaturity” (failure to demonstrate the requisite degree of civilized repression); “selfishness” (failure to work for the collective good—of course, a somewhat selectively imposed requirement); “boorishness” (failure to

achieve proper class behavior). Or the extra fillip of moral trumping: “People will get hurt!” True, typically, in outbursts of mass

dissatisfaction—strikes,

rebel-

lions, uprisings—people do, at times, get hurt. Beware of sharp rocks and flying debris. But if adultery summons the shaming language of bad citizenship, this also indicates the extent to which marriage is meant to function as a boot camp for citizenship instruction, a training ground for resignation to the a priori. Anything short of a full salute to existing conditions will be named

bad ethics. Ambivalence,

universal though it

may be, is typically regarded as the ur-form of bad marital citizenship, 5. Jerry Adler, “Adultery:

A New Furor over an Old Sin,” Newsweek, 30 Sept. 1996,

Pools

6. Communists, according to Marx and Engels, have “no interest separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole,” no “separate principles of their own” (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, trans. Samuel Moore, ed. David McLellan [New York, 1992], p. 17).

Adultery

15

but ambivalence may also be thought of as another way to describe a constitutive lack of skill at changing things. We social subjects occupy the possibilities of transformation quite badly, typically having had little training in effecting change; even when not fully resigned to the a priori, we are still often quite unable to leave it behind. This may not always present such a pretty picture when seen close up, given that the forms this inertness takes in disappointed marriages—seductiveness, broken promises, emotional vulnerability—perch a little precariously on all that rocky desperation. But at least credit bad marital citizenship with having hatched an entire service industry. Not to worry—marriage counselors are standing by, their profession owing its existence to the cheery idea that ambivalence is a curable condition. Ambivalence may indeed fade into resignation, and given a high enough tolerance for unhappiness, this counts as a cure—particularly in the absence of countertheories of everyday life. But even if adultery is construed as a critical practice with respect to existing conditions, this is practice galumphing far ahead of theory. If passionate love evolves from mistaken identity anyway—that poignant psychoanalytic paradigm—all parties here can expect to be governed by an overdetermined degree of aporia. Adulterers, lovers, adultery theorists, too—we’re all madly flinging ourselves down uncharted paths, falling back on bad alibis after scattering telltale clues, which we will be forced, at some

point, to confront.’ In adultery, its blockages to knowl-

edge joined at the hip to the lures of disavowal, all the players—adulterers, lovers, theorists—risk drowning in the same swirling, antinomic tidal

wave of feelings, cramped up with hubris and quixotry, having thought ourselves shrewd and agile enough to surf the crest despite the posted danger signs. You may say you’re not going to get in too deep; you may say you just want to have fun; but before you know it you’re flattened by a crashing wave from nowhere and left gasping for air with a mouthful of sand. Given the absence of concepts that could bridge the gap between the present and a future lifeworld where mise-en-scénes for change exist, given a prevailing ethos of conformity and renunciation, where are the avenues of resistance, aside from subcultures of bad behavior and pockets of social deviancy?* Marcuse, patron saint of vernacular utopians, had a soft spot for outcasts and outsiders who oppose social cohesion (“Their opposition is revolutionary even if their consciousness is not”).’ Protest, in other words, however inchoate, has to be protected from moral sham7. On the theme of love as mistaken identity, see Judith Livingston, “Love and Illusion,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 65 (1996): 548-50. 8. On the links between criminal or deviant subcultures and social stasis, see Eric

Hobsbawm, Bandits (New York, 1981); Stuart Hall et al., Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (London, 1978); and Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (Lon-

don, 1979). 9. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, p. 256.

16

Laura Kipnis

ing about what it may fail to know about itself. If the forms such protests take have, at times, a fantasmic or even scummy character, then dialectically speaking isn’t this simply a reflection of real conditions of existence? Aren’t there concrete grounds for the refusal of conformity, just as

there are concrete causes of this underdeveloped capacity to think creatively, or agentively, or collectively about change?

Thus it may be that what an essay on this subject can best hope to accomplish is an erratic reproduction of the structure—and structuring

antinomies—of its object: bad behavior and inchoate longings trolling around for a theory adequate to them. This is an essay about compromise

formations and what they feel like. We will be shuttling between rubrics and voices that don’t necessarily map onto each other: from complaint to mourning, from Marx to Freud, from utopia to kitsch, and from self-

parody to earnestness. We will be insufficient to our object. Just like all you adulterers out there, tripping over your big floppy shoes chasing improbable fulfillment, knowing full well it has the whiff of a doomed undertaking, we theorists, too, propel ourselves in pursuit of seductive and

alluring objects because something essential seems to lie in that general direction. Trying to retell tired old stories about quotidian unhappiness as collective narratives that transcend individual angst may risk hubris, though, not to mention embarrassment. It means imagining—as adulterers so often do—that you can do it differently, that you can engineer, through sheer will, a different moral and affective universe. The elegiac mode does traditionally allow a certain excess, so please read what follows in a mournful spirit. Please dignify the risks and hopes

of those everyday utopians who have trod this path before us with some patience for the bad bargains and compensatory forms the miserable classes engineer for themselves in daily life. So many comrades have met such joyless and dismal fates, dutifully renouncing what they once recognized as their best desires under threat of horrific losses and tortures in the merciless tribunals of marital inquisition. They “had no choice.” And, so, to those who did not survive to realize their own wishes for different selves and better futures, who could only filch a few brief moments of

happiness and self-reinvention before being drop-kicked, shamed and self-loathing, back to the marital gulags, we mourn your deaths, you, the

disappeared classes once so full of love and hope and desire and reasonableness. We leave bouquets at your gravesides, bouquets of flowery

prose.

Necromimesis, or The Condition of Believing One Is Dead Last night was delicious, though stumbling around in a stupor today and completely behind on everything. All discipline completely shot to hell. Your fault. Talk later? Desperate to hear your voice . . .

Adultery

17

Good marriages may take work, but unfortunately, in erotic life, trying is always trying too hard: work doesn’t work.'° Erotically speaking, play is what works. Nevertheless, while labor and capital may have struck a temporary truce at the eight-hour workday (an advance crumbling around us as we speak), in our emotional culture it’s double shifting for everyone." With one sphere sliding so smoothly into the other—production/reproduction, public/private, wage labor/relationship labor—what’s the difference if the system chugs along most efficiently when each entails the other, with overwork, obedience, and the illusion of free choice the

structuring conditions of all? Joint membership requires only a certain enforced renunciation of play—or of playing around—even when off the clock. The work ethic long ago penetrated the sphere of leisure; leisure, too, as we know, also takes a lot of work.'? Is intimacy already the next

lost cause? Or do you labor happily under the conviction that intimacy is your haven from the heartless brutality of the marketplace and domestic labor a refuge from the daily grind of wage labor? Oh, it’s a labor of love? Sentimentality about the work ethic is not exactly a new story—as Marx should have said if he didn’t—given how useful it is in heading off unsentimental inquiries into the frequently soul-crippling conditions of the factories, productive or reproductive. Marx himself leaned heavily on Gothic metaphors of menacing deadness in the course

of answering his own

plaintive question, “What

is a

working day?”!’ It turns out that the mise-en-scéne of the workday is a veritable graveyard, menaced by gruesome creatures and ghouls from the world of the ambulatory dead. Overwork produces stunted monsters; capital is a blood-sucking vampire, its machinery a big congealed mass of “dead labour” (C, 1:342); and the working day has become a site of contestation between workers and owners because the “werewolf-like hunger for surplus labor” is so ravenous that if laborers didn’t fight about it, the workday would be subject to unlimited extension (C, 1:353).

The motif of being bled dry keeps cropping up in Marx’s iconogra10. “In our erotic life. . . . itis no more possible to work at a relationship than will an erection, or arrange to have a dream. In fact when you are working at it you it has gone wrong, that something is already missing” (Adam Phillips, Monogamy [New 1996], p. 62). 11. One of the most common labor law violations is failure to pay for overtime

it is to know York, work,

to the tune of some $19 billion a year. See “Overtime Blues,” The Nation, 10 Mar. 1997, p. 7. 12. See Robert Goldman, “‘We Make Weekends’: Leisure and the Commodity Form,” Social Text, no. 8 (Winter 1983-84): 84-103.

13. Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes, 3 vols. (New York, 1976), 1:342; hereafter abbreviated C. Much of this language occurs in volume 1, chapter 10, “The Working Day,” but it is scattered throughout. On Marx’s use of metaphor, see Chris Baldick, In Frankenstein’s Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and Nineteenth-Century Writing (Oxford, 1987), pp. 121-40. For another turn through the affective boneyard, see Lauren Berlant on “dead citizenship,” in her “Live Sex Acts (Parental Advisory: Explicit Material),” The

Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, N. C., 1997), pp. 55-81, an analysis that influences mine significantly.

18

Laura Kipnis

phy of the workday, in which surplus labor is unpaid labor unsentimen-

tally extracted from the already tapped-out bodies of exhausted workers, who will be left crippled monstrosities by the process. Surplus labor is the differential between “necessary labor,’ or the number

of hours of work

necessary to produce the value of your pay, and the total length of the workday (C, 1:325). The value of those extra hours are expropriated from

the worker for the purpose of sustaining owners and institutions. The difference between the two—the ratio of necessary to surplus labor—is both the origin of profit and a formula to calculate overwork: in Marx’s idiom, the rate of exploitation. Given the “vampire thirst for the living

blood of labour,” says Marx, the prolongation of the working day beyond the limits of the natural day and into the night will only ever partially palliate capital (C, 1:367). Since forced labor until death from overwork

looks so bad—a little too visibly exploitative—one solution is shift work. Bring in the night crew, work them, send them home, and bring on the

midnight shift. In the Marriage Takes Work regime of normative intimacy, when the work shift ends and the domestic shift begins hardly makes much difference; from surplus labor to surplus monogamy is a short, easy commute. Under conditions of surplus monogamy, adultery—a sphere of

purposelessness, outside contracts, not colonized by the logic of productivity and the performance principle—becomes something beyond a structural possibility. It’s a counterlogic to the prevailing system. After all, when Marriage Takes Work—and it didn’t always; this is an

ideology that accompanied the rise of what historians of emotion call the “companionate couple’—what we get is a new form of compulsory labor.'* With the extension of the working day into leisure time and the consequent

transformations

in intimacy, it means,

in effect, a massive

giveback in the overall ratio of necessary labor to surplus labor for the average citizen: vertical integration in exploitation. The struggle over the length of the workday formed the basis of worker activism in Marx’s day, when the ten-hour day was considered a humanitarian advance. In our own period we see, by contrast, a weird affinity for work—or

so you’d

imagine given the popularity of the assumption that you keep on doing it in your off-hours. But interestingly, as contemporary work sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild notes, one reason for the current creeping expansion of the paid workday is that large segments of the workforce are putting in increasing hours of overtime because they’re avoiding going home.'° Labor strikes in the sphere of reproduction were a development Marx failed to foresee. Not surprisingly, it turns out to be the Christian 14. See Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love, and Eroticism in Modern Societies (Stanford, Calif., 1992), p. 155. 15. See Arle Russell Hochschild, “Time in the Balance,” The Nation, 26 May 1997, p.

11; excerpted from Hochschild’s book The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work (New York, 1997).

Adultery

1?

Right that has kept tabs on marital slackers and stepped forward with the antidote, a movement which goes by the name of the Promise Keepers— mass rallies of Christian husbands (2.7 million in 1997) who pack into football stadiums by the tens of thousands, singing hymns, chanting sports cheers, confessing sexual sins, and repledging their marriage vows (to each other—wives don’t take part) in frenzied affirmations of God and

patriotism. Note, however, the degree to which here, too, the language of work saturates the marital scene. “Let me ask you this question,” thunders one leader to the assembled masses of husbands, exhorting them to

spend more time with their wives. “What would your business look like if you applied the same amount of mental and emotional energy to it that you do to understanding your wife? Am I far off the mark when I say that most of America would be bankrupt?”!® The point that monogamous marriage is founded on the private property relation is familiar enough not to need rehearsing here, but an essay claiming the tradition of the left critique of the family can hardly be complete without noting one additional (if well-known) fact, namely,

that marriages bind couples together not just by means of affect, but juridically.'’ Just as for Marx, the role of the state in protecting dominant interests is not exactly neutral—meaning that on those occasions when,

for example, federal troops fire on striking workers, we might not want to describe their return to work as precisely voluntary—so too we must mention

that in matters

of domestic labor, as well, the state makes

its

compelling interest in promoting good marital citizenship quite clear. In many locales, sex with someone who isn’t your spouse means betraying the state as well as your mate—and can this be completely without affective consequences?!* In the nation of marriage, adultery is traitorship,

divorce means having your passport revoked, and who mediates your 16. Quoted in Linda Kintz, “The Appeal and Danger ofSacred Familiarity: The Promise Keepers” (unpublished paper), p. 6. See also Ron Stodghill II, “God of Our Fathers,” Time, 6 Oct. 1997, pp. 34-40. 17. See Mark Poster, Critical Theory of the Family (New York, 1978), and Eli Zaretsky, Capitalism, the Family, and Personal Life (New York, 1976). For materialist feminist critiques, see, for example, Michele Barrett, Women’s Oppression Today: Problems in Marxist Feminist Anal-

ysis (London, 1980); Barrett and Mary McIntosh, The Anti-Social Family (London, 1982); and

Christine Delphy, Close to Home: A Materialist Analysis of Women’s Oppression, trans. and ed. Diana Leonard (Amherst, Mass., 1984). The inception of much of this general line of thinking is in Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (Harmondsworth, 1986);

the critique of the family continues as a general theme in Frankfurt School critical theory, particularly in the work of Wilhelm Reich. 18. The state of Louisiana has even introduced something called covenant marriage, which couples can elect over civil marriage and which will make divorces more difficult to obtain—incompatibility isn’t sufficient grounds, although adultery is. State officials predict more states will follow suit. Divorce laws vary from state to state, but as of 1988 only five states had no adultery laws on the books. See Annette Lawson, Adultery: An Analysis of Love and Betrayal (New York, 1988), p. 42. Tanner also discusses adultery in relation to contract

law and the state in Adultery in the Novel, pp. 3-11.

20

Laura Kipnis

subjection to the state but your spouse? Infidelity makes you an infidel to the law, for which your spouse becomes an emblem, the hinge between

the privacy of your desires and the power of the state installed right there in your master bedroom. We may always already be legal subjects, with divorce court, property settlements, and custody arrangements entreating faithfulness should will and vows alone not do the trick, but keep-

ing those promises means at least not inviting the law to make its presence any more felt than necessary in your life, not having to dwell upon your subjection too consciously.

The Marital Panopticon Bad moment over last month’s phone bill. Did you know they now break local calls down by zone? (Although, thank God, not yet by number!) There seems to be an astronomical number of calls to one zone all of a sudden—this took some quick thinking! Am only going to be able to call from the office for a while . . . Yes, of course, we all understand jealousy. But remember that the state too casts a jealous, insecure, watchful eye on the fidelity of its citi-

zens. Every regime knows that good intelligence props up its rule; thus, best to figure you’re being watched at every moment. The big eye watches and observes: you never know exactly when, or from where. When it doesn’t like what it sees, it fashions itself after police interrogation techniques. The most practiced spouses can play both sides of the good cop/ bad cop routine. (“Just tell me, I promise I'll understand. . . . You did WHAT?!”) Once suspicions are aroused, the crisis alarm starts shrilling, and at that

point any tactics are justified to ensure your loyalty—although, as with the FBI, keep in mind that since almost anything can arouse suspicion,

“preventative domestic policing” will always be an option. Sure, easy to feel sympathetic to the wronged spouse: humiliated, undesired, getting fat, deserving better. The question of why someone cheats on you or leaves you can never be adequately explained. As the cuckolded say on the soaps, clinging to tattered dignity, “I want some answers!” —but what would really constitute an answer? Realizing that people are talking; that friends knew and you didn't; that someone

has

been poaching in your pasture, stealing what is, by law, yours is a special kind of shame. And even if you don't particularly want to have sex with your spouse, it’s a little galling that someone else does. (This fact can also spark a belated resurgence of desire; the suspicion-ridden marriage bed is at times a pretty steamy place.) So here’s a question for you spousedetectives: as you’re combing through those credit card receipts, or scanning through email, or perfecting the art of noiselessly lifting up extensions—what are you hoping to find? If you're looking, you basically

Adultery

21

know the answer, yet you're still there. And if you don’t find anything this time, are you willing to declare the matter settled? Hardly! Suspicion is addictive, even, at times, perversely gratifying. After all, rectitude is on your side, and you want those promises kept, damn it. You want those

vows

obeyed.

You want security. Of course

you want

love, and who

doesn’t?—not, least of all, the state. But youll settle for obedience, and,

when all else fails, you'll take adherence to forms. It’s not as though you don’t know when you're being lied to, though, and having transfigured

yourself into a one-person citizen surveillance unit, how can you not hate your spouse for forcing you to act with such a lack of dignity? Modern societies have covert emotional histories.'® If social conditions are alienating and fantasmic, private life is no less so, and knowledge about those conditions will be alienated and fantasmic as well. Take the plangent cry of the adulterer caught in the act: “I didn’t know what I was doing!” Too true. If the adulterous wish lodges itself in the fundamental psychic split between the pleasure-ego and the reality-ego, the resulting collision course between deeply unknowable motives and the intransigence of the reality principle can only ceaselessly reproduce the contours of that division.”° Of course adultery’s practices will be structured as a series of unreconcilable antinomies: as much blockage to knowledge as a condition ofits possibility; as much romance with possibilities of transformation as aversion to change. Idealization and deidealization,

utopianism

and

despair,

knowing

and

disavowing,

the whole

enterprise mirroring both long-suppressed desires and a bleak conviction about the futility of ever realizing them. With approach-avoidance choreographing the whole long folie a trois, even when the lights stay on, so

much of adultery takes place in the dark. But try to think. When adultery happened to you, serious adultery— what exactly happened? Despite the anxiety, the guilt, didn’t you, in some ridiculously short space of time, begin risking things you never thought

you'd risk, without a clue how you’d gotten yourself into the whole thing or what disasters were waiting around the next corner (or the next phone

bill)? Every moronic love song drilled a pathway directly to your deepest self, and even while fully aware ofjust how trite a thing you were doing,

wasn't it a million times more compelling than anything else in your life? You may have been hurtled up and down the entire gamut of emotions from one hour to the next, consuming Tums like Raisinets, but didn’t you 19. See Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy, p. 2. 20. A term that defines the subject’s relation to the outside world and modes of access to reality. Given that the two expressions are invariably opposed to one another, the reality principle usually gets to settle the debate—although less so in the case of sexual instincts, which are “more difficult to ‘educate’ than the ego-instincts” (J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, “Pleasure-Ego/Reality-Ego,” The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Donald NicholsonSmith [New York, 1973], p. 320; see also pp. 320-22).

QD

Laura Kipnis

feel suddenly reborn, with the power to reinvent everyday life, to act to-

ward it as if surprise, risk, gratification, and fulfillment were genuinely imaginable possibilities? What did you want? What do adulterers want—as Freud should have asked if he didn't.2! Not to feel dead? Not to feel miserable? You didn't care for how long—you weren't even really thinking all that clearly, to tell the truth, although you knew enough to feel slightly embarrassed by the banality of saying your spouse didn’t understand you—even though it’s true. And if you spilled the most intimate details of your marriage after a couple of shots of scotch, it’s just because you haven't felt connected to anyone in so long. You just wanted to feel the optimism of a new thing,

something in which everything wasn’t known in advance, wasn’t so fucking predictable. Is there anyone completely shameless about simply desiring not to be emotionally dead? What sort of entitlement does it take to risk feeling alive, unarmed

with

the

twin

weapons

of self-justification

and

self-

abasement, whether vented to potential affair mates or just a private tune on auto-play somewhere

deep in your reptile brain. (Situational ethics

must have been invented in the inner monologues of the adulterer.) For all the theoretical circulation of the term desire, and all the disciplines that currently claim it as their terrain—from lit-crit to architecture—why are its specific enactments so cringe-inducing? When did desire become so banal—such a middlebrow enterprise??? Or, to put the question slightly differently, what makes us so faithful to these languages of shame and

banality? Although as a citizenry we’ve produced a massive amount of largely negative fascination with the subject of adultery over the course of the last decade or so, hurling all sorts of language at it, aren’t we still quite sure there’s nothing of interest to say about it? In a society in which 21. The question actually paraphrases one posed in Michael Warner's slightly melancholy introduction to Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory: “What do queers want? This volume takes for granted that the answer is not just sex. Sexual desires themselves can imply other wants, ideals, and conditions” (Michael Warner, introduction to Fear

of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory, ed. Warner [Minneapolis, 1993], p. vii; hereafter abbreviated “I”). Warner proposes affiliating critical work in queer theory with the left tradition of “dissatisfaction with the regime of the normal in general,” although pointing out that left social theory often manages to exile sexuality from even work on social reproduction (“I,” p. xxvii). For Warner, too, critical social theories of sexuality double as a “carrier of utopian imagination” (“I,” p. viii).

22. A random example of the ubiquity of the language of banality when it comes to adultery: “In telling the story of Nona, a narcissistic, 40-year-old New Yorker who leaves a ‘patient, loving’ husband for a short, pitiful affair, Sigrid Nunez’s second novel could verge on the banal. But with her well-pitched prose . . .” (Christine Schwartz Hartley, review of Naked Sleeper, by Sigrid Nunez, New York Times Book Review, 1 Dec. 1996, p. 23). Questions about happiness seem to automatically invoke fears of banality: even Freud fretted about this in Civilization and Its Discontents, wondering if his observation that life isn’t made for our

happiness was a waste of paper and ink. See Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York, 1961), p. 71.

Adultery

ae

all spheres of existence have achieved such happy harmony that the same languages suffice for work, leisure, and love, and pledged as we are to a society without opposition, whose great achievement is to have effected exactly this paralysis of criticism, knowing what future you might want— achieving critical knowledge—becomes a fraught and complicated affair.*> There are few languages for it, besides sex, that is—a natural idiom

for utopianism, without the clunkiness of language; a ready-made habitat for so many forms of wishing. Marriage on the rocks? Have the feeling there must be more to living than this?* Sorry, but according to company policy, grievance procedures must be lodged in therapeutic idioms for which, it turns out, the disease doubles as the prescription. Clearly you’re not working hard enough. Solution: therapy labor.

“T Wasn't Thinking” For Marx, in his more epistemologically optimistic moments, exploitation in itself is a route to knowledge production. Conditions of overwork and access to consciousness about it should be proximate because this kind of consciousness is, after all, fundamentally embodied

knowl-

edge: born of exhaustion, the aging process, and direct observation of the conditions of production. Thus, workers naturally start to husband

their resources, their labor. They become ornery and thrifty, resistant to wasting it foolishly, especially to the extent that more of it is demanded from them than feels just. Absent sentiment, and without other blockages to knowledge, resistance to exploitation should be an inevitable consequence of a production process predicated on overwork, a process only exacerbated as exploitation is intensified. If collective demands for better conditions are ignored, workers will organize, bargain, or strike—knowl-

edgeable that when it comes to bosses, “any appeal to [the] heart [or] sentiment is out of place” (C, 1:343). In the end, “the bourgeoisie .

.

produces . . . its own grave-diggers.”*° In practice, as it turns out, there are as many impediments to knowledge and resistance as the day is long, impediments both ideological and material—not to mention invariable trade-offs between short-term reforms and systemic transformations. The story of why things don’t change 23. The critique of a society without opposition is Marcuse’s general theme in One-

Dimensional Man. 24. This line of argument is developed more fully in Laura Kipnis, Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America (New York, 1996). 25. For Charles Taylor, asking oneself “what makes life worth living?” is the fundamental question of modern subjecthood (Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity [Cambridge, Mass., 1989], p. 4). 26. Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, p. 16. See also C, 1:342-45, 1:929-30.

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Laura Kipnis

is a long and complicated story indeed. Ever more elaborate theories are devised to account for why everything keeps on just like before, or gets worse. We have formulae that explain the adaptability of capital to new conditions of accumulation. We devise origin narratives about processes of subjectivity pathetically eager to auction off their consent to any lowball bidder that comes up the pike. We make calibrations of the precise number of orbits reality takes before reappearing upside down, bobbing in

the specular seas of ideology. Critical theorists may

skirmish

about

whether Marx needs Freud more than Freud needs Marx, but it’s a little

like asking whether it’s the Tin Man or the Scarecrow who should lead us to the revolution. As history sorts it out, we, its subjects, shuttle between two incompletely theorized spheres—love and work, subjective processes and objective processes—punching in, punching out, trying to wrest love

from the bosses when not busily toiling in the mine shafts of domesticity. Or is it the reverse? The miserable classes can frequently be located scraping for happier consciousness in the discreetly soundproofed offices of therapeutic culture—psychoanalysis and its various domesticated offshoots—where it’s circumscribed as “self-knowledge” and the authorized forms of desire are those pollinated in the hothouse of the nuclear family, forever in lockstep with its oedipal teleologies. It’s not that we social subjects don’t register the contradictions of our collective existences: we register them painfully and seek relief, salves, treatment. But even when desire maladies are treated as social relations—and often in therapy they are, up to a point

(the mantra of the M.S.W.: “Tell them how you feel”)—it’s an interper-

sonal relation rather than a psychosocial affair, with your excess desires typically recast along a developmental teleology, something maturity will eventually cure. That the invention of romantic love was coincident with the invention of the novel has been widely noted: if entering romance gives you a story to tell about yourself, then entering therapy begins a project of retronarration in which desires that exceed social conventions invariably find their origin stories in the rubric of individual trauma or childhood deprivations. You can be fairly certain it’s not going to be the social order that’s organized pathologically, it’s you. Conflicts in the realm

of desire act out something “unresolved” in the self—a buried thing you will certainly have to spend years excavating, in regular visits and at no small cost. Cure will likely necessitate renouncing whatever it is that interferes with playing out your assigned role in social reproduction. But at least regular office visits will take the edge off any corners of psychic life not yet integrated into existing conditions. According to Freud, desire is regressive; from certain vantage points—a psychoanalytically inflected radical politics, for example—this is a good thing about it. Therapy culture at its best may offer a degree of moral lability; but despite its often quite supple languages about intimacy—even while describing, for example, romantic love as potentially

Adultery

yy)

“a powerful agent of change”—the sort of change envisioned here is of the socialism-in-one-country variety: transformation in one psyche.2” We have no emotional correlate of a labor theory of value to calculate the rate of overwork in the private sphere—in other words, what portion of intimacy shift work is necessary labor that sustains and dignifies the intimate subject and what portion is sucked from you simply because, as Marx puts it, “the vampire will not let go ‘while there remains a single muscle, sinew or drop of blood to be exploited’” (C, 1:416). The gap between theory and practice grows ever wider, while corollary forms like lying and self-alienation multiply correspondingly. Some so-called pragmatic versions of marital etiquette hold that lies are, at times, required to sustain the long-term couple. This may indeed be true. But lying is also a statement about the presence of power, implicitly a calculation that the truth will put you at risk. As with other strategic adaptations to situations premised on unfreedom, deception becomes necessary when having desires that don’t conform to the shape of an externally imposed system will subject you to harsh treatment.** Wanting two things at once is, after all, the topography of the Freudian psyche,

whether or not having antinomic desires is a marital taboo. Given the ambivalent nature of your desires, producing a false version of yourself (self-alienation) is one solution, splitting another.?? Splitting is inevitable in any case. But this need not be simply a routine matter of assigning competing desires to different agencies of your psyche; adultery affords the far more elegant solution of externalizing the conflict through the competing agents of your custom-designed triangle. Transformational desiring is bequested to your idlike seducees, who, taking on the risks of your fantasies and incoherence, are guaranteed to mistake the semantics of everyday misery for a rescue plea or for the language of a real future. The two do sound awfully similar, given that restless adulterers, like mouldering POWs, will promise anything for a shot at freedom—and besides, there’s no “no” in the language of the unconscious. “You led me on!” the wounded lover invariably charges, as if it were somehow your fault. (Like you were in control or something!) The spouse plays superego, of course, and you—well, you don’t know anything about it. What’s an ego for if not disavowal? Or keeping up appearances? The worship of appearances, it might be recalled, also has a certain 27. Livingston, “Love and Illusion,” p. 549. ”» 66 28. For Michel de Certeau tactics like “poaching,” “ruses,” and “deception” are deployed against the power of established orders, thus, reading de Certeau backward, may be taken as a clue to its presence as well (Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall [Berkeley, 1984], pp. 31, 37).

29. Or see Phillips, who poses it as an individual question about self-knowledge: “What does commitment leave out of the picture that we might want?” (Phillips, On Flirtation (Cambridge, Mass. 1994], p. xviii; see also pp. xvili-xx). The question is about flirtation, but translates well enough to adultery.

26

Laura Kipnis

centrality in Marx’s thoughts about social life, as the modal subjectivity of alienated labor. In the sphere of reproductive labor, too, we see a fetish

of surface appearances—of virtue, of the happy couple—representing the parallel subjectivity to alienated labor, its stay-at-home spouse. In deadened domesticity, the products of affective labor also seem to take

on a life of their own. The affective commodity too comes to subsume and dominate its producers, who, lacking any perspective on what they’ve

lost, allow themselves to be transformed into mere appendages to the process. Paradoxically, this gives the machinery—productive or reproductive—magical powers, and it grows ever more powerful, taking on a

life and soul of its own quite apart from you. So you escape as often as you can, stoking the machine

with more

lies about where

you’ve been

(“Search committee meeting tonight—yes I know it’s the third time this month!”), self-alienated in love as in labor. For Marx, the process of surplus extraction inherently produces coldness. “Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks” (C, 1:342).

Deadness inheres in the very machinery of production, itself the product of labors past; but this thing that you invented and onto which you bestowed life now confronts you as a hostile alien force. It doesn’t exist for you; you exist for it, to nourish its insatiable desire for fresh labor. But in

your alienation, you misrecognize the products of your labor as something separate and autonomous, something imbued with power over you. You pay deference to the machinery, accede to its demands—partly because they come so prettily packaged in the guise of affective ties. As Marx says of the capitalist machinery, cribbing the romantic idiom from Goethe, it “becomes an animated monster, and it starts to act ‘as if consumed by

love’” (C, 1:1007). Funny how this funereal argot haunts the scene of reproduction as well; dead marriages, frozen desires, cold husbands and frigid wives, all going through the motions, just a little machinelike themselves. Those

vampires of capital seem to have followed you home and sunk their fangs in for another feeding. Your desire may have vacated the scene, you may long for other things, but you’re indentured nevertheless because you’ve poured so much of yourself into the machine already—your lifeblood,

your history. But unlike the coldness of surplus labor, the sucked-dry emotional deadness of surplus monogamy relies on producing a fundamental disembodiment:

“Shut up!” it says to embodied

desires. However,

if the extraction of surplus labor in the sphere of production produces embodied knowledge, the extraction of surplus monogamy, conversely, produces a stupefying bodily self-alienation. The utility of delibidinalization (apart from Freud’s claim that there’s a certain comfort in deadness)

is that it secures more than just spousal fidelity; it organizes a fundamental acquiescence to shrunken desires that the labor process alone can’t

Adultery

at

manage to accomplish. Surplus monogamy doesn’t merely ask that you renounce other lovers; it’s a pledge to the ethos of renunciation itself.

Renunciation does seem to be enjoying something of a social whirl in these return-to-the family 1990s. With all the aggressive familialism pervading the zeitgeist, aspirations for collectivity have been downsized to about the size of a nuclear household. With the emergence of HIV as a convenient narrative denouement for any remaining countercultural fantasies of psychosexual reinvention, the heteronormative social narrative can now pretty confidently reassert its favorite myth, that “monogamous relationships are not only the norm but ultimately everyone’s deepest desire.”*° Asserting otherwise invites doses of ritual shaming. Not only adultery’s practitioners, but its chroniclers, too, are paraded through the town square of our small village under the sign of vulgar theory, derision hurled

like spitballs.

(“‘Adultery’?

It sounds

like one

of those

celebration of transgression essays,” pronounces a recently betrothed villager.)*! Even the counterhegemonic rank and file, who could once be counted on at least to notice the rapport between the prevailing social organization of sexuality and the grander designs of capitalist patriarchy,

have the stockades primed. Censure from the left: “The committed life doesn't have time for soap operas like adultery, which, after all, simply thematize late capitalism’s colonization of interiority. This isn’t race, it isn’t

class—the real social contradictions—it’s suffering suburbanites and petit bourgeois individualism.”*? A reproach from feminists: “Isn’t adultery just an exercise of male prerogative and a mirror of gender inequities? Isn't the standard demographic the tearful single woman and the sex-starved married man? And just who do you think is more vulnerable to exploitation in that couple?”*? In the meantime,

gay activists are lobbying for

30. Douglas Crimp, “How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic,” October, no. 43 (Winter 1987): 253.

31. Response to an earlier version ofthis essay presented at the 1996 MLA convention in Washington, D.C. Thank you to my interlocutors in the “Vulgar Marxism” audience.

32. So responded a Marxist reader of an earlier version of this essay (with apologies for poetic license). An extensive left literature critiques the attention devoted by cultural studies to “minor forms” like fandom, subcultures, pornography, and other marginalia, routinely accusing this work of neglecting the centrality of class. See, for example, Judith Williamson, “The

Perils of Being Popular,’ New Socialist (Sept. 1986):

14-15; Corey Dolgon,

“Challenging Cultural Studies: Not by ‘Culture’ Alone,” Minnesota Review 43—44 (Fall 1994— Spring 1995): 99-112; Teresa Ebert, “Ludic Feminism, the Body, Performance, and Labor: Bringing Materialism Back into Feminist Cultural Studies,” Cultural Critique 23 (Winter 1992-93): 20-26; and Mike Budd, Robert M. Entman, and Clay Steinman, “The Affirmative Character of U.S. Cultural Studies,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 7 (1990): 169-84.

33. So responded an early feminist reader (again, apologies for poetic license). Recent reports suggest there are generational shifts in these arrangements and that women in their twenties are now more likely to stray then men. Therapists also report anecdotally that adultery among women is increasing. See Adler, “Adultery,” p. 58. The literature—popular,

psychological, sociological—on gender roles in adultery is, of course, enormous, and while

28

Laura Kipnis

entree into the ranks of the legally married, while reinventing monogamy under

the guise of healthful living and a new, greener

terminology

of

renunciation: “sexual ecology.”** With the language of renunciation uniting so many former social antagonists; with such universal reconciliation to the view that out-ofscale desires make bad theory, bad subjects, and a bad polis; when even social critique is mounted in terms remarkably congenial to the shriveled expectations of the current conjuncture, is there no outside to all this newfound social harmony? When refusal seems like just so much childishness or churlishness, with resistance coded as bad behavior and quickly

recouped by the individualizing vocabularies of psychology or ethics, is there no collective narrative that can at least be glued together from the fragments of individual experience? When another theorist of workplace radicalism, E. P Thompson, chronicled the story of nineteenth-century class struggle, he zoomed in on prototransformational moments in which

the state seemed to teeter on the brink of change but revolution failed to congeal. What Thompson reveals in the process of tracking these outbreaks of resistance is that—however spontaneous, nascent, or voluntarist they may appear—what looked like isolated events formed part of a larger narrative.

However,

given the absence of implements—or

theo-

ries—for nourishing transformational moments and the lack of contexts to support any kind of full-scale transformation,

the impetus for social

change, though clearly pressing and clearly present, was detoured into insurrection or bought offby short-term reforms. But then, as Thompson points out, it was precisely the impediments to telling a collective story that gave the events in question—those outbreaks of resistance and rebellion, sabotage and wildcat strikes—their spontaneous, disjointed character. Without enabling narratives, these various shards of resistance never managed to organize themselves into revolutionary challenges. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a collective story to tell about them. According to Thompson, one such shard, notably, was the Romantic tradition, whose

resistance to Utilitarianism ran a parallel course to political radicalism but failed to merge with it into any sort of effective political challenge. As Thompson puts it, elegiacally: “In the failure of the two traditions to come to a point of junction, something was lost. How much we cannot be certain roles may be commonly associated with certain genders (cheating husbands, jealous wives), sociologists also indicate that the more education women have, the more likely they are to have affairs. In couples in which the wife has more education than the husband, she’s

the one more likely to stray. See Lawson, Adultery, p. 79. I presume I’m addressing a readership with a high degree of postgraduate education and one in which gender roles may perhaps be less predictable. Hence my avoidance of gendered pronouns throughout the essay. 34. See the recent book by Gabriel Rotello, Sexual Ecology: AIDS and the Destiny of Gay Men (New York, 1997). For the argument against Rotello and gay neoconservatism generally, see Warner, “Media Gays: A New Stone Wall,” The Nation, 14 July 1997, pp. 15-19.

Adultery

29

sure, for we are among the losers.”** Change that capital R to lowercase, and the relevance to the forms of intimacy under discussion might become more apparent. The history of why things don’t change is a long, complicated history indeed. In our time, when intimacy saturates all aspects of the public sphere, from politics to culture to law, its regimes and temporalities are certainly as instrumental in pacifying the citizenry and securing social cohesion as were those of the workplace when work ruled the land.*° It’s easy to miss the aspirations and wishes coded in small gestures of resistance and insurgency. But with intimacy the structure-in-dominance at this conjuncture, is reading Capital as a marriage manual really all that idiosyncratic? (Marx was himself, of course, a notorious adulterer.)°”

Stolen Moments Christ, I didn’t get home until after 1. That took some explaining. We really have to be more careful. . . Is ever a wristwatch checked more frequently than when in the midst of the adulterous love affair? Caught in adultery’s throes, even the most punctilious clock punchers will begin running perpetually late, missing appointments, double-booking, even somehow leaving watches behind in places they had no business being to begin with. Basically, you’ll risk just about everything for those stolen moments with your beloved. Time is a finite resource and not exactly yours to possess, as you'll soon discover, now that your greatest desire is to transfer vast sums of it into the accounts of the one you love. The regulation of time and temporality is one of the most fundamental modes of reconciliation to the social, yet now, for a mere “free” evening, you'll break your commitments and

breach your ethics; risk exposure, betrayal, property, reputation, and alltoo-certain eventual misery in the service of redistributing this most precious of commodities. (The adulterer’s rallying cry: not “Liberate the prisoners!” but “Free time!”)** 35. E. PRThompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1964), p. 832. 36. See Berlant, “Introduction: The Intimate Public Sphere,” The Queen of America Goes

to Washington City, pp. 1-24. 37. Given the current apotheosis of autobiographical writing into the genre-indominance and the corresponding critical move to regard all writing as, fundamentally, autobiography, it now becomes possible to read Marx’s chapter on the workday as a protracted discussion of his own marriage and struggles with fidelity. See Kipnis, Marx: The Video (1990) or its script, “Marx: The Video, a Politics of Revolting Bodies,” in Kipnis, Ecstasy Unlimited: On Sex, Capital, Gender, and Aesthetics (Minneapolis, 1993), pp. 243-93.

38. This discussion of poaching time draws largely on de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, but the regulation of time is also a theme in Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization. The literature on the colonization of time by capital is also quite vast.

30

Laura Kipnis

Stolen moments: what a dumb cliché. But time has been transformed into a currency you’re embezzling from its rightful owners:

spouse, job,

children, pets—in order to fabricate new temporalities. You become a specialist of everyday ruses, coughing up complex and instantaneous ex-

planations for all those unauthorized breaks. You'll be needing to work late quite a lot, or to make frequent, lengthy visitations to the library for

your research. (“Don't wait up!”) Suddenly the car needs numerous

re-

pairs; errands seem to multiply; an out-of-town trip is furtively extended for a day. And it’s not just time you're ripping off, it’s the wage-labor system itself. Instead of working on that paper that was due days or weeks ago, you're on the computer composing elaborate and witty emails to the beloved. Every time you hit “send,” you’re redirecting resources—your productivity, that is. More industrial sabotage. Your mind is elsewhere—

not on the job but playing over the last conversation or last sexual marathon, longing for the next one. You’re on the phone until all hours of the

night, meaning days are spent in a fog, alert enough only to plot your next assignation. From virtuous citizen to petty thief—it’s a slippery slope you're on. Pilfering from the company stockroom, poaching in the boss’s pond: you’re hardly going to make employee of the year this way. As we've learned

from

the avant-garde,

all dominant

forms invite

their structural transgressions, sitting ducks for whatever forces transpire to disrupt their logic. These inversions are not confined to the aesthetic realm alone, of course: religion has its blasphemers and the military its mutineers; with modern consumerism came an epidemic of shoplifting;

and entering into marriage automatically opens the possibility of adultery. When correctly packaged (that is, in aesthetic guises) transgressing social expectations is widely celebrated as a form of expressivity. When stamped with the imprimatur of Art, social violation is much vaunted as a sphere of knowledge production, rebellion and bad behavior celebrated

as privileged domains of truth.*® Political avant-gardistes would maintain that these transgressions of social norms can never be completely contained by walled-off spaces—whether museums, or language practices, or households. If selves are constituted through networks of institutional,

symbolic, and material everyday practices, then given the homologies between psychic and social structures, sufficiently disrupting the first must, in some corresponding way, rattle the latter. In the experimental spaces opened by deliberate violations of institutional norms lie the weak links of subject to structure. Creating these provisional, experimental spaces opens the possibility for social subjects to be pummeled by affective and aesthetic shocks, to be uncongealed and remade—and as theorists of cul-

tural revolution tell us, nothing will ever change, socially or politically, 39. For a discussion of the modern tendency to privilege expressivity as a form of knowledge production, see Taylor, Sources of the Self, pp. 368-90, 456-93.

Adultery

|

without basic character structures being remade too.*° At the very least, shaking things up emblematizes the possibilities of subjective dissidence from symbolic law. What can we learn from this? What we learn will depend on whether we regard adultery as a relatively contained cultural practice, taking, in other words, an aestheticist position (“adultery for adultery’s sake”), or whether, like theorists of a political avant-garde, we see its violations of convention echoing through wider social contexts, joining forces with other movements aimed, ultimately, at renegotiating the conditions of hegemonic consensus. Isn’t this what causes so much of the squeamishness and angst about adultery—the fear that it does indeed indicate that all vows, all contracts, are up for renegotiation? The analogy of aesthetic transgression might provide a useful heuristic in regard to adultery, for in many respects they are not dissimilar. Don't both make you see something differently—at least temporarily? Adultery too has an aesthetics, after all; it too delivers calculated shocks to our sensibilities. Adultery doesn’t just adulterate marriage, it systematically profanes it—a form of vernacular surrealism.‘ After all, the convention that expressivity and bad behavior are the province of professional artists is the legacy of a historical division of labor; this separation of art from life need not be adhered to forever. If in theory we were willing to entertain the possibility that everyday life too is a realm of expressivity, and that transgression too has a pedagogy, we might entertain the possibility—in theory—that behind the facade of quotidian life, a WPA of ordinary citizens have assigned themselves roles as vernacular experimentalists, mounting their two-person

shows in the museum

of the or-

dinary. We might thus be compelled to ask, seriously, as we would of a signed urinal or a fur-covered teacup in a museum—two examples of things that look silly but that are enshrined in the pantheon of serious forms—what do these transgressions mean to teach us? What’s at stake?

Shocking the Bourgeoisie What if adultery, like the aesthetic avant-garde, were construed as a

mode of experimentation? Consider that without a proper place (the 40. I’m drawing on theorists of the various avant-gardes, for whom the materiality of literary and artistic practices effect the category of the subject. See, for example, Paul Smith,

Discerning the Subject (Minneapolis, 1988); Alice A. Jardine, Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity (Ithaca, N. Y., 1985); and Colin MacCabe, James Joyce and the Revolution ofthe Word (London, 1979). 41. See Helena Lewis, The Politics of Surrealism (New York, 1988) on the historical asso-

ciation between political and aesthetic avant-gardes, including the close ties between surrealism and the Communist Party. See also Peter Biirger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis, 1984), on aesthetic movements that challenge art’s autonomy from daily life.

By

Laura Kipnis

home), or institutional sanctions (the marital contract), it too relies on improvisation and invention; poaching from established spaces; haphazardly borrowing, rejecting, or inverting its conventions on an ad hoc basis. Like previous bricoleurs and collage artists, it produces new forms out of detritus and leftovers; a few scraps of time, some unused emotions are

stuck together to create a new, unforeseen thing. Not only will this involve reinventing conventions of spectatorship and revamping basic ways of seeing but adultery does, in effect, materially rearrange the most fundamental geometry of social reproduction, the couple form—covertly transforming a vast social infrastructure of intimate relations from dyad to triangle, revamping its very contours.

But adultery is basically a parodic aesthetic, and only you marital insiders could wage such effective parody, could so tactically undermine the social framework from within. You have to thoroughly know the terrain to zero right in on its most cherished illusions and demolish them so efficiently. Parody hinges on knowing the logic of the system and systematically perverting it—at which point, one might say it verges on sabo-

tage. And this parodic transgression of the couple dyad is certainly a not insignificant

component

of adultery’s

allure.

Privately

or

nationally,

profaning the institution of the couple must have at least something to do with the secret frisson, the clandestine thrill, of the adultery enterprise—as perhaps becomes clearer from the other side of the bed. The saboteur has a privileged vantage point on the underside of the

system. From down here, outside the proper, with little reason to prop up its rule or protect its vanities, the strains and incoherence of the system are embarrassingly obvious. It goes without saying that you—when “you” are the other man or woman—will

pects of your lover's marriage, will find of data on the absent spouse’s intimate of every annoying habit, not to mention and large, as lovers often reveal to each

be exposed to quite privy as-

yourself possessing a storehouse life, an encyclopedic knowledge the full array of neuroses small other what they admit to no one

else. It’s not sex that really occupies the bulk of your affair hours, is it? It’s talk: confession, revelation, exchanges of embarrassing secrets.

Privacy norms and every other form of marital propriety are out the window. You, the third party, may on occasion find yourself on a tour of the family domicile, may sleep—or whatever—in the marital bed; have occasions to view family photographs; explore closets, medicine chests,

refrigerators. You may attend social functions at which the spouse is present, knowing that you know their secrets while they don’t know yours. You see it all. Triangulation has a rude and messy materiality to it. Even when

conducted

with discretion, flaunting marital rule can’t help but

leave a certain mucky residue behind—a faint odor of the sewer, a banana peel in the foyer. This messiness has a material and practical dimension: boundaries become permeable; the colors start to run. The spouse’s movements and domestic routines will begin to color yours, the lover.

Adultery

B33

You may find yourself involved in household business and errands; you are introduced to family friends who may or may not be in on the secret. Your own daily life will be shaped by the spouse’s moods, travels, illnesses,

propensities—or lack thereof—to jealousy and suspicion. And vice versa: it’s not as if your actions don’t register in the other direction. In fact, this person’s well-being lies smack in your hands. Do you kindly protect an unsuspecting spouse from the secret you know could shake his or her world, or do you find yourself—unconsciously or not—complicit in organizing its discovery? Easy to call at the wrong moment; to fail to wake your lover in time to get home at the appointed hour; to leave telltale signs in or on body, clothing, car; to neglect to point out when the lover is acting “carelessly.” As the boundaries crumble, you become, in some sense, sexual inti-

mates with the spouse. You may not have met, but, after all, you’re sharing many things. It’s not just that certain sexual details may be confessed, or vented, or inferred, but that the spouse’s existence is registered in precise detail on your body. You’re having a sexual whirl because the spouse has lost interest, is depressed or on antidepressants, too angry or too ambivalent, too busy or too bossy, impotent or frigid or too out of relation with his or her body. But also—let’s be frank—sexual techniques and rhythms get developed, in a long-term sexual relationship, in relation to a spouse’s body, and being made love to as though you inhabited someone else’s sexual preferences puts you on quite complicated terms of sexual intimacy: the preferences of another body are mapped out for you on your own. So too when you are the adulterer, you make love to your lover with the pleasure—but at times, the chagrin—of unfamiliarity,

mapping as you go the similarities and the differences. How can you not be comparing, measuring, playing catch-up, but still invariably registering the absent presence of another very familiar body, the one that shares your bed when you finally return to the domestic fold, for sleep if nothing

else. (Although sometimes for something else as well. How awkward to return home from the adultery bed to the marriage bed to find your spouse unexpectedly amorous!) In these adulterous avant-gardes, perhaps something new does enter the world. Maybe, for a minute, you the adulterer had your perspective shifted, had a new emotion. Maybe, briefly, change seemed possible, as if, with your newfound beloved the world was one of expressivity and

desire and utopian possibilities.*? Until, that is, you dragged yourself 42. The “utopian impulse” is “able to do its work only in disguise,” after all, as Fredric Jameson has pointed out (Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton, N.J., 1971], p. 156). Jameson’s reading of Ernst Bloch’s work colors this essay (as does Jameson’s commitment to utopian thinking generally), particularly his point that philosophizing utopia “begins at home . . . in lived experience itself and in its smallest details, in the body and its sensations,” or in experiences like astonishment, and other epiphanies of daily life (p. 122). For a discussion of the vicissitudes of the utopian

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home, crash-landing back in marital temporality, where the vows you’d sworn to uphold so long ago had long ago begun to feel monotonous, as claustrophobic as prison. “Where were you, I was expecting you hours

ago!” shouts the spouse over the television when you roll home at midnight. You were trying out new futures, that’s where you were. But don't

get any ideas about tunneling for freedom or making a run for it because armed guards (children, public opinion) patrol the perimeters, and the

attack dogs are starved for scandal. Adultery is, according to psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, at heart a drama about change. It’s a way of trying to invent a world, and a way of knowing something about what we may want: by definition, then, a politi-

cal form.** Articulating visions of change tends to be the province of political discourses and critical theories, but since these perhaps have failed to hold up their end, other forms step into the breach and arrogate the

function of a political imaginary. When political culture devotes itself to the privatization of needs, increasingly attempting to relegate need itself to the realm of individual responsibility, privacy in turn becomes the repository for imagoes of reimagined futures. At the same time, it’s not as though collective life will ever be completely evacuated of messy needs and transgressive wishes. As we see, political culture has lately devoted itself to inventing theatricalized social spaces where elected and appointed officials improvise spectacles of transgression for the edification and amusement

of their political constituents.

Indeed, national politics

seems to be quite overcoded with desire these days. It may be that electoral politics has become so increasingly evacuated of meaning that scandal is one of the only ways politicians can capture anyone’s attention, but given that the specifics of these scandals increasingly concern adultery,

we political constituents have been reconstituted as adultery publics. And to us falls that classic question—in the stentorious words of Divorce Court—Can this marriage be saved?

The Union Is in Trouble, or Adultery as a National Affair Even if Time hadn't designated Bill Clinton the nation’s “Libido in Chief,” you’d have to have been in a coma this decade not to notice that politician adultery is occupying an inordinate amount of the nation’s attention, with the military recently vying to play Gomorrah to Washington’s Sodom on the Potomac.** Politicians and public figures have of impulse for which Jameson's work is also crucial, see Berlant, “’68, or Something,” Critical Inquiry 21 (Autumn 1994): 124-55. 43. See Phillips, Monogamy, pp. 4-18. 44, The military generates its scandals internally instead of relying on the press: 124

U.S. military personnel were convicted of adultery in the past year, although as “Harper's

Adultery

55)

course been having their extramarital flings since day one of organized social life, but only recently has marital fidelity—or “character,” in current political usage—come to be the protective talisman supposed to save this rudderless nation of ours.*® The citizenry, in turn, has grown ever

more suspicious and mistrustful, ever more intent on ferreting out evidence of betrayal. Each new scandal just ups the ante, feeding the zeal to nose out yet another juicy betrayal. Not betrayals of national principles, justice, or democracy—betrayals of politicians’ marriage vows are what makes headlines. It’s the marital panopticon writ national. Think of it this way: these cheating politicians are, after all, our representatives. These cheating soldiers are our defense.*° They are, in other words, our standins. Are we feeling vulnerable, anxious? Do we suspect somehow, that things are going sour? Or, as your marriage counselor will surely inquire at the very first tearful session, is there something that we, the citizenry, aren't getting from this union of ours that we would need to feel secure in its embrace? In scandal and other genres devoted to exposing secret things, citizens have the opportunity to play the role of social detectives, a term Fredric Jameson has invented to express the ways certain kinds of knowledge are produced in investigation plots. In plots organized around detection, there are stories in which an individual detective confronts crimes of collective dimensions, and there are stories in which the collectivity ferrets

out the solution to an individual crime. But in both cases the detective role widens to take on a social function because, according to Jameson, it’s invariably society as a whole that’s the mystery to be solved and “revelations of its hidden nature” that are exposed.*’ Detective stories allegorize Index” points out, the number of generals prosecuted for adultery since 1951 is 0. See “Harper’s Index,” Harper’ (Aug. 1997): 13.

45. The press continued to pound the character issue throughout the 1996 elections, although often litotically. See, for example, Francis X. Clines, “Character Question Fails to

Catch Public Interest,” New York Times, 28 Oct. 1996, p. Al4, which raises the issue to say it’s a nonissue, just as Bob Dole repeatedly invoked the “problem” of Clinton's character by insisting he wouldn't bring it up, while then proceeding to do so. However, postelection reports claimed that Dole quickly dropped the character question (and the press altogether) after learning that the Washington Post was pursuing a story about an affair he’d had while married to his first wife—which, although confirmed by the affair mate, the Post never ran, probably because of the enormous pressure Elizabeth Dole and influential friends put on the paper to kill it. See Ken Auletta, “Inside Story: Why Did Both Candidates Despise the Press?” The New Yorker, 18 Nov. 1996, p. 48.

46. As one commentator puts it, perhaps somewhat ironically, the “vigorous pursuit of the good fight against adultery springs from basic common sense and the bedrock military principle on which our entire defense posture has been built: When the enemy attacks, we simply can’t have our soldiers, sailors, marines and pilots lying down on the job” (Alan Abelson, “Bum Raps,” Barron’, 9 June 1997, p. 3). 47. Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Blooming-

ton, Ind., 1992), p. 39; see also pp. 36-39. Jameson's analysis echoes Deleuze and Guattari on the invariably collective nature of minor forms. The “cramped space” of minor literature

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the social totality; it’s the unconscious desire to represent our collective destiny that animates all this social detection, even if in protocognitive fashion.

But then again, as Phillips would

add, suspicion is actually a

philosophy of hope. Jealousy is a form of optimism: “It makes us believe that there is something to know and something worth knowing.”* As these national adultery scandals continue to unfold, they often

seem like amazingly bad theater on a mass scale. The plot is excessively familiar: faithless marital citizens cast as the dastardly criminal class, co-

operatively playing along by carelessly scattering incriminating clues for a delighted nation of social gumshoes yapping at their heels. (“Prove it,” challenged Gary Hart, while dangling the perfectly cast Donna Rice before a weirdly enraptured news media. It didn’t exactly take Colombo to solve that one.) Regardless, the engine of an investigation plot sutures us back into the scene; the addictive quality of detective stories is not that

they’re open-ended but rather that you always find out whom to blame. Once the hapless adulterer is nabbed in the act, politics is reinvented as a scene from which at least one true thing has been unearthed. Despite the fact that the aggregate citizenry claim to believe when asked (or, indeed, when voting) that adultery has nothing to do with “character,” the two can't seem to get disentangled; sexual faithfulness to a wife (no adultery scandals about female politicians yet) has become a very public code for fidelity to an electorate, with sex in the wrong bed standing for the slimy betrayal of both her and the nation. (A recent anti-Clinton bumper sticker: “First Hillary, then Gennifer, now us.”) In this retooled national allegory, the citizenry is cast in the role of

insecure wife, continually suspecting and fearing perfidy. With the national press devoted to nosing out adultery scandals and the tabloids paying off mistresses for their stories before the sheets are even dry, with television interviewers playing couples therapists in tearful prime time confessionals, electoral politics has been refigured as a stagnant marriage, and don't we, the wives waiting at home, secretly know it? (Look at

the apathy of the 1996 elections: we were all just going through the motions; the romance died long ago.) We’re being cheated and duped; his promises are lies, his vows a joke. We’re a nation of cuckolds.*® Or worse: we're wives who know we’re being mocked and ridiculed behind closed doors while the lovers whoop it up with champagne and pastries. But “forces each individual intrigue to connect immediately to politics” (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “What Is a Minor Literature?” trans. Dana Polan, in Out There: Marginaliza-

tion and Contemporary Cultures, ed. Russell Ferguson et al. [New York, 1990], p. 59). 48. Phillips, Monogamy, p. 41. 49. David Brock’s The Seduction of Hillary Rodham (New York, 1996) follows this line of

argument and its identifications from the right. With its weirdly sympathetic identification with Hillary Clinton as scorned wife, the point is clearly that to whatever extent Bill betrayed Hillary, he’s betrayed the electorate as well. Brock is an ultra—-right wing columnist for the American Spectator.

Adultery

ae.

lacking agency, or assertiveness, or dignity, schooled as wives so often are in passivity and pragmatism, we know we're better off just keeping up appearances, and so grow colder and deader with each passing year and each new humiliation. According to anthropologist Victor Turner, leaders often plot their lives as social narratives, consciously or unconsciously acting in ways that allow them to become clothed with allusiveness and metaphor.” We elect our leaders, in other words, because they've made themselves legible to us as a collective mirror. What else does character mean at this moment in political culture but the ability of a particular political “character” to embody the appropriate collective story? (And, certainly, it’s not anthropologists alone who have achieved this insight; it’s the essence of the modern political campaign. About the 1992 presidential election, one operative wrote, “I put it to Clinton that launching a presidential candidacy was not unlike writing a novel: You had to create yourself as a sympathetic hero, in language that would touch the reader’s heart and mind. Clinton readily agreed that he had so far failed to emerge as a rounded and credible character in the unfolding narrative of the election.”)°! Or, conversely, we do not elect those who tell the wrong stories. Throughout the 1996 presidential campaign, Bob Dole strove valiantly, yet in the end fruitlessly, to get his own body to signify, to make his own war wounds and disabilities metonyms of a national history and future. He wanted his body to narrate a tale of triumph over adversity, stoicism in the face of pain and injury, and sacrifice in the service of American military hegemony—without realizing that the nation was in the grip of an entirely different story about itself and that national narratives these days are composed

in the idiom

of sex, not sacrifice.

His wounds

seemed

old-

fashioned: today’s heroes suffer from the nation, not for it.*° If scandals are realms of protoknowledge about the social totality, one inference that might be drawn from all this marital snooping is that the insecurity of the electorate about the “faithfulness” of our representatives coincides with anxieties about the fidelity of the wider institutions of representation themselves. Is the “union” itself in trouble? The language of needs is a crossover language, condensing the national, the sexual, and

the deeply personal, as well as matters of public policy and resource distribution. With the painful economic restructuring underway in late capitalism’s transnationalist incarnation, the destabilizing effects of which are 50. See Victor Turner, “Social Dramas and Stories about Them,” Critical Inquiry 7 (Au-

tumn 1980): 141-68. 51. Jonathan Raban, quoted in Howard Kurtz, “The Press in Campaignland,” Washington Post Magazine, 16 July 1995, p. 13.

52. I’m drawing on Berlant’s work on national intimacy and traumatized citizenship here and throughout this section. See Berlant, “The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy, and Politics,” in Cultural Pluralism, Identity Politics, and the Law, ed. Austin Sarat (forthcoming)

and “Introduction: The Intimate Public Sphere.”

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filtering down through all levels of social existence, the Western economies are becoming increasingly tightfisted, refusing to live up to their

most basic vows—unable or unwilling to provide even the most minimal economic safety nets, let alone economic justice, let alone the old promise

of the good life. The lower economic tiers are cavalierly abandoned to their fates like so many discarded middle-aged wives, and the floating trash heap of those unwillingly expelled from the wage economy floats from harbor to harbor with nowhere to land, teeming with workers uncer-

emoniously sent back, pink slips in hand, to homes they can no longer afford. Being made “redundant” is experienced as intensely private and intensely shameful. It feels personal, no matter that you’re hardly a blip on the screen of large and impersonal forces. It feels like being threatened with nonexistence. Cheated. Betrayed. Traded in for younger—or cheaper, or foreign—labor (categories that sound remarkably like the staples of the politician’s sexual imaginary too, from what we hear).

Isn't the citizenry being remarkably gracious about all of this? Downsizing—not only of corporations but also of national expectations—is the watchword of the nineties. Has the union betrayed you, caused you pain, shifted its loyalties, redistributed its resources? Then expect less. Make your peace with it. Lie back and think of a balanced budget. It doesn't matter if you’re happy—or employed, or if you have a home—simply show up for public displays of loyalty as required, hand in hand like our national couple, Bill and Hillary, whose own marriage—or

detectives have deduced—is just such an arrangement.

so we social

What ensures

such meek submission to indifferent institutions, even when crisis, transition, or pervasive discontent could, conceivably, prompt enlarged rather

than diminished expectations, more rather than fewer social demands? What impedes alternative kinds of knowledge about social and affective unions from acceding to consciousness? Is it precisely that resignation to the a priori that marital citizenship training (among other forms of

complacency schooling) provides? Do note that in the vast barrage of media attention to national adultery, in all the microscopic scrutinies of every blemish or “distinguishing mark” on the politician-body, the question of what these adulterer-representatives of ours are seeking in these nondomestic beds and yachts and hotel rooms is simply never posed.°? What could be so compelling that risking everything for a few moments in the semipublic arms of campaign workers, bimbos, congressional pages, hookers, or boys seems like a risk worth taking? How is it that politicians and their operatives whose careers are built on canniness and mistrust so readily display their vulnerabilities and everything else with such alacrity and such bad judgment? Cynics, moralists, and feminists unite in telling 53. When pants in a Little penis, one NPR other answered,

Paula Jones claimed she could prove that Bill Clinton had dropped his Rock hotel room because she could identify “distinguishing marks” on his commentator asked the other what he supposed these marks could be. The “I don’t know. A map of Bosnia?”

Adultery

ag

us the answer is simply power—either the desire for more or the expectation of its protection. But thanks to the tabloidization of political life, we

social detectives are now the eager beneficiaries of numerous blow-byblow accounts of the pillow talk of the powerful, each one making it appallingly clear that these affairs are conducted not under the sign of power but that of pathos. If the name Dick Morris still means anything by the time this essay goes to press, I need not say more.™4 My point is that what is so ordinary and accepted as to go quite unnoticed in all of this is simply that toxic levels of everyday unhappiness or grinding boredom are the functional norm in many lives and marriages; that adultery, in some fumbling way, seeks to palliate this, under condi-

tions of enforced secrecy that dictate behavior ranging from bad to stupid to risky to deeply unconscious; and that shame, humiliation, and even ruin accompany the public exposure of this most ordinary of circumstances, particularly in the cases of those who labor for the nation— those whose bodies represent and defend the “national interest.” Just “wanting to feel alive” or “young,”

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“wanting a little excitement,” “wanting

a change,” spells downfall. In other words, and in a quite perverse sense, America is a functioning representational democracy after all; it just works in reverse, with politician adultery representing back to the constituents at home both the impossibility of living by the rules of conventional ideologies of intimacy, and the dangerous impossibility of making happiness any sort of a political demand (or a demand of politicians). The absence of contexts for transformation is the defining condition of social existence—nationally and personally—as our politicians so effectively mirror back to us, with intimacy ideologies organizing habituation to lowlevel discontent so effectively that to chance transformation of any sort will seem patently ridiculous: a guaranteed laugh on a domestic sitcom or a guaranteed cover story in the Star. If adultery dares to stake out a small preserve for wanting something—even temporarily—it manages to do so largely through the always available idiom of sex. But renunciation still rules, the cornerstone of the administered psyche. Citizens are split

subjects, maritally and nationally, and like spouses who know each other's vulnerabilities

dia—reproduce

all too well, our

national

institutions—politics,

the me-

themselves efficiently by playing that split for all it’s

worth. With renunciation the reaction formation to thwarted desire, the

unfortunate sequel to the entertainment of national scandal is the unctuous strutting of public virtue. Renunciation is supposed to be a cure-all for the dangerous experimentation of a utopian imagination, an organ 54. The Star broke the story that Morris attempted to impress his prostitute girlfriend by, among other grand gestures, letting her listen in on phone conversations with the president. See Star, 10 Sept. 1996. Prostitutes often report that in general, the more socially powerful men are, the more they want to be humiliated and made submissive in sex. So reports “Barbara,” in her “It’s a Pleasure Doing Business with You,” Social Text, no. 37 (Win-

ter 1993): 18.

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Laura Kipnis

even politicians apparently find themselves supplied with. Luckily, virtue

doesn't appear to be a particularly sustainable form— isn't this the mes-

sage behind scandal culture?—and useless desires keep finding hapless emissaries to attach themselves to.®°

“What about Us2” Look, now that things are out in the open, please think about us. This is a plea for us, for the things you said you wanted. For happiness. Please don’t abandon that, even though it must now seem like the easiest thing to do. Renunciation brings us, sadly, to the question of endings. As anyone

who’s ever taken up one of the available roles in the adultery plot knows, the uncomfortable question of the future will eventually loom. How will this thing end? Who will fare well, and who badly? Which alliances will be left standing; which will be “history”? (Or is adultery’s biggest risk

stasis: the risk of transforming nothing?) Some affairs do end well, fading

into fond memories.

But with so much

unhappiness

and disavowal

bouncing off the walls of such confined quarters, unfortunately, this will

not always be the case. Are you the sort of adulterer who didn’t realize how unhappy you were in your marriage until you found yourself in the midst of a serious affair? Or did you, knowing exactly how unhappy you were, dive headlong into this affair as a rickety lifeboat from the premature funeral you call home?

Paradoxically,

this latter category of adulterer often seems,

“coincidentally,” to get discovered. Unaccountably, a letter is left out, a phone call overheard, an email misaddressed, an appointment missed. The spouse makes an inquiring phone call, and inevitably you’re not where you were meant to be because you're in someone else’s bed, com-

plaining about your spouse. Nothing creates intensity or instant intimacy in an affair like the spousal complaint, and when you are the other person, sharing your loyer’s aversions to the person who is, after all, your rival, being vested with

the inside scoop on the private inferno of marital woes, knowing that you alone are the respite from their ever-growing malaise—as you're assured in those whispered phone calls, those agonized emails—well, it’s quite the 55. On the politics of renunciation and the difficulties of finding a properly political idiom for the languages of desire, see Carolyn Kay Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives (New Brunswick, N.J., 1986), pp. 110-24. On the differences between

public and private forms of renunciation—and enjoyment—see Slavoj Zizek, “Superego by Default,” The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Women and Causality (London, 1994), pp. 54-85, who argues a different case: that the Law secretly condones transgression, including adultery, making the only true transgression publicly overidentifying with its dictates.

Adultery

4]

sweep-you-off-your-feet experience. The spouse’s faults become a staple of intimate patter: she’s bitter; he’s insecure; she’s a bitch; he’s remote;

she’s boring; he’s a tightwad. (It goes without saying that they’ve all lost interest in sex, or were never very interested to begin with.) The marriage is nothing short of a nightmare. All of this can provide you the opportunity for gracious beneficence: you may even find yourself arguing the spouse's side; becoming a behind-the-scenes adjudicator in marital quarrels; offering analysis, counsel, insight. If marriage is society’s container for intimacy, property, children, and libido, adultery doubles as its dumpster for all the toxic waste of marital strife and unhappiness—and who better personifies the receptacle than the detail-hungry lover? Every spousal complaint bonds you to each other that much more tightly. Until, that is . . . the discovered letter, the overheard phone call, or the missed

appointment leading to the spouse’s inquiring phone call. And here you are, exposed. Perhaps not for the first time? Woe to you serial adulterers! You’ve done it before, most likely you'll do it again,

but each time you somehow forget not to let it get so intense and out of control. This is an emotional enterprise with a large component of unacknowledged cynicism, a private bargain that the misery you know is coming up with your lover is worth inducing to escape the misery and tedium you’re currently enduring with your spouse. Once you’ve been caught the first time, married life quickly transforms itself into the do-

mestic equivalent of a South American police state, subjecting you to periodic search and seizures, ritual interrogations about movements and associations. Desk drawers are rifled for clues, bills audited for improprieties, and so-called friends transform themselves into a network of infor-

mants as extensive as that of former Stasi agents. All of which gives you even more to complain about to new love objects—although future affairs will now necessitate the cunning and sustained duplicity of an Anthony Blunt.®° All of this at least eliminates the need for awkward confessionals;

you don't need to confess because eventually you'll be found out. Or was this perhaps what you wanted? It’s not as though changing anything is so easy, after all. Among adultery’s risks is the plunge into a certain structure of feeling: the destabilizing prospect of deeply wanting something beyond what all conventional institutions of personal life mean for you to want. Yes, all these feelings may take place in the murk of an extended

present tense, but nevertheless, adultery, like cultural revolu-

tion, always risks shaking up habitual character structures. It creates intense new object relations at the same time that it unravels married subjects from the welter of ideological, social, and juridical commandments that handcuff inner life to the interests of orderly reproduction. It can invent “‘another attitude of the subject with respect to himself or her56. The “fourth man.”

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self’”5? In adultery, the most conventional people in the world suddenly experience emotional free fall: unbounded intimacy outside contracts, law, and property relations.** Among adultery’s risks would be living, even briefly, as if you had the conviction that discontent wasn't a natural condition, that as-yet-unknown forms of gratification and fulfillment

were possible, that the world might transform itself—even momentarily—to allow space for new forms to come into being. Propelled into relations of nonidentity with dominant social forms, you’re suddenly out of alignment with the reality principle and the social administration of desire. A “stray.” The more intense the affair, the more self-transforming it feels. Not

surprisingly, it turns out that all sorts of outwardly conventional people hunger to surrender to the emotions that go unutilized in lives organized around conformity and narcosis. Passionate love, energized by unconscious fantasy, is one of our few chances for self-reinvention, to shed our ties to quotidian personalities and their often badly tattered intimacies, lashed as they are to histories of disappointment, anger, and other forms

of personal failure. In other words, even though you can't believe your great luck in nabbing such a charming, attractive, witty, and highly sexed lover (with so many of the qualities so absent in your spouse), what keéps

you glued to the phone till all hours of the night exchanging soulsearching, whispered intimacies is actually courtship of another new object—yourself—and a new set of conditions for personhood. The beloved mirrors this new self back to you, and aren’t you madly in love with both

of them, with two idealized love-objects?°° No, of course, we don’t want to elevate individual experiences like

these into imaginary forms of protorevolutionary praxis, or to hold up private utopias as models for social transformations. Adultery doesn't necessarily present you with models of utopian worlds; instead, the utopianism is contained in the feelings it embodies—an experience, not a blueprint.®° Or as Thompson, elegist of failed revolutions, suggests: “Allow a 57. Joel Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), p. 218. I borrow the phrase from Whitebook who borrows it from

Cornelius Castoriadis. Whitebook gives an elegant psychoanalytic account of the utopian impulse, and although his zeal for sublimation as a solution to the antinomies of psyche and sociality is a little complacent for my taste, he provides an in-depth account of the tradition my own essay attempts to invoke through perhaps somewhat more unreconciled tactics and languages. 58. As in the realm of abjection, the space beyond identity, system and order whose occupant Julia Kristeva nicknames (coincidentally?) a “stray” (Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez [New York, 1982], p. 8).

59. On self-transformation in romantic love, see Christopher Bollas, “Transformational Objects,” The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known (New York, 1987), pp. 13-29, and Livingston, “Love and Illusion,” pp. 557-59.

60. I’m drawing on Richard Dyer’s argument in his “Entertainment and Utopia,” in Movies and Methods, ed. Bill Nichols, 2 vols. (Berkeley, 1985), 2:220-32.

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43

little space ... for the unprescribed initiatives of everyday men and women who, in some part of themselves, are also alienated and utopian by turn.”*! In the conspiracies of your illicit adulterous cells, you lovers are pursuing desire, yes, but aren't you also playing closet theorists, vernacular utopians, performatively arguing the minority position that discontent isn’t, pace Freud and everyone else, the human condition, or somehow natural? Romance

is, quite obviously, a socially sanctioned zone for wishing

and desiring, and a repository for excess. Mobilized as it is by unconscious fantasy, it’s potentially a profoundly antisocial form as well—when unharnessed from the project of social reproduction. So the state steps in to license its practices, as if couples were pharmacists dispensing controlled substances to each other. The state, of course, is hardly the only agency regulating these practices; we have superegos as well, and should romance become disaggregated from ritual and convention there’s always shame, which kicks in rather quickly, making unregulated forms of ro-

mance look like a tawdry enterprise. Certainly there are few social subjects for whom being exposed in adultery is an entirely shame-free event and who can rescue much dignity from the scene. Between the inner mortification and the social ridicule, there you stand, red-faced, just an-

other libidinous stooge packed into a crowded Volkswagen with twenty more clowns like yourself, all circling the big top in self-deluded quests for shiny lost objects and faint memories of plenitudes that never existed in the first place. When possibilities to transform everyday life do manage to force themselves into the open, like tiny, delicate sprouts struggling up through the hard dirt, what an array of sharp-bladed mechanisms stand ready to mow them effectively into mulch before they manage to take root! When your fantasies are bared to the world—or your spouse, or yourself—and you stutter the requisite “I didn’t know what I was doing!” it’s no mystery how opting for rigor mortis comes to seem so inevitable, with even local transformation an impossibility. Every unhappily married person moonlights as a C.P.A., expert in marital cost-benefit calculations, armed with a private formula to assess the trade-offs, risks, investments, future pay-

offs of bad situations. Divide your current unhappiness according to how well you’d come out in the property settlement, multiply according to some private floating variable—fear of the unknown, fear of screwing up your kids—and what you arrive at is a misery quotient: a precise calibration of how much discontent you can tolerate as the purchase price of a normal existence. (The term misery quotient could also be another way of saying “ideology of everyday life.”) And certainly, as even Thompson points out, there aren't any guarantees in the transformation

business.

Putting yourself on the side of change means embracing courage and 61. Quoted in Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman, p. 110.

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risk, with no particular assurance about outcomes. No one can say what the transformed future looks like. But given everyday lives composed of equal parts resignation and low-grade depression, it’s most likely the case that all such possibilities will remain lodged in a never-to-arrive temporality. The project for transformational critical theories of everyday life would be to reinvent the foundations for these calculations through redescription and denaturalization. But in personal life displacement rules: the forms available for imagining change are simultaneously blockages to knowledge and refuges from the real, all the while functioning as place-

holders for unformed desires. And what zs the status of the individual story here? Even when the changes under discussion are circumscribed issues of personal happiness, when the biggest change on the immediate agenda is likely to be only the creation of another couple, the buzz of

language and moral pressure hurled about makes even local change resemble some kind of apocalypse. What could be more “natural,” or comfortable, than not thinking about it as the default cognitive mode of personal life. But isn’t the reason adultery feels like such a big drama, as it models the possibilities and impossibilities of change, the glimmer of other possibilities: the crack in the mirror of psyche and social existerice,

the homology that doesn’t quite map? Falling into adultery propels social subjects into imaginary spaces and temporalities—call it the adultery imaginary—which, as we’ve seen, refuse compliance with social forms and conventions that don’t deliver on their promises. In this space, provi-

sional though it may be, being destabilized, desiring, and unself-alienated are norms; gratification is not a remote possibility but an immediate demand. But this is the language of theory, not of adultery itself, which is

inchoate and episodic. It doesn’t sustain thinking; it resists narrative (favoring the lyric). So having engineered a massive domestic crisis, maybe not for the first time; having managed to bring yourself to what some might construe as a crossroads, the problem for you, the exposed adulterer, will be precisely those sticky questions about the future. You’re being asked to confront something, but through a fog. As you said all along, you had no idea what you were doing. You were feeling your way toward something maybe, but you don’t know what. Through the mucky emotions, the shouting, the tears—who could now say? Life is in chaos. Things are very fragile. Perhaps the lover, too, is giving you grief: “If you're so unhappy, why don’t you finally just do something about it?” About what? About your unhappiness? About all the misery you’ve spent so much time detailing to the attentive lover, who seems to have been— who knew!—keeping track? Could you risk giving up your discontent— assuming you can even name it—or have you become so habituated to it

Adultery

4)

that you only feel legible to yourself in relation to your own unhappiness? After all, your experience in other affective worlds has been brief. Perhaps this is the moment for abject contrition: “How could I have hurt you like this, I hate myself!” This may even work for both spouse

and lover. Or you can try standing your ground: “Look how unhappy I’ve been. Look what I’ve been driven to!” You may even realize, somewhere back in the old reptile brain, that being found out isn’t such bad leverage as a means to at least temporarily ameliorate the domestic scene. (Not that this was ever your intention of course—not consciously, anyway.) And renouncing the adulterous love object in a grand sacrifice on the altar of your dead marriage does help pump some blood into the corpse. If you’re sacrificing something that really mattered to you, all the

better. It may even propel you back into the arms of that previously reviled spouse, amidst pledges to work harder at the marriage and put in more time at home. Often things will improve. The spouse vows to become more attentive, less whiny or critical or remote, more sexually adventur-

ous. Marriage counselors are consulted. Plans for family outings are made. Domestic improvements are undertaken; major appliances may be purchased; there is a sudden upsurge in public entertaining; vacations are embarked upon and real estate purchases considered: all capital reinvestments in the marriage. You'll never be ambivalent again, right? It may be a few years before you're let out alone again, but it’s good to be back home. Meanwhile, those new forms of subjectivity your love affair so reck-

lessly and hopefully ushered into the world have probably started seeming, in retrospect, like something experienced in a temporary fugue. That other person, to whom you pledged love, courage, honesty, has become something of an inconvenience. You worry about gossip, about the egre-

gious betrayal of your confidences and complaints. How stupid you were, how immature. The person you briefly became—the one you may even have recognized, temporarily, as your best self—seems

distant, like the

whole thing happened to someone else. What was all that stuff about desiring different futures anyway? Besides, the marital panopticon is on

full alert, so glue that smile back in place.

For the Sake of the Children The last thing in the world I want to do is hurt you, but I couldn't live with myself if I caused any more hurt than I have already. I may live to regret this, but at least for now... The discontented classes are creative geniuses at improvising displacements for transformational fears and desires. Intellectuals stuck in

46

Laura Kipnis

bad lives can celebrate the possibilities of upheaval—textual or social— in their scholarship, can elegize all the bygone opportunities period by period, wresting rescue from the present, projecting disappointment into the past or hope into the future. Then, of course, there are the children.

Investing futurity and optimism in your children is always a good displacement; they make convenient prostheses for any surplus hopefulness you find yourself burdened

with, as well as tidy explanations for your

inertia should you be called on to explain it to the beloved or to yourself. “For the sake of the children” is always a good trump card: end of discussion (even though the privileging of the child’s perspective in adult narratives will always be selective and capricious). At most you might allow yourself to calculate the years until they’re grown and you yourself can matriculate to a less alienated life—but only when you're really feeling desperate. Unfortunately, what “for the sake of the children” means, in practice,

is habituating children to contexts of chronic unhappiness and dissatisfaction; to unmet needs as status quo; to bitching mothers, remote fathers,

and other gendered forms of quotidian misery. Do you somehow think the kids don’t know? That you’re the master thespian of the home front; that your family life isn’t just re-creating another generational traiziing ground for lives of affective poverty, for emotional mutilation as the affective norm? The truth is, having grown up in such a household yourself, you consider it your rightful place. It seems like home. You couldn’t “live with yourself” if you renounced it because you’ve had no emotional training in anything different. And neither will your children. What would it take to sustain the new forms of self and the world of gratified needs invented by your love affair—that is, if you hadn't been

persuaded that a sheepish return to the emotional deadness you tried so desperately and so recently to escape now counts as a happy ending? Or if you hadn't deluded yourself that your bittersweet love affair with your own unhappiness somehow protects those around you from injury? What would it take to install those newfound forms of optimism and desire into ordinary life in place of emotional fatigue and renunciation? (And by all means, bring the kids along.) What would it take to expect more forms of gratification and pleasure in the present, in other spheres than intimacy alone—even without the hand-me-down utopia of sex? If adultery werent a placeholder for more sustained kinds of transformation and honesty, or a repository for wishes split off from the pragmatics of everyday life? At the very least, it would take an unembarrassed commitment to utopian thinking. It would mean forging connections, in theory and in practice, between the myriad forms in which we do tentatively invent these possibilities in our everyday lives and larger questions about the 62. See Bollas, “Transformational Objects.”

Adultery

47

social organization of work, love, shame, and pleasure. It would take fan-

tasy, which is indispensable to this kind of social project. In our everyday practices though, aren't we all quite dedicated to inventing beautiful, nascent worlds in which the realization of desire is possible? Do we not, at some level, know that these arent banal questions, we avant-gardistes of

everyday life, we emergent utopians who experimentally construct different futures out of whatever we can, taking up residence in our ragtag inventions in starving, greedy ways, though barely able to imagine committing to them—tourists in the world of gratification armed with temporary visas. We have, after all, been born into social forms in which fighting for happiness looks like a base and selfish thing, and realization of desire is thwarted and fleeting at best, so often an affair of short duration.®

63. See Jameson, “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan: Marxism, Psychoanalytic Criticism, and the Problem of the Subject,” Yale French Studies, nos. 55-56 (1977): 393-95, from which I paraphrase.

Sex and Talk

Candace Vogler

Sharing at the emotional level is one of the hallmarks of intimacy. Unless two people are willing to reveal a good deal of information about themselves—not only biographical, but also in terms of what

they feel, what they fear, what they worry about, and what they hope for or dream about—it is unlikely that any meaningful intimacy can exist. It is actually in this process of communication that the essence of intimacy is expressed. — MASTERS, JOHNSON, AND KOLODNY, Heterosexuality' 1. Call what Masters, Johnson, and Kolodny describe self-expressive intimacy. Paradigmatically, self-expressive intimacy is a private affair of selves, although models of ethics or politics that stress storytelling, emotions, identification, and empathy suggest that the very patterns of selfexpression and self-enhancement that make intimate life a haven can be used to draw us—at least by an act of imagination or feeling—into the public world as well. My purpose in this paper is not to argue against the thought that intimacy is sometimes a matter of reciprocal self-expression and selfscrutiny, nor even to deny that self-expressive intimacy can be soothing, but rather to contend, first, that not all intimacies are affairs of the self I have benefitted greatly from comments by the fellows at the Chicago Humanities Institute (1995-96 academic year), Dan Brudney, Hank Vogler, Martha Nussbaum, Cass Sunstein, Elyah Millgram, and Lauren Tillinghast on earlier drafts of this essay. I wrote the essay during residency at the Chicago Humanities Institute and am grateful for the support. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Lauren Berlant for her encouragement, advice, insight,

and friendship. 1. William Masters, Virginia Johnson, and Robert Kolodny, Heterosexuality (New York, 1Rc}C2:9esOm od

48

Sex and Talk

49

and that, second, the fact that some intimacies are not affairs of the self is what makes people want them. To do this, I will tell a story about what I will call depersonalizing intimacies. My story begins with unhappy husbands and wives drawn from U.S. popular psychology books about ailing marriages.? Marriage begins to die, U.S. popular psychology tells us, when couples can no longer sustain intimacy. On the self-expressive model, this would suggest that marriage falters when couples get out of the habit of knowing each other. But that is not what case-study unhappy marriage is like. Here is how therapistauthor Michael Vincent Miller describes morbid companionate marriage: The self-conscious intimacy practiced in many middle-class marriages is particularly lethal. Like doctors examining a patient’s blood pressure, couples check up regularly on the progress of the relationship. ... Many a couple’s evenings, if they can still speak to one another at all in such a climate, are filled with anguishingly earnest diagnoses of each other’s motives. . . . Once they climb in bed, there

is apt to be more of the same, perhaps accompanied by massage exercises from Masters and Johnson or experiments with new sexual techniques and positions. . . , but when you import [new sexual techniques] into an atmosphere already close to despair, they mostly add

to the forces already turning love into labor.’ Endless

conversation

about the relationship;

sex as a collective-action

problem calling for creative solutions; a habit of probing for knowledge of each other—this is the stuff of bad case-study marriage. It’s not that case-study spouses have fallen out of touch. Rather, they are mired in something like epistemic overkill. The well-heeled, well-educated pairs one meets in expensive hardcover books like Miller’s even apply scholarly works on psychoanalysis or culture to problems on the home front. What they share with paperback case-study spouses is so profound a knowledge of their spouses’ selves that they can silence or push them to the breaking point with the simplest of gestures.* That is why it is interesting that pop2. I will call these characters “exemplary,” or “paradigmatic,” or “case-study” because they function as points of identification, empathy, and instruction for readers. 3. Michael Vincent Miller, Intimate Terrorism: The Deterioration of Erotic Life (New York,

1995), pp. 84-85; hereafter abbreviated /T. 4. For high-end examples, see /7, pp. 32-33, 46, 63-64, 135, 99-103. For paperback examples, see Maggie Scarf, Intimate Partners: Patterns in Love and Marriage (New York, 1987),

pp. 144-50, 220-39, 259-65.

Candace Vogler is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago where she teaches philosophy and gender studies, She is currently at work on a book about practical rationality to be entitled Reason and Action.

50

Candace Vogler

ular psychology names what has fled when the honeymoon is over “intimacy.” Case-study spouses sometimes call it intimacy, too. More often, casestudy wives

complain

that their husbands

won't talk,° and case-study

husbands complain that their wives won't have sex.® Greg and Sarah (a case-study couple) express the gender-typical heterosexual complaints in their very first session with Miller: She speaks first: “Greg, why don’t you talk about how hard it is for you to say what you’re feeling?” He sinks farther into his chair, his

eyes narrow, and he folds his arms tightly across his chest. Two spots of color appear on his cheeks. She reaches across to touch his arm, which causes his whole body to stiffen. “For one thing, you wouldn't be depressed so much,” she says,

“if you'd learn to express your feelings more openly.” [/T p. 26] Greg won't say a word, so Sarah proceeds to give a detailed account of what he’s like and how he behaves at home. Eventually, Greg loses his temper and blurts out a detailed description of her character and conduct. Then he introduces his topic: “‘As long as we’re here, I think we

ought to talk about our sex problem. That’s the sort of stuff you help people fix, isn’t it, Dr. Miller? She hardly ever wants to have sex any more’” (IT) p. 27). The husbands miss sex. The wives miss talk. The cou-

ples miss something about verbal or sexual intercourse, which gets called intimacy. And nobody is short on personal information. Suppose, then, that what they need isn’t new and improved pedagogies of the self. Suppose instead that when contemporary U.S. middle-class marriage decays, husbands

and wives grow rigid, their senses of them-

selves calcify, and they can neither forget who they are, what they want, what they’ve been and done to one another, and how disappointingly it’s all come out, nor allow their partners to forget these things. Suppose, that is, that all that is left between them is the tedious yammering of selves: “T’m like this,” “you’re like that,” “you never,’ “I always,” “you always,” “I

never,” that sort of thing. Suppose, that is, that the splendid solidity of the case-study spouses’ senses of self and partner marks not only the miserable triumph of self-expressive intimacy but also the complete ruin of the kind of intimacy they actually want with each other.’ In order to imag5. See Masters, Johnson, and Kolodny, Heterosexuality, p. 90; Scarf, Intimate Partners,

pp. 220-45; William Lederer and Don Jackson, The Mirages of Marriage (New York, 1968), pp. 220-23; and IT, pp. 26-27, 135-40. 6. See Masters, Johnson, and Kolodny, Heterosexuality, pp. 90-92; Scarf, Intimate Partners, pp. 220-45; IT, pp. 32-33, 63-65, 45-46, 57; and John Gottman, Why Marriages Succeed or Fail and How You Can Make Yours Last (New York, 1994), pp. 154-55. 7. Martha Nussbaum suggested that perhaps solid selfhood is only perilous for troubled people. There is, actually, a lot of data suggesting that selfhood of the sort praised by contemporary philosophers and ego psychologists is in general bad for one’s psychological health. For reviews of this material, see Roy Baumeister, /dentity: Cultural Change and the

Sex and Talk

Sul

ine this, we have to imagine a kind of intimacy that has nothing to do with tracking or expanding the borders of selfhood. We have to imagine that when wives ask for talk, they have in mind a style of verbal inter-

course in which one can forget who one is, for a little while. We have to imagine that when husbands yearn for sex, they likewise are hoping “to be liberated from the fetters of selfhood, to be allowed to stop being true to their various ideas of self” (ES, p. 213).

In order to tell a story about this kind of sex and this kind of talk (and its uneasy position in U.S. heterosexuality)® I will draw on various sources. I will start from a contemporary philosopher’s version of the selfexpressive model of intimacy. He will be the villain of my piece, and Kant will begin rescuing us from him. Drawing on cues from Kant, I will use a

poem by Adrienne Rich to illustrate how depersonalizing intimacy could occur in talk, and prose by Leo Bersani about sex as a scene of depersonalizing intimacy. Both Rich and Bersani are radical critics of the operation of exemplary U.S. heterosexuality; the (predominantly female) consumers of popular psychology are more like its moral proletariat, charged with producing exemplary heterosexual intimacy at home and managing family values for children. Case studies are meant to serve as points of identification and instruction for the readership. I will read Rich’s poem as embodying a feature of female talk that rather subverts views that stress the place of women’s talk in heterosexual, familial relations. (Kant

will provide a traditional story about women’s proclivity for talk, and popular psychology will provide a slightly different account.) I will under-

stand case-study wives’ request for case-study husbands’ speech as a kind of inadvertent, inchoate (and to that extent impotent) protest against casestudy heterosexuality. In effect, I will read Bersani as exploiting a feature

of male sexual self-representation for the sake of destabilizing a heteroStruggle for Self (Oxford, 1986) and Escaping the Self: Alcoholism, Spirituality, Masochism, and Other Flights from the Burden of Selfhood (New York, 1991); hereafter abbreviated ES. 8. I will use “exemplary U.S. heterosexuality” as a name for complex systems of human relations involving such things as romance and marriage and different ways of handling the early education of boys and girls. It is the cultural and institutional complex that will concern me, not some quasi-biological fact about chromosomal sex differences. 9. The phrase “moral proletariat” is borrowed from Annette Baier. It appeared in an unpublished section of her essay “What Do Women Want in a Moral Theory?” The published version of the essay appeared first in Novis 19 (Mar. 1985): 53-63 and was later reprinted in her Moral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics (Cambridge, Mass., 1994). Baier stressed the role of (middle-class, heterosexual) women

as a moral proletariat for liberal moral theory,

a group engaged in vital ethical social labor who were untheorized by male philosophers. That role would be inconceivable without the corresponding (heterosexual) masculine (middle-class, liberal) hero of moral theory. Applying “proletariat” to consumers of popular psychology is a bit strained. I have in mind a kind of analogy between early commodityproduction and late ideology-(re)production. The analogy is, of course, flawed, but features of intimacies more usually treated in work on same-sex intercourse will promise respite from the business of exemplary heterosexuality in my story in roughly the way that home was meant to provide a haven from work.

D2

Candace Vogler

sexual male system of self-representations. (Again, Kant will provide the

traditional account of male sexuality, one thoroughly inscribed in an account of heterosexual gender relations.) While seeking refuge from the burdens of heterosexual masculine selfhood in the “little death” is a timehonored strategy, I will read in case-study husbands’ call for sex a kind of

illicit desire to escape from the ordinary business of exemplary heterosexuality as well. Case-study husbands don’t just want (depersonalizing) sex.

They want it with their wives. This suggests that they long for a mode of intercourse at home that does some violence to their senses of themselves as husbands, fathers, heads of household, authorities, and so on. Again, this longing is inchoate. Further, it is even less clearly pitched against

exemplary U.S. heterosexuality than the wives’ call for talk since heterosexual sexual intercourse is a traditional escape-hatch for exemplary U.S. men that needn’t involve any diminution of social status and is understood by exemplary U.S. women to be expressive of normal manliness, whereas

wives’ proclivity for talk has been read by exemplary U.S. heterosexual men as a mark of idleness, irrationality, pessimism, and bad character (I will take up husbands’ understanding of talk in some detail below). I will not affect tidy reunification between unhappy case-study husbands and wives in my story. To some extent, case-study husbands and wives will have to unlearn a little of their (heterosexual) genders to have

depersonalizing intimacy with one another. To a larger extent, they will have to learn to think differently about the relation between the larger world and what happens at home. But this in turn might open a mode of engagement with the public which does not rest on empathetic flights of fancy. 2. My story will link sex and talk non-self-expressively. Many contem-

porary philosophers treat sex as talk or as very like talk on the selfexpressive model of verbal intimacy.'° In this spirit, Robert Nozick writes:

10. A lot of Anglo-North American philosophers take this approach. I will concentrate on Robert Nozick because his version is more plausible than most. The most sustained deployment of the sex-talk analogy, however, is to be found in Robert Solomon's essay “Sexual Paradigms,” in The Philosophy of Sex: Contemporary Readings, ed. Alan Soble (Savage, Md., 1991): sex “has its own grammar, delineated by the body”; it uses a “phonetics of touch and movement”;

its unit of meaningfulness (equivalent to the sentence) is the gesture; it

communicates “interpersonal attitudes and feelings” (p. 60). Having sex solely as a means to physical pleasure “is the sexual equivalent of hanging up the telephone without saying anything” (p. 60). Now, our wives are bringing their husbands to therapy precisely in order to talk about interpersonal attitudes and feelings. Solomon's story offers intriguing possibilities for redescribing the role of therapists in bad marriages (simultaneous translators? erotic hearing aids?), but doesn’t shed much light on the wives. Our husbands, on the other hand,

want more sex, but don't like talk. I suppose Solomon could suggest that they suffer from a widespread urge to engage in crank phone call sexual behavior, or else all are afflicted with one of the “semantic” perversions (the bodily equivalents of lying) (p. 62). But this account hardly helps us understand why the men want sex with their wives. While Nozick’s account

Sex and Talk

DS

In verbal conversations, people speak in different voices, with different ideas, on different topics. In sexual conversation, too, ev-

eryone has a distinctive voice. And there is no shortage of new things two people can say, or older things that can be said newly or reminisced about. To speak of conversations here does not mean that the sole (nonreproductive)

purpose

of sex is communication.

There

is also excitement and bodily pleasure, desired for themselves. Yet these

two

are

also important

parts of the conversation,

for it is

through pleasurable excitement and the opening up to it that other powerful emotions are brought into expression and play in the sexual arena. In this arena, everything personal can be expressed, explored, symbolized, and intensified. In intimacy, we let another within the

boundaries we normally maintain around ourselves, boundaries marked by clothing and by full self-control and monitoring. Through the layers of public defenses and faces, another is admitted to see a more vulnerable or a more impassioned you.!!

Now, case-study wives want talk but refuse sex. Case-study husbands want sex but shrink from talk. If sex was as much like friendly conversa-

tion as Nozick suggests, then the women ought to crave it and the men ought to fly from it. Further, the public/private contrast is not strictly applicable to wives who stay at home with children (as some case-study wives do), whose “public arena,” home, 7s their husbands’ “private arena.” Still, the romantic aspiration in Nozick’s picture is one we will encounter

in other places, and the picture itself will provide a point of contrast in what follows.

The thought that I can’t express myself freely in “public” life is not new. Nor does the thought that I can’t have sex in “public” come as a revelation. In one form, both thoughts are Kantian. What Kant does with them, however, is more interesting and subtle than the contemporary

philosophical urge to treat them as a single idea. In Kant, some talk is like sex, not because both are occasions for self-exploration or self expression, but rather because something alien to the well-tempered self can act out in both. 3. Kant’s discussion of relations between confidants in the Lectures on

Ethics opens with an observation very like Nozick’s: In ordinary social intercourse and association we do not enter completely into the social relation. The greater part of our disposition will leave the puzzle untouched, he, at least, thinks that the content of sexual conversation

concerns more than interpersonal attitudes and feelings. 11. Robert Nozick, The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations (New York, 1989), p. 64;

hereafter abbreviated EL.

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Candace Vogler

is withheld; there is no immediate outpouring of all our feelings, dispositions and judgments. .. . But if we can free ourselves of this constraint, if we can unburden our heart to another, we achieve com-

plete communion.

That this release may be achieved, each of us

needs a friend, one in whom we can confide unreservedly, to whom we can disclose completely all our dispositions and judgments, from whom we can and need hide nothing, to whom we can communicate our whole self.'?

Various good things (besides a chance to satisfy the urge to unburden oneself) come of such friendships. Kantian friends help each other out and “correct”

each other’s views, and men

develop

the minor

virtues

(among them cheerfulness and sweetness, kindness, taste, and sympathy) in the course of fitting themselves for friendship. Complete openness in matters of disposition, sentiment, judgment,

and feeling between

men

characterizes Ideal friendship and serves as a standard of conduct between friends.'® Perhaps because “friendship is the hobby-horse of all rhetorical mor-

alists,” Kant devotes less attention to its pleasures than to its dangers (LE, p. 200).'* The first of these is imprudence: “We must so conduct ourselves

towards a friend that there is no harm done if he turn into an enemy” (LE, p. 208). The problem with perfect candor between men is that they

all have something to hide: “If all men were good there would be no need for any of us to be reserved; but since they are not, we have to keep the shutters closed” (LE, pp. 224-25). Of course, if all men were good, it’s

hard to see why a man

wouldn't enter completely into ordinary social

intercourse in the first place. But in a world with bad men, a man can be

tempted to enlarge the sphere of trust too quickly and too widely when he finally finds someone to talk to. The other dangers Kant discusses explicitly involve immoderation or intemperance: tendencies for intimates to demand too much of one another and to “[shut] out from [their] heart all who are not within the charmed circle” (LE, p. 206).!°

I take it that Nozick could make roughly parallel remarks about lov12. Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics, trans. Louis Infield (1930; London, 1979), pp. 205-6; hereafter abbreviated LE.

13. See, for example, Kant, Metaphysische Anfangsgriinde der Tugendlehre, vol. 6 of Koniglich Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin, 1902-38), pp. 471-72; hereafter abbrevi-

ated Ak. 14. In Metaphysische Anfangsgriinde der Tugendlehre, in Ak. 6, p. 470, friendship appears as the hobbyhorse of novelists. 15. Kant never hints that excessive attachment could develop between men and women (or even between female friends). He thought that women and some men lacked the necessary liberty to enjoy free intercourse with those who dominated the public sphere, and that the proper relations between husbands and wives necessarily involved the man husbanding/governing (herrschen) the woman. Kant seems also to have thought that feminine rivalries were sufficiently intractable to leave little room for female friendship. See, for

example, Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht, in Ak. 7, pp. 171, 303-11.

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55

ers. Lovers need to have well-placed trust in one another. While love is a lifeline to warmth and sincerity in a brisk, complicated world, it ought not be the sole focus of one’s life. And so on. He would deny that we need particular lovers only because the world is full of bad object-choices because the ultimate end of sex is coupling—“I believe that the romantic desire is to form a we with [one] particular person and with no other” (EL, p. 82). Otherwise, Nozickian romance looks at first glance for all the

world like excellent Kantian friendship. The two ought to be very different. It would be odd for Kant to treat friendly conversation as anything like (brute, subrational) sexual intercourse. Of course, Nozickian sexual intercourse is unusually civilized. When Nozickian lovers manage truly to couple, the result is like birth

without pain: “As egg and sperm come together, two biographies have become one. The couple’s first child is their union—their earlier history was prenatal” (EL, p. 85). Not only is sex like talk, talk is like pregnancy and childbirth—only without the physical stuff women might associate with such matters. Just as the public/private arenas metaphor that shaped Nozick’s remarks on the need for self-expressive intimacy didn’t strictly apply to wives who stay home with children, the couple-as-fetus image suggests some confusion about the impact of chromosomal sex differences on procreation. It is as though Nozick feels some need to come up with a picture of procreation that puts males in the same position with respect to childbearing as females (sometimes) are—and this from a heterosexual philosopher who otherwise urges that we pay the strictest attention to our partners. Biographies are what come together in Nozickian sexual conversation. Life stories become the matter of which the “we” of “me” is made. Carnal pleasure, although desired for its own sake, serves

to loosen tongues for self-exploration and “we”-making. At one point, Nozick actually wonders whether lovers might engage in sex “im order to have ... unposed conversations”

afterwards (EL, p. 65), making sex a

means to conversation, which in turn is the main reproductive technology for couple-making (unless two people have invented some system for tapping out dates, names, and so forth on each other’s skins, they won't be

exchanging detailed autobiographical information by means of touch). But however disembodied, chaste, and driven by make-believe reproductive urges Nozickian sex and romance might be, Nozick’s topic remains physical intimacy, and we all know how Kant felt about that.

Here comes the Kant we know best from the Lectures on Ethics: There can be perfect and complete intimacy only in matters of disposition and

sentiment,

but we

have

certain

natural

frailties which

ought to be concealed for the sake of decency, lest humanity be outraged. Even to our best friend we must not reveal ourselves, in our natural state as we know it ourselves. To do so would be loathsome. [LE, p. 206]

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Candace Vogler

And:

Every house keeps its dustbin in a place of itsown. We do not press our friends to come into our water-closet, although they know that we have one just like themselves. Familiarity in such things is the ruin of good taste. [LE, p. 225]

I suspect that one will assume Kant means that it’s in bad taste to talk about bodily matters with one’s friends: caught in the grip of Puritanism, he didn’t notice that the canvas on which he painted the need for friendship could be stretched to cover the whole realm of the senses. Nozick has this to say about our natural state as we know it ourselves, intimacy, and water closets:

It is no reassurance to be loved by someone ignorant of those traits and features we feel might make us unlovable. Sometimes these are character traits or areas of incompetence, clumsiness, or ignorance;

sometimes these are personal bodily features. Complex are the ways parents make children uncomfortable about sites of pleasure ination, and these feelings can be soothed or transformed in est attentive and loving sexual intimacy. In the full intimacy the full person is known and cleansed and accepted. And (EL p27)

or elimthe closof love, healed.

(The remark could have been clipped from a popular psychology advice column. One curious feature of U.S. popular psychology is that it seems predicated upon the conviction that there are no good grounds for low self-esteem.)

Kant’s caution about loathsome talk is meant to cover idle talk about animal nature, I think—talk that has no pragmatic, scientific, or philo-

sophical point. But animal nature does a special sort of work for Kant as a more general marker of features of human life that are not expressive of rational humanity. His thought—in dangerous intimacies the body makes trouble for the mind in the mind—is part of a more general concern about ethically loaded traffic in aspects of human life alien to rational autonomy and, hence, to the well-tempered self qua ethical subject and rational agent. 4. Elsewhere, Kant investigates a mode of intimacy with oneself that,

while having nothing to do with the body directly, is nevertheless to be avoided. I have in mind Kant’s discussion of men’s attempts to track the flux of inner experience. “Observing oneself” is not merely being aware of one’s actions, character, and effects on others. It is making “a methodi-

cal inventory of the perceptions formed in us, which supplies the material

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for a diary of introspection.”'® In the part of the Anthropology devoted to this topic Kant writes: the real purpose of this section is to give the strict warning . . . against occupying ourselves with spying out the involuntary course of our thoughts and feelings and, so to speak, carefully recording its interior history. [A, p. 14]!” He explains: To observe in ourselves the various acts of the representative power when we call them forth merits our reflection; it is necessary and useful for logic and metaphysics.—But to try to eavesdrop on ourselves when they occur in our mind unbidden and spontaneously (as happens through the play of imagination when it invents images unintentionally) is to overturn the natural order of the cognitive powers, because then the principles of thinking do not come first (as they should), but instead follow after. If it is not already a form of mental illness (hypochondria), it leads to this and to the lunatic asylum. A man who can relate at length his inner experiences (of grace, temptation) can arrive, after the voyage of discovery he makes to scrutinize himself, only in Anticyra. [A, p. 15] One went to Anticyra in order to convalesce from serious illness, and the

allusion to hypochondria likewise suggests a mental problem that is physically debilitating: “The exact opposite of the mind’s power to master its pathological feelings is hypochondria, the weakness of abandoning oneself despondently to general morbid feelings that have no definite object (and

so making no attempt to master them by reason).”!® While I’m not certain that the Kant who counseled caution when confiding in others really (or even also) intended to give a veiled warning against attempting to discuss the flux of inner experience, the stuff of perilous self-observation ought to be off-limits in friendly conversation. For Kant, there cannot be proper objects of self-observation at all. Inner experience lacks the form that makes controlled observation possible: spati16. Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. MaryJ.Gregor (The Hague, 1974), p. 14; hereafter abbreviated A.

17. Compare: “Baumgarten includes observation of oneself amongst the duties towards oneself. We keep ourselves under observation not by eavesdropping but by watchful attention to our actions” (LE, p. 143).

18. Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, trans. Gregor (Lincoln, Nebr., 1992), p. 187; emphasis Gregor’s. The passage occurs in Kant’s remarks about the relations between the Philosophy Faculty and the Faculty of Medicine, written as a letter urging that prescriptions tending to moral health are critical to treating the whole person medically. See Kant, Der Streit der Fakultdten, in Ak. 7, pp. 103-4; see also Kant, Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht, in Ak. 7, pp. 180, 181, 202, 212-13.

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ality. It “sees the relations of its modifications

only in time, and so in

flux, where the stability of observation that is necessary for [empirical] experience is lacking” (A, p. 15). (Kant is lecturing on anthropology

rather than introspective empirical psychology in part because minds present no objects for observation.)

But more than this, Kant’s popular writings on ethics and happiness are informed by the thought that a great deal of wastefulness, misery, and evil in human life can be laid at the door of people’s tendency to overstep the appropriate limits of reason and will, to fail to treat themselves or each other as finite, dependent, rational legislators in a Kingdom of Ends. The imprudence of rash confidences and the immoderation of excessive attachment are species of overstepping. Setting out to track the spoor of inner experience likewise amounts to overstepping. When caught in the grip of morbid inner feelings, a properly rational man first checks to see whether they have any basis in the conditions of his life, and if so, whether

there’s anything he can do about it. If the feelings are groundless, or have their source in something beyond his control, “he leaves his oppression ...1n its proper place (as if it had nothing to do with him), and turns his attention to the business at hand.”'® That people have inner experience is a fact of psychological life for Kant, and so is part of our natural state as we know it ourselves. But the course of inner experience is anything but “natural” viewed from the standpoint of rational agency. Like irreclaimable waste, the flux has the character of something that can neither be put to good use nor properly assigned to one’s self gua rational moral agent. What comes up when a man eavesdrops on inner experience, then,

offers a clear contrast to what friends discuss: dispositions, judgments, sentiments,

feelings, and

the “whole

self” (understood

as the field of

character and legitimate identifications, not unlike what philosophers and ego psychologists nowadays call identity).*° Kant assumes that such stuff originates in arcane operations of animal nature, but his general topic is experienced alterity 7 one’s own mental life. 5. Kant struggled to warn his audience that where actions, character, dispositions, judgments, sentiments, feelings, and thought run out, mon-

sters be. The monsters tempt the would-be self-observer to (a) claim inner experience as just more self (a kind of “it’s me! here I am! see what I 19. Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, p. 189. 20. I have in mind here discursive or narrative accounts of identity, which understand identity as a system of self-representations cast in the form of a life story. This kind of account gets developed in the work of ego psychologists in the “personological” region of clinical cognitivism; see, for example, Dan P. McAdams,

Power, Intimacy, and the Life Story:

Personological Inquires into Identity (New York, 1985). Narrative accounts of identity are pop-

ular among philosophers these days, treated at length by Charles Taylor, Martha Nussbaum, Alexander Nehamas, Rom Harré, and others.

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do!”) such that “without noticing we are doing it, we suppose we are discovering within us what we ourselves have put there” (4, p. 15), or (b)

treat the flow of mental experience as a kind of quarry to be pursued and disavowed until the hunter loses track of himself (a kind of “it’s not me!

that’s not me either! there’s no me here!”), leaving him with the impression of “powers flowing into [him], by none of [his] doing, from some

unknown source” (A, p. 15). The difficulty with the “it’s me!” side is fairly obvious. The difficulty with the “there’s no me here!” side is slightly more subtle.?! First, once a mental content has become an object of purely diagnostic interest, the content itself provides one with no reason to do or think anything. For example, if I and my Nozickian lover are having a private chat, and I confess that I keep imagining killing my mother and then getting the feeling that she hates me, we will turn our attention to the psychological complexities of mother-daughter relations rather than deliberating how to finish the old girl off or reviewing the evidence in favor of my “belief” that she hates me. The murder-image is not a source of inspiration for a new project. The “unbidden” impression that she hates me is not a product of reason. (In a different setting, Leo Bersani asks rhetorically: “can

fantasies have opinions?”)” Realizing that involuntary and disturbing inner experience is not made of good intentions, appropriate emotions, and well-grounded thoughts may help me avoid heteronomy (if I am like the rational man), but the importance of avoiding heteronomy doesn’t justify eavesdropping on myself because of the second problem with the “there’s no me here” side of the introspective trap: the more I try to follow the flux of inner experience, the more I produce a bastardized version ofit.

If Iset out to make a study of the flux, I will do so by trying to read myself like a book, or by trying to piece together a picture of arcane men-

tal life like an archaeologist unearthing a jumble of shards in what may or may not be a man-made depression, or, perhaps, by trying to chart my inner “movements” according to some theory. But applying theories of inner experience to one’s own mental state alters the explanandum, the heap of mental debris grows and shifts in character as one prods it, and anyway the “raw material” of inner experience ought not be mistaken for some set of items that bear determinate relations to one another. Traffic in inner experience is not like thinking or planning, but one nevertheless hunts for something like a purpose or a wish or a thought when tracking the spoor of inner experience. The subject of inner experience is, after all, the same as the subject of thought, the subject of appropriate emotions and feelings, and the intending subject—“I”—and the 21. I am grateful to Elijah Millgram for pointing out that the problem here was less obvious. What follows is based on Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht, in Ak. 7, pp. 133-34,

read against the account of inner sense at Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht, in Ak. 7, pp. 161-62. 22. Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), p. 168; hereafter abbreviated H.

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ways one has to work with involuntary, elusive or oppressive, inner experience are the ways one has to work with other sorts of content. Since the sane man can tell that the flux is not the same as thinking, appropriate feeling, or planning, he will tend to consider inner experience as serving

ends that either “belong” to him (but not after the fashion of his plan to have lunch with a friend), or else “belong” to some other force, like nature or ideology or his parents. For Kant, hypochondria was the paradigmatic outcome of self-observation, I think, because it involves feeling

doomed by Nature to suffer shifting torments; animal nature is the usual source of alterity in mental life. Nowadays, one might instead feel doomed by bad parenting. Kant has a point: one often is tempted to conclude long introspective journeys by imagining oneself to be a complicated product of some other “agent”—culture, say, or genetics or history or trauma—as if made to “its” order—thereby effecting a magical union of “it’s me” and “there’s no me here” (a result that ought to trouble a Kantian agent). By Kant’s lights, attempting to track inner experience offends against

the development and maintenance of a stable, integrated, and rationally coordinated system of self-representations functioning as the conscious seat of moral agency. If one must pay attention to the spectral residue of alterity (for Kant, paradigmatically, the psychological spoor of animal nature), one does so in order to free oneself from its grip and get on with the business of life—that is, one’s legitimate interest in the flux is, in the broadest sense, therapeutic.** The mode of self-awareness threatened by self-observation, it turns out, just 7s the mode proper to finite, dependent rational beings. Look

for your self in disturbing inner experience and you will find something other than you. Talk about inner experience with an intimate and you risk drawing your friend into the same morass. 6. I began this essay by noting that case-study U.S. wives complain that their husbands won't talk. I also pointed out that the wives shouldn't be requesting an exchange of biographical material: case-study spouses know each other exquisitely well. Actually, if popular psychology is any

indication, exemplary U.S. heterosexual women do not regard talking as, 23. Kant discusses related matters under the rubric of “natural ends.” We treat an effect as a natural end when we treat it as if it was an intended outcome of a process ordered toward bringing it about, but where the cause is not itselfa rational agent. See Kant, Metaphysische Anfangsgriinde der Tugendlehre, in Ak. 6, p. 424; and, of course, Critik der Urtheilskraft, in Ak. 5, esp. pp. 369-81. 24. In Der Streit der Fakultdten, Kant recounts his own struggle with hypochondria, and his success in turning away from the oppression (Beklemmung), as if this feeling had nothing to do with him; see Ak. 7, p. 104. I suspect that this sort of discussion, filled with pragmatic advice about mastering oppressive anxious feelings, is partly meant to provide a contrast to a discussion devoted to describing them in detail and serving mostly to heighten their effect. The latter is the sort of thing he rules out.

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primarily, a medium for information exchange, self-expression, or selfassertion. The self-help shelves in popular bookstores contain many inexpensive paperbacks intended for a female readership and devoted (wholly or in part) to telling women how to talk to husbands. The main

thing to bear in mind when talking to husbands appears to be this: “Watch your words very carefully because he will think you are reporting on your considered views, that you are prepared to defend what you’ve said with evidence or argument, that you are expecting him to respond

in kind, and that whoever ‘loses’ the argument will be humiliated. Men do not understand that sometimes one says a thing mainly in order to get rid of it, and that anyway a lot of what one says to intimates isn’t meant

to convey any definite thought.”*> While this sort of thing might seem like grounds to ridicule the readership of self-help books, one could just as easily wonder about persons who are so ego-bound as to imagine no uses for conversation beyond selfassertion, argument,

reporting, or the weaving of an identitarian safety

net around a private life. Even good talk about ideas requires a kind of openness that case-study wives may understand much better than do their husbands. Think about the difference between the sort of intellec-

tual conversation where interlocutors lay out positions, deploy their stock of argumentative tactics in defending themselves, attempt to act as though they already have thought about what anyone has to say on some subject, and, unsurprisingly, even if things go splendidly, leave with no more than something new to say on behalf of the view they held from the start (as Nozickian lovers might part with no more than a bigger version of the sense of self with which they began). Contrast this with the sort of

intellectual conversation where instead you pose questions that none of you knows how to answer, or discuss hunches without already knowing how to develop or defend them, where you might be surprised by what

gets said and where you sometimes even lose track of who said what. The latter is not, strictly, Nozickian. Adrienne Rich gives an apt, if interestingly convoluted, representa-

tion of counter-Nozickian woman-to-woman verbal intercourse in a poem that was popular among college-educated U.S. feminists in the consciousness-raising era.*° The scene is familiar—two women, in a kitchen, talking

25. See, for example, Gottman,

Why Marriages Succeed or Fail and How You Can Make

Yours Last, pp. 103-36; Laurie Schloff and Marcia Yudkin, He and She Talk: How to Communicate with the Opposite Sex (New York, 1993); Aaron Beck, Love Is Never E nough: How Couples Can

Overcome Misunderstandings, Resolve Conflicts, and Solve Relationship Problems through Cognitive Therapy (New York, 1988), pp. 90-113; and Deborah Tannen, You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation (New York, 1990), hereafter abbreviated Y/D. 26. The phenomenon of U.S. feminist consciousness-raising had an admittedly limited constituency of predominantly white, college-educated women. Many of Rich’s poems were copied out or handed around as inspirational texts for this movement. (“Dialogue” was given to me four times in 1978, which is at once sweet and alarming in retrospect.)

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about their troubles: She sits with one hand poised against her head, the other turning an old ring to the light for hours our talk has beaten like rain against the screens a sense of August and heat-lightning I get up, go to make tea, come back we look at each other,

then she says (and this is what I live through over and over)—she says: J do not know

ifsex is an illusion I do not know

who I was when I did those things or who I said I was

or whether I willed to feel what I had read about

or who in fact was there with me or whether I knew, even then that there was doubt about these things?’

The two interlocutors in “Dialogue” know each other. One has the impression that “for hours” they’ve been trading autobiographical material (the “old ring,” for instance, suggests that they have been surveying the wreckage of at least one marriage). Nozick imagined that friends and lovers talked about themselves in order to weave together their life stories. What happens in “Dialogue” is different. The storytelling part of “Dialogue” is lodged (tacitly) in the past tense (“for hours our talk has beaten”). The rest of the first stanza is written in

the simple present. There are two standard uses of the English simple present: to mark something habitual (“John walks to school,” meaning not that he’s walking there now, nor even that he walked to school this day or that, but rather that when he goes to school, he usually walks);?* or to

narrate dreams and fabulous tales that have a definite chronology (“The rabbit looks this way and that, and then he walks over to me and I fall”).

A series of events becomes strangely vivid when told by stringing together simple present phrases. The idiom gives one the impression that each bit of the story is spinning itself out somewhere, over and over again, after 27. Adrienne Rich, “Dialogue,” Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971-1972 (New York, LOTS) apa Ze 28. One indicates that John no longer 7s walking to school in one of two ways: “John walked to school” (perfected: he made it there) or “John was walking to school” (incomplete: suggesting that he was interrupted before he arrived on campus). One puts “John walks to school” into the past tense this way: “John used to walk to school” (but now he takes the bus, or, but then he moved, or, when he lived in Pittsburgh).

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the narrative has moved on; the storyteller’s present tense in this way sometimes retains something of the standard English use of the simple present to mark the routine or the habitual. “Then she says” may belong to simple present narrative, just like “I get up, go to make tea, come back.” “This is what I live through,” however, is habitual. Like a song lyric marked “CHORUS: repeat and fade,” it isn’t tied to any datable event, and so isn’t properly “tensed” at all. On this reading, Rich’s uses of the simple present simply diverge: “she says” is narratwe, “I live through” isn’t. But because “I live through” is sandwiched in between “she says” and “she says,” it is possible to read the repeated “she says” as likewise habitual—“she” does not merely say it this time or that time; “she” says her final lines as “I” lives through them—over and over, again and again, like a tune stuck in the narrator’s head, or a haunting inner experience of temptation or grace. In the moment of their most acute intimacy, the interlocutors are frozen outside the passage of time, perhaps because, for the narrator, listening to a friend occasions the kind of dislocation Kant warned came jumbled up with self-observation: involuntary inner experience appears to be informed by time without space, but the temporal can’t be tracked reliably when spatiality is absent. These women

couple, but not like separate plot lines in a Nozickian ro-

mance. There is no straight chronology, no narrative progression, just repetition in a habitual present tense. And, while the atmospheric tension

“a sense of August and heat-lightning”) is at once brought to its head and relieved in the final lines, the mood remaining is not one of voluble plenitude. Time is out of joint for our narrator. Space, however, seems entirely to disappear. “I” places herself squarely between “she says” and “she says” such that “I live through” what “she” says in the very positioning of the parentheses. It isn’t clear who’s sitting where, whether “she” is no longer the subject, but has become instead an excuse and frame for a selfobserving “I,” or whether they have merged into a single, free-floating presence. “She” becomes part of the “I” who again and again will live through something—sex or memories of sex, memories of that very conversation or a moment when “I” finds a voice through another woman, making a sudden, timeless, and impersonal “we.” In the end, our narra-

tor could as well add: J do not know/if our conversation was an illusion/I do not know who I was when I heard those things/or who I said I was/or whether I willed to feel/what I had read about/or who in fact was there with me/or whether I knew, even then/that there was doubt about these things. But if the poem ended this way, “I” might conclude: J have never felt closer to anyone/it was wonderful. What “she” says (that “she” can’t track her self confidently in her own sexual history) makes “I” lose track of itself. In the poem’s own terms, the

dialogue is sexual. The speaker's refusal to stick to her own story makes the breach that

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“T” rushes into, over and over. The wobbly uncertainty that follows (and

retrospectively frames) this point in the poem is the hallmark of a form of verbal intimacy that has little to do with Nozickian self-expression. And we see in it what might have troubled Kant: one friend’s description of a

state that neither expresses a clear sense of character (“I do not know who I was,” “who I said Iwas,” “whether I knew even then that there was doubt about these

things”) nor belongs to self-conscious rational agency (“J do not know if sex is an illusion,” “who Iwas when I did those things,” “whether I willed to feel what I had read about,’ “who in fact was there with me”) prompts sudden recognition

and a matching response from the other friend (“and this is what I live through/over and over”). For Rich’s interlocutors, in a counter-Nozickian way, talk is like sex:

it makes you lose track of yourself. Depersonalizing talk is good, something to write poems

about and to remember.

Sexual

self-dislocation,

however, is more like a bad dream. In order to make sex good, the poem seems to suggest, a woman may need a stable system of sexual selfrepresentations with which she can identify and that can function as a

legitimate seat of her sexual agency, to make herself an “I” all ripe for Nozickian romance Nozickian

and do her best to find an intimate sphere where

love might work

for women—that

is, where

who

she is be-

comes what she expresses, enjoys, and, perhaps, enlarges by coupling with another. That, at least, would appear to be the didactic line running across the poem’s surface. Scratch the surface, and things get strange.

Do

the

women

in

the

kitchen

lack

systematic

sexual

self-

representations? Probably not. One assumes that, before they looked at each other, they were discussing their interpersonal (mis)adventures. That talk beat “like rain against the screens,” of course, and our narrator

may be suggesting that they told their life stories through screen identities, like Nozick’s “public defenses and faces,” false fronts stripped off in the italicized final lines, only to reveal that the masks were spun of nothing, and hanging in midair. But the kind of ignorance professed at the conclusion of “Dialogue”—the kind that comes after a long story of disappointment, fear, frustration, or loss and suggests that the speaker has no idea how or why all this came about—is always complicated. While it takes the form of confessing the absence of a clear sense of self, there is gener-

ally no poverty of self-representation in unhappy life stories. The production of sentence after sentence about what I/we did, and what you/he/she/ they did, and what happened next and then next is at once a familiar form of talk and the opposite of a symptom that the speaker lacks a strong sense of self and other. In this sense, the final lines aren’t so much a con-

fession as a repudiation of the obvious answers to questions like, “Who was that? what did we think we were doing? why did I say ‘yes’?” It’s not that the speaker is in the dark about what happened. It’s that she disavows the content of the earlier feminine troubles talk.

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In this sense, what we find in “Dialogue” isn’t a simple desire to know oneself better sexually or find a better outlet for sexual self-expression. It is rather a certain will to ignorance masquerading as longing for Nozickian romance. The didactic register of the poem suggests that what will solve the problem of sex is a stronger sense of self—as though the way to repair the damage of sexual history is to make a new ego, as thoroughly known

and stable as the characters in troubles talk, which can master

history through judicious sexual self-expression in a world where romance stories could let you be “known and cleansed and accepted” and “healed” (as Nozick put it), and as though the “I” who went on about herself for hours had nothing to do with the “I” in the final lines. (In a

footnote to his remarks about inner experience Kant pointed out, “It looks to us, here, as if the ‘I’ were doubled

(which would be contradic-

tory)” since the “I” position has to remain the same in order to be the subject of both thinking and inner experience; Kant thought the illusion

stemmed from mistaking two different forms of self-representation for two different contents [A, p. 15].) The romantic urge in “Dialogue” comes

bundled up in a sense that one’s sexual history holds no surprises; that it is neither more nor less than a single case of a familiar, known, unalterable, and mundane pattern leading to female unhappiness.

Qua products of similarly patterned sexual histories, the women engage in troubles talk (which, for the poem’s audience, is so familiar that its content goes without saying) and appear to conclude that they need

to conjure differently configured selves out of nothing to engage in differently managed sex if they are to experience something better. They place themselves squarely on the “me’—“not-me” seesaw that Kant thought spelled trouble. Too much of an all too familiar sense of self and other leads to a desire to disavow the relevant systematic self-representations entirely. That this approach is not a recipe for happiness, however, is suggested by the fact that the narrator relives the italicized lines over and over. Suppose, however, that the women were to resist the temptation to climb on that seesaw. Suppose that the impersonal force of troubles talk (the problems are everyone’s at once, and therefore no one’s in particular)

were to open up space for a kind of interested detachment that fell short of the disavowal of the calcified, strangely impersonal senses of self, other, and heterosexual relations that are the stuff of troubles talk. I will move toward discussing troubles talk more generally by way of remarks about men and sex, continuing to rely upon Kant, but drawing in Leo Bersani. In Bersani, as in Rich’s poem, dislocation of the self in some modes of same-sex intercourse is to be prized, and the odd sense of

doubling the “I,” of identifying with a self that is not itself, is inspirational. Rich can be hopeful about woman-to-woman talk, even if it doesn’t straightaway produce any very definite results. Bersani sees similar potential in man-to-man

homosexual

intercourse.

Further, Bersani repre-

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sents the sexual as involving a rather less deliberate version of the relation between a swollen, overly solid sense of self and its loss, the kind of thing we first met in Kant’s cautions about self-observation.

7. Kant realized that there are margins to well-tempered selfhood that obtrude in inner experience. He assigned the marginal elements to arcane operations of animal nature, and I have suggested, through a reading of Rich’s “Dialogue,” that the experience of self-dislocation that

worried him was a thing women possessed of the exceptionally solid senses of self and other one finds in exemplary unhappy marriage might seek in conversation. Kant’s concern was that trying to chart the margins of one’s psychological life (or, I suggested, to talk about them casually) offended against the maintenance of ethical self-understanding and rational will, and so ought to be avoided. However, Kant thought that another form of inti-

macy that essentially takes people outside the proper purview of reason and will couldn't be simply avoided by adult human beings in general: sexual intercourse. For Kant, one of the very few regions of human life appropriately viewed as if it was ordered to another “agent's” “ends” is sexual life. Kant explains: “As one’s love of life is intended by nature for the preservation of his person, so is his sexual love intended for the preservation of his kind, i.e., each is a natural end.’?° What nature “intends” and what

people intend do not inevitably coincide, of course. Worse, the “means” by which nature attains “its end” degrade humanity: Sexual love “is the only case in which a human being is designed by nature as the Object of another’s enjoyment” and “as soon as a person becomes an Object of appetite for another, all motives of moral relationship cease to function,

because as an Object of appetite for another a person becomes a thing and can be treated and used as such by everyone” (LE, p. 163). To what-

ever extent I am legitimately identified with and only with moral personality, there’s no me there for sexual intercourse.

But, for all that, without

sexual appetite “a man would be incomplete; he would rightly believe that he lacked the necessary organs, and this would make him imperfect as a human being” (LE, p. 164). If lacking sexual appetite marks me as incomplete and imperfect qua human being, then sexual appetite is me after all. Kant works hard to handle the moral quandary posed by this magical union of me and not-me by strictly prohibiting masturbation (in which I make of myself an object for pleasure—this is worse, even, than

committing suicide since suicide at least “requires courage; and where there is courage, there is always respect for the humanity in one’s own 29. Kant, The Metaphysical Principles of Virtue, in Ethical Philosophy, trans. James W. Ellington (Indianapolis, 1983), p. 85.

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person”)*° and by placing coercive juridical constraints on interpersonal sexual intercourse. In a fascinating discussion of Kant’s views on sex and marriage, link-

ing Kant’s account with Andrea Dworkin’s discussion of sexual intercourse and Catharine MacKinnon’s work on rape, Barbara Herman writes:

Kant [sees] inequality as among the possible effects of sexuality, but he does not take the moral problem of sexual relations as exclusively a problem of the subordination of women. On either of the obvious interpretations of his account of sexuality, the moral costs are borne by both parties. There is the romantic version of his story: It is not the act of intercourse that by its nature subordinates women, but the

ego dissolution of sexual bonding that threatens the boundaries of both persons. If persons cannot sustain the integrity of their agency in certain sorts of relations, those relations are impermissible. And there is what I take to be the central claim about objectification: Sexuality involves the moral loss of self, not in terms of boundaries, but as being persons to and for one another.*!

Overstepping the legitimate boundaries of reason and will is always a feature of Kantian sex. The appetite for sex regards persons as means to pleasure, not ends-in-themselves, and the sex act brings moments of such acute sensation that partners lose track of themselves entirely as autonomous selves. Given that sex essentially involves a morally impermissible relation between persons, Kant wasn’t in favor of very many kinds of it. He wasn’t at all interested in establishing a sphere for ethically safe sex between men, or between women,

or between men and women

who were unwilling to have procreative sex. But procreative sex was the chief means to perpetuating the species, and marriage was meant to place a kind of moral cordon around it. Here’s how the marriage contract is supposed to protect would-be parents. First interpretation: I give myself to my husband completely in marriage,

granting him full rights of disposal over my whole being—

something that, strictly, gua moral agent, I can’t do—but I do myself no injury because my husband gives himself to me completely and reciprocally, thereby returning to me the all of me that I gave to him, and vice versa. Second interpretation: while no one is permitted to grant another person complete rights to disposal over her or his own person unilaterally, the marriage contract effects so complete a union of two persons that, in 30. Ibid., p. 87. 31. Barbara Herman, “Could It Be Worth Thinking about Kant on Sex and Marriage?” in A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity, ed. Louise Antony and Charlotte Witt (Boulder, Colo., 1993), p. 56.

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Candace Vogler

granting each other complete rights to their persons reciprocally, no in-

jury is done to either “part” of the newly constituted “whole” being.* How is the fact that both spouses consent to a bargain that neither is permitted to strike alone supposed to legitimate the contract? If my husband and I get ourselves back again immediately because of the reciprocity provision, then it’s hard to see how we have made any progress. If, however, we become a single person, then one wonders

why the newly

ageregated person is permitted to have sexual intercourse with zéself, when having sex with oneself is worse than suicide. The tension between what is and is not assignable to the self—the tension that makes selfobservation dangerous to one’s sanity, talk like the kind overheard in Rich’s kitchen loathsome and outrageous, and gratification of sexual ap-

petites a moral problem—appears to have been resolved for purposes of procreation miraculously. It is as if, faced with the thought that sex is necessary for the species but cannot be made into a person-to-person exchange, Kant has set himself the task of spreading a carefully worked carpet over a swamp.”° And while we’re wading through the quagmire of sex in Kant, it is worth noting that the region where men get stuck is curiously different from the territory women inhabit. Nature in Kant sets up a battle of the sexes ringed round the business of procreation. Man’s chief weapon in the battle is physical strength; Nature gives woman the power to draw male sexual appetite and “loquacity and emotional eloquence” with which to manipulate man’s sexual desire for her (4, p. 167). Unfortunately, words are nearly useless in the state of nature, where “all superiority is on the man’s side” (since brute force wins) and “the woman

is a

domestic animal” (A, pp. 167-68). Woman's aptitude for using talk to control men only shows itself in civil society: “In the crude state of nature we can no more recognize [woman’s] proper nature than we can that of the

crab apple and the wild pear which reveal their diversity only when they are grafted or inoculated. ... Man is easy to scrutinize: woman does not betray her secrets” (A, p. 167). One such secret may be that a healthy woman, although in need of some “male’s protection against other men” (4, p. 167), does not care 32. For both versions, see Kant, Metaphysische Anfangsgriinde der Rechtslehre, in Ak. 6, pp. 265-85. See also LE, pp. 166-67. 33. Herman

takes up these issues explicitly; see “Could It Be Worth Thinking about

Kant on Sex and Marriage?” pp. 60-63. She does not think that Kant’s accounts of marriage work, taken on their own. She has more sympathy with the Rechtslehre version, because it is isomorphic with the account of property and shows recognition that public juridical constraint is sometimes a necessary framework for social relations. She offers the following as a Kantian gloss on how the solution might work: the rights and responsibilities which come with marriage “secure regard for one’s partner as a person with a life, which is what the sexual appetite by itself causes one to disregard” (p. 63). It’s not that the marriage contract

makes sex permissible, it’s that it makes many other things obligatory. The other things repair any moral damage caused by sex.

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much which one. Her sexual appetite is radically impersonal: Since nature wants her to be sought after, woman cannot be so fastid-

ious in her choice (by taste) as man, whom nature has fashioned more coarsely and who already pleases her if only his physique shows that he has the strength and ability to protect her. [A, p. 170]

His sexual appetite, however, fixes upon her personal qualities, her particular charms, the things that inspire protracted feminine rivalries over male attention. Because his appetite fixes upon particular women, while any successful woman “makes herself the object of everyone’s tastes” (A, p. 171), in monogamous marriage, she can use his special desire for her,

and her skill at manipulating that desire, to claim “gentle and courteous treatment by the male, so that he finds himself imperceptibly fettered by a child through his own generosity and led by it, if not to morality itself, at least to its clothing” (A, p. 169). In spite of woman's moralizing effect on man’s coarse nature, how-

ever, the kind of marriage Kant favors is one where the husband governs the household, not one where the two parties have equal juridical stand-

ing or where women are given greater rights because they start off at a special disadvantage qua members of the sex on the bottom in the act itself, most available to sexual objectification, and forced by circumstance

to court it.** Kant may be thinking that, if women were men’s equals before the law, men’s position would be hopeless. Each sex will try to move toward the other from a position of strength: “inclination toward what is advantageous to us is common to all” (A, p. 169). But man lays down his best weapon—physical force—with his fellow citizens and equals in civil society. At the point where her powers are most keen, he is disarmed. Special legal standing may serve to compensate him for his relative impotence. While I hope we would nowadays shrink from treating Kant’s speculation on the character of the sexes as a page from the Book of Nature, there are, actually, indications that case-study U.S. heterosexual men feel safer having sex with women than they do talking with them, that casestudy U.S. heterosexual women feel safer talking with men than having sex with them, and that these women find themselves in charge of having the emotions and talking on behalf of the interpersonal world they share with their male partners.*° To this extent, case-study U.S. heterosexuals

are more Kantian than one might have thought. This isn’t too surprising: the gender differences Kant discusses under the rubric “the character of 34. See Kant, Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht, in Ak. 7, p. 303. 35. See, for example, Masters, Johnson, and Kolodny, Helerosexuality, pp. 15-22; Scarf, Intimate Partners, pp. 220-45; and Augustus Napier, The Fragile Bond: In Search of an Equal, Intimate, and Enduring Marriage (New York, 1990), pp. 359-80.

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Candace Vogler

the sexes” are intertwined

with middle-class

norms

organizing procre-

ative heterosexual activity.

8. Herman argues that Kant’s view of sexual intercourse is very like Dworkin’s and MacKinnon’s but that the latter seem to hold out hope for person-to-person (read: Nozickian) sex in a world purged of the institu-

tions of sexual domination. Kant thinks that sex itself offends against personhood: the appetite for it objectifies and the pleasure of it disrupts people’s sense of themselves as distinct individuals with rational wills. The contemporary theorist closest to Kant on this subject is Leo Bersani.*° However great the distance from Kant’s work on animal nature and its effects to Bersani’s nuanced discussions of affects, drives, and psychic organization;*’ or from Kant’s crude view of sexual appetite to Bersani’s work on the trajectory of homosexual desire;** or from Kant’s thought

that the object of sex appetite is the human being with whom one wants sex to Bersani’s discussion of the strange disappearance of objects in sexuality;°° or from Kant’s project of protecting us from (always depersonalizing and therefore unethical) sex by means of marriage to Bersani’s view

that sexual depersonalization is itself to be ethically prized,*° there are certain spiritual affinities between the two. For one thing, both think that

sex is “at least in certain of its ineradicable aspects—anticommunal, antiegalitarian, antinurturing, antiloving” (“IR,” p. 215).

For Bersani, views like Nozick’s belong to an immense contemporary intellectual effort, conducted in the face of a long history of male sexual violence, to render sex ethically safe by fitting it to a liberal egalitarian model and then to treat that model as describing the true path of sexual activity. Not only is this enterprise likely to fail (since, as Kant’s and Rich’s interlocutors noticed, sex isn’t like that), but the “redemptive reinvention of sex” shares deep kinship with the very forms of sexual brutality it is designed to correct (“IR,” p. 215). They have a common root. Both involve overstepping the appropriate limits of reason and will by trying to claim for the self a region of human life that does not belong to personhood. The rapist, the batterer, and the gay-basher use physical force to try to master and control the sexual (by attacking people who “make” one feel vulnerable to the sexual loss of one’s sense of self). The liberal sex theorist, on the other hand, pretends that there is 36. Bersani’s work on sex is shaped by his work on Freud, and Freud’s relation to Kant was complex. I will not do justice to Bersani’s Freud, or Freud’s Kant. 37. See, for example, Bersani, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (New York, 1986), pp. 34-67, hereafter abbreviated FB; and The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), pp. 29-46.

38. See, for example, H, pp. 35-60. 39. See, for example, Bersani, The Culture of Redemption, pp. 42-46. 40. See, for example, Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” in AIDS: Cultural Analysis/ Cultural Activism, ed. Douglas Crimp (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), pp. 197-222; hereafter abbreviated “IR.”

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no such vulnerability, that sex doesn’t involve traffic with anything but well-tempered selves. Like the self-observer who wrongly trails after inner experience swelling up with the inward cry “it’s me!” the liberal sex theorist either mistakes loss of self-awareness for an incomprehensible extension of his own powers or else (if he is trying to tell a noble lie) is recommending

that we

learn to make

this mistake.*!

Bersani

writes: It is possible to think of the sexual as, precisely, moving between a hyperbolic sense of self and a loss of all consciousness of self. But sex as self-hyperbole is perhaps a repression of sex as self-abolition. It inaccurately replicates self-shattering as self-swelling, as psychic tumescence. If, as these words suggest, men are especially apt to “choose” this version of sexual pleasure, because their sexual equipment appears to invite by analogy, or at least to facilitate, the phal-

licizing of the ego, neither sex has exclusive rights to the practice of sex as self-hyperbole. For it is perhaps primarily the degeneration of the sexual into a relationship that condemns sexuality to becoming a struggle for power. As soon as persons are posited, the war begins. It is the self that swells with excitement at the idea of being on top, the self that

makes the inevitable play of thrusts and relinquishments in sex an argument for the natural authority of one sex over the other. [“IR,”

p. 218] Unlike Kant, Bersani thinks that it is possible to hang out in the sexual without overstepping the limits of reason and will, that overstepping is more a sin than a necessary evil. If pretending that sex is a person-toperson exchange condemns sex to becoming a struggle for power, then dispensing with that pretense might be the first real step to take against sexual violence. Don’t recommend that people turn to sex for selfexpression and self-amplification. If they manage to have good sex at all under those conditions, the result is bound to be disappointing; passionate sex plunges people “into a self-shattering and solipsistic jowissance that drives them apart” (“IR,” p. 222). (In this vein, one self-help author who

went in search of Nozickian sex laments: “after having what could be described as explosive physical sex .. . I felt like crying. .. . I would look over ... and wonder what happened or what had not happened to make me feel so alone.”)*? But sex purged of the demand for self-enhancement “could . . . be thought of as our primary hygienic practice of nonviolence”

(1k 22)

41. Nozick’s view of sex and love appears in a book intended as an undergraduate text, and is written in a kind of philosophical persona which probably has little to do with the man himself. In this sense, Nozick may be telling a noble lie for educational purposes. If Bersani is right about sex, the attempt at sentimental education is misguided.

42. Kimberley Heart, When Fairy Tale Romances Break Real Hearts: A Guide to Creating Loving, Lasting Relationships (Tiburon, Calif., 1992), p. 173.

WE:

Candace Vogler The figure who takes himself to be at an advantage in the sex act,

who is on top, who has might on his side in physical interaction generally,

is paradigmatically male (as we saw in Kant). For this reason, Bersani

suggests, a celebration of loss of self in sex between men could be especially valuable “because it never stops re-presenting the internalized phallic male as an infinitely loved object of sacrifice” (“IR,” p. 222), indeed,

“nothing is more threatening to the culturally enforced boundaries between men and women than a man participating in the jouissance of real or fantasmatic female sexuality” (H, pp. 121-22). Now, I want to suggest that what our husbands want from sex is timely self-forgetfulness, rather than an occasion for self-expression, just as I think that what our wives want from talk is likewise self-forgetfulness,

rather than an opportunity to express and defend their considered views. Bersani’s writings on sex capture something of the spirit of the thing for case-study U.S. husbands, not just male homosexuals, just as (I think) a lesbian poet’s representation of talk captures something of the spirit of that activity for case-study U.S. wives. Further, I suspect that exemplary U.S. heterosexual women sense a certain advantage in intimate talk and feeling, that their husbands sense it in sex, and that part of the explanation about why one spouse moves to talk and the other to sex in search of depersonalizing intimacy is that “inclination toward what is advantageous to us is common to all” (4, p. 175). But if we drop Kant’s account of Nature’s role in shaping relations between the sexes, and treat the remark about advantage as a more narrowly anthropological observation about heterosexuality in one traditional form, then we can’t quite go along with

the thought that self-forgetfulness in talk or sex has nothing to do with personal or cultural history. Women aren't born talkers, nor do men naturally fall prey to their own sexual appetite. By a similar token, we needn't accept Bersani’s explanation about sexual vacillation between me and not-me couched in terms of “a breakdown of the human itself in sexual intensities, ...a kind of selfless communication with ‘lower’ orders of be-

ing (IRS pa 221): It’s not that Bersani isn’t acutely aware of the cultural, political, and historical circumstances he writes in, to, and about. It’s that when we

ask, “But why sex? Why, given the many things that induce loss of selfawareness, is sex so singular?”** the answer he often is tempted to give turns on speculative psycho-biology. In order to get at the sense in which Bersani’s sexual is romantically 43. For a fascinating discussion of various routes to loss of self-awareness,

see ES.

Baumeister suggests that U.S. middle-class selves have come to bear so much ethical weight that the impulse to escape the self is a basic survival mechanism for U.S. middle-class people. He considers suicide, masochism, alcoholism, binge eating, spiritual disciplines of various sorts, and various other kinds of activity as vehicles for escape from what he calls “the burden of self” (ES, p. 9). All involve escape from a strong sense of personal identity

in activity focussed on bodiliness and are to this extent like what Bersani reads in sex.

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frozen out of time (as was talk in Rich), I will draw a different parallel between Kant and Bersani. I will suggest that the sexual in Bersani’s hand becomes weirdly sublime.

9. On one reading of Kant’s dynamic sublime (I won't so much defend this reading as employ it), sublimity beckons when the self finds itself in the presence of an unrepresentable, incomprehensible force of nature, witnessed from a position of perceived physical safety. Faced with this spectacle, imagination strains to represent nature’s might, but fails. The self feels itself suddenly diminished by its failure to represent the natural world, and the human world slides away from nature. But this in

turn spurs imagination to “carry our concept of nature to a supersensible substrate (underlying both nature and our faculty of thought) which is great beyond every standard of sense.”** That substrate is the noumenal. In suggesting that Bersani renders sex nearly sublime, I do not mean that reflection on the sexual opens up against, without quite representing, noumenal freedom in Bersani. Bersani’s sexual is in this respect utterly unlike Kant’s dynamic sublime. But if the place of the noumenal was usurped by the biological life of the human organism, if the place of aesthetic judgment was taken over by psychoanalytic investigations of sexuality, and if the presentations of sense were rendered as “consciousness of being,” then another spiritual affinity between Bersani and Kant

could surface in a passage like this: The investigation of human sexuality leads to a massive detachment of the sexual from both object-specificity and organ-specificity. We desire what nearly shatters us, and the shattering experience is, it would seem, without any specific content—which may be our only way of saying that the experience cannot be said, that it belongs to the nonlinguistic biology of human life. Psychoanalysis is the unprecedented attempt to psychologize that biology, to coerce it into discourse,

to insist that language can be “touched

by,” or “pick up,”

certain vibrations of being which move us back from any consciousness of being. [F'B, pp. 39-40] The tremulous brush with the ground of being in Bersani’s speculations on sexuality doesn’t concern what unites the starry heavens above with the moral law within but rather an intimation of the prelinguistic biology of the organism and, through it, the life force of the species. However, 44. Kant, The Critique ofJudgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford, 1952), p. 104; hereafter abbreviated CJ. Bersani reserves the term sublime for a defensive ego restruc-

turing of narcissism, a massive shift whereby the ego desexualizes self-abolition through an ideal self image: “In the ego’s relation to the ideal version ofitself, narcissism is itself idealized, sublimated into something more sublime” (Bersani, The Culture of Redemption, p. 42). This is an un-Kantian use of “sublime”; if Iunderstand him, Bersani is describing a process

closer to the apprehension of Kantian beauty.

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Candace Vogler

the account he gives of the dynamic operation of the life force of the species is not a straightforward bit of teleological theorizing. It has a twist to it. And that twist sublimes the sexual. Bersani suggests that “sexual pleasure occurs whenever a certain threshold of intensity is reached, when the organization of the self is momentarily disturbed by sensations or affective processes somehow ‘beyond’ those connected with psychic organization” (“IR,” p. 217). The speculative biological account of this phenomenon is, roughly, this: the infant is routinely subjected to intense stimuli from activities absolutely crucial to its survival before it can represent its circumstances and long before it has ego structures strong enough to bind or resist the associated energies, and so it is routinely overwhelmed by what sustains its life; the sexualizing of sensory ébranlement stems from associating beingoverwhelmed

with excitement

(notice that, because

the overwhelming

stimuli the infant must seek out are life-sustaining, the psychic danger is linked to something that is not at all physically dangerous; like the circumstances that conduce to mature reflective aesthetic judgment of the dynamic sublime, the infant’s circumstances are relatively safe); as the infant’s level of psychic organization increases, “the ego will domesticate, structure, and narrativize those waves of excitement which simulta-

neously endanger and yet also protect the first years of human life” (FB, p. 40). In short, the infant is so raw to sensory input that the things that keep it alive bring it pain instead of pleasure. But, functionally, pain spurs an organism to avoid stimuli rather than pursue them (H, p. 94). What takes sexual pleasure away from ordinary biological functioning, and sends it crumbling toward the sublime is that the capacity for sexual pleasure emerges from a “psychical strategy which partially defeats a biologically dysfunctional process of maturation” (FB, p. 39). There is a magnificent rearing up of the human (in the individual, prior to the devel-

opment of identity or personality) agaist nature in Bersani’s account of

sex. That this act of humanity serves life, that “it is perhaps only because sexuality is ontologically grounded in masochism that the human organism survives the gap between the period of shattering stimuli and the development

of resistant or defensive ego structures”

gests, nonetheless, tween

humanity

(FB, p. 39), sug-

a common, hidden, and even unknowable affinity beand

nature,

indirectly

disclosed

when

the

human

organism must negotiate a biological defect (the infant can’t cope with the sensory overload produced when its biological needs are met) for the sake of preserving its biological life (the infant must nevertheless respond favorably to the circumstances that meet its needs). Bersani will only speculate about the common ground of humanity and nature that 45. See also FB, p. 38: “the pleasurable unpleasurable tension of sexual excitement

occurs when the body’s ‘normal’ range of sensation is exceeded, and when the organization of the self is momentarily disturbed by sensations or affective processes somehow ‘beyond’ those compatible with psychic organization.”

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makes sexual pleasure possible because the experience of jouissance is contentless. Both the spiritual affinity between Kant and Bersani and the reversal of the Kantian conclusions emerge clearly in passages like this, I think:

the object of [sexual] desire [becomes] the very experience of ébranlement or self-shattering. The need to repeat that experience can be thought of as an originary sublimation, as the first deflection of the sexual instinct from an object-fixated activity to another, “higher” aim. “Higher” here, however, would have no connotation whatsoever

of reparation or restitution; instead it signifies a primitive but immensely significant move from fragmented objects to totalities, a move taking place at this stage as a form of self-reflexiveness.*° Compare: Kant’s dynamic sublime is not a response to objects but to a kind of flooding of the imagination by formlessness; it has less to do with nature than with us and, then, less to do with our interests than with the

supersensible ground of our being; the dynamically sublime “compels us to think nature itself in its totality as a presentation of something supersensible, without our being able to effectuate this presentation objectively” (CJ, p. 119). The capacity to judge nature sublime is only possible for men

of culture, but it is to this extent universal: “we say of a man

who

remains unaffected in the presence of what we consider sublime, that he has no feeling” (CJ, p. 116). While Bersani suggests that the capacity to experience feelings associated with the “masochistic thrill” of jowissance “might be” in a different sense universal—“an inherited disposition, the

result of an evolutionary conquest”—the “conquest” is a conquest by human nature of human nature, and the account of this bears some similar-

ity to an account of judgment about the aesthetic sublime as emerging from the intimation of the (natural and rational) ground of being got

when the self touches the limit of its representational powers in nature (H, p. 100). For Kant, appreciation of the sublime in nature indirectly reveals the supersensible, noumenal substrate common

to the laws of nature and

reason. As near as I can tell, the problem with Kant’s account of the sublime is part and parcel with the problem of the noumenal more generally: it scarcely makes sense to postulate a realm that is not only unknown but in principle radically unknowable, and if it did make sense to suppose there was a noumenal

realm, it’s hard to understand how it could carry

any philosophical weight because it is too desperately outside the range of thought all by itself to explain anything. (I assume this is a philosophical commonplace.) For all that, there is something deeply compelling about Kant’s discussion of the sublime, as there is something deeply compelling about Kant. (I take it that this too is a philosophical commonplace.) 46. Bersani, The Culture of Redemption, p. 37.

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Candace Vogler

I find Bersani on sex differently compelling, and not just because I think that his view is genuinely helpful in thinking about sex and the case-study husband. If one hasn't the boundless self-assurance or moral sentimentality (or, for that matter, the beloved sheaf of autobiographical material just waiting for the right audience) required to find the pastoral vision of sex anything but decidedly un-sexy, alien, and faintly revolting,

then one almost cannot not love an account of the sexual as sublime. The story is a delicious antidote to the widespread impulse to harness sexuality firmly to carts carrying happy selves toward egalitarian camaraderie.*’ Nevertheless, it’s worth resisting the impulse to sublime sex if only because, in the relevant sense, it’s worth resisting the impulse to sublime

anything. 10. One of the ways Kant’s treatment of the sublime may be meant as an improvement over Edmund Burke’s (at least implicitly) centers on the desire to repeat the feeling of sublimity; the brush with sublimity that

humiliates imagination and overwhelms the self also gives it a sense of

the unrepresentable supersensible substrate common to nature and thought. If we had merely escaped potential disaster, felt a kind of muted terror or pain from a position of physical safety,** then the desire for répetition would be hard to explain. Yes, humans endowed with a survival

instinct will enjoy having been preserved from destruction, but it’s hardly an operation of self-preservation to send us scurrying back for more. In Bersani’s account, sexual desire is also repetitive; we strive to repeat “that unrepresentable psychic shattering” that we needed to live through, over and over, in infancy (FB, p. 114). 47. J have been using Nozick as my representative of the impulse. To my mind, however, the most uncanny example is to be found in the work of Richard Mohr. In “Why Sex Is Private: Gays and the Police” (in The Philosophy of Sex, pp. 193-218), Mohr gives an account of the phenomenology of male arousal very like Bersani’s. In the last two-thirds of Gay Ideas (Boston, 1992), Mohr uses his account of masculine homosexuality to argue that

male homosexuality essentially expresses and supports liberal democracy and enlightenment moral values. The view is so odd, buttressed as it is by images and anecdotes that give

Mohr’s work the look and feel of native informant testimony, that one wonders how Mohr himself could have missed the relentless hierarchy other men seem to find inescapable in gay underground life and the iconography of “high” and “low” gay male subcultures. One finds in Gay Ideas image after image of impossibly muscled or flawlessly smooth men engaged in sex or dance or posturing, never far from an appreciative gaze, if only the camera’s, shuffled into a text containing slogans like: “Equality is the ideal, male homosexuality

is its model, and democracy the realization of the ideal in practice” (p. 197). It is as if one longed to argue that feminine embodiment provided a model for all that was gentle and welcoming and nurturing, revealing the true affective basis of egalitarian social justice, and then decided to illustrate the piece with photographs of runway fashion models. 48. This is, basically, Burke’s account. See Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, ed. John Boulton (London, 1958), especially the suggestion that the sublime leaves us in a state of “delightful horror; a sort of

tranquility tinged with terror” (p. 136).

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The first place we saw the sexual associated with a repetitive loss of self-awareness was in Rich’s “Dialogue,” linguistically marked by the use of the simple present “and this is what I live through/over and over.” In Bersani, the “living through” is more literal: in order to endure infancy one lived through (that is, by means of) learning to experience ébranlement

as habitually thrilling. But the loss of self-awareness in Rich’s poem didn't just happen in sex. It happened in talk between women in a kitchen. It would be excessive to describe the acute, depersonalizing intimacy of “Dialogue” as turning on a “self-shattering and solipsistic jowissance” (“IR,” p. 222). Perhaps for this very reason, reflection on women’s talk wont lead one to biological speculation about the violently overwhelming sensory stimuli one inescapably confronts when talk mimics Kantian selfobservation. And perhaps because of this, one might explain the difference between seeking out talk for depersonalizing intimacy and seeking out sex by suggesting that verbal loss of self-awareness is a substitute for the real thing—sexual self-shattering, sexual excitement, sexual pleasure. Women, one might suggest, are more refined than men and prefer their pleasures muted (as Kant thought), or maybe women are physically more reticent than men (as Kant also thought) and so can’t really engage the

sexual as sport where self itself falls prey. (Kant had an explanation of these things, tied to that feature of heterosexuality Nozick tried to finesse with an inanity about birthing the romantic we: unlike men, straight, fer-

tile women risk pregnancy in procreative sexual intercourse, and so they have learned to keep their wits about them.) But Bersani 1s too sensitive to the mobility of the sexual (which can inform indefinitely many trajecto-

ries of desire because its “object” is no proper object at all but rather selfdislocation) to deny that talk in Rich’s poem is sexual. What belongs most

intimately to the sexual in Bersani is a seesaw of “it’s me!”—“there’s no me here!”. Unsurprisingly, the weakest point in Bersani is precisely the singular-

ity of sexual excitement as a vehicle for depositing the subject on the seesaw and moving him from one side to the other. Focus on orgasmic sensory overload introduces something at once too concretely mesmerizing and too general into Bersani’s rather more precise abstract treatment of the stultifying political consequences “of channeling our imagination of human relations into the narrow domain of the private” (H, p. 123). If the speculative biological story were true, then how could Bersani possibly use it to recommend public politics over private pleasures for anyone? Why should it matter at all where, or how, or with whom

self-shattering

and solipsistic jowissance is attained? Kant’s thought was that faced with adults who could not experience the sublime under circumstances that gave us this experience, we would think them wanting in feeling. Surely all Bersani could say was that people who “chose” psychic tumescence as sexual pleasure lacked one thing, or had too much of another. But provided that people don’t inaccurately replicate self-abolition as self-swelling,

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Candace Vogler

why does it matter how sexual excitement plays itself out? After all, if people wind up living in a world where the whole of everyone’s activities

and erotic energies are so directed toward lively public spheres that no deep distinction between public and private remains, then this will be in

part because the shift is compatible with human survival. If people live otherwise, then this too will have shown itself compatible with human survival. Put bluntly: Every way people can live is a way members of the human species—that 1s, people—can live. In this sense, an account of the seesaw of me—not-me in sex that treats sexual excitement, not as a culturally imbricated destination for men with overly rigid senses of masculine selfhood seeking depersonalizing intimacy, but rather as the sublime foot-

print of human evolution, thereby drastically reduces its own political interest.

11. There was no sensory overload in Rich’s kitchen. In the place of “self-hyperbole” was autobiographical troubles talk. In the place of “selfshattering” was a repudiation of the autobiographical material in a thinly disguised longing for a sense of self that could be expressed and enhanced in sex. Do the women conclude that having a self that can feel itself master of the sexual must be the secret to pleasurable sex after long experience with men who “chose” psychic tumescence as sexual pleasure and seemed to get it at women’s expense? It is hard to say. What is easier to say is that if the women are being tempted to sex as self-hyperbole, this is not because they lack any sense of the creative potential of a dislocation of one’s sense of self. They get it from each other in talk. What was unsatisfying in Rich’s poem was that, rather than engage anecdotal autobiography creatively, or speculate about it, or enjoy a rueful moment

(any of

which would invite partial detachment from a sense of personal history as an all-too-familiar song and dance where women find themselves forming an inadvertent chorus line), the women

instead complain that they

do not know sex, they did not know their sexual partners, and they do

not know themselves sexually. But at least some kinds of sex (I want to say, good sex) can’t happen unless people stop worrying about who they are, and what the activity means to them, for them, and about them. As

social psychologist Roy Baumeister puts it, “ego and identity simply get in the way when it comes to sex” (ES, p. 116). Not to be able to keep track of oneself entirely, moment by moment, makes one vulnerable, but some

such vulnerability may belong to sex just as it belongs to sleep, and drunkenness,

and sneezing.

What

happens

in women’s

talk, however,

needn't involve a physical disruption of this magnitude. For this reason, the counteridentitarian political possibilities opened up by depersonalizing verbal intimacy may extend well beyond the kind of gorgeous psychophysical tempering of a sense of self produced and relieved in a moment of solipsistic sexual ecstasy. It is time to think more about women’s talk, especially about troubles talk, a kind of collective lament, the sort of talk

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one assumes beats “like rain against the screen” for hours in Rich’s kitchen before anyone said anything that the poet found worth repeating. In troubles talk exemplary U.S. women rehearse their problems aloud with one another, matching story-to-story and heading for bits of gossip when personal examples fail to yield a match. They voice fleeting thoughts, impressions, doubts, and feelings and mix discussion of minor events in intricate sensory detail with talk of bigger things. This is one of the most common ways exemplary U.S. women engage each other verbally and exemplary U.S. men can‘ stand it. As one man put it in an interview with sociolinguist Deborah Tannen, “‘I do not value my fleeting thoughts, and I do not value the fleeting thoughts of others,” having had to engage with a woman’s troubles talk for the sake of finding a new partner after his divorce left him “dizzy from having been bounced around like a yo-yo tied to the string of her stream of consciousness” (Y/D, pp. 83, 84). Exemplary U.S. men talk in order to express judgments and convey information. They are most inclined to talk when “they feel the need to impress, in situations where their status is in question.” Accordingly, they think that expressing doubt is humiliating and prefer giving information because it “frames one as the expert, superior in knowledge, and the other as uninformed.” Similarly, they cannot hear a rehearsal of complaint except as both an expression of incompetence and a request for advice, “a challenge to their ability to think of a solution.” Exemplary U.S. men are confounded by their female peers’ apparent inability or unwillingness to make “categorical statements about right and wrong,” their lack of interest in problem solving, and the apparent absence of “logic” in troubles talk (Y/D, pp. 85, 63, 52, 92). And while the men “complain about women’s refusal to take action to solve the problems they complain about,” and most especially women’s refusal to take men’s advice, the exemplary U.S. man also “regards giving [unsolicited] advice as a form of attack and sees one who gives advice as taking the superior position” (Y/D, pp. 52, 53). Exemplary men mean what they say. They strive for a certain economy of expression and a sleekly objective mode of presentation perhaps because, for them, talk is so fraught with acute sensitivity to social hierarchy, and so much about securing and defending positions in it, that they’d rather not say anything than say a thing that would make them feel vulnerable. Men’s style of talking is generally taken to reflect the ordinary or normal function of talk, and women’s talk is understood as a perplexing deviation from that norm. (Think back to Nozick: while Nozick was ex-

ceptionally chatty for a man, the kind of talk he imagined lovers having about their feelings was designed to solve the problem of low self-esteem, and the topic of lovers’ conversation wasn’t endless complaint, passing fancy, sudden momentary doubt, and fleeting impressions, but rather grander life stories and long-standing judgments, dispositions, tastes,

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Candace Vogler

sentiments, views, and so on.) The usual explanation given of women’s

talk in popular psychology concerns its function in “making connections between people” by “emphasizing sameness rather than difference.”* Middle-class women are supposed to derive a sense of comfort and selfesteem through connectedness with others. They are supposed to learn to value these things because they are supposed to strive to be motherly, and mothers are charged with building connections and maintaining peace among members of their families. Middle-class men are supposed to get self-esteem through a sense of independence and autonomy. They are supposed to learn to value these things because they are supposed to be breadwinners for wives and children and need these qualities to compete for scarce resources and get ahead. Each sex is supposed to use talk as a means to its own gender-characteristic ends. While this account of men’s talk seems plausible, the corresponding explanation of women’s talk is too tame to capture the phenomena. “Making connections” and “establishing rapport” suggest that exemplary women are engaged in attempts to build networks among autonomous persons by finding common ground. As we learned from Kant, talk that mimics the “movements” of self-observation (or, as the exemplary man put it, “stream of consciousness”) cant do that. One of the best chap-

ter titles I encountered reading marriage self-help books was “Your Private Thoughts Become Cast in Stone.”°® It was an especially good title because the chapter explains to its feminine audience that troubles talk leaves men feeling overwhelmed: the men think that women who try to engage them in marital troubles talk are reporting on marital problems so fundamental as to be lodged at the very heart and core of each spouse’s self, making any resolution impossible. It comes as news to the women who consume popular psychology books that voicing “your private thoughts” could “cast them in stone.” Their ordinary mode of intimate talk does not aim to demonstrate how separate, individual people with common

beliefs and interests can make connections, build bridges, find

rapport, and so on. Its usual outcome is instead loss of a sense of oneself as a separate person with sound beliefs and clear interests, a loss voiced outright by Rich’s interlocutors in the final lines of “Dialogue.” I would suggest that the reason that proposing solutions to problems is such a spoiler for troubles talk, the reason it’s so annoying when people do this rather than join in, is that it breaks the whole mood of happy submersion by hinting that the speakers ought instead to become conscious of themselves as autonomous persons with wills that might more productively be turned to the task of solving the problems “under discussion.” Indeed, 49. The account and explanation grow out of the work of Carol Gilligan. See Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge, Mass., 1982). 50. See chapter 4 of Gottman,

Yours Last.

Why Marriages Succeed or Fail and How You Can Make

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that husbands will hear troubles talk as a description of wives’ views of their life circumstances is all by itself supposed to give wives a reason to change their conversational style. If women were hunting for common ground through shared experience and considered judgment in troubles talk, then the self-help advice for unhappy wives would amount to a set of techniques for engaging in deliberate subterfuge. The authors would be telling their readers to lie. But that is not what the authors are suggesting at all. The authors sense that their readers have no real epistemic stakes in the content of troubles talk. The readers want the sort of intimacy with their husbands that they get from talk with other women, the sort that allows one to forget who one is for a little while, to feel like the most personal things do not mark one off as unique (and to that extent, alone) in all the world. The authors

are simply explaining to exemplary women that, in order to get this kind of intimacy from exemplary men, women need to change their way of talking. This is not what the authors would say, of course. The authors of selfhelp books represent themselves as teaching women readers how truly to know and express their true selves and so make room to discover their husbands’ true selves in turn, for the sake of making connections, build-

ing rapport, and producing self-sustaining intimacy in the privacy of their own homes. That is, the authors describe their projects in strictly Nozickian terms. But unless they mean to suggest that lying is the way really to share your true self and connect with his true self, then the obligatory “self” patter is just so much bad window dressing obscuring an otherwise useful display. 12. If Iam right, for our wives, safe self-forgetfulness is associated with troubles talk. When it comes to sex, they may instead dream of Noz-

ickian romance in just the way the women in Rich’s kitchen do: as a chance to detach from a long, painful sexual history entirely, to see yourself as newly born, and to bring your newer, better, stronger self into person-to-person relation with the partner of your dreams. But you can't have Nozickian romance if you’ve disavowed your own life story. Nozickian romance is made of autobiographies. In this sense, the dream of an egalitarian romance seems as strange as Kant’s marriage contract. It appears to express a hope that the problems of sex between men and women could be solved by creating a brand new person ex nihilo who could have sex without morally injuring itself, but it cannot explain how or why the brand new person won't face the same ethical problems the old persons did. For our husbands, taking refuge in a story about the elemental primacy of the male sex drive might likewise cordon sex off from everything else in human life, but, again, there’s no reason to suppose that when the masculine self loses track of its own boundaries and relinquishes control

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Candace Vogler

over itself in a moment of sexual ecstasy, nothing from the history of rela-

tions between the sexes remains to influence what goes on between sexual partners. Even if a case-study husband wanted sex in order to escape himself and in order to celebrate the sacrifice of his internalized phallic homunculus, there is no guarantee that the problematic features of bad styles of heterosexual masculinity will evaporate. Good intentions are not that powerful, even when they are the good intentions of phallic selves.

The cultivation of a lively appreciation of the limits of individual reason and will through depersonalizing sex, while a kind of antidote to contemporary liberal worship of selfhood, is oddly limited qua political activity. It is differently limited than is the vision of politics as a field for high liberal empathy, shared judgment and identification, and cheerful camaraderie in the belly of the nurturing, self-sustaining political we. The

contemporary masculinized U.S. middle-class self that has learned to take everything personally and understand everything about itself as ethically momentous not only is burdensome (as exemplary husbands and wives know), and deluded (as Kant and Bersani point out), but its sphere of

political activity is confined to what it can happily identify with. Anything that disrupts this business is for that reason alone politically valuable. But simply losing track of one’s sense of self is not all by itself a vehicle for changing those conditions that make middle-class selfhood so tedious that one can’t help longing for self-forgetfulness. And losing track of oneself in a moment of sexual ecstasy, however pleasant, at best leaves one all

stripped bare with nowhere in particular to go. The women in Rich’s kitchen had nowhere in particular to go either. But talk that mimics the movements of self-observation without an orgasmic conclusion leaves open the possibility of partial detachment from an artificially congealed sense of self. Rather than teetering back and forth between self-hyperbole and disavowal, the women

could entertain

the possibility that they are neither masters of the whole shape of their senses of self nor entirely in the dark about what happened simply because they have lost the delusion of perfect self-mastery. To imagine that these are the only two possibilities is, in effect, to imagine that the proper limits of individual reason and will are not only the limits of the ethical,

but also the limits of the political. Both women’s talk and hygienically selfshattering sexual congress, however, provide examples of ethically significant collaborative action that is not happily conceived as a sum of individual acts. It is the instability of the borders between self and notself that in each case invites self-forgetfulness and allows partners to lose track of their individual contributions to the effort. And both sorts of activity operate in a politically charged context. The explosion of self-help for unhappily partnered women, the place where we first encountered a longing for depersonalizing intimacies, is a response to the change in gender relations brought about by the second-

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wave women’s movement, as self-help authors are quick to point out.°! Middle-class men and women do not know how to think about themselves or be with one another in a world where middle-class heterosexual gender norms of the sort Kant thought were Nature’s blueprint for human social life persist, but exemplary heterosexual gender relations and aspirations have changed. Seeking out depersonalizing sex in such a climate can serve as a magnificent rebellion against the anxious attempt to produce the self as master of its world in the face of changing circumstances. Seeking out depersonalizing talk without giving into the temptation to sink into lyrical self-disavowal, however, could produce the space necessary for rethinking personal history in its political context, for politicizing the personal, rather than personalizing the political (the narrative romantic impulse we found in Nozick) or opting out of a kind of active political engagement in the face of a sudden apprehension of the limits of selfhood (as the lyrical romance of Bersani and Rich would lead one to do).

13. While popular psychology books about marriage offer all kinds of advice for negotiating gender at home for the sake of couple building and family making, and while nothing is more common than for the authors to chart the new perils at home as a side effect of the second-wave U.S. women’s movement, like Nozick, the only history most of them take

to be at issue between stagnantly partnered or chronically restless heterosexuals is family history, and they treat this history as well-understood and unsurprising. Officially, popular psychology offers an account of intimacy as the private affair of true selves facing the burden of changes in family structure brought about by women’s demand for a more egalitarian distribution of opportunities for self-expression and personal development. The spiritual underpinnings of popular psychology are decidedly Nozickian and deeply heteronormative in their desire to promote egalitarian coupling in the wake of feminism and in their focus on the family as what informs peoples’ senses of self and marks the horizon of their life expectations. Indirectly, however, this literature affords a glimpse of the widespread longing for self-forgetful intimacies on the part of utterly normal U.S. middle-class heterosexual men and women. I have told a complicated story about this longing, linking it to a longing on the part of husbands to escape from certain heterosexual mas51. See, for example, Napier, The Fragile Bond, pp. 69-92; Steven Carter and Julia Sokol, He’s Scared, She’s Scared: Understanding the Hidden Fears That Sabotage Your Relationship (New York, 1993), pp. xvi-xviii; Regina Barreca, Perfect Husbands (and Other Fairy Tales): Demystifying Marriage, Men, and Romance (New York, 1993), pp. 1-18; Laura Schlessinger, Jen Stupid Things Women Do to Mess up Their Lives (New York, 1994), pp. 223-25; Lederer and Jackson, The Mirages of Marriage, pp. 35-38; Harriet Goldhor Lerner, The Dance of Intimacy (New York, 1989), pp. 1-19; and JT, pp. 1-20, 165-71.

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culine norms and to a longing on the part of wives to enjoy a kind of verbal intercourse with their husbands that they get from troubles talk with other women. I drew on Adrienne Rich and popular psychology to describe self-forgetful, counterphallic woman-to-woman talk, and on Leo

Bersani to describe self-shattering, counterphallic man-to-man sex. While both Bersani and Rich are much more critical of heterosexual masculine norms than any popular psychologist, I have diagnosed both the casestudy wives’ call for talk and the case-study husbands’ call for sex as calls for modes of intimate intercourse that do not adhere to heterosexual masculine norms of conduct. In this sense, the case-study couples wind

up having something in common with Rich and Bersani. I read all my texts against bits of Kant, partly in order to provide a counter-Nozickian philosophical framework for thinking about how some kinds of talk might be like some kinds of sex and partly because I wanted to illustrate how engagement with a bit of history which one might have assumed

one knew backwards

and forwards

(for example, what Kant

thought and why) can sometimes yield surprising results. That is, my engagement with Kant was meant partly to mime something that goes missing in Rich’s kitchen: a willingness to rethink “historical” material that is disturbing or painful (for example, Kant’s views on women, sex, talk, and

introspection), for the sake of a different engagement with the present

(for example, with some contemporary work on sex and gender). I hope also to have suggested that Kant may have been too cautious about intimacies that exceed the limits of the well-tempered self, that such intima-

cies needn't lead to an overstepping of the limits of reason and will unless we take it that depersonalizing intimacies inevitably deposit people squarely on the seesaw of “it’s me!”—“there’s no me there!”. That seesaw caused trouble (in different ways) in both Bersani and Rich. It levered

Rich’s interlocutors from a rehearsal of their troubles into a disavowal of their senses of self. It led Bersani careening toward the sublime in search of a speculative account of sexual self-shattering. If we allow ourselves to be mesmerized by the lyric power of women talking in Rich, or the sublimity of men having sex in Bersani, then, to

whatever extent these are appropriate images for what case-study husbands seek in sex and their wives want from talk, we will be forced to

conclude that husbands and wives are so different that they are wasting their money on those therapist-authors. At least, we will be pressed to-

ward some such conclusion if we try to maintain a measure of something akin to Kantian respect for both parties. The more usual course would be to accuse the women of frigidity and pessimism (as case-study husbands do), or else to charge that all men ever think about is sex (as case-study wives do). But the peculiar commonality between Rich’s representation of talk and Bersani’s story about sex isn’t just that both involve self-forgetfulness but rather that both associate positive shift away from

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lethal self-consciousness with violent abolition or anxious disavowal of a sense of self. It’s true that you can’t be at once keenly aware of and in deadly earnest about your own

story, your own

history, your own

struggles, your

own limits, how you personally carry the effects of culture in your life, and so on, and blissfully unselfconscious.

But it is likewise true that the

senses of self one (thankfully, occasionally) loses track of entirely needn't be the calcified, utterly known,

and inflexible things that yammer

on

about each other in the tedious arguments of case-study spouses. The problem of epistemic overkill in bad marriage isn’t just the problem of knowing each other too well. It is also the problem of being too much in the grip of an artificially solid sense of one’s self (and its history and interests) and too attached to one’s view of one’s spouse’s (equally solid, equally trackable)

self. To imagine

intimacies

that are

neither

entirely

self-

expressive nor strictly self-disrupting is to imagine intimates occasionally pursuing pleasures more complex and variegated than those associated with reciprocal self-expression, self-shattering jouzssance, or rote rehearsal of troubles leading to a sense of entrancing estrangement from a too common, too familiar life story. By cultivating not just the pleasures of selfexpression, self-abolition, or self-disavowal, a space might open up for reading a larger world writ into an intimate scene, and perhaps, from there, for imagining a kind of intimate engagement with a larger world as something neither hostile to nor affirming of one’s ownmost sense of self. We can retain a kind of Kantian spirit even if we don’t entirely share Kant’s concern over momentarily disrupting the patrol of the borders of the self. The problem Kant addresses in his popular and pragmatic work isn't really that the self has margins, nor even that we share something that could be called animal nature; it’s rather that adults try to claim as or for

self more territory than belongs to the business of well-tempered, rational selfhood. We could accept that, in even our most intimate intercourse with ourselves and others, something alien to the well-tempered self can act out, without becoming overwrought about this. If case-study spouses could approach each other in this spirit, things might go better. Rather than pretending that alterity in their own experience is entirely within their control (“it’s me—or, if not me, it’s mine, mine, mine”), rather than

simply reversing this pattern by deciding that, since too much self is a bad thing, no self-awareness must always be good (“there’s no me here— thank God!”), they could try for a mode of interested detachment that belongs more to ruefulness than despair and less to romance than irony.

Cag) in America

Mary Poovey

The title of this essay takes liberties with the title of a book published in 1994. Sex in America, subtitled A Definitive Survey, is one of a pair of books,

the other of which is entitled The Social Organization of Sexuality: Sexual Practices in the United States.‘ The two books are the outcomes of a set of surveys conducted over a seven-month period in 1992 by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC), an organization devoted to quantitative social science research. Taken together, the two books purport to tell “a true story about sex, based on scientifically accurate survey data” that was collected by 220 professional interviewers (S, p. 1). While most of the “scientifically accurate survey data” appears in the more technical volume, The Social Organization of Sexuality, I will primarily be concerned here

with the “story,’ which is conveyed in the anecdotes and summaries that appear in the more popular Sex in America. Looking at the story of how its authors researched and marketed Sex in America will enable us to see beyond the portrait they produced of American sex to the epistemological puzzle that undergirds it—the pervasive ambivalence toward knowlI would like to thank audiences in Melbourne

and Brisbane, Australia, as well as at

the University of North Carolina and Northwestern University for helpful suggestions on an earlier version of this essay. Lauren Berlant was instrumental in helping me formulate some of the points I make here, and our conversations have continued to challenge me as I have revised the essay. 1. See Robert T. Michael et al., Sex an America: A Definitive Survey (Boston, 1994), hereafter abbreviated S; and Laumann et al., The Social Organization of Sexuality: Sexual Practices in the United States (Chicago, 1994). In this essay, I address only the more popular of the two books, even though they present the results of the same survey, because Sex in America was

explicitly designed to make these results available to a “wide” —that is, both numerous and nonprofessional—audience (S, p. viil).

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edge that is currently fueling the so-called culture wars both inside and outside the American academy. The liberty I have taken with the title of Sex in America is to superimpose the international sign of prohibition over the operative noun sex. By this graphical alteration I do not mean to suggest that the thesis of these books is that there is no sex in America, much less that there should be no

sex in America. On the contrary, the authors state their conclusions clearly in both books: Americans are having lots of sex, but what their survey “definitively” shows is that the sex Americans are having is with “people who are remarkably like ourselves—in age, race or ethnicity, and education” (S, p. 44).? The reason for this, the authors assert, is that what

most of us imagine to be our most intimate behavior, driven by our most private fantasies, is actually determined by social factors that are just as regular, and therefore just as measurable, as are rates of birth, death, and

suicide. Once we have “the facts about Americans’ sexual practices” (S, p. 1), the authors claim, we can see that sex is just another social phenome-

non that conforms to the same kind of laws that make social scientific research possible in the first place. The sex that the authors of this study found in America,

then, is

2. For the sake of convenience, I repeat in this essay the authors’ consistent use of American and America, even though it should be noted that their survey did not include Canada or the nations of Latin America. The authors of Sex in America do not comment on the discrepancy between these terms and the geographical area their survey actually covered (the United States), nor do they comment on the assumptions about the equation of language use with national identity implicit in their decision to exclude from the “group that represents all Americans” everyone who does not speak English (S, p. 30). The authors’ repeated references to “us,” “all Americans,’ and “we Americans” suggest that they believe that national identity, which is by their account at least partly a function of language use, confers (or reflects?) some essential homogeneity. This assumption is complicated, to say the very least, by the authors’ fundamental assertion that like chooses like when it comes to sex. While the authors never explore the complications or provenance of amodel that postulates both a fundamental homogeneity and segmentation into heterogeneous parts, this model replicates the modern market, which assumes in its participants a universal desire for the commodity form, but which is segmented into ever more finely differentiated “market shares.”

Mary Poovey is professor of English and founding director of the Institute for the History of the Production of Knowledge at New York University. Her books include The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (1984), Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (1988), Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830-1864

(1995), and A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (1998).

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Mary Poovey

curiously both what political and religious conservatives always thought sex should be and not at all what they feared it had become. That is, according to this survey, American sex is heterosexual, potentially repro-

ductive intercourse with people who are like ourselves (in every sense

except gender), and it is not transgressive or dangerous in any way. This explains why the authors of Sex in America state that their findings are “counterrevolutionary” (S, p. 25). It also explains my graphical alteration to the title of the more popular book: I wanted to represent sex both ways, as simply what conservatives think it “should” be and as an admonitory reminder of that other, prohibited incarnation that it seemed to have, but has not really, become.* Of course, depicting sex as always al-

ready under erasure fails to explain why the authors of Sex in America represent their study as a necessary exercise in cultural therapy, much less why the U.S. government first wanted to sponsor and then decided to defund a survey about sex. If there was no sexual revolution, then how can this survey be “counterrevolutionary”? And in what sense have Americans been injured such that these writers can now offer a cure? If there was no sexual revolution, then why did the federal government

initially consider a sex survey worthy of federal support? And if sex momentarily seemed

like a matter

of national concern,

then why did the

government subsequently decide not to fund a survey about sex? Answering these questions, which are questions about knowledge as much as sex, will help us recognize the paradox that informs the change I have made to the study’s popular title. In this essay, I argue that the history of the sex survey exposes two late twentieth-century attitudes toward knowledge that also inform the culture wars—those debates over whether there are enduring cultural values and whether science can generate objective facts that have recently divided the American academic community.* The two attitudes toward knowledge revealed in the debates 3. My formulation could be read one of two ways: either sex is what conservatives think it should be in being “just” sex, in which case, sex would be the primary part of the formulation and superimposing the sign of prohibition would expose sex’s forbidden other; or all sex is tantamount to forbidden sex, in which case, the sign of prohibition is part of

the primary formulation, and the transgressive (unclothed) sex just peeks through its veil. However you read the title of my essay, it should be noted that in it I have employed a sign that seeks to prohibit behavior in accordance with Derrida’s notion that one can keep a concept in play and negate it by using a strike-through to place it under erasure. Anyone who doubts that these amount to the same thing should just imagine the effect that all those No Smoking signs have on smokers forbidden by them either to light up or forget their habit. 4. On the culture wars generally, see Gerald Graff, Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education (New York, 1992). One of the most virulent campaigns of this war has been waged over science, between advocates of the position that science is a value-free instrument for producing objective truth and practitioners of “science studies,” who argue that, as a social institution, science necessarily participates in culturally specific processes of adjudicating value and allocating resources. For a defense of the position that science 1s value free, see Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt, Higher Superstition: The

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over Sex in America are as follows: on the one hand, in the federal government’s treatment of the sex survey, we see the twin convictions that knowl-

edge can be a genuinely transformative instrument and that, as such, knowledge production must be controlled; on the other hand, in the sex surveyors’ presentation of their results, we see the reassuring counterassertions that social scientific knowledge poses no challenge to the status quo; that it is not a transformative

instrument;

and that its production

should, as a consequence, be freely allowed, like the production of any other commodity in the market. The paradox I examine in what follows is that, despite their apparent opposition, these two attitudes toward knowledge ultimately generated the same results—that is, the sex surveyors found exactly what the political guardians of national morality wanted to believe. In order to understand what the sex survey tells us about this paradox, it is important to provide two historical frames: the story of the sex survey itself, and some account of what I have thus far loosely referred to as “knowledge.”

Sex without Government/Numbers as Therapy The idea for a sex survey originated in the federal government as a response to the AIDS pandemic. In 1987, in the last year of the Reagan administration, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), acting on behalf

of a coalition of federal agencies, including the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, issued an official request for proposals for studies of sexual practices, on the assumption that knowing more about sexual behavior was requisite to developing policies to control the spread of the disease. In an apparent attempt to forestall anticipated opposition to a sex survey, the NIH called the proposed study the “Social and Behavioral Aspects of Fertility Related Behavior.” Researchers at NORC, a survey research firm associated with the University of Chicago, responded with a proposal for what they (also euphemistically)

called “The

National

Health and Social Life Survey.” From the beginning, the sex surveyors claim, they wanted the study to cover all aspects of sexual behavior, but Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science (Baltimore, 1994). For a sampling of the science studies positions, see the essays in Social Text, no. 46-47 (Spring-Summer 1996). Vhe temperature of this pitched battle became even higher when Alan Sokal, one of the contributors

to the Social Text issue, revealed that his essay was a “parody” of cultural studies. This admission, in turn, sparked a new barrage of responses, which appeared as “Mystery Science Theater,” Lingua Franca, July-Aug. 1996, pp. 54-64. When the authors of Sex in America refer their method to scientific criteria, they invite one to place the controversy over this book in the context of the science wars. In this essay, I have declined to pursue this line of thought because I see substantial differences, as well as intriguing similarities, between the statistical methodology of the social sciences and the scientific method.

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as the proposal made its way through government channels, the project began to encounter opposition: first, NORC was asked to restrict the survey to behaviors that might cause AIDS (that is, to exclude subjects like masturbation); then, elected officials began to express concern about conducting any kind of sex survey at all. After considerable congressional debate over how Americans would respond to “scientific” questions about sex, the “invasion” of their privacy, and the “immorality” of some of the

previewed questions, the Republican administration decided not to fund the project. This repudiation by elected representatives of the very knowledge that government agencies had requested cannot be attributed solely to Republican squeamishness, for in September 1991, the Democrat-controlled Senate backed a bill sponsored by Jesse Helms that explicitly prohibited the use of NIH money for any sex survey. This bipartisan opposition to the survey suggests that, even though they argued that Americans would demonstrate their conservative values by resisting questions about sex, lawmakers

could not count on such resistance to

generate an image of Americans as sexually conservative. Lawmakers realized, in other words, that if they endorsed the sex survey, it might well

produce an image of American sex that did not accord with their assumptions about who Americans are. When the project was defunded, NORC sought private funding, which they finally received from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation of Menlo Park, the Rockefeller Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T: MacArthur Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the New York Community Trust, the American Foundation for AIDS Research,

and the Ford Foundation.® In the history of the sex survey, then, we see a project designed to produce knowledge

that was both reliable, according to the criteria of

social scientific research standards, and useful, from the perspective of policymakers, pass from the promise of government sponsorship to notfor-profit foundation funding. While the sex survey was conceptualized in such a way as to satisfy both social scientific and policy criteria, its

eventual scope was dictated by the constraints imposed by this turn to the private sector: repeatedly referring to the “limited resources” with which they worked, the authors note that they could only interview 3,500 adults—“enough,” they say, “to be extremely confident about the accuracy of the data as a whole, but... not .. . enough for detailed analyses of small minority groups” (S, p. 29).° The authors cite this funding limita5. The details of the survey’s history are provided by the authors of Sex in America. See S, pp. 27-28. 6. The authors also note that their method was “extremely expensive. . . . Each interview cost ... an average of about $450” (S, p. 33). These references to limited resources

and high expenses simultaneously rationalize the limitations the surveyors imposed on their survey and, implicitly at least, blame the federal government for making these limitations necessary.

Gy) mm America

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tion as the reason they did not include sufficient numbers of gays and lesbians to analyze their responses separately, as they did with racial groups like blacks and Hispanics, although we will see that homosexuality posed problems for the sex surveyors that no amount of funding could solve. Beyond the constraints that the withdrawal of federal funding imposed on the scope of the actual research, the move to private funding also required the authors to find another way to disseminate their results. Whereas the well-oiled machinery of government had promised a more or less direct route from official report to House and Senate committees to the president’s signature to enacted legislation, private foundations could only finance the research; they could guarantee neither a large public audience for the sex researchers’ findings nor a way to translate those findings into policy or law. Denied government funding, the sex researchers turned to galvanizing public opinion to lobby for government action, a strategy that has a venerable history in Western democratic societies. By appealing both to a professional audience (through a respected academic press’s publication of The Social Organization of Sexuality) and a popular audience (with the trade press publication of Sex in America), the researchers hoped to enlist the support of both the academic community and the public in making the government pay attention to the knowledge it had first solicited and then scorned. The history of the sex survey left it with a decidedly mixed agenda. On the one hand, its authors wanted to generate knowledge according to established social scientific criteria, for this would authorize their survey

in the eyes of both government officials and the community of academic professionals. On the other hand, they wanted to represent the knowl-

edge they produced in a manner that would enable them to sell books to an audience often skeptical of both government and the academy. On the surface, these two agendas seem to pull in opposite directions: the social scientific criteria demand that knowledge production be “disinterested” and that the results not be known in advance of the research; the market criteria, by contrast, dictate that the content further the interests of both

publisher and author by giving “the average reader” what extensive market research has discovered he (and she) wants.

While these two agendas might seem to be served by the separation of the researchers’ findings into two differently written and marketed books, the more popular Sex in America suggests that the method the researchers deployed actually enabled them to align the two criteria in a single book. Thus, the authors insist that they embarked on the survey with no preconceptions about what they would find, that their motives were disinterested, and that they were as surprised by what they found as the average reader must be. These claims seem intended to guarantee the disinterestedness of the authors, even though they also acknowledge that the data generated by the sex survey simply confirmed the assumption with which they set out: “we are convinced, and our data bear us

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out, that sexual behavior is shaped by our social surroundings” (S, p. 16). Equally significant, the story the data reveal—beyond the fact that

conducting a social scientific investigation of sex was a feasible and worthwhile project—is the story that the authors claim a large segment of the public wants to hear: that sex in America is not what the sexual revolutionaries of the 1960s wanted it to be, that it is neither rampant nor kinky

nor more pleasurable outside the boundaries of (heterosexual) marriage than within. Despite being abandoned by the federal government to a set of apparently antithetical agendas, then, the sex surveyors managed to produce knowledge about sex that confirmed both the assumptions about method intrinsic to this kind of social scientific research and the wishes about sex (presumably) shared by a large segment of the American bookbuying public. The two agendas that informed the sex surveyors’ project could be reconciled in this way because the authors packaged the survey’s results according to the conventions of one of the most popular genres in American nonfiction: the self-help manual. The not-so-covert message of Sex in America is, in fact, a variant of “I’m OK, you’re OK.” Citing screenwriter

Mary Lou Weissman, the authors invoke the self-help genre early in the first chapter: the delusion that other people are having better sex, Weissman comments, “‘is the same ultimately self-abusing urge that makes people cling to the fantasy—against all contrary evidence—that other people who are thin eat as much as they want. Only you have to diet’” (S, p. 4). While the analogy implicit here—sex is like fat—seems to mobilize the shame that many self-help books use to goad their readers into reform, Weissman is actually saying that the shame people feel is not about excessive sex but about not living up to the cultural fantasy about how much and what kind of sex is properly American. Indeed, Weissman’s reference to self-abuse suggests that the authors of Sex in America are ambivalent about the shaming strategy to which self-help books generally resort. In order to move beyond the banality of the genre, yet capitalize on its appeal, the sex surveyors thus sought to deshame sex. Instead of suggesting that sex, like fat, is a sign of bodily excess, the authors argue that if readers only knew the facts, they would be rid of their shame, for,

in America, sex 1s not excessive but just right. In order to remove the shame from Americans’ feelings about sex, the authors use numbers. Numbers help deshame sex not only because numerical representation forecloses the kind of detailed, anecdotal narration that the authors associate with pernicious “myths” (S, p. 1), but also because the properties of statistical representation enabled the authors to set out their assumptions about normativity in the guise of statistical norms. We begin to see how the researchers converted the method that produces these norms into a therapeutic application of ideas about normativity in the sex surveyors’ opening representation of their imagined audience. In the first chapter of Sex in America, the authors imagine a

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debate in which the composite character conjured by the pronouns “us” and “we” occupies an uncomfortable position at odds with both “religious conservatives” and “assertive liberals.” The authors represent the “discomfited majority” as suffering verbal harassment from both sides and as longing nostalgically for the silence that had once blanketed the majority relation to sex. Religious conservatives seem bent on confronting us, the discomfited

majority, with decisions about what they call matters of ethics and morality—we,

who have not paid that much attention to these sex

questions and who would prefer not to do so now. At the same time, assertive liberals seem every bit as intent on

confronting us with taking stands on the rights of gays or obnoxious speech or embarrassing displays of sexuality. It is not permissible these days to have no opinions about these sexual issues that many people would prefer just stay out of our conversations, off of our airways, and off the pages of mainstream newspapers and magazines that Americans have read for years. [S, p. 7] In this imaginary scene, the authors simultaneously castigate “religious conservatives” and “assertive liberals” for having politicized sex and produce a silent majority that has been offended, if not damaged, by the fallout of the sexual revolution. Summoning such a silenced majority as the implied readership of Sex in America underwrites the authors’ therapeutic agenda, both because this representation casts other (more radical) depictions of sex as poisonous and because it promises that the antidote for this venom is simply appreciating the sex “we” already enjoy. In their opening paragraphs, the authors establish the need for this therapeutic dynamic when they explain that the “myths” about sex promulgated by popular culture and sex radicals damage “self-esteem, mar-

riages, relationships, even physical health,” and when they identify its beneficiaries as the “you” whose sexual experiences are not “endless, fascinating, [and] varied” (S, p. 1).

The “you” of the book’s opening paragraphs may seem to include both the authors of Sex in America and the thousands of people they interviewed, for the initial “you” seems to merge seamlessly with the “we” hectored by conservatives and liberals a few pages later. In one respect, however, the authors distinguish between a “you” that needs to buy this book and a “we” that is both represented by the survey and that “represents all Americans”: whereas the former are reluctant to speak about sex, the latter have learned to do so (S, p. 30). So important is public discourse about sex to the authors’ project that they promise that talking (or at least reading) about sex will curtail the damage that the sexual revolution has inflicted on the silent sexual majority: once “you” realize that everyone else in America is actually like “you”—something “you” can only know by listening to others like yourselves talk—“you” will feel better about

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Mary Poovey

yourselves because then “you” will know that “you” are as “normal” as everyone else. This emphasis on normativity underwrites the sex surveyors’ depiction of a silent sexual majority. In so doing, it also constitutes the heart of the therapy the book promises, and it aligns the social scientific agenda that informed the research project with the commercial agenda implicit in the production of a trade press book. According to the authors of Sex in America,

normal Americans

are driven by the desire to be normal—

and to know that they, and especially their sexual behaviors, are already normal.’ Because of the politicized disinformation that has thus far circulated about sex, by extension, they can only know what normal really is

by reading a book like this. Finally, the form that information must take to convince normal readers that they are normal is statistical—for, by the authors’ own account, numbers metamorphose almost inevitably into the

kind of evaluative thinking that makes people who belong to the statistical majority feel superior to those who do not. In the list of questions that the authors say “nearly everyone” asks, we see both the emphasis on normativity and this tendency to interpret numbers evaluatively: “What are my chances of getting a sexually transmitted disease? ... What are the chances that I will marry eventually? . .. How likely am I to find a partner if I take a new job? ... . Is there something perverse about my sexual fantasies? ... Are most people having sex as seldom as I am?” (S, p. 2; my emphasis).

The slide from perverse to infrequent in this list of frequently asked questions suggests that the equation the authors establish between statistical norms and the desire to be like everyone else constitutes an interpretation of human behavior and group dynamics. When the sex surveyors attempt to explain why they equate statistical norms with (what they represent as) a nearly universal desire to be normal, they reveal that, in order

to equate norms and normativity, they have conflated certain properties of the statistical method with a set of theoretical assumptions about how groups work. This conflation is clearest in the authors’ repeated use of the term group to signify both the population that statisticians constitute 7. The authors’ therapeutic agenda is clearest in their treatment of unpartnered older women.

These women,

their statistics show, are unlikely to find a sexual partner; but, the

authors insist, women should not be discouraged by these findings because their survey also found that unpartnered women are not unhappy. In fact, because they do not think about sex, unpartnered women—and men—may even be happier than individuals who are still engaged in the sexual market: “There are no easy answers for older women who have not found a man. The one consolation ... is that all of our evidence argues against the theory that a woman without a partner is a sexually thwarted creature. Instead, we find, women—and men—who have no partners think less about sex and report having what often are very happy and fulfilling lives without it” (S, p. 87). The lesson seems to be that if you are an unpartnered

older woman

and do think about sex, you are not normal;

or,

conversely, you should feel better about yourself even if you have no partner and feel uninterested in sex because being normal is better than being partnered.

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in order to conduct statistical analysis in the first place and the kind of social unit that qualitative sociologists tend to study. Whereas a statistical population is a methodological unit that only yields descriptions of regularities, however, the social group is an analytic object that has been constituted to facilitate sociological theorizing about dynamics and causation. To conflate the statistical population with the social group is to assign agency to a unit that has only been constituted for the purposes of description; it is, in other words, to assume that, because a group can be designated a population, the population will act as if it were a social group. To understand

this point, it is important

to remember

that the

method of statistics does not imply anything about either causation or agency. To constitute a population and to identify its regularities is not to imply either that individuals imitate each other because they want to be alike or that the population actively polices its members so as to make them conform. When the authors of Sex in America treat the statistical population as a social group, however, they introduce theoretical assumptions about how groups work that imply exactly this kind of self- or social policing. According to these assumptions, individuals belong to social groups because they want to be with others like themselves, and social groups remain social groups by excluding individuals who do not conform to the group identity. Thus, to belong to a social group is, by definition, to conform to its norms—because the pressure exerted by the group makes individuals actively seek to conform to its salient characteristics. The authors of Sex in America repeatedly refer to these dynamics of group policing when they discuss the power of one’s “social network”: “Your sexual partner is expected to be part of your crowd, so your partner has to be appropriate, has to fit in, which means that your partner is expected to be much like you, your friends, and your family” (S, p. 54). “We do not act alone in deciding who is a suitable partner. The couple who falls in love must gain the approval of an array of bystanders, whose views of

the suitability of the match have an impact on the stability of the relationship. This is how the social network and social scripts exert their silent, but immensely powerful, effects” (S, p. 55). “Those couples that flout the conventions and marry [even though one of them doesn’t conform] can risk being ostracized” (S, p. 58).

The theoretical presuppositions that convert descriptive statistical norms into instruments of group policing belong to a larger sociological theory about agency, causation, and teleology. As it emerges in Sex im America, this theory might be called social determinism or even social darwinism. Specifically opposed to both biological determinism and any mode of analysis (like psychoanalysis) that might privilege the individual, this social determinism locates agency in an abstraction that the authors call “social forces.” According to the sex researchers, these social forces

exert influence through various social formations, both formal and infor-

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mal, and their ultimate goal is to preserve a certain kind of “society.” Although they rarely state the biological imperative implicit in the kind of society they envision, occasionally the authors acknowledge that this so-

cial organism mimics, and presumably supports, the teleology of animal species: “society’s goal is to get people safely married and procreating” (S, p- 110).

As this statement suggests, the society the authors imagine privileges marriage over more informal kinds of coupling, and it privileges procre-

ative marriages over childless couples. Even though they repeatedly refer to couples, then, as if partnership and not the institution of marriage was the heart of this kind of society, they frequently slide from formulations that seem to equate cohabitation and marriage to sentences that privilege marriage alone. And when they move, without comment, from “cohabitation” to heterosexual “partnered sexual activity,” they reveal that the procreative agenda is always paramount, even though what seems to be at

issue is whether marriage is “erotic” or not. “We find that the critical factor that produces the most sexual activity is being part of a couple, whether it is a marriage or a cohabitation. Even though married life is

not seen as very erotic, it is actually the social arrangement that produces the highest rate of partnered sexual activity among heterosexuals” (S, p. 118).8 The authors dismiss ideas about what is “erotic” in favor of numerical facts about the rate of partnered sex among heterosexuals because

they assume that “society’s goal is to get people safely married and procreating.” Because they make this darwinian assumption, moreover,

the

sex surveyors argue that “peer pressure,” which encourages the individual to choose a similar partner, is “beneficial and productive” (S, p. 55),

for what is being benefited and (re)produced is not the individual but reproductive, heterosexual society. For the most part, the theoretical presuppositions that underwrite Sex in America remain implicit because it is important for the authors to suggest that they derived their conclusions from their research, not that their research was designed to confirm their theoretical or disciplinary

assumptions. When the authors state these theoretical assumptions directly, however, their defensive posture suggests that they anticipate ob-

jections to both their conclusions and their method.

The data we will present seem to support an extraordinarily conventional view of love, sex, and marriage, but we do not have any pre8. The authors’ discussion of marriage is characterized by a proliferation of superlatives and intensifiers unique even in this generally hyperbolic book: they refer to “amazing evidence,” “striking” facts, and the “dramatic” impact of the marriage effect (so great that it “swamps” all the rest of their data) (S, p. 105). It is impossible to say whether raising the rhetorical temperature in this section of the book reflects the authors’ enthusiasm for marriage or their anticipation of skeptical responses from their readers—most of whom, according to the authors’ own assumptions, would be heterosexual and married.

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conceived notions to impose on our findings or our interpretations. Our results could be read to mean that an orthodox view of romance, courtship, and sexuality—your mom’s view, perhaps—is the only route to happiness and sexual satisfaction. But that is not what we intend. Instead, we believe that American society is structured to reward those who play by the marriage rules. You are likely to gain the approval of your friends and family and colleagues at work by being happily married by an appropriate age, and you will find yourself part of a group of married couples who are also friends. All the forces of society enhance your satisfaction with marriage. So ifin our survey marriage appears as the magical answer to sexual happiness, that should be no surprise. And if you are not happy in your marriage, you are likely to divorce, increasing the chances that, when we look

at married people, they tell us how happy they are. [S, p. 113] In this revealing statement, the authors of Sex in America simultaneously

defend their method by reference to their beliefs and defer responsibility for their findings to the way that the method endorses these beliefs. Even if we accept the implication that all marriages are heterosexual (and potentially procreative), we still may be struck by the circularity implicit in this claim. Because they “believe” that society is “structured” to preserve itself by preserving the marriage form, and because they assume that “the forces of society” operate through social groups, which also tend to preserve themselves, the authors conclude that the happiness that married

couples report confirms the assumptions about group behavior that their sociological training predisposes them to believe. But how do the sex surveyors identify the sexual happiness they associate with marriage? According to their own description of their method, married couples report that they are sexually happy and satisfied because only the couples who are happy and sexually satisfied stay married; once they cease to be happy and satisfied, they divorce, and once they divorce, they no longer

belong to this social group (or, equally importantly, to this statistical population). Thus, by definition, married couples are sexually satisfied and happy, because only sexually satisfied couples are married. It is important for the authors of Sex in America not to emphasize the role that their sociological presuppositions play in their foundational assumptions, for to do so would be to pit the discipline of sociology against the (natural) sciences. It is important not to set up such a contest, in turn, both because most of the reading public would not award the trophy to sociology and because the sex surveyors want to capitalize on science’s prestige by assimilating their statistics to the scientific method (they promise “scientifically accurate survey data”). When the sex surveyors encounter answers they did not anticipate, however, the weight of these sociological assumptions becomes clear. Thus, for example, when they are forced to report that “most” people respond to questions about 999 why they masturbate by saying they do so “‘to relieve sexual tension” —a

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response that would support biological rather than social determinism— the authors simply dismiss these answers as “interpretations” (S, p. 166). In fact, the authors offer an explanation for their respondents’ tendency

to offer such biological “interpretations” that once again restores social determinism to the prominence that they, as sociologists, believe it must enjoy: the respondents interpret masturbation as a release of sexual tension, they explain, because this is “a socially induced answer.’ Once more,

the authors betray the emergence of their theoretical (and disciplinary) bias by using the verb believe. We believe ... that when our respondents said they were “relieving sexual tension,” they were actually giving back to us a socially induced answer. The tensions they were feeling were the result of their being in sexually stimulating environments in which desire is experienced more frequently. Since they may share the cultural belief that they have a sex drive independent of social influences, they may 1nterpret their desires as arising from internal sources. [S, p. 166]

The problem with this explanation, of course, is that there is nothing to distinguish the respondents’ supposedly misguided interpretations from the authors’ presuppositions, which also constitute interpretations—most basically, of which factors are to be considered most salient in the analysis of a complex subject like sex, and more particularly, of how individuals relate to social groups. In fact, the problem of interpretation constantly haunts the authors of Sex in America. This is true for two reasons: first, because the prestige of rival interpretive frameworks makes it critical for the sociologists to downplay the interpretive status of their own assumptions (about social determination), so that sociologists will seem more authoritative than sci-

entists; and, second, because they need to argue that society’s tendency to urge false interpretations upon individuals tends to undermine respondents’ ability to tell the truth, so that the sex researchers will seem more authoritative than their respondents. The problem that any social scientist might have in determining whether or not respondents are telling the truth, especially about a subject as controversial as sex, has been cogently addressed by Richard Lewontin in his New York Review of Books essay on Sex im America.” My concern is not so much whether the surveyors could actually distinguish truth from falsehood, but how these authors’ 9. See R. C. Lewontin, “Sex, Lies, and Social Science,” review of Science in the Bedroom:

A History of Sex Research, by Vern L. Bullough; The Social Organization of Sexuality; and Sex in America, in New York Review of Books, 20 Apr. 1995, pp. 24-29. The sex researchers’ inability to identify, so as to factor out, the presence of their respondents’ “interpretations,” which may also include falsehoods, surfaces most problematically in relation to homosexual and

“forced” sex. See S, chap. 9 and p. 229.

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disciplinary predisposition to see social determinism leads them to address this problem. When the authors of Sex in America focus on society and the social group instead of either the biological or the psychological individual, they suggest that respondents cannot tell the truth because society tends to impose misleading interpretations on individuals—presumably, in order to protect itself. This suggestion seems to cry out for further analysis—about, for example, how society imposes such delusions and why some misunderstandings (about masturbation) support a marriage-based society while others (those of the sex radicals) undermine

it. Because they want to deny the theoretical nature of their enterprise, however—because they want to present their findings as self-evident (if scientifically demonstrated) common sense—the authors of Sex in America do not address any of these theoretical issues. Instead, they offer an account of social encouragement that leaves most of the questions it raises unanswered. In their discussion of why men and women report different attitudes toward certain sexual practices, for example, the notion of social

encouragement cannot identify the site at which society operates: does society simply encourage men to say that they find certain practices appealing or does it encourage them to experience these practices as appealing? In fact, in their cursory

treatment

of the misinterpretations

that

society “encourages,” the authors map the difference between saying and feeling onto gender in such a way as to confuse the matter even further. “It may be that our society encourages men to say they are very stimulated by some of these activities but discourages women from feeling the same way” (S, p. 151; my emphasis). The authors of Sex in America try to bracket the problems raised by interpretation—both their own and that of their respondents—by distinguishing between “fact” and “opinion.” If this distinction could be maintained, it would enable the researchers to limit their survey to the former.

When we ask about a fact—how many partners did you have? What did you do the last time you had sex?—the answer 1s clear and reliable. When we ask an opinion—Is oral sex very appealing, appealing, unappealing, or not at all appealing?—there is more room for fuzziness in replies and more room for social conventions about how strongly men and women are supposed to feel about sex to push the data slightly one way or another. [S, pp. 151-52] Once more, this passage raises more questions than it can answer. Given their own assumptions about social forces, one might well give more credence,

not less, to social conventions,

which

are also, presumably,

in-

formed by (if not articulations of) the very social forces that the authors want to illuminate. Instead of addressing how social conventions relate to social forces, however, the authors of Sex in America direct their readers’ attention to their method, as if the limitations—and virtues—of statistical

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analysis could explain why they adopt certain assumptions (about social determination) and refuse to pursue theoretical questions. The kind of sociological study that can produce knowledge about social groups, they explain, must limit itself to what can be quantified; and what can be quantified are “facts,” not opinions or interpretations. Even though they admit

that opinions are informed by the very social forces they claim to study, then, and even though they acknowledge that opinions too often color what respondents represent as facts, the authors of Sex in America claim

to follow the dictates of the statistical method: to isolate facts from opinions and to quantify only the former. I will return in a moment to the limitations that statistical analysis imposed on the knowledge the surveyors could produce about sex. For now, it is important to uncover the sex researchers’ general assumptions about knowledge production so that we can place them alongside the complex attitudes toward knowledge revealed by the government’s treatment of the sex survey. We can glimpse the sex researchers’ attitude toward knowledge in their reaction to the government’s abandonment of the project. Even though they criticize this decision and hold it responsible for certain key omissions in their study, the authors of Sex in America represent their financial loss as a gain for knowledge in general. “Freed of political constraints” by the government’s

withdrawal,

they explain,

“we decided to make this a sex survey that would go far beyond the original purpose of helping to fight AIDS. ... Our hope was to glean data that would help not only with the fight against AIDS, sexually transmitted diseases, and unwanted pregnancies, but that also would help us under-

stand what enabled some sexual partners to stay together for years while others break apart after only one or a few encounters” (S, pp. 28-29). Implicit in this celebration of depoliticized knowledge 1s a set of assumptions that we generally associate with the academic community: that knowledge is a self-evident good; that it should be generated freely, without utilitarian or political constraints; and that, if unfettered by partisan agendas, it will improve the lives of individuals and society as a whole.

As I have already suggested, the sex researchers were able to present the knowledge that their unconstrained position made available as both disinterested and marketable because their assumptions about normativity informed a therapeutic agenda designed to sell books. Because their assumption about normativity was able to align the social scientific and commercial agendas to which the loss of federal funding had consigned them, moreover, what initially appeared to be a paradox—that the (scientific) truth could be just what (most) people wanted to know—seems to lose its paradoxical character. In their treatment of the subject, the stun-

ning implications of their conclusions all but disappear in the complacency of their appeals to common sense. If all groups are self-policing and self-contained, as the authors of Sex in America repeatedly assert, and

>) enero

10

if like consorts with like, then not only do heterosexual, drug-free Americans not have to worry about AIDS, but the kind of apartheid culture the authors say we already have is the most desirable, because the safest, form of society. As a statement about what counts as acceptable knowledge about sex, the sex surveyors’

conclusions

are even

less controversial,

for they re-

inforce what government officials also seem intent on conveying to the American public: that the only legitimate knowledge confirms what we (the majority) already know, that the only knowledge governments should sponsor is knowledge that doesn’t ask the majority to change its behavior at all. Even if identifying the therapeutic program seems to dissolve the paradox inherent in the authors’ alignment of a social scientific and a commercial agenda, this other paradox remains: that a project designed to generate new knowledge should end up supporting the position about knowledge production endorsed by the government that defunded it. To grasp the significance of this paradox, whose implications extend far beyond these authors’ failure to interrogate the limitations of the social scientific method, we must turn briefly to the subject of knowledge production more generally.

Government by Knowledge/Numbers as Morality The federal government’s decisions to endorse, then repudiate the sex survey imply a complex set of assumptions about what kind of knowledge constitutes socially “useful” knowledge and about the ends that government-sponsored knowledge should serve. These assumptions are difficult to grasp, for scholars have only just begun to provide the kind of historical account of the relationship between knowledge production and government that would enable us to understand them.'? While the 10. The theoretical premises of this project are that knowledge is a social construct and that what counts as knowledge—and even as a fact—changes over time. In practice, this project requires us to account both for the variety of sites where various kinds of knowledge have been produced and for the gradual and uneven appropriation of some of these kinds of knowledge by governments, which have also varied in makeup, effectiveness, and mode of rule. The best introduction to this area of study is The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago, 1991). Re-

cently, historians of science have made significant contributions to what Lorraine Daston has called “historical epistemology,” “a history of the categories of facticity, evidence, objectivity, and so forth” (Lorraine Daston, “The Moral Economy of Science,” Osiris, 2d ser., 10 [1995]: 24) (this volume, entitled Constructing Knowledge in the History of Science, is edited by Arnold Thackray). The contribution most pertinent to the subject of the sex survey is Theodore M. Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (Princeton, N.J., 1995). Much of the argument of this section is distilled from my A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (1998).

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complexities of this subject obviously lie beyond the scope of this essay, I can note that in the late eighteenth century, when the governors of the

newly constituted United States sought to institutionalize some relation-

ship between the production of systematic knowledge and government, two models vied for their attention: the French model of centralized, government-sponsored knowledge production; and the British model,

where even scientific knowledge was generally cultivated by private citizens or informal institutions and circulated, through print and public lectures, in civil society.'' Whereas a strong French government could base national policies on the knowledge whose production it financed,

the relatively weak central government in England had to rely on the marketplace of ideas for much of its information, as well as for support for its sporadic attempts to collect and act on data. Thus, for example, most of the information collected about the poor (before the 1770s) and crime (before the nineteenth century) was sponsored by parish churches or private individuals;'* and when the government tried to introduce a

national census (in the 1690s and again in the 1750s), the proposal met with resistance sufficient to defeat it.'* English resistance to a national census only abated when, at the end of the eighteenth century, poor harvests and a dramatic increase in poor rates made rate-paying Englishmen fear that a growing body of starving poor would outstrip the public purse. Even then, however, the problem was made visible not by official records but by a private individual in the forum of the public press. In 1798, Robert Malthus galvanized his contemporaries with his shocking declara-

tion that, because food supplies increased arithmetically while bodies reproduced geometrically, Britain would run out of food within twenty-five years if it could not find some way to limit population growth. The culating ment in take the stead, it problem

census is particularly relevant to the issue at hand, because calthe size of the population indirectly involved the British governthe sexual behavior of the citizenry. This involvement did not form of policies intended to curtail reproduction, however; intook the form of information collection. This approach to the is consistent with the attitude toward knowledge production ar-

ticulated by Malthus in subsequent editions of An Essay on the Principle of 11. See Jiirgen Habermas, “The Model Case of British Development,” The Structural Transformation ofthe Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category ofBourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass., 1989).

12. On the collection of information about the poor, see Dorothy Marshall, The English Study ofSocial and Administrative History (London, 1926), pp. much of the early information about crime and incarcera-

Poor in the Eighteenth Century: A 77-79. Jonas Hanway collected tion in particular. 13. On the census efforts The Spread of Numeracy in Early

in the 1690s, see Patricia Cline Cohen, A Calculating People: America (Chicago, 1982), pp. 32-34. Peter Buck traces the

British resistance to the census, as well as the role of private individuals in galvanizing support for it, in his “People Who Counted: Political Arithmetic in the Eighteenth Century,” Isis 73 (Mar. 1982): 28-45.

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Population, and from Britain’s strong political about a “moral

103

it suggests the mode of governmentality that developed distinctive combination of a weak central government, parties, and an active public press. Malthus’s argument restraint” implied that if people knew how population

growth would affect their own well-being, they would voluntarily control their sexual behavior; thus, all the government had to do in order to

inspire self-government was to make the relevant information available." This suggests that governments do not sponsor knowledge simply in order to strengthen their power over the people. Instead of facilitating coercion, government-sponsored knowledge works like other kinds of knowledge produced and circulated in the marketplace: through appeals to rational self-interest. Once they have reliable knowledge, this position assumes, people will believe and act on that knowledge—will govern themselves, in other words, in such a way as to make individual freedom coincide with the common good. Even though the census was instituted in the fledgling United States to insure democratic representation, not simply to monitor the growth of the population, the attitude toward (self-) government, knowledge, and governmentality that Malthus formulated generally triumphed over the sovereign model of rule by law associated with France. The census is relevant to the concerns of this essay not only because the arguments by which British resistance to it were overcome exemplify the triumph of the liberal mode of governmentality epitomized by the United States but also because the numerical form in which the census presented information constitutes the form of knowledge that modern governments have found most useful, wherever it is produced. As Theo-

dore Porter has argued, numerical representation is particularly useful to governments that seek to develop a consensus because numbers create the effect of objectivity and therefore inspire trust, even though—or precisely because—the individuals who produce numerical knowledge are not personally known to those who are governed by it. Numbers create the effect of objectivity, Porter explains, because they seem to obey the rigorous, uniform, and impersonal rules of mathematics, which is a lan-

guage that crosses international and regional borders and solicits assent by the appeal to reason. In public and scientific uses .. . mathematics (even more, perhaps, than law) has long been almost synonymous with rigor and universality. Since the rules for collecting and manipulating numbers are widely shared, they can easily be transported across oceans and continents and used to coordinate activities or settle disputes. Perhaps most crucially, reliance on numbers and quantitative manipulation 14. T. R. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population: From the Revised Edition (1803-), in An Essay on the Principle of Population: Text, Sources and Background, Criticism, ed. Philip Appleman (New York, 1976), p. 131.

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minimizes the need for intimate knowledge and personal trust. Quantification is well suited for communication that goes beyond the boundaries of locality and community. A highly disciplined discourse helps to produce knowledge independent of the particular people who make it.!° History

suggests

that numerical

representation

has

not

always

needed a mathematical basis to inspire the kind of trust that Porter describes.'© Even when it has that basis, moreover, as modern statistics does, numerical representation can only claim the properties of mathematics, not the ability to generate accurate knowledge about the world; numerical representation can be said to be rigorous and impartial, in other

words, only because mathematics is rigorous and impartial 7 the sense of being rule governed, not because numbers are necessarily grounded in mea-

surement or counting.!? Knowledge presented in numerical form has proved attractive to Western

democratic governments,

then, not neces-

sarily because such knowledge is accurate, but because it can support the assumption about knowledge intrinsic to the liberal mode of government: knowledge that inspires trust because it seems impartial and rigorous promises to support good government because citizens respect knowledge and voluntarily adapt their behavior accordingly.

We can only presume that this assumption motivated the scientists 15. Porter, Trust in Numbers, p. 1x.

16. Thus, for example, the eighteenth-century moral philosophers who adapted the Newtonian method tended simply to appropriate mathematical metaphors for what they called experimental philosophy, instead of actually using mathematical operations. While David Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40) is the best-known example of experi-

mental moral philosophy, this discipline was extensively practiced in the Scottish universities, especially at Aberdeen. For a discussion of George Turnbull and Gerard Alexander, two of its leading proponents, see P. B. Wood, “Science and the Pursuit of Virtue in the Aberdeen Enlightenment,” in Studies in the Philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. M. A.

Stewart (Oxford, 1990), pp. 127-49. 17. Lorraine Daston implies this distinction when she points out that in the history of mathematics, philosophers have not always claimed that the knowledge they produced was accurate; just as frequently, she suggests, philosophers of mathematics have tended to claim only that their knowledge was precise. “Accuracy concerns the fit of numbers or geometrical magnitudes to some part of the world and presupposes that a mathematical model can be anchored in measurement;

precision concerns the clarity, distinctness, and intelligibility of

concepts, and, by itself, stipulates nothing about whether and how those concepts match the world” (Daston, “The Moral Economy of Science,” p. 8). In addition to precision and accuracy, Daston argues, mathematics may also be valued because the knowledge it generates is communicable or impartial. See Daston, “The Moral Economy of Science,” pp. 8-12. I suggest that one reason that numerical representation carries so much social authority is that these other connotations—precision, communicability, and impartiality—can be confused with accuracy, so that many people believe that numbers are accurate (based in measurement) when they have only been generated according to some intelligible model. By the same token, many people are suspicious of numbers (even as they quote statistics) because, since numbers are not necessarily based in measurement, they obviously do not always accord with what we see or know by other means.

Gy) ‘Amen

E105

and administrators at the NIH who initially proposed “a national survey of sexual practices” (S, p. 27). It also seems likely that these officials expected the results of the survey to be presented in numbers, for, given the link that Porter describes between government and numbers, no other mode of representation would have seemed so amenable to policymaking. While this attitude toward knowledge, government, and numbers may have informed these officials, however, the history of the

survey shows it almost immediately colliding with what seems like a completely different attitude toward knowledge and government, if not toward numbers. This belief about knowledge, which predates the en-

lightenment belief in rationality, does not trust individuals to govern themselves according to what they learn, but assumes that knowledge simply inspires imitation.'* People who believe that knowledge provokes imitation assume that all knowledge production, especially government-sponsored knowledge production, is a form of advocacy. According to this assumption about knowledge, which was voiced by the elected representatives who opposed the sex survey, to produce knowledge about something—no matter what the form that knowledge takes—is to promote it. Thus, if you don’t want to promote something—in the case of the sex survey, the kind of sexual behavior that causes people to contract the AIDS virus—then you shouldn't sponsor any knowledge about it. These two attitudes toward knowledge seem different because they assume different things about how knowledge works. In doing so, moreover, they underwrite two different models of the proper relation-

ship between government and knowledge: the first assumes that knowledge will inspire people to govern themselves in keeping with the common

good (although they may need the help of policies); the sec-

ond, that government must control knowledge production because people cannot or will not govern themselves (even with the support of policies).!® While these differences are significant, however, the two attitudes toward knowledge expressed by government officials share at least one assumption: that knowledge is powerful because it has the capacity to change individual behaviors. In this sense, these attitudes re18. One could argue that some version ofthis fear that knowledge inspires imitation informed the medieval church’s persecution of heresy. While it might seem that statistical knowledge would discourage imitation, because it is so difficult to identify with numbers

and aggregates, early opponents of statistics objected on precisely these grounds. See my “Figures of Arithmetic, Figures of Speech: The Discourse of Statistics in the 1830s,” in Questions of Evidence: Proof, Practice, and Persuasion across the Disciplines, ed. James Chandler, Arnold

I. Davidson, and Harry Harootunian (Chicago, 1994), pp. 418-20. 19. Beneath these models of governmentality may well lie two further assumptions about knowledge: the first, that knowledge can be disinterested (that is, that it can identify a “common good”); the second, that all knowledge is interested, either because there is no

good sufficiently common to outweigh differences or because human beings are naturally driven by selfish passions.

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semble each other and differ from the attitude implicit in Sex in America. Even though the authors of the sex survey champion the production of knowledge for its own sake, that is, the knowledge they actually generated suggests that the more “we” know, the happier “we” will be to stay as “we” are. The authors of Sex in America seem to suggest that there is no reason to fear knowledge or to bank on its ability to inspire rational self-government because “scientific” (statistical) research methods

re-

veal that “we” inevitably obey “social forces” that automatically preserve the society conservatives endorse. If they did not set out with the assumption that American

sex should be straight, married, and consen-

sual, as they say they did not, and if the attitude toward knowledge they endorse differs so radically from both attitudes voiced by government officials, then

how

can

we

account

for the coincidence

between

the

knowledge the sex surveyors produced and what our elected government officials wanted to hear? Although an adequate answer to this question would require a much more elaborate account than I have been able to give here of the relationship between governments and the production of various kinds of knowledge, I can suggest two provisional answers. The first has to do with the sex surveyors’ preference for numerical—statistical—analysis, which is one feature that links all the attitudes toward knowledge I have thus far discussed. As I have already suggested, statistical analysis is essentially descriptive; it does not imply any theories about either causation or agency. Despite this fact, however, statistical analysis does impose certain limits on the kinds of things that one can study; or, phrased differently, statistics demands that what can be studied be represented in a certain way. Most basically, as the sex surveyors’ desire to exclude “opinion” suggests, one can only develop statistics about entities that can be counted; or, phrased differently again, in order to analyze something—like sexual-

ity—statistically, one must represent it so that it seems amenable to quantification. In Sex im America, this methodological imperative leads the sex surveyors to represent sex as a compound made up of separate but repeatable kinds of acts (kissing and touching, vaginal intercourse, masturbation,

anal

intercourse,

and

so

on).

Each

of these

acts

might

be

accompanied by another, essentially nonsexual act (like the use of alcohol or looking at pictures), but “sex” acts are clearly distinguishable from these associated acts, even if the latter might be considered the conduit through which “social forces” affect the individual. I will suggest at the end of this essay how this depiction of sexuality as the quantifiable and subdividable entity the researchers call “sex” might be challenged by an alternative mode of representation and analysis. For now, it is important to note that, even in the terms of their own project, the necessity to count poses problems for the sex surveyors. Initially, the sex researchers describe the problem associated with quantification as one of sufficiency: in order to generate useful results, they point

Gy) in America

out, one must have significant figures. quantification, the decision to defund they defend

107

a population sufficiently large to produce statistically By thus representing the problems associated with sex researchers are able to blame the government's the sex survey for the limitations of their study. As

their method,

however, it becomes

clear that, even if the

government had given the sex researchers money, they could not have produced knowledge about the group that an AIDS-related survey might well have wanted to target: gay men and lesbians. In chapter 9, when they take up the subject of “homosexual partners” at length, the authors reveal that the problems associated with statistics’ reliance on quantification cannot be reduced to an issue of sufficient numbers or sufficient money. Instead, what the authors describe as the nature of homosexuality suggests that, because any quantitative method has to stabilize its object of analysis before counting can begin, some things just can’t be analyzed by statistics. Homosexuality defies quantification, according to the authors, both because homosexuality may not produce external signs and because, even when it does, these

signs may not refer to the kind of stable essence essential to counting. People often change their sexual behavior during their lifetimes, making it impossible to state that a particular set of behaviors defines a person as gay. A man who has sex with men today, for example, might not have done so ten years ago. Does a man who has homosexual sex in prison count as a homosexual? .. . Is a woman a lesbian if she finds it sexually arousing to look at other women, but has only heterosexual intercourse? Does it matter if she considers herself a heterosexual? [S, p. 172] If “people often change their sexual behavior during their lifetimes,” then the elusiveness that the authors attribute to homosexuality must also

characterize heterosexuality. If heterosexuality is no more definite than homosexuality, then it makes no sense to claim to limit a study to heterosexuality, since there is no entity or set of behaviors one can identify as heterosexuality. If one cannot stabilize homo- or heterosexuality, finally, it makes no sense to claim that sexual like tends to consort with like, since

the idea that sexual identity may be unstable (or unidentifiable) calls into question what the authors describe as the basis for the formation of so-

cial groups.”° 20. Predictably, the authors of Sex in America do not interrogate the implications of their admission that homosexual identity may not exist (or be identifiable). Instead, they offer three reasons why they cannot conclusively identify a gay person and then offer as a conclusion about homosexuals (which they have been able neither to identify nor to study)

the kind of blanket statement about “social networks” that one might have expected from a theory about social determinism: “what we can conclude is the importance of community size and social networks in forming the structure of opportunities and constraints for homosexual as well as heterosexual desire” (S, p. 183).

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Instead of seeing the problem posed by homosexuality as a challenge either to the statistical method or to their theory about groups, the authors of Sex in America repeatedly endorse the assumptions about identity central to the statistical method. These assumptions, in turn, tend to en-

dorse the bias toward normativity inherent in the authors’ assumptions about social groups—even though statistics do not necessarily turn norms into normativity. To represent sexuality as discrete, repeatable sex acts that can implicitly be referred to a sexual identity, in other words, is to represent sex—or certain sex acts—as amenable to administration, in

that it—or they—can be vilified if they do not conform to what the majority represents as “normal” whether or not this constitutes the statistical norm. Representing sex as discrete acts makes it easy to imagine policing certain acts while tolerating sex in general; by the same token, referring sex acts

to a sexual identity makes it easy to imagine policing certain individuals, because they practice these sex acts, even in a society supposedly made up of a “we” that encompasses “all Americans.” The capacity of numerical representation—and statistics in particular—to turn something as amorphous as sexuality into a series of administrable units enables us to expand Porter’s explanation about why modern governments find statistics so useful. Beyond simply being trustworthy because objective and objective because impersonal and rulegoverned, statistics may appeal to modern governments because, in representing as quantifiable entities behaviors whose very nature might seem to defy administration, they bring these behaviors into the domain of government. By the same token, in deriving from the analysis of growps the regularities of these behaviors, statistics help generate the impression that even something as changeable as sexuality is inherently law governed, both in the sense that it obeys statistically ascertainable laws and in the sense that it has a “normal” —that is, a socially acceptable form. The ease with which the authors of Sex in America slide from statistical norms to normativity, in other words, may help characterize the government's use of statistics as well. This, in turn, helps explain why a project devoted to

generating new knowledge about sex managed to produce the results that a government resistant to change wanted to hear. The second reason I can offer for the coincidence between the sex surveyors’ findings and the attitudes toward knowledge voiced by the government follows from this bias toward normativity. As I have argued, the authors’ tendency to privilege normativity underwrote a therapeutic agenda that enabled them to market their findings as a self-help book. But what can we make of the fact that self-help books are so popular in the United States that emulating this genre seemed to promise large sales? The appeal of self-help books, I suggest, reveals the prevalence of the belief that one can make choices that will initiate change. Both the kind of choices and the degree of change actually available, however, are dramatically restricted by the very market in which images of choice and

) enemies.

. BOD

change are produced. In a market that both celebrates and limits choice and change, in other words, consumers

tend to want what they already

have (literally or imaginatively)—or, to translate this into its epistemological counterpart, they want to learn what they already believe. When knowledge is produced according to the model of this market, as it is in both the commercial arena and the domain of policy, it does not matter so much whether one believes that knowledge is a transformative instrument or a therapeutic balm, for what counts as knowledge will resemble what we already know. The peculiar models of change and choice supported by modern market

society become

visible in Sex in America

in chapter 3, entitled

“Who Are Our Sexual Partners?” when the authors attribute what many individuals experience as a dearth of sexual partners to what they call “the sexual market.” What begins as a familiar saga of free-market forces (supply and demand) soon becomes a parable about individual choice. Only, choice in this account turns out to be the voluntary restriction of desire to someone who is not likely to be so much in demand as to be unattainable—that is, to someone “appropriate,” someone like ourselves. “The myth is that each person has the whole world to choose from. The reality is that when we finish excluding everyone that we consider unsuitable or unobtainable and when we finish dividing the market into sex for recreation or sex for possible marriage, there are very few people left for each of us to seriously consider” (S, p. 64). We might note in passing the authors’ tendency to privilege marriage over other forms of partnership, but the point I want to make is how this vignette simultaneously celebrates choice and drastically limits its very possibility. Words like excluding, dividing, and consider seem to refer to voluntary decisions, but the passage as a whole suggests that excluding and dividing are involuntary (or determined) actions, and that when it

comes time to consider, there are no real choices left to be made because all of the remaining contestants are remarkably like “us” (and, presumably, like each other). This characterization

of choice accords with the

authors’ theory of social determinism, of course, for the idea that groups police their own identities assumes that individuals in the group will “voluntarily” restrict their choices to others who conform to the group. It also accords with an image of a market—for sexual partners, for self-help books—that thrives on endlessly elaborated differentiations but will not tolerate substantial differences. The differentiations keep competition alive by generating the effect of choice; excluding substantial differences permits the same productive instruments to be reused repeatedly, thus keeping production costs low and profits high. I will not elaborate this model of the market, which is no doubt familiar to most readers. Instead, I simply want to point out that in a demo-

cratic society where information

is managed

by a mass, commercial

media, policy must be marketed, too. Even if it is not necessarily the case

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that the coexistence of the U.S. democratic political system and modern market society means that the former must resemble the latter, recent de-

velopments in American politics and in policy formation more generally suggest that the market model of choice and change is informing the constitution of policy as well. In the 1996 presidential campaign, for example, which featured one candidate who repeatedly appropriated the other’s program initiatives, then took credit for “bold new ideas,” we saw how restricted Americans’ choices have become in the political arena. In the whittling down of a program designed to “change welfare as we know it” into another version of the policies already in place, we saw how little tolerance for substantial change policymakers really have and how willing most Americans are to embrace the continuation of what is already familiar—even when “we” all agree the system does not work. Of course, even

as we settled for more of the same, the very fact that we agreed that the system does not work suggests that most Americans want to feel that we could have chosen otherwise, that the restricted choices about what kind

of government we will have are limited only by the goodwill or competence of the legislators who (fail to) represent us. As if to curtail even this intermittent longing for genuine change, politicians from both parties accused each other of plotting change so radical that nothing recognizable would remain. Just as the sex surveyors needed the idea ofa sexual revolution to authorize the production of knowledge that proves unnec-

essary for anything but the sale of books, so politicians seem to invoke the idea of genuine change simply to reassure voters that the narrow range of available options will insure that things work out for the best after all.

If the attitudes toward knowledge that I have described in this essay are so pervasive, and if so many kinds of knowledge are driven by the normalizing dynamics of the market, is it completely impossible in late twentieth-century America either to imagine or to produce knowledge that does not simply reinforce normative thinking? Obviously, this ques-

tion is too vast for one person to answer, not least because an adequate response would require making more precise discriminations among kinds of “knowledge” than an essay of this length allows. Even in the more restricted arena of knowledge about sex, I can make only a few suggestions, which may well be simply placeholders for a kind of knowledge I can’t yet imagine. It seems to me important to offer such suggestions, even if they only keep open the desire for new knowledge practices, because desiring something more is the first step in devising new modes of knowing about and imagining intimacy and sexuality. The one thing that seems clear to me from reading Sex in America is that if one wants to generate new knowledge either about why the AIDS virus continues to spread or about American sexual practices more generally, then one has to supplement statistical analysis with some other kind of instrument, which will not reduce sexuality to sex acts. To so reduce

Gy) in America

II

sexuality is to strip it of both the cultural connotations and the personal fantasies that, even according to the sex surveyors, inform every experience of sexuality. To denude sexuality of these meanings, in turn, if only

for the purposes of research, does not only impoverish the terms available to us for understanding our own sexuality; it also makes it impossible to understand why so many American youths continue to think of unprotected, penetrative sex as the only “real” sex, even though they know the risk of AIDS. Anyone who wants to help halt the pandemic of AIDS has to address these young people’s fantasies—not just about sex but about all of the social issues upon which sexuality impinges. We do not yet possess an analytic instrument capable of generating authoritative knowledge about the social nature of phenomena like sexuality that occupy the territory where body overlaps with mind and social images coexist with personal fantasy. Proponents of psychoanalysis have offered models of the relationship between images and sexuality, but it has thus far proved difficult to bridge the gap between the therapeutic practice of individual psychoanalyses and anything like a general application of psychoanalytic principles, even as an analytic instrument. Anthropologists have provided a promising method in the ethnographic interview, for such extended conversations enable the analyst to place individual acts in the context of fantasies, myths, rituals, and dreams. The ethnographic interview, of course, is time consuming, and it produces results that seem unwieldy, especially to a media geared to sound bites

and photo ops and to a public schooled to recognize numbers as knowledge and stories as “human interest” filler. My first suggestion, then, is that those of us committed to making new knowledge, especially about undisciplined entities like sexuality, di-

rect our attention to developing new analytic instruments that could provide alternatives to what statistics can tell us, so that we will be better able

to assess the limitations—and advantages—of numerical representation. My second suggestion is that we develop more accounts of how the knowledge-producing instruments that currently exist have affected or been used by institutions like governments or universities to facilitate some kinds of knowledge and foreclose others. Until we understand how the analytic instruments, the disciplines, and even the syllabi organize what we know and privilege some forms of knowledge over others, it will be impossible to imagine genuinely transformative knowledge, especially about a subject as scornful of disciplinary boundaries as sexuality. By now it should be clear that I do not intend the analysis I have offered here as a narrow critique of Sex in America or even of the government’s failure to sponsor a sex survey. I am not arguing that the NORC survey was not a good example of its kind, nor am IJarguing that the kind of statistical analysis embodied in the sex survey is completely without value. I am arguing that statistical analysis is not sufficient for understanding sexuality because, in turning sexuality into sex, statistics create

LI

Mary Poovey

the false impression that such social behaviors can be addressed simply and in isolation from the social matrix in which they are embedded. This impression may be reassuring to those who believe that knowledge should be simple because it works by enlightening a rational public, but it is false because a culture that embeds both sex and knowledge in the logic of the market ensures that individuals are not simply rational subjects and that they will continue to experience sexuality as a social event, no matter how discrete its analysts claim it is. We need additional instruments for analyzing sexuality, and we need more accounts of how existing instruments have been used because we need to expand both what and how we know—beyond the false hope that sex can be controlled by public policy or individual acts of rational will; beyond the unwarranted fear that knowing about sex will provoke imitation somehow damaging to a silent but vulnerable sexual majority.

“‘Pleasure, Sex, and Politics Belong Together”:

Post-Holocaust Memory and the Sexual Revolution in West Germany

Dagmar Herzog

It would be wrong to hold the view that all of what happened in Auschwitz was typically German. It was typical for a society that suppresses sexuality. —ARNO PLACK (1967)

Is morality only about genitals and not about genocide? — VOLKMAR SIGUSCH (1984)!

1 In histories and journalistic assessments of the West German New Left, the sexual revolution figures awkwardly. It is generally either downplayed Research for this essay was begun with an Andrew W. Mellon Faculty Fellowship in the Humanities at Harvard University and completed with a Summer Stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities; I am grateful to both organizations for their generosity and support. Even as this essay only marks the beginning for me ofa long search to make sense of the issues it raises, | am also deeply grateful to the many individuals who— by patiently wading through its earlier incarnations and offering astute criticisms—have helped me to give it whatever clarity it has now. Each of them has left his or her mark; none of them is responsible for the outcome. I thank Omer Bartov, Doris Bergen, Volker Berghahn, Lauren Berlant, Jane Caplan, Erica Carter, David Crew, Geoff Eley, Sander Gilman, Atina Grossmann, Elizabeth Heineman, Kali Israel, Claudia Koonz, Robert Moeller, Uta Poiger, Anson Rabinbach, Christiane Rothmaler, Joan Scott, and Michael Staub. 1. Arno Plack, Die Gesellschaft und das Bose: Eine Kritik der herrschenden Moral (Munich, 1967), p. 309, hereafter abbreviated G; and Volkmar Sigusch, “Editorial,” Sexualitat Konkret

5 (1984): 4.

113

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Dagmar Herzog

or ignored, savagely criticized, or treated as comic relief.’ Meanwhile, in

the mass of literature on post-Holocaust memory in West Germany that has appeared in the last decade in both English and German, there has been a surprising silence about the relationship between the processing of the meaning of the Nazi Judeocide and the evolution of sexual politics in the post-1945 period.* Yet furthering the sexual revolution was a central component of the student rebellions of the sixties and seventies and doing so was closely intertwined with the New Left’s efforts to bring the 2. The best recent English-language histories of the West German New Left are in Richard W. McCormick, Politics of the Self: Feminism and the Postmodern in West German Literature and Film (Princeton, N.J., 1991); Andrei S. Markovits and Philip S. Gorski, The German Left: Red, Green, and Beyond (Cambridge,

1993); and Sabine von Dirke, ‘All Power to the Imagina-

tion!” The West German Counterculture from the Student Movement to the Greens (Lincoln, Nebr.,

1997). See also William David Graf, The German Left since in the German Federal Republic (Cambridge,

1945: Socialism and Social Democracy

1976); Rob Burns and Wilfried van der Will,

Protest and Democracy in West Germany: Extra-Parliamentary Opposition and the Democratic Agenda (New York, 1988); and (the rather hostile) Jillian Becker, Hitlers Children: The Story of the

Baader-Meinhof Terrorist Gang (London, 1989). Interesting German-language histories can be found in Peter Mosler, Was wir wollten, was wir wurden: Studentenrevolte—zehn Jahre danach

(Reinbek, 1977), and CheSchahShit: Die Sechziger Jahre zwischen Cocktail und Molotov, ed. Eckhard Siepmann et al. (Berlin, 1984). CheSchahShit is an exception to the general rule; many of the essays engage in detail with various dimensions of the sexual revolution. Two other valuable beginning efforts to write histories of the sexual revolution are Ulrike Heider, “Freie Liebe und Liebesreligion: Zum Sexualitatsbegriff der 60er und 80er Jahre,” in Sadomasochisten, Keusche, und Romantiker: Vom Mythos neuer Sinnlichkeit, ed. Heider (Reinbek, 1986); and Ulf Preuss-Lausitz, “Vom gepanzerten zum sinnstiftenden Kérper,” in PreussLausitz et al., Kriegskinder, Konsumkinder, Krisenkinder: Zur Sozialisationsgeschichte seit dem

Zweiten Weltkrieg (Weinheim, 1989).

3. There is now so much literature on the politics of post-Holocaust memory that there are already excellent English-language metahistories analyzing the evolution of the scholarship.

For some

outstanding recent examples, see Michael Geyer, “The

Politics of

Memory in Contemporary Germany,” in Radical Evil, ed. Joan Copjec (London, 1996), pp. 169-200; Omer Bartov, Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representa-

tion (New York, 1996); Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory, ed. Geoffrey Hartman (Oxford, 1994); Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution,” ed. Saul Friedlander (Cambridge, Mass., 1992); and Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Historians’ Debate, ed. Peter Baldwin (Boston, 1990). Meanwhile, although in this context

sexual politics per se have not been studied, the relationship between the politics of memory and gender politics is starting to come into focus. Two superb recent examples on the immediate postwar period are Atina Grossmann, “Unfortunate Germany: Victims, Victors,

and Survivors at War’s End, Germany 1945-1950” (Working Paper: Center for German and European Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 1995), and Elizabeth Heineman, “The

Hour of the Woman:

Memories of Germany’s ‘Crisis Years’ and West German National

Identity,” American Historical Review 101 (Apr. 1996): 354-95.

Dagmar Herzog is associate professor of history at Michigan State University and the author of Intimacy and Exclusion: Religious Politics in PreRevolutionary Baden (1996). She is currently working on a sexual history of West Germany from the 1940s to the 1990s.

Post-Holocaust Memory and the Sexual Revolution

115

subjects of fascism and the Third Reich more forcefully into public discussion. Although the sexual revolution was unquestionably larger than the New

Left student movement,

and although some

student radicals

were uninterested in theorizing sexual questions, a significant portion of the student movement saw itself as the vanguard of the true sexual revolution. Student radicals were both among the most open and _provocative defenders of the new publicity of sexual styles and practices that characterized the late sixties and early seventies and the ones that most explicitly made the case that sexual repressiveness was a bulwark of a politically and economically repressive society. For them, sexual liberation was an indispensable and inextricable component of political revolution. Sexual conflicts, furthermore, proved to be an important site for this

generation's struggles to understand the meanings and lessons of the Holocaust. The West German New Left student movement was never very large—actual activists probably numbered only in the thousands—but it was extraordinarily influential. Not only did the movement shape the values of its own and subsequent generations in the broadest and most profound ways, but in the decades since the sixties the movement’s existence has also been taken—even by more conservative observers—as a sign that Germans truly were capable of democracy. This made the student movement in West Germany peculiarly important in comparison with the movements in other nations.* Meanwhile, the West German New

Left was certainly appalled by many forms of social and political injustice, and it celebrated and supported a broad array of resistance struggles, both in the Third World and at home. The damaging consequences of capitalism, racism,

imperialism,

and militarism

worldwide

were

major

preoccupations, and, indisputably, race relations in the U.S., the war in Vietnam, the struggles of the Palestinians, the need to reform West German universities, the value of Marxist theory, and the limitations of really

existing Stalinism figured as prominently in New Left activism as did either sex or the legacies of Auschwitz. And yet the facts of German fascism and the Judeocide in particular left an inescapable imprint on postwar West German culture and affected postwar people’s lives and selfunderstandings in the most intimate ways. It was ultimately no coincidence that members of the West German generation of 1968—both New Left men and their feminist critics—repeatedly made references to the Third Reich and the Holocaust in their battles with each other, and with

members of their parents’ generation, Experiments in communal living, gotiation of gender relations, among against the backdrop of the perceived

over sexual mores and relations. new parenting styles, and a reneother things, all were elaborated legacies of the Nazi past. In devel-

4. See Heinz Bude, Das Altern einer Generation: Die Jahrgdnge 1938 bis 1948 (Frankfurt, 1995), esp. pp. 17-22 and 41-42.

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Dagmar Herzog

oping new sexual attitudes and practices, the “68ers” declared that they were breaking with what, in their view, had caused

German

fascism in

the first place: not only “capitalist imperialism,” but also a particular set of (what they called) “bourgeois” familial arrangements and a specific form of conservative Christian morality. Yet much of what the 68ers were actually rebelling against were their own experiences in the postfascist 1950s and the interpretations of Nazism’s sexual legacies proffered by parents and political and religious leaders in that decade. Although the trajectory of the sexual revolution in West Germany was in many respects similar to that in other Western nations—with intergenerational and intergender conflicts playing themselves out in similar ways—there was an unusual ferocity to the German debates that makes sense only when we understand the complex mutual imbricatedness of different eras in German history. Studying the connections between post-Holocaust memory and the sexual revolution in West Germany can illuminate three areas of intellectual and political inquiry.® One subject it can help us begin to reconsider is the practical ramifications and consequences of Christian theology and moral teachings of the 1940s and

1950s, both Catholic and Protestant,

for the generation that would come of political age in the 1960s and 1970s. For due in part to the special role granted the churches by the Allied occupiers, and in part to the frantic desire to reestablish “normality” and “decency” in the postwar period, conservative Christians were initially in an unusually strong position to shape the moral landscape and 5. Most scholarly efforts thus far to analyze the cultural moments in which the themes of sex and Holocaust have been brought into connection have involved a critique of the grotesque ways Holocaust imagery has been put to use for titillating effect (both in ventures explicitly self-defined as pornographic, and in a broader array of both mass and high cultural documents like films and novels which style themselves as having a morally weighty message to convey); the need to think about the conjunction of these themes also in other ways forms the subject of this essay. See especially Joan Smith, “Holocaust Girls,” in Misogynies: Reflections on Myths and Malice (New York, 1991), pp. 42-60; Alvin H. Rosenfeld, “The Fascination of Abomination,” in Jmagining Hitler (Bloomington, Ind., 1985); Friedlander, Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death, trans. Thomas Weyr (New York, 1984);

Lucy S. Dawidowicz, “Smut History (New York, 1977), Geuens, “Pornography and Winter 1996): 114-30. For

and Anti-Semitism,” in The Jewish Presence: Essays on Identity and pp. 216-24; and (for a contrasting perspective) Jean-Pierre the Holocaust: The Last Transgression,” Film Criticism 20 (Fall— crucial efforts to think through the problematic relationship

between self-understood antifascism and sexualized representations of fascism (though not the Holocaust), see Andrew Hewitt, Political Inversions: Homosexuality, Fascism, and the Modern-

ist Imaginary (Stanford, Calif., 1996); Linda Mizejewski, Divine Decadence: Fascism, Female Spectacle, and the Makings of Sally Bowles (Princeton, N.J., 1992); and Silke Wenk, “Hin-weg-sehen oder: Faschismus, Normalitat, und Sexismus,” in Erbeutete Sinne: Nachtrdge zur Berliner Aus-

stellung “Inszenierung der Macht, asthetische Faszination im Faschismus,” ed. Klaus Behnken and Frank Wagner (Berlin, 1988), pp. 17-32. For a compelling attempt to begin making sense of the pornographization of the Holocaust in Israel, see Bartov, “Kitsch and Sadism in Ka-

Tzetnik’s Other Planet: Israeli Youth Imagine the Holocaust,” Jewish Social Studies 3 (Winter 1997): 42-76.

Post-Holocaust Memory and the Sexual Revolution

LZ

language of the postwar years and to put forward influential interpretations of Nazism’s causes and effects (all the while managing rather successfully to marginalize more progressive Christians’ efforts to connect a spiritual revival with social justice and antimilitarist efforts). Although the messages about Nazism and its sexual politics implicitly and explicitly put forth by many of the more moderate and conservative religious and political leaders were occasionally contradicted by the suggestion in popular magazines, perpetrator biographies, and survivor memoirs that there was a titillating relationship between pleasure and Nazi evil, more generally the religious and the popular messages appeared to reinforce each other. The general message seems to have been that the Nazis themselves encouraged promiscuity and illegitimacy and that their sexual immorality was inseparable from their other crimes.* Meanwhile, if ex68ers’ retrospective accounts about life in the fifties are to be believed,

church and political leaders in that decade also succeeded in narrowing questions of morality to sexual matters and in presenting sexual sobriety as the most effective cure for the nation’s larger guilt and moral crisis. These phenomena have the potential to explain much about the political directions subsequently taken by the student movement.

In short, then,

although it may seem strange to spend time discussing postwar Christianity when the focus of this essay is on the generation of 1968 and its views on sex and the Holocaust and their interconnection, Christianity actually matters considerably. It does so both because the Christian churches positioned themselves as the adjudicators of good and evil in the postwar period and because it was the churches (and the politicians and publicists allied with them) that brought sexuality into the picture as the primary

moral challenge facing postwar Germany. In addition, attending to the ways post-Holocaust memory and the sexual conflicts of the 1960s and 1970s were interwoven can provide a fresh perspective on the West German New Left itself—both on the New Left’s peculiar mixture of fierce antifascism and unthinking antiSemitism, and on what was at stake in the evolution of its anxieties, preoccupations, and internal conflicts around sex. Throughout their program-

matic writings on sex, members of this generation returned frequently to the problems of genocide and brutality within the concentration camps, with New Leftists suggesting that it was sexual repression that engendered the Nazi capacity for cruelty and mass murder, while German feminists were quick to invoke the Holocaust in their own assaults on male 6. For a particularly classic example of a survivor memoir widely read in West Germany at the time and conveying precisely this message, see Eugen Kogon, The Theory and Practice of Hell: The German Concentration Camps and the System Behind Them, trans. Heinz Narden (1947; New York, 1975); see esp. the chapter on “The Psychology ofthe SS,” pp. 258-

71. For a flavor of the kind of titillating messages about the perpetrators’ virility put out in the mainstream media, see Heinz Héhne, “Der Orden schichte der SS,” Der Spiegel, 14 Nov. 1966, pp. 94-107.

unter dem

Totenkopf:

Die Ge-

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sexual aggression and male disinterest in female sexual pleasure. In part, as my first epigraph suggests—and its sentiments were by no means unusual in its time—New Leftists launched such arguments in order to strengthen their case for sexual liberation with the most shocking metaphors available. But the recurrence of Holocaust imagery also indicates some anxieties that the release of libido might be, not just liberatory, but rather dangerous, and that the pursuit of pleasure might lead, not to social justice, but to evil—anxieties that feminists would bring into the

open, but with their own distortions and for their own purposes. In addition, one noteworthy feature of so many of the debates within the left scene about sex, and about sex and fascism, is their focus on the male

body and male desires and anxieties in particular. In postwar West German struggles over the various sexual lessons of Nazism, male bodies were called to a kind of public visibility and accountability that most scholars of the history of sexuality generally assume to be reserved for women. Finally, exploring this conjunction of issues can contribute to a revision of the extant scholarly and journalistic consensus on the politics of memory in West Germany in general. One matter that can be illuminated by a study of postwar sexual conflicts has to do precisely with the “layerings” of memory I have begun to describe here—that is, with the ways

each cohort of postwar West Germans evidently approached the past only through, over, and against the interpretations of their historical predeces-

sors (with New Leftists contradicting the representations of the past offered them by many of their parents, and feminists offering yet a third description of Nazism’s purported sexual lessons). The other insight that

can be gained from examining these proliferating versions of the lessons of the Third Reich directly challenges the stereotypical view of postwar West Germany as characterized by repression or amnesia regarding the Holocaust. While this view is restated continuously, my research indicates a contrary perspective: that postwar West Germans, specifically as they struggled over postwar sexual relations, were actually talking constantly about their nation’s recent past, including the mass murder at its heart. Beginning to get at this complicated and in obvious ways so deeply freighted set of problems involves drawing not merely on the formative and the programmatic texts of the 68ers, though those sources are crucial. It also means trying to make sense of the outpouring of autobiographical memory-essays about their adolescences in the fifties and their sexual comings-of-age in the sixties, written by ex-68ers in the late seventies and early eighties, as their faith in their own ability to sustain both a

political and a sexual revolution broke down. This is where attention to the multiplicity and complexity of memory’s “layerings” becomes especially important. For what is going on in these memory-texts is an attempt to reconstruct the fifties’ interpretations of the thirties and forties within the context of the seventies’ and eighties’ struggle with the meaning of

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119

the sixties. Meanwhile, it is also significant that many of these memoryessays appeared in the special issues on sexuality suddenly put out by almost every New Left journal of note in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and one of the striking features of these essays is, again, the obsessiveness with which they tried to make public some of the most intimate ways men in particular related to their own bodies and the bodies of others. Exploring these various interconnected problems means, furthermore, returning to and reexamining a much-discussed and now-classic text on both fascism and sex: New Left and “feminist male” Klaus Theweleit’s two-volume magnum opus, Male Fantasies, published in West Germany in 1977-78. Male Fantasies’s two sprawling volumes constituted an extended treatise on the literature of the Freckorps—those paramilitary gangs roaming Weimar Germany, the Baltics, and adjacent territories to crush popular insurgencies, and it has generally been received as a study of the (proto)fascist male mind. This is not least because many members of the Freikorps ended up among Hitler’s stormtroopers and/or as concentration camp commandants and guards. One of Male Fantasies’s main arguments had to do with what it found to be the fascist man’s fear of the feminine—especially of imagined hordes of Bolshevik females—and of anything wet, muddy, red, or gushing, as well as the fascist man’s fear of

his own body’s potential for pleasure. But while most commentators (and certainly not incorrectly) see Male Fantasies as an intervention into debates about fascism, I want to show that another useful way to think about Male

Fantasies is to see it also as an effort to bring the subjects of fascism and the Third Reich to bear on a set of problems the West German New Left was having with itself about gender and sex. This is especially true of the second volume, significantly subtitled Male Bodies: Psychoanalyzing the White Terror. When Male Fantasies is resituated in its historical context— both in terms of the trajectory of the West German New Left and the sexual revolution it had been trying to make since the late sixties, and in terms of the evolving ways the Third Reich and the Holocaust had been interpreted in the postwar era—its content appears in a new light as well. Simultaneously, this resituation enables a deepened understanding of the connections the generation of 1968 evidently perceived between sexuality and fascism. Male Fantasies is an original and very individual intervention in conflicts about these themes, but it also reflects and summarizes many of the broader preoccupations of the generation of which Theweleit was a member. For although the reference points of Nazism and the Holocaust run like a thread through the sexual debates of the postwar period, surfacing at the most seemingly unlikely moments, their palpable presence was not always articulated directly in the printed record; sometimes the relationship between pleasure and violence, or pleasure and evil, was addressed at more oblique angles. It was often Theweleit who hauled back into explicit focus that which seemed to be worked through only in displaced ways elsewhere.

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2

The apparent inability to leave the past behind—indeed, the apparently unquenchable urge to bring it up over and over again precisely in the context of sexual relations—not only reveals how intense was the felt need to invert the sexual lessons of Nazism drawn by their parents’ generation but also, and perhaps even more significantly, suggests something

about the difficulty of theorizing a sexual revolution—of connecting pleasure and goodness, sex and societal justice—in

a country in which only a

generation earlier pleasure had been so intimately tied in with evil. It is quite evident that for most of its existence, from its inception in the 1960s to the present, the West German New Left struggled both to understand the connections between sexuality and fascism and to put those understandings to use in the sexual politics and more general politics of its own time. The very first efforts at thematizing the links between sex and fascism in the 1960s involved the recovery and reappropriation of the Freudian Marxist work of Wilhelm Reich from the 1930s and of various members of the Frankfurt School from the 1930s to the 1950s. (Increas-

ingly, of course, the ongoing Herbert Marcuse in the 1960s Characteristically, sixties attention paid in some of the

work particularly of Theodor Adorno and became part of the New Left debates.) commentators stressed the inadequacy of earlier psychologically or ideologically fo-

cused work to “material” (by this they meant economic, social, and historical) factors. Yet even as this lack was duly noted, the commentators also

stressed how essential attention to psychology and ideology was and lamented the explicit neglect of post-Freudian insights in too much postwar left theorizing about fascism. Marxist scholar Wolfgang Fritz Haug, for example, an important mentor to the 68ers, made exactly these points in 1965 in the pages of the Marxist journal Das Argument (of which he was the main editor). In his introduction to Reinhart Westphal’s “Psychological Theories about Fascism,” one contribution to a series of special issues

of Das Argument dedicated to retheorizing German fascism, Haug stressed the ways “Nazism displayed psychopathological abnormalities of such epochal historical force, that the task has become urgent to seek the foundation of this force within normality” (especially, Haug suggested, within the bourgeois family) and insisted that the significance of psychology’s insights lay in the way they “forbid the fundamental separation of the abnormal from the normal, which means here: fascism from bourgeois society.” Above all, Haug asserted, and here he was expressly invoking the Holocaust, what made psychology important was its ability to investigate “the connection between the suppression of sexual drives on the one hand and the anti-Semitic persecution mania and its raging in manifest cruelty on the other.”” 7. Wolfgang Fritz Haug, “Vorbemerkung,” Das Argument 32 (1965): 30-31.

Post-Holocaust Memory and the Sexual Revolution

ya |

Westphal himself, reflecting a common postwar left concern about the 1930s Left’s inability to attract the masses away from fascism, understood his task as reviewing for readers what could be gained from the extant studies on the psychology and appeal of fascism (not only Reich’s, but also those of Erik Erikson, Erich Fromm,

and Alexander Mitscher-

lich). Placing the “prehistory of the personality-foundation of fascism” in “the history of the family and its changing economic function within capitalism,” Westphal explained the combination of hate and guilt feelings, rage against an actually weak but nonetheless fiercely authoritarian father, and hostility towards sexuality that supposedly characterized both Hitler and his followers. In reviewing one study, Westphal suggested that the animus against sexuality thought to characterize the bourgeois family weakened heterosexual tendencies only to intensify “anal- and phallicsadistic” tendencies and contribute to the production of individuals whose personality was “authoritarian-masochistic” or “ambivalent, sadomasochistic.” At another point, he suggested that the process by which a variety of fears could be projected specifically onto Jews was accelerated by “the reactive defense against homosexual aims directed towards the father.” And at yet another point he indicated that in the sadistic subjection of and fear of the female one could find the fear of sexual strivings in general, as he also pointed out that “the latent homosexual component among the Nazis” expressed itself in “the fanatic persecution of manifest homosexuality (like Jews and communists, homosexuals were sent to con-

centration camps).”® All these contradictory but also in many ways mutually reinforcing themes would recur many times, although always with different subtle nuances, in other late sixties and early seventies texts. As the New Left and feminist journalist Ulrike Heider later simply summarized it (in the course of her attempt to defend the gains of the sexual revolution against neoconservative

ex-leftists and romantic

maternalist ex-feminists), the

early proponents of the sexual revolution had argued that it was the sadomasochistic psychic structure produced by the petty bourgeois authoritarian nuclear family that caused the Germans to become a people of racist murderers.° In 1967, Arno Plack, a young philosophy Ph.D., produced a major text elaborating on these matters: Society and Evil: A Critique of the Reigning Morality. Although Plack was sharply criticized by some on the Left,'® his work would also prove remarkably influential. According to Plack, not only Freud himself but also the psychoanalyst Mitscherlich and the (at that time much-discussed) animal behavior theorist Konrad

Lorenz all

8. Reinhart Westphal, “Psychologische Theorien tiber den Faschismus,” Das Argument 32 (1965): 31, 34, 37, 38. 9. See Heider, “Freie Liebe und Liebesreligion,” pp. 92-109, esp. p. 94. 10. Compare for example Haug, review of Society and Evil, by Plack, Das Argument 56 (1970): 49-53.

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Dagmar Herzog

mistakenly assumed that there was an innate aggressive drive in human beings. In contrast, Plack insisted that aggression was a learned behavior

acquired because of the frustration of drives for nurture and pleasure. Plack’s book is long and meandering, containing extended asides on such issues as the importance of maternal tenderness and breastfeeding and the need to respect women as sexual beings while avoiding the dangers of female careerism. It also contains extended consideration of the lessons of the Holocaust, particularly as these had come to light in the con-

text of the Auschwitz trials held in Frankfurt in 1963-65 and reported on daily in major newspapers. (Iwenty-two SS-men were tried, as well as

one prisoner Kapo; the years of testimony from 273 witnesses made a detailed picture of what went on in Auschwitz difficult for the public to ignore. For many subsequent 68ers, these trials were a radicalizing event.) Plack was clearly not only targeting the conservatism of his elders but was also concerned

to distance his own self-consciously, thoroughly

theorized analysis from what some might perceive to be nothing but an elaboration of such slogans of his peers as the call to Make Love, Not War. Plack insisted on the unhealthiness of monogamy and called for “a healthy sensuality” (G, p. 169). But he was also intent on clarifying that, as he put it, “it is after all not so that through the sheer fact of sexual activity ageressivity can be avoided.” Sexual excess, he suggested, could also sig-

nal hidden hostility towards one’s fellow human beings—though he was quick to explain that this hostility might well have its roots in a deficit of motherly warmth in infancy (G, pp. 287-88). Nonetheless, Plack’s overarching contention throughout was that “un-lived-out sexual impulses” led to “aggression, indeed lust for murder”

(G, p. 163). Or, more

pre-

cisely: It was the original suppression of sexual drives that created the “vital displeasure” (vitaler Unmut). When it built up, it produced that very aggression other theorists thought was natural, an aggression that was

itself suppressed before subsequently exploding in wartime. This, according to Plack, was why there had to be collective enemies: to alleviate

the moral burden on the conscience. These enemies must be made to seem both evil and cowardly, someone to whom the group who attacked

them could feel morally superior. And this, in turn, Plack observed, was the bitter kernel of the “joke” that the Jews would have had to have been invented if they had not already existed. Simultaneously, and this again was a characteristic move

for his generation,

Plack was quick to point

out—parenthetically—that while Jews functioned this way for his own society, “a similar dynamic is at work elsewhere for the Negroes” (G, p. 274). Plack drew repeatedly on the testimony from the Auschwitz trials, trying to fit the contradictory scraps of evidence they offered into his argument that sexual repression was the cause of cruelty. For example, in one instance he declared: “Do not object at this point that after all even some SS-men in Auschwitz did not shy from initiating intimate relations with Jewesses.” There was, he pointed out, quite a difference between,

Post-Holocaust Memory and the Sexual Revolution

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on the one hand, comfortable coexistence between “different racial or religious groups” such that sexual relations between individuals from those different groups were a possibility and, on the other hand, the ““taking’ of Jewesses in order to humiliate them, as members of a hated ‘race, even more” (G, p. 163). At yet other points Plack puzzled over how it could be that older members of society called loudly for the punishment of rapists and murderers but were disinclined to support the Auschwitz trials. Plack surmised that the liberties taken by individual criminals bothered people, but murderers in uniform were an object of identification. As Plack put it, “Murder with the permission of the state is the secret yearning of the many, who do not want to do the evil, to which they are drawn, without a good conscience” (G, p. 323). Over and over again, Plack stressed what clearly for many of his generation was a profound and value-transforming revelation: those who “celebrated true orgies of sadism” in the camp were seemingly, when outside the camp, so law-abiding and ordinary in every respect, people who had never run amok in even the slightest way (G, p. 308). These apparently were individuals who, before and after their time in Auschwitz, were

characterized by the most stereotypical philistine probity and petty bourgeois normality and respectability; even the state prosecutor at the trials—who seemed to marvel at his own findings—had felt compelled to comment, “Those aren’t even citizens, but real philistines who back then

could let their bad instincts have free reign’” (G, p. 305). As one member after another of the generation of 1968 would later testify, the similarity

between the code of good behavior postwar society demanded of them and the model of behavior evidently exemplified by the executors of genocide, sickened them deeply. But it is also clear that identifying this similarity helped them feel as though they could finally understand how “it” could have happened, and they had something concrete to fight against in their present. Above all, they had a handle on what came to seem like one of the greatest hypocrisies of postwar society, in Plack’s words, “the secret agreement of the society, that provides cover for the concentration

camp

murderer,

but at the same

time for example

de-

nounces the parents ofa bride for the crime of pimping, if they allow the future son-in-law to spend the night” (G, p. 309). Morality, their society seemed to be telling them, was only about sex, not about murder.'! 11. Another variation on this theme was to present sex as being as bad as murder. A classic instance of this rhetorical strategy was offered by the Christian Democratic politician Hermann Kraemer in 1964. Kraemer declared that a movie containing a few moments of masturbation and sexual intercourse (Ingmar Bergman's The Silence) reflected “the same spiritual stance” as “the concentration camp Auschwitz.” Referring explicitly to the trial of Auschwitz perpetrators taking place in those days in Frankfurt, he contended that “the degradation of the human is nowhere so clear at this moment than in this trial. This degradation of the human finds its continuation in the sexual acrobatics of the Swedish filmmaker” (quoted in Heinz Ungureit, “Bernkastels Landrat vergleicht ‘Das Schweigen’ mit Auschwitz,” Frankfurter Rundschau, 24 June 1964, p. 22).

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Although Plack only mentioned Wilhelm Reich occasionally, Reich’s spirit is in evidence throughout Plack’s book. And it is clear that in the

popular dissemination of the sorts of ideas advanced by Plack no one was more influential than the rediscovered Reich, as many who lived through the late sixties in West Germany will testify. Reprints of Reich’s work, first in bootleg form, then formally published, were circulated widely in the early days of the sexual revolution; it was “Wilhelm Reich up and down,”

as one left woman later remembered. Or as a former member of the German SDS (Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund, comparable to the American Students for a Democratic Society) later put it, “Wilhelm

Reich was

probably bootlegged back then more than any other author.” In 1968 the outside wall of the cafeteria at the University of Frankfurt carried a graffiti slogan exhorting all passersby to “read Wilhelm Reich and act accordingly!”?

In his key text, Repressive Family Politics (1969), Dietrich Haensch offered a particularly accessible cut-and-paste pastiche of Reich’s main views. Calling for emancipation from both authoritarian childrearing and monogamous marriage (though he was quick to stress that, like Reich, he was not advocating loveless promiscuity), Haensch reinforced his pleas

for general sexual liberation by explaining that not only capitalist class relations but also fascism and brutality in wartime were products of the

“genital weakness” induced in those whose natural drives had been coercively distorted and repressed and who had been forced to develop “cramped-up” concepts of honor, duty, and self-control. Hitler had only needed to intensify already-existing bourgeois practices, and these, in turn,

had

outlived

Hitler.

“The

tendency

to sadism

is maintained,”

Haensch informed his readers, “by diverting the libidinal energies away from the sexual drive and towards the drive for destruction and aggression; the necessary fixation on the enemy occurs by diverting the hatred produced by the ambivalent hate-love fixation on the sexual oppressor onto the military opponent.’

But also those who did not explicitly invoke Reich as their main thority nonetheless operated with similar assumptions. One group did so—with spectacular flair—were the members of the Kommune small but endlessly publicized and debated experiment in communal ing and anarcho-radicalism launched in Berlin in 1966. (A classic

authat lI, a livex-

12. “Ich will das so alles nicht,” Pflasterstrand, no. 21, 15 Dec. 1977-11 Jan. 1978, p. 33; Siepmann, “Genital versus Pragenital: Die Grossvater der sexuellen Revolution,” in

CheSchahShit, p. 101; and Mosler, Was wir wollten, was wir wurden, p. 159. On Reich’s extraordinary significance for the 68ers, and on how his ideas were interpreted, see also Reimut

Reiche, “Sexuelle Revolution—Erinnerung an einen Mythos,” in Die Friichte der Revolte: Uber die Verdnderung der politischen Kultur durch die Studentenbewegung (Berlin, 1988), pp. 55-57. 13. Dietrich Haensch, Repressive Familienpolitik: Sexualunterdriickung als Mittel der Politik (Reinbek, 1969), pp. 14, 12, 66, 67.

Kahle Maoisten vor einer kahlen Wand Fic. 1.—*“Naked Maoists before a Naked Wall.” Members of the Kommune | in 1967. From a brochure put out by the Kommune 1, reprinted (and captioned) in Der Spiegel, 26 June 1967, p. 20. This photo has been reprinted many times—usually in a spirit of humor and/or nostalgia—and now counts as one of the icons of the era. In 1988, former leader of

the SDS Reimut Reiche (long hostile to the Kommune 1) would make the following observation about this photo: “Consciously this photo-scene was meant to re-create and expose a police house-search of the Kommune 1. And yet these women and men stand there as if in an aesthetically staged, unconscious identification with the victims of their parents and at the same time mock these victims by making the predetermined message of the picture one of sexual liberation. Thereby they simultaneously remain unconsciously identified with the consciously rejected perpetrator-parents. ‘Sexuality makes you free’ fits with this picture as well as ‘Work makes you free’ fits with Auschwitz” (Reiche, “Sexuelle Revolution,” p. 65).

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ample of the Kommune 1’s provocative style was provided by the photo of its members—including one of the two children living with them— distributed by the members

themselves on a self-promotional brochure;

see fig. 1.) On trial in 1967-68 for distributing leaflets against the Vietnam War (which were interpreted by the authorities as an invitation to burn department stores), one member of the commune

defecated in the

courtroom and others mocked the prosecution witnesses’ criticisms of the group’s much-advertised advocacy of promiscuity by rhetorically asking, “Tf our anti-authoritarian stance . .. is a sign of constitutional abnormality, then is authoritarian behavior and National Socialism a consequence of the healthy normality of the Germanic race?” '* Meanwhile, the preem-

inent newsmagazine Der Spiegel, in the late sixties remarkably sympathetic to the sexual revolution and the New Left (including the Kommune

1),

alike, brought the standard New Left line on sex and fascism to a very broad audience indeed. In 1966, in a long disquisition on the centuries-

long history of societal attempts to suppress sexual pleasure (a narrative

that took many jabs at the Christian churches: the church fathers’ “fear of sex became the trauma of a whole culture,” and so on), Der Spiegel could clearly not resist adding Adolf Hitler to the illustrious list of those historical figures purportedly profoundly hostile to sex (fig. 2). Crucially,

Der Spiegel used a Hitler quote from Mein Kampf—to the effect that the society of the 1920s was “a hothouse of sexual images and provocations” and that “public life must be freed of the suffocating perfume of our modern eroticism”—to slam the very similar sort of remarks produced by “the defenders of cleanliness” in the 1960s.'* Over and over again, in the years that followed, leftists would make

these sorts of connections. The aforementioned Wolfgang Fritz Haug, for instance, would opine again in 1969 (in an essay entitled “The Sexual

Conspiracy of Late Capitalism?”) that “fascism has demonstrated, to what an extent people who are sexually suppressed and therefore dominated by sexual fears” can be controlled and manipulated, while Dieter Duhm, in his much-discussed book, Fear in Capitalism (1972), also found sexual

repression to be at the source of “the murder orgies of the Third Reich.” ® Duhm (in a series, incidentally, of poachings from Plack) underscored this message by strongly suggesting that there was a direct connection between Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler’s Catholicism-induced sexual 14. Trial testimony reproduced in Klau mich, ed. Rainer Langhans and Fritz Teufel (Berlin, 1967), p. [173].

15. “Die gefallene Natur,’ Der Spiegel, 2 May 1966, pp. 54, 57-58. 16. Haug, “Sexuelle Verschw6rung des Spatkapitalismus?” Neue Krittk 51-52 (1969): 87, and Dieter Duhm, Angst im Kapitalismus: Zweiter Versuch der gesellschaftlichen Begriindung zwischenmenschlicher Angst in der kapitalistischen Warengesellschaft (Lampertheim, 1972), p. 100; hereafter abbreviated AK. Compare also the self-evidence with which these ideas about “the relationship between deformed sexuality and fascism” and how “specifically the petty bourgeois are receptive for the insanity of fascism due to a repressive sexual morality” are presented in Karl W. Pawek, “Im Dritten Reich der Sinne,” Konkret (Aug. 1978): 44.

Fic.

2.—“Sex-Critic

Hitler: Suffocating Perfume.” From Der Spiegel,

2 May 1966, p.

58. In portraying Hitler as a “sex-critic” by quoting antisexual statements from Mein Kampf, Der Spiegel lent weight to its own defense of sexual liberation. Completely suppressed in this account was the fact that Hitler was anything but unambiguous in sexual matters; not only did Hitler vehemently criticize “bourgeois notions” and “prudery” in less public venues, but he and other leading members of the Nazi regime would ultimately actively encourage pre- and extramarital promiscuity—and not only for the sake of reproduction. Compare Bleuel, Das saubere Reich, pp. 7, 10-11, and 176-204.

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shyness and the pleasure in sadism Himmler evidenced by traveling to

Auschwitz specifically to observe the flogging of female prisoners there.'’ And like Haensch before him, Duhm fear and hatred of repressive parents. witz trials, Duhm remarked that “the deeply in all human beings who are

tied the potential for aggression to Referring specifically to the Auschbestiality of these executioners sits raised with the instrument of fear

and who because of their fear have no possibility of living out in any way their hatred against the oppressors (in the first instance the parents)” (AK, p- 100). Related themes emerged in the writer Karlheinz Deschner’s The Cross of the Church: A Sexual History of Christianity (1974). Deschner was older

than the 68ers—he was in his forties in the late 1960s/early 1970s—but he was well-received by them.'* Deschner relied a great deal on Reich’s own criticism of Christianity and above all on Reich’s notion that sexual satisfaction and sadism were mutually exclusive. Deschner quoted Reich pointedly: “The kindness and goodness of genitally satisfied people is

noticeable. I have never seen a human being, who was capable of satisfaction, who could be sadistic.” By contrast, according to Reich, “inhibited

sexual energy is transformed into destruction.” Deschner also relied on Plack, quoting one of his statements on sexualized brutality in Auschwitz.

Plack had been struck by testimony about the prisoner Kapo Bednarek who, it was said, “kicked the genitals of his victims until they died.” In doing so, in Plack’s view, he was “kicking that drive that the dominant

morality taught him to despise.” Plack explained that in some parts of Spain after a bullfight “men and boys stream into the arena in order to spit and trample on the testicles of the slain animal: a true festival of 17. Strikingly, the brilliant and respected left historian Detlev Peukert would make a similar move in his influential Inside Nazi Germany, drawing on Theweleit (who else?) to buttress his suggestion that there was a direct connection between Himmler’s early sexual

hangups (including a deep-seated distress in the face of pornography and a profound hostility to premarital sex) and his leadership role in the machinery of genocide. That this was only one facet of Himmler’s sexual persona and that later he would be known as a key Third Reich spokesman for the notion that every (“Aryan”) man deserved more than one woman, is left out entirely. To mention this would not necessarily have contradicted the sexual liberationist message Peukert intended implicitly to communicate, but it would surely have complicated it. See Detlev Peukert, “Order and Terror,’ Inside Nazi Germany:

Conformity, Opposition, and Racism in Everyday Life, trans. Richard Deveson (New Haven, Conn., 1987), pp. 197-207. 18. See, for example, Henryk Broder’s glowing review in Konkret, which not only effused in classic 68er fashion about Deschner’s findings on “the connection between sexual abstinence

... and the tendency to violence, ... ‘between. .. self-denial and barbarism,”

but also raged particularly against Rome’s attitude during the Third Reich, in which “‘the evil of the time” had been located in divorce, unchaste fashions, and bordellos rather than “the concentration camps or the persistent persecution of the Jews.” Broder declared that this was the sort of book that “in the best case is written once every twenty years” (Henryk M. Broder, “Das groBbe Verbrechen war immer der Geschlechtsverkehr,” review of Das Kreuz

mit der Kirche: Eine Sexualgeschichte des Christentums [The Cross of the Church: A Sexual History of Christianity], by Karlheinz Deschner, Konkret [May 1975]: 51).

Post-Holocaust Memory and the Sexual Revolution

129

triumph over the so-called base, brutish, ‘the evil’ in our selves.” Plack

felt this dynamic explained Auschwitz as well, and clearly Deschner found him convincing, quoting Plack’s remark that “the morality of the mass murderers, who make the Jew into their bull, is none other than that of the petty bourgeois philistines from the ranks of whom they are recruited.”!® Deschner’s book skidded back and forth across the centuries and different national contexts, but in so doing he managed to amass an extraordinary amount of evidence on the extent to which the Christian church had continually communicated the idea that pleasure was more obscene than butchery. Though the bulk of the book focused on earlier times, the

concluding chapter of the 1974 edition heaped on evidence from the fascist and especially the postfascist period as well. Deschner not only scathingly quoted church leaders pleased by Nazi attacks on sexual immorality and actively calling on their faithful to participate in the war effort but also cited example after example of postwar West German Christian spokespeople who, unfazed by the “millions of dead” in two world wars and in Vietnam, continued to act like sex and nudity and pornography

were the main moral challenges. As one post-World War II Catholic commentator cited by Deschner put it, “If there is a drive that is capable of

pressing the human being down beneath the dignity of his reason and freedom, then surely that is the sexual drive” (KK, p. 398).?° Incredulous

that “one still takes this religion seriously!” rather than “making it the object of satire, of psychiatrists. . . [and] sticking its proclaimers among the comics, in courtrooms, in rubber cells,’ Deschner over and over underscored his main point: that “the actual crime in ‘Christian culture’ is, precisely, absolutely not murder, but rather—with a grain of salt—sexual

intercourse” (KK, p. 399). Needless

to say, in making

these connections,

in slamming

both

Christianity and the Nazi era and pinpointing what they saw as the sexual dysfunctionality of both, New Left men were also announcing and justifying their own sexual views and practices. They were lending a special

moral aura to their own rejection of monogamy and of (what they frequently called) “‘fascistic’ nuclear families.”*' At the same time (and this was no less important), quite a few of the most vocal disseminators of these views were certainly not advertising themselves as misogynists— that would come later—but rather more as victims of a society that se19. Quoted in Deschner, Das Kreuz mit der Kirche: Eine Sexualgeschichte des Christentums (Diisseldorf, 1974), pp. 385, 390-91; hereafter abbreviated KK.

20. Deschner is quoting the postwar commentator F. Pittet, one of the contributors to the Catholic sex advice manual Gesundes Geschlechtsleben: Handbuch fiir Ehefragen, ed. Franz Xavier von Hornstein and A. Faller (Olten, 1950). 21. Grossmann, “Questions of Jewish Identity: A Letter from New York,” in Germans

and Jews since the Holocaust: The Changing Situation in West Germany, ed. Anson Rabinbach and

Jack Zipes (New York, 1986), p. 176.

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Dagmar Herzog

verely damaged human beings’ ability to take pleasure in their own bodies and the bodies of others.” Furthermore, these commentators were quite clearly articulating their horror at what they saw as the persistence of the Nazi legacy in their present, both as it was directed at children and as it was aimed at adults. Duhm, for example, expressly connected his discussion of Nazism with documentation of widespread child abuse within West German families— “this massive number of private concentration camps” (AK, p. 101). Plack had made similar comments. In a related vein, the sex-rights activist (and former head of the Frankfurt student movement) Gtinter Amendt in

1978 elaborated on the connections he saw between the at once repressive and (surreptitiously) sadistic-erotic child disciplinary practices being recommended by respected educators and policymakers in West Germany and the “fascism of Nazi Germany.” Alarmed by conservative politicians’ success in making “duty, obedience, industriousness and order” key educational goals again, Amendt reminded his readers that “‘as is wellknown, these principles were also written on the barracks walls of Auschwitz and Treblinka.”?? Two years earlier, Amendt had also with great earnestness criticized the 1976 papal encyclical (which opposed homosexuality and sexual liberation) as a “sex crime” and criticized conservative politician Franz-Josef Strauss’s homophobic remark, “Better a cold warrior than a warm brother,’ with the following observation: “For whomever’s historical consciousness has not completely rotted away, this expression of F-J. Strauss’s differs in no way from the ‘Jew-bitch’ and ‘communist pig’ that as labels led the way to the ‘final solution’ in the concentration camps.”*#

Strikingly, New Leftists’ interpretations of Nazism’s sexual politics stood in sharp contradiction to those proffered by the institutions that sought to establish themselves as the main moral authorities in the imme22. As Preuss-Lausitz observed in the early 1980s, by that to imagine that the former “battle cry” of the sixties—“Whoever woman, already belongs to the establishment” (Wer zweimal mit zum Establishment) could ever have been considered progressive,

point it had become hard sleeps twice with the same derselben pennt, gehért schon but he assured his readers

that it most certainly had been. “An incredibly chauvinist, heartless, indeed reactionary

sentence, I would say today; the astonishing thing is that almost no one but the ‘old moralists’ questioned its progressiveness (which was taken as evidence for its progressiveness)” (Preuss-Lausitz, “Vom gepanzerten zum sinnstiftenden K6érper,” p. 98). 23. Ginter Amendt,

“... dann meinen

die auch Gewalt. . .)” Konkret (May

1978):

14. Amendt is quoting approvingly Jutta Wilhelmi’s comments in the Frankfurter Rundschau. Amendt is probably best known for his bestselling “sex enlightenment” books for teenagers, Sexfront (Frankfurt, 1970) and DaSeBu (Das Sex Buch) (Dortmund, 1979). 24. Amendt, “Die gesunde Lehre tiber die Geschlechtlichkeit,” Konkret (May 1976): 36.

Post-Holocaust Memory and the Sexual Revolution

137

diate postwar years.*° To many Christian activists (and numerous political leaders along with them) Nazism promoted the destruction of the family and encouraged a generalized promiscuity. The best way to assert postwar society's difference from Nazism was to advocate traditional family values. Even generally secularized homes tended to communicate stereotypically conservative values around sex.”° Furthermore, in a country governed until 1966 by Christian Democrats, the perspectives the churches fostered were not only the most widely disseminated ones but also the ones that structured criminal and civil law and state family and welfare policy. There was also in the postwar decade—and this is crucial to register—a progressive version of Christianity being articulated, one which drew different lessons from the Nazi past than conservatives did. This strand of Christianity combined hope for a renewal of serious spirituality with openness to some aspects of socialism and with a profound Opposition to remilitarization.*’” But these more progressive views were minority ones; they also typically did not extend to sexual matters. In short, while countervailing interpretations of Nazism’s sexual lessons did exist in little pockets here and there, they were quite hard to find. Social Democrats scrambled to disassociate themselves from any taint of Weimar-era sexual radicalism, and even the most politically leftist of Chris-

tian antifascists tended to share some sexual assumptions with their more conservative brethren. Meanwhile, to judge alone by the ubiquity of essays published in Western Germany on the topics of “the marital [or sexual] crisis [or mis-

ery] of our day” in the second half of the 1940s and the first half of the 1950s, those ten years were hardly a time of conservative consensus about marriage and sexual morality. Instead, they were a time of considerable tumult, contradictory tendencies, and widespread cultural anxiety about

marital and sexual relations; the often hysterical tone of these essays reinforces that judgment.**

(And, certainly, commentators

on the “erotic

25. On the importance of both the churches and the attempts to restore the patriarchal family and sexual conservatism in the postwar years, see also Heide Fehrenbach, Cinema in Democratizing Germany: Reconstructing National Identity after Hitler (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1995), and Maria Hohn, “GIs, Veronikas, and Lucky Strikes: German Reactions to the American Military Presence in the Rhineland-Palatinate during the 1950s” (Ph.D. diss.,

University of Pennsylvania, 26. See Peter Kuhnert ualitat in den 50er Jahren,” bensgeschichte und jugendliche

1995). and Ute Ackermann, “Jenseits von Lust und Liebe? Jugendsexin “Die Elvis-Tolle, die hatte ich mir unauffallig wachsen lassen”: LeAlltagskultur in den fiinfziger Jahren, ed. Heinz-Hermann Kriiger

(Opladen, 1985).

27. See Dagmar Herzog, “Making Sense of the Past: Antifascist Protestants and the Lessons of the Third Reich, 1945-1965” (paper delivered at the Mellon Faculty Forum, Harvard University,

4 Apr. 1994). Comparable versions of progressive Catholicism existed

as well. The relationships, indeed continuities, between antifascist Christianity in the 1950s and the student rebellions of the 1960s remain to be more fully explored. 28. The essays listed under the headings “Ehe,” “Geschlecht,” and “Sexualitat” in the Bibliographie der deutschen Zeitschriftenliteratur between 1944 and 1955 provide an excellent

WBZ,

Dagmar Herzog

overstimulation and damned

sexualism” of the era thought a dramatic

upheaval in sexual mores was at hand already.)’? But it is also significant how very many of those essays insisted that they were offering “Christian” or “church-oriented”

perspectives

on, and solutions

to, the purported

misery/crisis.°° In an anthology from the early 1980s attempting to reconstruct 68ers’ formative experiences in the 1950s (it is entitled Children of War, Children of Consumerism, Children of Crisis), the authors stressed over and

over again the emphasis placed in the 1950s on “petty bourgeois family virtues on the one hand and anti-Communism

on the other,’ as tradi-

tional (petty) bourgeois norms and styles of childrearing became a prime means to demonstrate postwar Germans’ “decency” (Wohlanstdndigkeit).*' In light of the way the German bourgeoisie had been compromised by its absorption into fascism, and in light of the virulence of Nazi antiBolshevism, these were ironic continuities, only presented as ruptures.°*? And as the editors also observed, the transparent hypocrisy of those par-

ents and teachers “who had helped to carry the Nazi regime and were now hiding behind properness” would ultimately fuel the youth rebellions from the mid-sixties on.**

The churches played a crucial role from the very beginning in presenting sexual propriety as the cure for the nation’s larger moral crisis— and in suggesting that sexual immorality, not complicity in murder, was the source of that crisis. For example, in October 1945 one Protestant synod, in its postwar call to its flock to turn away from the godlessness of

Nazism, expressed far more concern about the “forgetting of respect and modesty between man and woman ... the crumbling of chastity”—and

sampling of these themes; the preoccupation with “crisis” subsided somewhat in the later 1950s, presumably at least in part because the postwar gender imbalance (the much-hyped “surplus of women”) was beginning to “even out.”

29. Johannes Leppich, “Thema 1,” in Pater Leppich Spricht: Journalisten héren den ‘roten’ Pater, ed. Ginther Mees and Giinter Graf (Diisseldorf, 1952), p. 44.

30. The significance of the Christian churches in establishing the parameters of debate on sexual matters throughout the 1950s and even into the 1960s was also evident, for ex-

ample, in the way newsmagazines like Der Spiegel, eager to advance more liberal attitudes toward sexuality, rushed to review in enthusiastic detail books on sex by reformist theolo-

gians. The felt need to break the hold of the churches using the churches’ own discursive framework was apparently quite strong. See “Freude im Haus,” Der Spiegel, 22 Aug. 1966, pp. 54-56, and “Der Sexus ist kein Siindenpfuhl,” Der Spiegel, 28 Nov. 1966, pp. 68-87. 31. Preuss-Lausitz et al., “Einleitung,” Kriegskinder, Konsumkinder, Krisenkinder, pp. 15,

WG, A 32. On these double continuities presented as ruptures, see also the important essay by Robert G. Moeller, “Reconstructing the Family in Reconstruction Germany: Women and Social Policy in the Federal Republic, 1949-1955,” Feminist Studies 15 (Spring 1989): 137-69, as well as Moeller, Protecting Motherhood: Women and the Family in the Politics of Postwar West Germany (Berkeley, 1993). 33. Preuss-Lausitz et al., “Einleitung,” Kriegskinder, p. 24.

Post-Holocaust Memory and the Sexual Revolution

£33

the way these made Germany a “laughing-stock” among nations—than about what it euphemistically referred to as the expropriation of the Jews. Another Protestant statement in 1946 stressed that as significant as “the sin of yesterday” (here it referred obliquely to the “horrors and crimes” of the Nazis) was “the sin of today”: the “licentiousness. .. with which

women and girls today surrender themselves and men profane female honor.’** The Catholic church issued similar statements, not only identifying Nazism with secularization and lamenting and criticizing the “secularization”

of wartime

and

postwar

marital

arrangements,

but

also

contrasting (elliptically but pointedly) “the dark memories of the past years” with the need for“Christian family life” in the present; one Catho-

lic commentator expressly connected disdain for virginity with Hitler's propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.*° Although a number of these texts lumped together the postwar “disorder” (with its “surplus of women” and their sexual relations with occupation troops) with the Nazi period, they also referred to the ways the Nazi years themselves had for-

mally and informally encouraged pre- and extramarital heterosexuality.*© On the whole, Christianity in the postwar period presented itself as a great contrast to Nazism. Nazism’s great crime, in the postwar churches’ estimation, was that it turned the German people away from the Christian

God. Even those critical of church complicity with the Nazis contributed to this interpretation by tending to describe the complicity as consisting in the churches’ absorption of Nazi ideas glorifying the state and the racialized Volk rather than, as they might have, locating that complicity in the churches’ failure to interrogate the history of its own anti-Judaism. Yet when attempting to present Christian sexual values as a meaningful contrast to Nazi ones, both Catholic and Protestant commentators ran into some difficulties, especially around reproductive matters. In the

pages of the prestigious intellectual Catholic journal Frankfurter Hefte, for example, in an essay on “The Woman

Question,” Maria Jochum in 1946

34. “Wort der ausserordentlichen Landessynode der Evangelisch-Lutherischen Kirche in Oldenburg an die Gemeinden Oktober 1945,” and “Kundgebung der Landessynode der Evangelisch-Lutherischen Kirche in Bayern in Ansbach, 9.—13. Juli 1946,’ in Kirchliches Jahrbuch fiir die evangelische Kirche in Deutschland 1945-1948, ed. Joachim Beckmann (Giitersloh, 1950), pp. 43, 45, 48. Yet another statement, announcing that the German people were “sinking into a swamp of vice and shame,” complained particularly of the way “purity and marital fidelity are being trampled on among us” (“Wort an die Gemeinden der ausserordentlichen Rheinischen Provinzialsynode vom 20. September 1946,” in Kirchliches Jahrbuch fiir die evangelische Kirche in Deutschland 1945-1948, pp. 56-57).

35. Robert Grosche, “Der deutsche Katholizismus 1945-1950,” P. Audomar Scheuermann, “AbriB des kirchlichen Eherechts,” and Pope Pius XII’s remarks to Berlin Catholics (17 June 1949), in “Botschaften und Ansprachen des Heiligen Vaters,” in Das katholische Jahrbuch 1951/52 (Heidelberg, 1951), pp. 133, 161-75, 210. See also the related remarks made by the pope in 1950 in “Botschaften und Ansprachen des Heiligen Vaters,” pp. 217— 18. For the remark about Goebbels, see Leppich, “Thema 1,” p. 46. 36. See Hans Peter Bleuel, Das saubere Reich: Theorie und Praxis des siutlichen Lebens vm Dritten Reich (Bern, 1972), pp. 176-204.

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Dagmar Herzog

certainly stressed that the Nazis had encouraged promiscuity, diverging

drastically from Christian values by making a sexual revolution of sorts. Jochum expressly emphasized the disturbing way, under the Nazis, unmarried women were “encouraged into extramarital motherhood or at least into libertinage.” But in seeking a language in which to validate the

church’s own demand for procreation, Jochum stumbled into circumlocution. The Nazi-encouraged “joy in children,” she declared, was actually “the opposite of the true order of life, that is realized in humble acceptance and not in the goal-orientation of a state’s hubris.”*’ The prominent Protestant bishop Hanns Lilje ran into similar conundrums in 1954 as

he struggled in the pages of the Protestant Sonntagsblatt to specify the distinctions between

Nazi and Christian values.

On the one

hand, he

pointed out that Nazism was ultimately about a “fundamental denial of the family. .. despite all wordy profamily declarations.” And he insisted that it must be self-evident that “it is the end of all ethics in this matter,

when one wants to make a biological breeding institute out of marriage and

family.”

On

the other

hand,

however,

like Jochum,

he urgently

wanted his readers to understand that having the “will to the child” (Wille zum Kind—a term frequently used by the Nazis and which Lilje simply repeated unselfconsciously) was a powerful act of Christian faith.?* Meanwhile, some Christian commentators had much less difficulty asserting contrasts between Christian and Nazi sexual politics. Another contributor to the Frankfurter Hefte in 1946, for example, the Catholic doctor Her-

mann Fruhauf, acknowledged only in passing that the Nazi reproductive agenda had involved not only the enforcement of abortions for “eugenic” and “racial” reasons but also an active attempt to stem the abortion rate among those sorts of women the regime hoped would reproduce prolifi-

cally.°° Frihauf’s main message was that a comprehensive antiabortion stance was the only way to be truly anti-Nazi, and he reached for the

strongest metaphor available to underscore this point. According to Friihauf, whoever favored abortion rights, “whether he intends this or not, whether he understands this or not, serves those forces and powers, that trespass against humanity; he finds himself at a particularly dangerous

point on that precipitous slope, that in its last consequences leads to the gas chambers of some Auschwitz.’*° Even though the conclusions drawn by Friihauf constituted a one37. Maria Jochum, “Frauenfrage 1946,” Frankfurter Hefte 1 (June 1946): 24, 25. 38. Hanns Lilje, “Zerfall der Familie?” Sonntagsblatt, 7 Feb. 1954, p. 24. 39. For a fuller and more sensitive exploration of the doubleness of Nazi reproductive policies (brutal, forced sterilizations, abortions, and ultimately murder on the one hand;

systematic denial of abortion rights to those deemed “desirable” on the other), see Gisela Bock, “Racism and Sexism in Nazi Germany: Motherhood, Compulsory Sterilization, and the State,” Signs 8 (Spring 1983): 400-21. 40. Hermann Frtthauf, “Paragraph 218,” Frankfurter Hefte 1 (Oct. 1946): 590. On the persistence of these sorts of explicit comparisons between abortion and concentration camps (including Auschwitz) into the 1950s, see Angela Delille and Andrea Grohn, “Es ist

Post-Holocaust Memory and the Sexual Revolution

135

sided reading of Nazi reproductive policies, they were widely held, and not only among Catholics. Even many of the left-liberal Social Democrats who acquired the reins of government in 1966 were, as some female parliamentarians later remembered, marked by an “incalculable” and “pronounced trauma” around the topic of abortion. It was “because of the memory

of the horrors of euthanasia in the NS-era,” one recalled, that

her male colleagues—many of them Protestants—“would not even begin to consider a change in the criminal law.” There was a widespread belief, as another reconstructed it, that “precisely we as Germans could not approach this topic.”*! What was it like to grow up in a climate in which these sorts of views were influential? Over and over again, writing in the late seventies and

early eighties, former 68ers tried to capture the “hothouse atmosphere” of the fifties and the way (as they remembered it) their parents’ generation acted as though religious piety and/or an uptight sexual morality were the best way to display decency even as (with the American occupiers’ blessing) countless former Nazis were restored to positions of authority within the new Federal Republic.*? One after another, individual 68ers recalled “the stifling air of the Catholic

small town,” or their parents’

“masochistic-Protestant attitude, that managed to make of every misery a higher virtue.” Some merely commented on how “the parents permanently preached morality,” while one claimed she suspected there was a “connection between the prudery of the parents’ generation and the erotic tie to the Fuhrer to which a large part of that generation had succumbed.”* Others, like 68er novelist Peter Schneider, simply referred self-evidently to “the sexual taboos of the postwar years”—even as verboten

...: Empfangnisverhiitung

und Abtreibung,”

in Perlonzeit: Wie die Frauen ihr

Wirtschaftswunder erlebten, ed. Delille et al. (Berlin, 1985), p. 124.

41. See Helga Timm and Renate Lepsius, “Ohne uns keine Reform des Paragraph 218,” in Frauenpolitik als Beruf: Gesprache mit SPD-Parlamentarierinnen, ed. Lepsius (Hamburg, 1987), pp. 113-15. It was apparently possible in the fifties to articulate an alternative reading of the lessons of Nazi reproductive policies and to present a proabortion stance as an appropriately anti-Nazi one, as one report in Der Spiegel (on a trial in Wiesbaden in which

an abortionist was found not guilty) made clear. The court there, among other things, remarked pointedly that “the effort to encourage population growth has in German history ... been pursued in an ugly, abominable way.” But in this instance Der Spiegel related this perspective with sarcasm and not as a respectable alternative to the dominant view (Der Spiegel, 6 Aug. 1958, pp. 23-24). 42. The sentiment ofa “hothouse atmosphere” appears to be pervasive. The specific term comes from Michael Schneider, “Nicht alle sind tot, die begraben sind: Versuch tiber eine Nachkriegskindheit,” in Trtimmer, Traéume, Truman: Die Welt

1945-49, ed. Gabrielle Dietz

et al. (Berlin, 1985), p. 103. 43. Uli Puritz, “Schreiben tiber Sexualitat: Oder Wie fische ich das Salz aus der Suppe,” Asthetik und Kommunikation 40-41 (Sept. 1980): 16; Michael Schneider, “Nicht alle

sind tot, die begraben sind,” p. 102; Siepmann, “Die Negation der Negation als brennender Weihnachtsbaum: Das Treibhaus der antiautoritaéren Philosophie und seine Erbauer,” in CheSchahShit, p. 184; and Heider, “Freie Miche; spuoge

136

Dagmar Herzog

Schneider also evocatively captured the intensity of his first petting experiences (“the wild arousals that we felt and that sometimes seemed really fascistic to me”).**

Writing in a special issue of the Berlin-based New Left journal Asthetik und Kommunikation entitled “Germans, Leftists, Jews” (1983), Eber-

hard Knédler-Bunte succinctly described his fifties upbringing within an atmosphere of repressed sexuality and the persistence of uninterrogated anti-Semitism: “From my parental home I knew only that one had sinned heavily against the Jews, and the pastor traced this back to the betrayal of our Jesus. More could not be gotten in a north Wirttembergian small town in the fifties. ... What remained palpable was the aura of innuendo and secrets that was as difficult to get at as the one surrounding sexuality.” Knédler-Bunte

also admitted

that, having learned about the Judeocide

from a book in 1958, in his disgust with his family he instrumentalized the Holocaust: That the Germans could kill millions of human beings just because they had a different faith was utterly inexplicable to me. My whole moral world view shattered, got entwined with a rigorous rejection

of my parents and school. If religion had not prevented this nrass destruction of human

beings, then it is no good for anything, then

the whole talk of love of your neighbor and of meekness. . . was just ae; And in the pages of the Hamburg-based Konkret, the premier New Left

newsmagazine, Hermann Peter Piwitt put it most unsparingly. Writing in 1980 in an essay entitled “Love under the Kidney Table” (in reference to the fashionable furniture of the fifties), Piwitt constantly switched back and forth between seemingly incompatible topics. On the one hand, there

are descriptions of his teenage paranoia that people on the street could

smell his daily masturbation, and there are accounts of his rage at God for not proving His existence by punishing him for this activity. And, intercut with these, there are bitter references to the hypocrisies of post-

Holocaust Germany and the sickening insipidness of its truisms: That without God, without faith, life is meaningless, absurd. This

was a publicly agreed-upon matter—that the misery of the era, of Nazism, of the war, originated in the “faithlessness of the mass, that

no longer took the old values seriously” [here he was directly quoting a 1953 issue of the Protestant Sonntagsblatt].... And we? ... The

truth was, that we were expendable, ... the whole generation that 44. Peter Schneider, “Die Sache mit der ‘Mannlichkeit’: Gibt es eine Emanzipation der Manner?” Kursbuch 35 (Apr. 1974): 121, 122.

45. Eberhard Knédler-Bunte, “Verlangerung des Schweigens,” Asthetik und Kommunikation 51 (June 1983): 45, 44.

Post-Holocaust Memory and the Sexual Revolution had to grow up in the fifties.

137

... We were neither Jews, nor did the

repute of having murdered some open certain other doors for us.*° Or, as Piwitt put it in another essay on the fifties, there was in that decade

a generalized insecurity about how to behave. ... Embarassing was not only dandruff—embarassing was also “that matter of the Jews” [das mit den Juden]. . . Embarassing for a girl, no longer to be “innocent,” and embarassing for a man to marry a girl that had already

been with another man before him. ... Not just embarassing but criminal was homosexuality, abortion, partner-switching; and a landlady was guilty of pimping if she allowed a woman renting from her to have male visitors.*”

The way “memories”

of the Holocaust and memories of and angst

about sex jostle each other here only makes sense when we see that both sex and the Judeocide were inextricably intertwined with questions about God and the meaning of life, and with the inadequacy of the simplistic pieties that were being offered as answers. Sex and the Holocaust got

tangled up in these memory-pieces in part because the particular conservative version of Christianity promoted in the 1950s, with its muddling of different kinds of “sins,” had already tangled them up. No one pointed

this out more forcefully than the 68ers themselves and their mentors. Karlheinz

Deschner,

in his The Cross of the Church,

was

most

scathing

simply by amassing incriminating evidence. For example, in one particularly angry passage, Deschner reported this postwar comment by the immensely popular Catholic priest Johannes Leppich: It is true: we have a terrible war behind us, a war which has left behind demolished churches and houses and a multitude of dead. But destroyed churches and houses can be rebuilt, and every day enough human beings are born. No—that is not what is ruining Germany. And if one asks me: is our Volk being ruined, or does it still have a future, then there is only one answer: We are dying once more

at the hands of our women and girls, who every day throw what is most sacred in them into the dirt. [Quoted in KK, p. 401}** 46. Hermann

Peter Piwitt, “Liebe unterm

Nierentisch,”

Sexualitdt Konkret

2 (1980):

369376 47. Piwitt, “Autoritar, betulich, neckisch und devot,’ Konkret (May 1979): 33.

48. The charismatic Leppich was fiercely anti-Communist, but due to his commitment to “the social question” he was known at the time as the “red” or “workers’ priest.” In the late 1940s and early 1950s, his open-air speeches drew crowds oftens of thousands. See the full text of his speech on the dangers of untrammeled sexuality, “Thema 1,” and a discussion of his popularity and impact in Pater Leppich Spricht, pp. 43-53, 5-15.

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Dagmar Herzog

4 Clearly, the fifties in West Germany saw a broadscale attempt to suppress and monitor the sexual behavior of both women and men, even as women were monitored much more effectively and closely and—simultaneously—even as actual sexual behavior regularly departed from the expected norms.*® It was not until approximately the middle of the 1960s that both women

and men

began rebelling more

openly. By 1966, Der

Spiegel was reporting that a sexual revolution was at hand, though it also reported that in one survey, 50 percent of female university students still defined themselves technically as virgins (although the vast majority of these also stated that they were indeed sexually active, engaging in pet-

ting—they used the American

term—to

the point of orgasm).°° A few

years later, discussions of petting were being drowned out in a flood of debates about the pill and promiscuity.*! As one poster of the era put it,

“We're not talking about ‘the pill? we’re taking it.”°? Many women participated in the sexual revolution as actively as men. “I experimented around without any inhibitions,” one former 68er woman

recently sum-

marized it, and countless personal testimonials, from both women and men, concur.” But already in 1968 there were signs of discontent améng New Left women, and by the mid-1970s, with the feminist assault on New Left men in full swing, this discontent would be public knowledge, a source of great voyeuristic interest to the nonleft, nonfeminist general public and a source of enormous contention—and ultimately anguish— within the Left. 49. For a perceptive and nuanced analysis of some of the contradictory developments in West Germany’s sexual politics in the 1950s, see Uta G. Poiger, “Rock ’n’ Roll, Female

Sexuality, and the Cold War Battle over German Identities,” Journal of Modern History 68 (Sept. 1996): 577-616. For a wonderful set of memory-documents that capture both the effectiveness of the constraints placed on women and girls in the fifties, and their various attempts at subversion of the expected sexual norms, see Perlonzeit. Compare also the important testimonies in Kuhnert and Ackermann, “Jenseits von Lust und Liebe?” 50. “Die gefallene Natur,’ pp. 50-69, and “So nennt man

das,” Der Spiegel,

14 Nov.

1966, pp. 112-13. Already in the early 1960s the popular newsmagazine Stern ran a survey that incorporated a broader cross-section of class backgrounds and age groups and found that 87 percent of men and 70 percent of women admitted to having engaged in premarital intercourse (although those who did so with someone other than their subsequent spouse only amounted to 74 percent of the men and 41 percent of the women). See Wolfgang Metzger, “Liebe, Ehe und geschlechtliches Leben,” in Krise der Ehe? ed. Johannes Schlemmer

(Munich,

1966), p. 84. For a more detailed analysis of the differences (and, more impor-

tantly, the similarities) between the sexual behavior of workers and students in the mid to late 1960s, see Gunter Schmidt and Sigusch, “Patterns of Sexual Behavior in West German

Workers and Students,” trans. Fred Klein, Jowrnal of Sex Research 7 (May 1971): 89-106. 51. For example, contrast the Spiegel reports from 1966 with “Thema Eins,” Der Spiegel, 3 Aug. 1970, pp. 33-46. 52. This poster is evident in a photograph in Sabine WeiBler, “Sexy Sixties,” in CheSchahShit, p. 98. 53. C. H., private conversation with author, 1996.

Post-Holocaust Memory and the Sexual Revolution Although New Left women

139

had a number of complaints, sex was at

the heart of what increasingly appeared to be an irresolvable rage between (not all, but a great many) New Left men and women. The fact that childcare and other household labor went unremunerated, the fact that left men condescended towards women’s intellectual abilities, and so forth, were seen as somehow derivative of or at least inextricable from

that originary rage. And although women in the U.S. and other western European countries certainly had similar gripes (and ultimately experienced a similar male backlash), there is also a distinctive streak of venom

in the West German debates that is hard to miss—a streak of venom typified, for example, by the ubiquity of the phrase “[chop that] cock off!” (Schwanz ab!) in feminist graffiti.

New Left female fury at specifically New Left male behavior in bed was the spark igniting the feminists’ own revolution, a fury palpably clear in the very first New Left feminist document, the flyer put out by the Frankfurt Broads’ Collective (Weiberrat) in 1968 (fig. 3). Along with the visual impact of the chopped-off penises of well-known New Left leaders came the following text: We won't open our mouth! If we do open it, nothing comes out! If we leave it open, it gets stuffed for us: with petty bourgeois dicks, socialist screw pressure, socialist children, love, socialist flotsam and jetsam, turgidity, socialist potent horniness, socialist intellectual pathos,... revolutionary fumbling-about, sexual-revolutionary arguments ... BLAH BLAH BLAH!... Let’s vomit it out: we have penis envy, we are frustrated, hysterical, uptight, asexual, lesbian, frigid, shortchanged, irrational ... hard, virile.... We compensate, we overcompensate. . . We have penis envy, penis envy, penis envy. . . .

Then came the famous and oft-quoted concluding slogan: “Liberate the socialist pricks from their bourgeois dicks!” The years that followed saw the proliferation of a wide array of feminist institutions, from rape crisis centers to coffeehouses and bookstores.” By the end of the 1970s, it was easy to see that the women’s movement

was one of the strongest social movements in the country. And like the New

Left men

before them, feminist women

targeted the churches for

particular animus. Some worked to reinterpret Christianity itself, among other things generating a creative feminist theology movement (many of 54. Flyer text reprinted in Sibylla Fliigge, “Der Weiberrat im SDS,” in CheSchahShit, p. 174. 55. Useful histories of the women’s movement in West Germany include Der grosse Unterschied: Die neue Frauenbewegung und die siebziger Jahre, ed. Kristine von Soden (Berlin, 1988); Autonome Frauen: Schliisseltexte der Neuen Frauenbewegung seit 1968, ed. Ann Anders (Frankfurt am Main, 1988); So fing es an!: 10 Jahre Frauenbewegung, ed. Alice Schwarzer (Cologne, 1981); and Kezner schiebt uns weg: Zwischenbilanz der Frauenbewegung in der Bundesrepublik, ed. Lottemi Doormann (Weinheim, 1979).

Rechenschaftsbericht des weiberrats der gruppe frankfurt

ee mK

ere

1) schauer 2) gang 3) kunzelmann

4) 5) 6) bi

Nis

\

oN

krahl rabehl reiche ae

Fic. 3.—“Report of the Broads’ Collective of the Frankfurt Group.” Flyer created by SDS women in November 1968. Reprinted in Autonme Frauen, p. 12.

Post-Holocaust Memory and the Sexual Revolution

14]

whose members have, significantly, been sharply criticized for their own unthinking anti-Semitism; efforts, for example, to undercut antifeminist

versions of Christianity by describing Jesus Christ as “the first feminist”

have, unfortunately, commonly included disparaging assertions that in being so, Jesus was breaking from “patriarchal Judaism”).°° Other feminists argued that Christianity was unsaveable—misogynist in its very essence—for as one poem about Jesus’ mother Mary put it, “the religion of men began with your rape.” Another feminist slogan—emblazoned in graffiti on a church wall—was: “If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.”*’ Abortion, indeed, was a major issue; the main

formal campaign that feminists engaged in, launched in 1971, was the struggle to separate pleasure from the fear of pregnancy by legalizing abortion. This is the campaign that consolidated feminism into a real and

widely supported social movement, one that drew in many women beyond the confines of New Left circles. Meanwhile, within the Left a far more controversial, though informal, campaign involved (what in the U.S. context has been named) “the

battle for orgasm equity,” that is, the effort of many feminists to redefine heterosexual sex acts themselves.** Certainly some women involved with men

were

perfectly, indeed

extremely,

happy with penetration.°®

But countless others—gathering courage in the women’s consciousnessraising groups that were springing up everywhere—began to declare that penetration just did not do it for them and that they were tired of being traumatized into thinking themselves frigid and defective.®’ As one put it, they “no longer want to feel like just a more or less shapely mass of

flesh with a hole.”®! The catalyzing document for thousands of women 56. See Susannah

(May-June

Heschel, “Anti-Judaism in Christian Feminist Theology,” Tikkun 5

1990): 25-28,

95-97, and Judith Plaskow, “Feminist Anti-Judaism

and the

Christian God,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 7 (Fall 1991): 99-108. 57. See the photograph in Ele Schofthaler, “Zweierlet MaB: Die evangelische Kirche und der Paragraph 218,” in Das Kreuz mit dem Frieden: 1982 Jahre Christen und Politik, ed. Peter Winzeler et al. (Berlin, 1982), p. 145. 58. See Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess, and Gloria Jacobs, “The Battle for Or-

gasm Equity: The Heterosexual Crisis of the Seventies,” Re-making Love: The Feminization of Sex (New York, 1986).

59. For some keit: Zur Parnass,

And by the late seventies/early eighties they were starting to go public with this. classic examples, see Barbara Sichtermann, “Der Mythos von der Herbeifiihrbarfeministischen Diskussion um den Orgasmus,” Freibeuter 2 (1979): 94-100; Peggy “Ich bin Peggy Parnass,” Sexualitdt Konkret 1 (1979): 94-95; and Maria Wieden,

“Wider den linken Moralismus von Sexualitat,’Asthetik und Kommunikation 43 (Mar. 1981):

113-17. 60. For details on the clitoris debates, see Anders, “Chronologie der gelaufenen Ereignisse,” in Autonome Frauen, p. 26; Michaela Wunderle, “Lust und Liebe: Die feministische Sexualitatsdebatte,” in Der grosse Unterschied, pp. 20-24; and Renate Schlesier, “Die totge-

sagte Vagina: Zum Verhaltnis von Psychoanalyse und Feminismus: Eine Trauerarbeit,” in Weiblich-Mdnnlich: Kulturgeschichtliche Spuren einer verdréngten Weiblichkeit, ed. Brigitte Wartmann (Berlin, 1980). 61. Nushin, “Frauenfolter,” Pflasterstrand, no. 23a, 9-22 Feb. 1978, p. d.

142

Dagmar Herzog

was the bootleg translation of Anne Koedt’s The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm—which became an underground bestseller when it appeared in Germany in 1973. Popularized versions of its findings appeared in Alice Schwarzer’s The “Little” Difference (1975) (Schwarzer was and is the editor of the main German feminist magazine Emma) and in the prominent feminist Marielouise Janssen-Jurreit’s pathbreaking tome, Sexism (1976). Janssen-Jurreit, for example, opined forcefully that men’s neglect of the clitoris was a “rape of women’s self-experience” that could well be described as “clitoridectomy the occidental way.” She also implicitly invoked the Holocaust to strengthen her case, actually describing the indicative

features of “Hitler’s race theologies” as “no sexual self-determination for the woman, no striving for individual erotic happiness.” The antifeminist backlash from many—also leftist—men (and not a few women) was not far behind. Reading New Left men’s memory-essays from the late seventies and early eighties, one gets the sense that the entire New Left scene in Ger-

many went through a phase somewhere in the mid-seventies of exploring not only clitoral stimulation but also nonpenetrative sex in general. And one also gets the sense that few men (at least among those who were writing about it) were ultimately very happy with this development, whether they were self-styled “chauvies” or sensitive-guy “softies.” Rather than seeing alternatives to penetration as a way to experiment with inten-

sifying sexual pleasure for both partners, mocked the notion of “the infantile caressing orgasms” purported to have become typical this with the lost dream of “sex with hide and of joy and pain.

numerous essays not only paradise of endless cuddlein “the scene” (contrasting hair. . . with sweat and tears

. . with orgasms like cannons firing”)®* but also expressed

a vituperative rage at feminism—which easily slid into a more simple and all-encompassing misogyny. The classic summary statement of this mood was undoubtedly (the pseudonymous) Gernot Gailer’s declaration of 1980 (which appeared in both the taz, a left Berlin daily, and in Asthetik und Kommunikation):

This women’s movement. As if we didn’t have enough to do. .. . Then they show up. Chop that cock off, they say right away, if we once lech at them a second too long. Chop that cock, no thank you, I say then. Totally self-assured. And: the truly oppressed ones are us after all. We men. Down with the women’s movement. For more peepshows. 62. Marielouise Janssen-Jurreit, Sexismus: Uber die Abtreibung der Frauenfrage (Munich, 1978), pp. 539 and 295; trans. Verne Moberg, under the title Sexism: The Male Monopoly on History and Thought (New York, 1982).

63. Hermann L. Gremliza, “Normalitat der Perversion,” Sexualitdt Konkret 3 (1981): 8. See here also two satiric interventions: the special issue of Pardon on “Lust ohne Frust: Die neue Erotik” (Aug. 1979), and “Verein gegen schadlichen Geschlechtsverkehr e.V.,” Sexuwalitit Konkret 3 (1981): 30.

Post-Holocaust Memory and the Sexual Revolution

ip}

That’s no joke. Honestly. I am for the peepshow. The women’s movement doesn’t do anything for me.** But as is already evident in the flyer put out by the Frankfurt Broads’ Collective in 1968, it is difficult to separate chronologically the feminist women’s insurgency from the misogynist male backlash against it; the men’s response is already contained in the women’s own statement of complaint. A similar dynamic would be evident in subsequent years, as feminists and antifeminists engaged in an escalating spiral of attacks and counterattacks. (Simultaneously, an interesting feature of many men’s comments on the battle of the sexes was that they frequently elided the issue of the consistent presence of active antifeminism by acting, time and again, as though they had been putting up with feminist demands for a long time, but now were, finally, for the first time, breaking the silence.)®

In their attempts to score points against recalcitrant leftist males, feminists repeatedly invoked the fascist era in a variety of ways, decrying Nazism’s “masculinity-madness” and “masculine ideology”® and, among other things, announcing that “antifeminism” was “the hidden theoretical basis of German fascism.”°’ For example, after one Siegfried Knittel had confessed his misogynist fantasies and behavior in the important leftist, Frankfurt-based newspaper Pflasterstrand in 1978 (and the male editorial collective had inadequately distanced themselves from his remarks),

forty enraged female staffers put out the following declaration: One may feel sorry for the early fate of young Siegfried or not, and it is surely very regrettable, that the erstwhile SS-bullies also did not have a pretty youth, [but] it is to be welcomed as well that they at least are not allowed to see the Pflasterstrand as their central genital... . Not even a concentration camp guard in the National and Soldiers Paper could report on his “self-emancipatory acts” with such freedom and ease as Siegfried Knittel could about his deeds in the 64. Gernot Gailer, “Eine Traumfrau

zieht sich aus,” Asthetik und Kommunikation 40-41

(Sept. 1980): 91. 65. To give just three examples (from 1977, 1980, and 1992): See Siegfried Knittel, “Vom Ende der matriarchalischen ‘Emanzipations’-moral,” Pflasterstrand, no. 22, 12-25 Jan. 1978,

pp.

20-22;

Gailer,

“Eine

Traumfrau

zieht

sich aus”;

and

“Wutgeheul

aus

Man-

nerseelen,” Der Spiegel, 25 May 1992, pp. 68-84. 66. See “Eine Welle von Nazi-Drohungen gegen Feministinnen,” Emma (Dec. 1983): 5; Margarete Mitscherlich, “Die Unfahigkeit zu kampfen,” Emma (Apr. 1991): 28; Ingrid Schmidt-Harzbach, “Die Liige von der Stunde Null,” Cowrage (June 1982): 34; and Annemarie Troeger, “Die DolchstoBlegende der Linken: ‘Frauen haben Hitler an die Macht ge-

bracht,” Frauen und Wissenschaft: Beitriige zur Berliner Sommeruniversitat fiir Frauen, Juli 1976, ed. Gruppe Berliner Dozentinnen (Berlin, 1977), p. 324. 67. Annette Kuhn, “Der Antifeminismus als verborgene Theoriebasis des deutschen Faschismus: Feministische Gedanken zur nationalsozialistischen ‘Biopolitik,” in Frauen und Faschismus in Europa: Der faschistische Kérper, ed. Leonore Siegele-Wenschkewitz and Gerda Stuchlik (Pfaffenweiler, 1990), p. 39.

Mees

Dagmar Herzog

Pflasterstrand. We will not let the political frustration of the men be carried out on our backs and bellies. Characteristic gestures of this sort also appeared constantly in Emma. In one major essay, for instance, Emma identified the entire male-dominated sexual revolution of the 1960s with the Nazi period. According to Emma, the young women who had, together with leftist men, “gone on the street against rearmament, against the emergency laws, and Vietnam, [the women who] had begun to take the pill and discuss the ‘sexual revolu-

tion,” were “slowly starting to realize that they were once again going to be betrayed,” just like their erstwhile “brown”

mothers had been. These

daughters “no longer wanted to type and listen . . . and willingly spread their legs”; they were “waiting for the zero hour [die Stunde Null, that is, May 1945].”° Contributors to Emma also explicitly linked leftist men’s

defenses of pornography with both fascism and Auschwitz.’”? And one Emma contributor underscored her points about the horrors of rape by explicitly invoking the so-called Einsatzkommandos (the battalions that performed the mass executions by shooting which constituted a significant part of the Holocaust). But what had in actuality been the roundup and slaughter of more than one million (some say two million) Jews of both

genders on the Eastern front she described as a spectacle specifically of mass rapes of ethnically unidentified women and children.”! It was not surprising, then, that progressive men would fight back using similar tactics. Henryk Broder, for instance, writing in Konkret (even

as he confessed that “when women have big boobs I automatically reduce my expectations of their brains”) criticized the feminist slogan “all men are chauvinists” by pointedly comparing it with the racist notion that “all Jews are cunning.’”* (Broder was and is a well-known German Jewish commentator on matters Jewish and German; he has aptly been defined

recently as “a kind of Mr. Moral Jewish Voice in Germany.” In the late

1970s, Broder was just starting to highlight his Jewishness more frequently in his journalistic work.)’* Other men used related tactics. Psychoanalyst and “masculinity specialist” Berndt Nitzschke, for example,

responding to feminist attacks on porn, called attention to the Nazis’ at68. Die Frankfurter Stadthexen et al., in Pflasterstrand, no. 23, late Jan.—early Feb. LO7Srap ale 69. “Der Aufstand der Frauen: Am 6. Juni 1971 ging es los!” Emma (June 1991): 18, 20-21. 70. See FIL, “Sieg Macho,” Emma (Dec. 1987): 6, and Ingrid Strobl, “Justine und Justiz,” Emma (Feb. 1988): 33. See also the section on “Playboy bis TAZ,” in Schwesternlust und Schwesternfrust: 20 Jahre Frauenbewegung, ed. Alice Schwarzer (Cologne, 1991), p. 129. 71. See Ute Bechdolf, “‘Das Schlimmste waren die Schreie;” Emma (Aug. 1989): 3300. 72. Broder, “Ich bin ein Chauvi,” Konkret (Oct. 1979): 55, 57. 73. Scott D. Denham, “Schindler Returns to Open Arms: Schindler’s List in Germany

and Austria,’ German Politics and Society 13 (Spring 1995): 138.

Post-Holocaust Memory and the Sexual Revolution

naS

tacks on porn and its purportedly Jewish purveyors. Nitzschke sarcastically pointed out that “the dignity of the German woman was thoroughly protected back then, because the sex-offenders were not sitting, as they supposedly are nowadays, behind trees at night, but rather. . . in the concentration camps.””4

BD) To hear ex-68ers tell it, the tension between the sexes on the Left was increasingly felt to be inseparabk from a larger emergent sense of political disorientation. Sometimes when one reads the left books and newsmagazines it seems like post-1968 melancholia in West Germany set in already around 1969, or indeed, already in 1968 itself. A foretaste of the future mood came, for example, when Reimut Reiche, head of the

SDS in 1966-67 and author of the widely read and convolutedly theorized (Marx- and Marcuse-influenced) Sexuality and Class Struggle (1968), harshly criticized the Kommune | for, “as paradoxical as it sounds,” both “its Proudhonism and its Stalinism”; he meant to call attention to its na-

iveté about being able to create a political revolution in a little island by itself and the psychological “terrorism” with which its members treated each other in their insistence on maintaining nonmonogamy.”®

the leaders of the Kommune

Indeed,

vacillated between charming (and at the

time quite politically inventive) self-revealing vulnerability—as for example when communard Dieter Kunzelmann told a major newsmagazine that “I have difficulties with my orgasm and I want this to be made known to the public. . . . [I want to have] a real orgasm sometime” —and a rather harsh braggadocio about the acquisition of new female members and fellow travelers: “It’s like training a horse; one guy has to break her in, then

she’s available for everyone.””° As Reiche phrased it in the lovely contorted prose of the day: “This subjectively revolutionary attitude becomes objectively counterrevolutionary”

(SK, p. 155). (Rudi Dutschke, one of

the most earnest and charismatic of the New Left’s leaders, put it even

more forcefully. He not only charged that “this is not what I imagine a commune should be. The exchange of women and men is nothing but the application of the bourgeois principle of exchange under the sign of pseudorevolutionism.” He also suggested that the Kommune l|’s mem74. Berndt Nitzschke’s lecture before sexologists in Salzburg, 5 Nov. 1988; excerpted

in Emma (Feb. 1989): 29.

75. Reiche, Sexualitét und Klassenkampf: Zur Abwehr represswer Entsublimerung (Frankfurt, 1968), p. 155; hereafter abbreviated SK.

76. Quoted in Heinrich Mehrmann, “Erobern Kommunen Deutschlands Betten? Mehr Sex mit Marx und Mao,” Pardon (Aug. 1967): 17, 22. The most moving analysis of

the Kommune’s significance is in Klaus Hartung, “Die Psychoanalyse der Kiichenarbeit: Selbstbefreiung, Wohngemeinschaft und Kommune,”

in CheSchahShit, pp. 102-6.

146

Dagmar Herzog

bers were “unhappy neurotics” and that the group’s naked self-display in the self-promotional photograph “reproduces the gas chamber milieu of the Third Reich; for behind the exhibitionism helplessness, fear, and hor-

ror are hidden.”)’” Reiche reported that many young leftists had started communes

in imitation of the Kommune

1, but when their expectation

that the escape from the nuclear family and sexual repression could abolish all suffering and fulfill all hopes instantaneously proved a delusion this led to “many . . . chaotic personal collapses or, where these could be avoided, to positions of deep resignation” (SK, p. 155). Whether or not Reiche in his self-righteous superiority over Kunzelmann and Co. was correct in the specifics (and it is worth pointing out that both Reiche’s and Kunzelmann’s organs provided targets for the Broads’ Collective’s angry humor), what is significant is the sense evident throughout Reiche’s dis-

cussion—one that would become articulated with ever greater frequency—that the political difficulties the Left was running into more generally were inextricable from their crises and confusions around sex. Certainly by the mid-seventies the sense of both personal and political disenchantment (and the puzzling over whether and how those were related) was starting to get articulated with ever greater regularity, and by the late seventies, particularly with the retrospectives generated at the occasion of the ten-year anniversaries of 1967 and 1968, melancholia and introspection were the overwhelming moods, along with both selfcastigation and mutual recriminations.’* By 1977, at least one left text spoke of “the collapse of the antiauthoritarian movement” as though it were a self-evident fait accompli.” The intensification of state and police 77. Quoted in “‘Wir fordern die Enteignung Axel Springers,” Der Spiegel, 10 July 1967, pp. 32-33. 78. See, for example, the comic and the angry remarks in the retrospective photo essay on the New Left, “Das umstrittene Erbe der Apo,” Konkret (June 1977): 11; the psychoanalyzing and sociologizing interpretations of post-68 privatization in Johann August Schiilein, “Von der Studentenrevolte zur Tendenzwende oder der Riickzug ins Private: Eine sozialpsychologische Analyse,” in “Zehn Jahre Danach,” the retrospective special issue of Kursbuch 48 (June 1977): 101-17; the eloquent and earnest introspection of a participant, Peter Schneider, “Nicht der Egoismus verfalscht das politische Engagement, sondern der Versuch, ihn zu verheimlichen,” Frankfurter Rundschau, 25 June 1977, p. III; the agonized rage at neoconservative mockery of 68ers in Walter Boehlich, “Biirgerkrieg als Sexschnulze,” Konkret (Dec. 1980): 62-63; and, as well, three important obituaries: (on Ulrike

Meinhof) Gremliza, “War sie denn unser?” Konkret (June 1976): 4; (on Herbert Marcuse)

Gaston Salvatore, “Tradumen entsprang ein Augenblick Geschichte,’ Der Spiegel, 1979, pp. 148-49; and (on Rudi Dutschke) Michael Schneider, “Sanft war er, sanft, ein bi®chen zu sanft—wie alle echten Radikalen,” Konkret (Feb. 1980): 23-25. Note also the simplistic psy-

chologizing on post-68 depressiveness (along with some condescending remarks about former 68ers’ sexual unhappiness) in Ursula Nuber and Heiko Ernst, “Die traurige Generation,” Psychologie Heute (Apr. 1989): 20-27. A more balanced and sensitive interpretation of seventies melancholia is Michael Schneider, Den Kopf verkehrt aufgesetzt oder Die melancholische Linke: Aspekte des Kulturzerfalls in den siebziger Jahren (Darmstadt, 1981). 79. “Editorische Notiz der Herausgeber,” in Jos van Ussel, Sexualunterdriickung: Geschichte der Sexualfeindschaft, ed. Heinrich Brinkmann et al. (GieBen, 1977), p. [1].

Post-Holocaust Memory and the Sexual Revolution

147

repression of the Left (including tapped phones, house searches, and blacklisting, especially in 1977 as the government escalated its antiterrorism campaign), did not, to say the least, make either the Left’s selfdiagnoses or its ability to envision fresh political agendas any easier.*° Pressure came from within as well, as the Left suffered internal conflicts

over terrorism and careerism; both of these phenomena seemed like admissions that the revolution was failing. Overall, there was a sense of deep discouragement that political transformation had not been as easy to achieve as had been initially expected and that the state the students were battling was both more powerful and more flexible than had been thought. In these years there were particularly intense debates about the inadequacy of Marxist and other political-economic analyses and activism, and the need to attend to subjective and personal matters; simultaneously, there was fierce controversy over whether the focus on the personal was a sign of depoliticization, a “drawing-back into the private,” as one essay in the left journal Kursbuch put it, or precisely part of the necessary “revolutionizing of the everyday,’ as the Kommune | (and its dissident sibling Kommune 2) had originally wanted.*! It was specifically its confidence in the absolute inseparability (and mutual beneficiality) of the personal and the political, as Peter Schneider pointed out in 1977, that in the beginning had given the student movement its euphoric strength and revolutionary power, and it was exactly those “personal and political needs, that later got separated into mutually hostile camps.”* Only for a brief moment in the late sixties “everything”—sex and politics, hash and Vietnam—“had seemed to hang together with everything else,” as former member of the SDS Eckhard Siepmann put it, and then things became more confused. What remained was “a desert, in

which no one understood anyone else anymore, everyone was suspicious of everyone else, and no theoretical stone could still be found standing

on top of another.’** Furthermore, to complicate the difficulties over the 80. On the state campaign of repression against the Left, see Margit Mayer, “The German October of 1977,” New German Critique 13 (Winter 1978): 155-63. On the complex interactions between external repression and internal problems within the Left, see Har-

tung, “Versuch, die Krise der antiautoritaren Bewegung wieder zur Sprache zu bringen,” Kursbuch 48 (June 1977): 14-43. 81. Schiilein, “Von der Studentenrevolte zur Tendenzwende Private,” p. 101, and Mehrmann,

“Erobern

Kommunen

oder der Riickzug ins

Deutschlands

Betten?” p. 22. See

also Kommune 2, Versuch der Revolutionierung des biirgerlichen Individuums: Kollektives Leben mit politischer Arbeit verbinden! (Cologne, 1971). For another characteristic example of the late

seventies discussion of the notion that without working on the personal—in this case working through fears of abandonment acquired in earliest infancy—“a real political practice of liberation is impossible,” see Reiner Gogohn and Mario Magiera, “Angst—Das Tabu unserer Gesellschaft,” taz, 10 May 1979, p. 9. 82. Peter Schneider, “‘Nicht der Egoismus verfalscht das politische Engagement, sondern der Versuch, ihn zu verheimlichen,” p. III.

83. Siepmann, “Unergriindliches Obdach fiir Reisende” and “1969—Die groBe Sonnenfinsternis,” in CheSchahShit, pp. 194, 204.

148

Dagmar Herzog

relationship between

the personal and the political, the later seventies

were a moment when the sixties’ sexual revolution and the seventies’ feminist critiques of it were both felt to be in crisis; there was an explosion of (often mutually conflicting) accounts announcing that promiscuity wasn't working, but twosomes weren't working either, and that general romantic

and sexual unhappiness was widespread. As Stefan Hinz observed in the pages of Konkret in 1981: “Loving has become difficult. Certainly in this

country it has.”*# As part of the larger introspective move, in the late seventies and early eighties many of the New Left journals produced special issues on

the topic of sexuality, and these issues were widely read and discussed— by all accounts sparking profound conflicts in bars, workplaces, and bedrooms alike. In every case, the justification for such a publishing

enterprise was formulated in terms of dissatisfaction with the reigning

state of affairs in and between left bodies. As the editors of the Pflasterstrand put it in a tone of strategic self-deprecation in the wake of their special issue of December 1977, the reason the issue had sold out so rapidly had nothing to do with the quality of its contents. Rather, “the topic caught hold, because there is such a total deficit in the discussions around relationships, sexuality and the women/men battle.” Their only motivation, they claimed, had been “to provide something like a provocation, dragging the topic out of private drawers into the light of day.”*° Or again, as some members of the editorial collective put it, the goal was to “carry out [publicly] a discussion, that otherwise always stays

jammed up in the cogs of privateness.”*° The editors were worried that among too many young people, “the same creepy dramas as went on in grandma and grandpa’s bedroom still exist today” (“S,” p. 19). In a related vein, the editors of Konkret announced in 1979 that they were

bringing out a special issue, Sexualitdét Konkret, “because round about us we see the ruined sexual relationships and the helplessness in face of theming”

Clearly, even as a number of contributors to the special issues complained (and rightly so) that (with few exceptions) no one was making themselves truly vulnerable, and even as members of the Pflasterstrand’s editorial collective, for example, expressed awareness that encouraging individual experiential contributions (or, as they put it, “subjective screw-

experience-reports”) could draw the rebuke that one was “solely grubbing around in one’s own individual shit, rather than only even tentatively suggesting collective paths and perspectives towards liberation and transfor84. 85. hereafter 86.

Stefan Hinz, “Sexualitat: abbreviated Drei aus der

“Die Kunscht des Liebens,” Konkret (Apr. 1981): 50. Wenig Fortsetzung. . .,” Pflasterstrand, no. 22, 12-25 Jan. 1978, jo, Ge “S.” Redaktion, “Von Feen und Faunen,” Pflasterstrand, no. 23a, 9-22 Feb.

1978, p. 4. 87. “Intern,” Sexualitdt Konkret 1 (1979): 4.

Post-Holocaust Memory and the Sexual Revolution

149

mation” (“S,” p. 19),°* part of the impetus for these projects was precisely

the desire to make the private public (in some ways thus reclaiming one of the earliest impulses of the student movement).

Thus,

for example,

Pflasterstrand editor Daniel Cohn-Bendit responded to feminist criticism that male writers on matters sexual were all just “paper masturbators” by declaring that “I am not just a paper masturbator but rather a deeply committed masturbator with many fantasies and dreams that are neither

all ugly nor all pretty.’*° Others ventured different forms of vulnerability (or exhibitionist self-exposure?), whether sharing—as one man did—the self-derogatory information that he had so loved looking supercool in his ultratight jeans (“pure insanity: for more than a decade I did that to myself, even though so often it made

my balls and my stomach hurt”), or

volunteering—as another did—that “I always come too early,’ or revealing—as in yet a third case—that “I share with some men that I know the experience, in the course of screwing suddenly to be 5 kilometers away, separated from my penis, separated from the woman, totally alone.’°° As the writings on sex on the Left multiplied in the late seventies and early eighties, two themes repeatedly recurred. One had to do with a profound hostility to feminism and a deep anxiety among left men that

women, under the influence of feminism, might reject the act of “dickfucking” (Schwanzficken—that is, penetration), entirely. And the other had

to do with the relationship between the personal and the political, between sex and what had happened to the attempt to change the world. Indeed, one could argue that the whole series of issues on sex in the

Pflasterstrand in late 1977/early 1978 consisted mainly of one long and embittered extended conversation about the “dick-fuck,” and the related issue of left male resentment at feminism, and vice versa. Simultaneously, it was an important forum for both male and female leftists to articulate their sadness and confusion about the state of left politics. Contributor after contributor remarked on “the political helplessness of the Frankfurt scene. Externally nothing succeeds anymore, internally we beat on each other.” Or, as another put it, “already years ago we had it up to here with

the proletarians . . . now we apparently have it up to here with ourselves.”

Occasionally a call for a more utopian optimism broke through—as one “Micky” announced in February 1978: “I am not ready to sacrifice the visions of a liberated ... world of revolutionary houses of lust and of

laughing orgies.”°! But mostly contributors took the opportunity to re88. “Kontroverse zum ‘Stammheim-Fick,” Pflasterstrand, no. 22, 12-25 Jan. 1978, p. 23. 89. Dany, in Pflasterstrand, no. 23, late Jan.—early Feb. 1978, p. 3.

90. Puritz, “Schreiben tiber Sexualitat,” p. 13; “Gedanken eines Sauriers,” Pflasterstrand, no. 21, 15 Dec. 1977-11 Jan. 1978, p. 40; and “Vogeln,” Pflasterstrand, no. 21, 15 Dec. 1977-11 Jan. 1978, p. 28.

91. Harry Oberlander, “Notizen aus der Provinz,’ Pflasterstrand, no. 23, late Jan.—early Feb. 1978, p. 3; Drei aus der Redaktion, “Von Feen und Faunen,” p. 5; and Micky, “Warum

ich mich an dieser Diskussion nicht beteilige. . .,” Pflasterstrand, no. 23a, 9-22 Feb. 1978, p. a.

150

Dagmar Herzog

mark on the growing confusion over what it might mean to be leftist and how exactly left sexuality differed from the bourgeois version. One left man, calling himself “a dinosaur,” “a relic from the so-called Softie-era,” generated consternation in the Frankfurt scene by confessing

in 1977 that “despite my best efforts I can no longer find the unbroken red thread. My most beautiful screw ever was on the morning when the news came over the radio of the death in Stammheim

[announcing that

three of the imprisoned left terrorists from the Red Army Faction had committed suicide]. We were both for a long time completely numb. Then we fucked pretty brutally, then we were totally empty.’*? Responding to the outrage of the editors that he was getting off on other people’s suffering and thereby disengaging sex from politics in the most offensive way, the “dinosaur” tried to sort through his feelings once more. First he complained that the editors should not have accompanied their statement of disgust about him with such a hurtful caricature (fig. 4)—as though the “dinosaur” spent his time masturbating while thinking of the suicides. The “dinosaur” accused the editors of imitating the Stiirmer (the influential Nazi magazine filled with racist images of not only big-nosed but also hypersexualized Jews). And the “dinosaur” also reflected further in selfcritical anguish on his own and everyone else’s confusions: The suicides in Stammheim did not make me horny. They made me feel rage, sadness, helplessness. In this situation I could—and that is first of all my brokenness, maybe—screw, specifically in this rage and

mourning. I could screw AGAINST ALL THAT

and was simulta-

neously driven by something outside myself, was a victim, okay, maybe I also turned the woman with whom I was having sex into a victim. In any case I was empty, and my body could speak, against the speechlessness, that we, I guess, all felt. Or didn’t you feel it? With you apparently it’s not like that. Sex must be integrated into a political reality, you say. That seems to work seamlessly for you. Not

for me. Sex and relationships and politics, with me that’s sometimes separate, sometimes opposed.” This concluding perspective would be articulated even more forcefully two years later when the aforementioned pseudonymous Gernot Gailer, in his sophisticated and much-discussed statement of (what we would now Call un-p.c.) left pornographic fantasies, “A Dream Babe Undresses” (published in its unabridged version in Asthetik und Kommunikation), invoked the old 68er slogan Pleasure, Sex, and Politics Belong Together only to disagree completely. “Sex and politics,” Gailer intoned, “never did work, does not work, and never will work.” 92. “Gedanken eines Sauriers,” pp. 40, 42. 93. “Antwort eines Sauriers,” Pflasterstrand, no. 22, 12-25 Jan. 1978, p. 23. 94. Gailer, “Eine Traumfrau,” pp. 84-85.

ey KONTROVERSE ) ZUM *STAMMHEIM-FICK”

z

ys

OTUs

2

- 19t20!44 b norte

Die

ualitat

Auseinandersetzung

und

das végeln

iber

begreifen

Sex-

wir

als einen wichtigen Teil in unseren Beziehungen. Doch wenn sich diese

Suche nach Veranderung im luftleeren Raum abspielt, nicht integriert ist in eine politische Realitat, ist es eine Ge-

fahr, dai die “Subjektivitat

an sich”

zum einzigen Inhalt der Veranderungs-

winsche verkommt. Es lebe die Individualitat: jeder erzahlt seine Schwierigkeiten und Probleme, versucht sie nach seinen Moglichkeiten und Vorstellungen zu l6sen, interessiert sich vielleicht ab und an noch mal, wie andere diese

bewaltigen .. . mehr ist da an Perspektive tatsachlich nicht din. Das Manko, das allen subjektiven V6gel-Erlebnisberichten anhangt, ist da®B aus ihnen auch nicht einmal anSatzweise irgendwelche perspektivischen, kollektiven Phantasien zur Veranderung geweckt werden. - Geschweige denn, da® da sowas von gemeinsamer Betroffenheit bzw. gemeinsamer Suche nach

Mdéglichkeiten

von

Seite 42. Genosse “Sauner™, denke doch mal mit vertauschten Rollen: wie mag es Dir ergehen, wenn Du in einer Knastzelle hockst und erfahrst, daG die Ge-

Nossin, mit der Du einmal so toll (#sprachlos) gevdgelt hast, sich angeblich in der Zelle nenenan erhangt hat und Du anschlieGend im Pflasterstraod lest, da& Leute drauBen mit dieser Meldung ihr schdnstes Vogelerlebnis verbinden. Jegliche mal vorhandene Gemeinsamkeit geht verloren oder war es

lange vorher, ohne da® wir es wahrhaben wollten. Die Totalitat an GegenSatz, was unsere Empfindungen ausmacht, laGt Beispiele kaum noch zu. Die Aussagen der Roten Hilfe zu Ruhland fallen uns zu Dir ein. “Die Untan

Sau hat jedes MaG fur oben und Rie liebe

24

wy» MEINE

SCHONSTE VOGELE! WAR AN DEM MORGEN, ALS DIL MELDUNG VON DEM TOD AUS STAMMHEIM AUS DEM RADIO KAM." Pilasterstrand Nr. 2)

Veranderung-

en und Bediirfnisbefnedigung herzustellen ware. Die Getrenntheit der Erzahler und uns wurde uns am deutlichsten auf

arme

ee y

---te-

2-9

Scheie. So, wie ihr es geschneben Ihabt, wie ihr es wahrgenommen habt,

habt ihr recht, und ich verstehe euer Befremden. Ihr muft es haben, wenn ihr jenen einen Satz aus dem Zusammenhang reif®t, von dem ich dachte, er wirde im Zusammenhang klar Das mag auch an meiner flapsigen Schreibe liegen, aber woran liegt es, da® ich mir, in der Kartikatur mit einer Asthetik des Siurmer, im Pflasterstrand-Buro einen abwicnse? Die Selbstmorde in Stammheim haben |mich nicht aufgegeut. Sie haben mich ‘witend,

traung,

ratlos

gemacht.

In

dieser Situation konnte ich - und das ist erstmal meine Kaputtheit, vielleicht, vogeln, eben in dieser Wut und Trauer

Ich konnte DAGEGEN vogeln und ;war gleichzeitig fremdbestimmt, ein Opfer, ok. vielleicht habe ich auch die Frau, mit der ich gevogelt habe, zum Opfer gemacht, Ich jedenfalls war leer,

Bei kuch kommt das nicht vor Sexualitét muf\ integnert sein in pobtische Kealitat schreibt thr. Das scheint bei Euch bruchlos zu klappen. Ber mir nicht. Sexualitut und Beaichungen und Politik, da ist bei mir manchmal getrennt, manchmial gegensdtzlich, Ich habe Phantasien, die manchmal weit aufterhalb dieser Idylle liegen, die AUCH Kompensation hedeuten. Man wird bei euch schnell zun Verrater. Ich verstehe euer moralisches' Erschrecken, aber ich erchrecke auch vor eurer Moral, in der ich eine arme

Sau bin, die keinen roten f'uden mehr findet Ich teve eure Kntik an samtlichen Artikeln uber Sexualitat, dafs sich daraus beim besten Willen keine perspektivischen, kollektiven Phantasien zur Veranderung erkennen lassen. Aber ich will mir und allen anderen auch zuvestehen, sich erstmal durch einen|

Fic. 4.—“Controversy about the Stammheim-Fuck.” Caricature accompanying the editors’ criticism of the “dinosaur” and the “dinosaur’s” response, Pflasterstrand,

no. 22, 12-25 Jan. 1978, p. 23.

122

6

Dagmar Herzog

:

This was the milieu in which 68er Klaus Theweleit was writing Male Fantasies. Male Fantasies needs to be seen, I think, as a last-ditch attempt

at an optimistic reading of the relationship between the personal and the political. In contradiction to the building sentiment that pleasure, sex, and politics were at odds, Male Fantasies announced, resoundingly, that pleasure, sex, and politics did belong together. Male Fantasies suggested that sexual dysfunctionality was at the heart of the most important and gruesome political events of the twentieth century. It brought, in short,

both German fascism and the Judeocide explicitly back into the discussion the Left was having with itself, and it proposed that understanding

the connections between bodily feelings and the propensity to violence in the past could show the way to a nonfascist future. The impact of Male Fantasies should not be underestimated. In the late 1970s, when it was published, the book was a blockbuster hit, and it

was not only widely reviewed but also broadly appropriated, in both popular and scholarly venues. Rudolf Augstein, the editor of Der Spiegel, in 1977 deemed Male Fantasies “maybe the most exciting German-language publication of this year,’ while in the more conservative but no less influential Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in 1978, Lothar Baier (who found the

book appalling and announced that its explanatory value “inclines . . towards zero”) also noted that the two volumes had created a sensation,

that the publisher was unable to keep up with the extraordinary demand, and that “in certain parts of the intellectual scene they are being almost maniacally devoured.” And in the pages of the opinion-making Die Zeit, Male Fantasies was called “the most productive contribution of left theoreticians to the fascism debate to date.” The review in Frank-

furt’s Pflasterstrand actually said that the book could help to heal the problems in the left scene and to “build bridges” between the estranged partics.2 The impact was lasting. A few years later, in the early 1980s, Ulf Preuss-Lausitz, in his contribution to the anthology on 68ers’ coming of age in the 1950s, started his inquiry with the assumption that in the bod-

ies of human beings, “in these places of seemingly greatest privacy, lines are drawn of whole-societal processes, and that this in turn affects our

social-political actions.” His inspiration for pursuing these reciprocal connections between bodies and politics, he emphasized, came above all from two sources: his own and his peers’ experiences, and “the investigations 95. Rudolf Augstein, “Frauen fliessen, Manner schiessen,” Der Spiegel 52, 1977, jos Whey

Lothar Baier, “In den Staub mit allen Feinden der Frau,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 18 Apr. 1978; Bazon Brock, “Frauen, Fluten, Kérper, Geschichte: Ein wichtiger Beitrag linker Theorie zur Faschismusdebatte,” Die Zeit, 25 Nov. 1977, p. 11; and “Blut und Widerstand: Der Traum vom Terror,’ Pflasterstrand, no. 21, 15 Dec. 1977-11 Jan. 1978, p. 19.

Post-Holocaust Memory and the Sexual Revolution

152

of Klaus Theweleit into the dangers and possibilities of certain bodysocializations.” Theweleit’s most impressive accomplishment, said PreussLausitz, was the way Theweleit “above all convincingly worked out the

inner affinity between the socialization of men in that time and fascism.”%° Meanwhile, just last year, in 1996, in a new anthology on the history of masculinity, Male Fantasies was once again hailed as a pathbreaking work, this time as the pioneering text in the history of masculinity in Germany and one which “surely now as much as ever counts as the most wellknown contribution” to that genre.°” As mentioned, Theweleit attempted to make sense of the (proto)fas-

cist male mind above all by consulting protofascist and fascist men’s own writings. Theweleit examined over 250 Freckorps memoirs as well as the writings of such men as Goebbels and Auschwitz commandant Rudolf HO6ss. In addition to this rich source base, Theweleit engaged a broad array of theoretical works and issues. Although resolutely anticapitalist and deeply committed to understanding human psychology, Theweleit was repeatedly critical of Marx, Freud, and the Freudian Marxist Frankfurt school.

Instead,

Male Fantasies

Freudian analytic theories. It was Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s notions machine” and by Margaret Mahler’s provided “maintenance mechanisms”

drew

eclectically

on

various

non-

particularly influenced by Gilles of the unconscious as a “desiringinsights into how acts of aggression for children suffering from psycho-

sis, particularly children who, being (as Theweleit summarized her) “not-yet-fully-born,’ had never acquired the necessary sense of bodily

boundedness to be able to relate libidinally to other bodies.** Theweleit was convinced fascistic men had the same problem. And his book heaped on such a wealth of empirical evidence from so many men’s own writings that, for many readers, the thesis became hard to resist. Male Fantasies careens wildly between the brilliant and the idiotic, the

tedious and the illuminating, the perceptive and the problematic; often those tendencies coexist within the same passage. It is definitely the product of a 68er. (Theweleit, born in 1942, describes his parents, and thereby

situates himself similarly to those who felt that the aftereffects of Nazism lingered throughout their adolescences in the fifties: “The blows [my father] brutally lavished as a matter of course, and for my own good, were the first lessons I would one day come to recognize as lessons in fascism. The instances of ambivalence in my mother—she considered the beatings 96. Preuss-Lausitz, “Vom gepanzerten zum sinnstiftenden Korper,” p. 89. 97. Thomas Kiihne, “Mannergeschichte als Geschlechtergeschichte,’ in Mdnnergeschichte—Geschlechtergeschichte: Mdnnlichkeit im Wandel der Moderne, ed. Kithne (Frankfurt, 1996), p- 16. 98. Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, trans. Stephen Conway, Erica Carter, and Chris Turner, 2 vols. (Minneapolis,

ME

1987, 1989), 2:212; see also 2:210-11; hereafter abbreviated

154

Dagmar Herzog

necessary but tempered them—were

the second” [MF

1:xx].) But Male

Fantasies is also definitely a post-1968 book. Rather than simplistically adopting Wilhelm Reich’s dictums about the relationships between sexuality and fascism in the way, say, Dietrich Haensch did, Theweleit is constantly at pains to criticize and go beyond Reich. Moreover, rather than assuming triumphing over the Right will be easy, Male Fantasies assumes a world in which leftists are once again disoriented and are struggling to understand what makes conservatism appealing to the “masses.” Further, it is a world in which there is tremendous perplexity about the relationship between the personal and the political. And, finally, far from assuming that all antifascists’ sex lives are going smoothly, Male Fantasies struggles with the challenges brought by feminism as well as with the general sense of dissatisfaction with the way the sexual revolution was going. Male Fantasies is above all an intervention in two conversations: the one that the male Left was having with itself about its own bodies, and the one (less openly thematized but no less pressing) that the society as a whole had intermittently been having about the relationship between pleasure and evil. Near the end of volume

1, Theweleit

complained

that “historians

have never been interested in what has really happened to human bodies—what bodies have felt” (ME 1:362). And clearly his book involved a

recurrent attempt to figure out what fascistic men’s bodies actually felt, particularly when they were engaging in killing on the battlefield, though

also, for example, when engaged in the ritual of marching in spectacular column formations. But Theweleit was interested as well in what the left men of his generation were feeling inside their bodies. On one important level, Theweleit can be read as styling himself as an ultra-sensitive guy, while in his own way outmachoing the other guys,

implying quite strongly that sensitive guys have more fun. Against the clamor of other heterosexual men worrying over the impact of feminism, Theweleit was telling them: relax.®® Relax: it’s not the erection that matters (indeed, he repeatedly mocked other—also especially left—men’s concerns about erection and penetration), it’s the whole-body orgasms you'll have if you lose your fear of women, and of their fluids, and of their

recesses (in fact, what you're really afraid of is your own fluids, and you shouldn't be). Relax, furthermore, because women, and feminism, are not scary; women and feminism are good for us, too. And to top it all off,

to reinforce this message, Theweleit had the whole chilling counterexample of the Third Reich to back him up. This, then, is the spirit in which

99. Theweleit is very uneven on homosexuality. He certainly means to be hip, and was received that way in at least one gay text that I could find; but he is confused and

offensive as well, claiming to find similarities between gay men and fascists (precisely in the context of trying to refute the old canard that all Nazis were gay!) that suggest that homosexuals, like psychotic children, might be incompletely “born”; see MF 2:314-18.

Post-Holocaust Memory and the Sexual Revolution

155

Theweleit could deliver such bon mots as the following:

If personal relationships are to be transformed, it no longer suffices simply to demand more frequent and more pleasurable orgasms. . . . Instead, the very notion of the orgasm as the sensation of one person has to be dissolved, abandoned. If human beings were to begin to achieve release through orgasms in which they experienced the other, the diverse and the different as equal, they might well become nonfascists. [MF 2:104]

(Very occasionally there are other moments in Male Fantasies as well, ones which acknowledged that bodies didn’t always cooperate with utopian programs. As Theweleit put it affectingly in passing in volume 1, what “all of us” “suffer most from” is feelings of alienation: “The real problem is that our bodies cramp up when they try to feel pleasure; sweat breaks out

where

love

should;

our

soft, erect

members

become

unsatisfied

bones. . .” [ME 1:416-17].) But when he turned away from his own generation and to the details

of the past, Theweleit ran into more difficulties. For example, he seemed unable to decide whether fascism offered its adherents pleasure or not,

and he resolved this dilemma far more successfully when thinking through the appeal fascism held for the general public (see esp. MF 1:430-32) and the warrior—though here too he ran into theoretical tangles—than when he tackled the problem of brutality within concentration camps. Theweleit’s basic argument throughout the book was that “the fascist never experiences the existence of a body capable of release. . . . [His is] a body incapable of the experience of pleasure in any form” (MEF 2:195). But then again, in the context of making a case about the inadequacy of past antifascism and eager to develop an antifascism that would be more successful because more attuned to the “mysteries” of the body (ME 2:108), Theweleit was sure that the key to the fascists’

success lay in the “refusal by fascism to relinquish desire” (albeit “desire in its most profound distortion”); the Communist Left in the pre-Nazi years, according to Theweleit, “never so much as intimated that there

might be pleasure in liberation” (MF 2:189). Or at another point, specifically in the context of criticizing the Left for assuming fascism had anything to do with the masses’ economic interests, Theweleit asserted that “what fascism allows the masses to express are suppressed drives, imprisoned desires” (MF 1:432). Or yet again: “Fascism never expropriates the owners of the means of production. . .. The only thing it ‘lberates’ is perverted desire—which it then turns loose on human beings” (MF 2:201). Turning to the battlefield, Theweleit was more consistent. Invoking the notion of “the orgasm

of killing” (ME 2:127), Theweleit explained

that for “soldier males,” “heroic acts of killing take the place of the sexual act” (ME 2:279). Soldier men take pleasure in killing, but it is not a sexual

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Dagmar Herzog

pleasure; indeed, according to Theweleit, it is the pleasure of averting sexual desires in one’s own body by destroying the bodies of others. Theweleit stated very clearly that “I would hardly describe the white terror as a form of ‘sexuality’”; instead, he argued, soldier males try to es-

cape or transform their own sexuality, “which they perceive as a force that will engulf and destroy them” (MF 2:315). And most explicitly: “It seems increasingly doubtful that terms such as hetero- or homosexuality can usefully be applied to the men we are studying. . . . These men seem

less to possess a sexuality than to persecute sexuality itself—one way or another” (MF 2:61). But when he got to torture within concentration camps, Theweleit

had to face head-on the problem of pleasure in evil. At various points in the book (like Plack and other 68ers before him), Theweleit was at pains to point out that notions of an innate aggressive drive or death drive in human beings were nonsense. Furthermore, in tackling the notion of human nature as innately evil, Theweleit rather cleverly invoked head Nazi

Hermann Goering as a key proponent of that view (an excellent discredit-

ing strategy), and he pointed out very movingly and perceptively that the spread of the idea of human evil’s inevitability was one of the most tragic and pernicious consequences of Nazism itself. But in the end, what did this leave him with? In an extended section in the second volume, Theweleit ventured an

interpretation of a phenomenon observed by the (long-anonymous) author of The Men with the Pink Triangle (it had just appeared in 1972), a

homosexual survivor of the concentration camps of Flossenbtirg and Mauthausen. This author said he himself had witnessed “‘on more than thirty occasions” an SS camp commander masturbating during floggings of prisoners (MF, 2:301).'°° In Theweleit’s view, the public masturbation needed to be understood in multiple ways: as a deliberate reminder of the utter disempoweredness of the spectators; as a celebration of the torturer’s own aliveness in the face of those condemned to death; as a tortur-

ing of the victim in his capacity as a sexual being (in other words as antisexual against others); and also—and here we get to the heart of Theweleit’s problem—as the torturer’s act of repression against himself. How could this be (particularly since Theweleit himself acknowledged that “ritual flogging seems to me to be the most ‘sexual,... of all forms of torture”)? How is evil not true pleasure; how is this not a truly enjoyable orgasm? Was this concentration camp commandant not having orgasms? Theweleit ultimately suggests that, yes, of course, he was, but they were not the best kind. This is how Theweleit put it: He presumed to know that 100. It was recently discovered that the author of The Men with the Pink Triangle was Josef Kohout; he lived until 1994. His pink triangle is “the only one known to have been worn by a prisoner who can be identified”; it is now in the possession of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (David W. Dunlap, “Personalizing Nazis’ Homosexual Victims,” New York Times, 26 June 1995, p. Al).

Post-Holocaust Memory and the Sexual Revolution

17

the public masturbator at the flogging absolved himself of the requirement that he fantasize in order to gain pleasure. Masturbation releases him absolutely from his threatening interior since this now takes the externalized form of the victim at the whipping post. His interior is severed from his body. ... He is now able to repress the “desire to desire,” the very existence of his unconscious. And the more he can substitute external perceptions for those of the interior, the more successful repression will be. [MF 2:303]

And how did the murder of the Jews function in Male Fantasies? Although there have been countless reviews and discussions of Male Fantasies both in the U.S. and in Europe, with only one or two exceptions no one has noticed that “Jews are almost entirely absent” from it, and cer-

tainly no one has explained what role they do play.'°! Far from ignoring the Jewish question because Jews were just not a big concern for the preNazi Freikorps men that provided Theweleit with his main source base, Theweleit instead repeatedly and quite deliberately invoked the Holocaust (“concentration camps,” “Auschwitz,” “gas chambers”) in order—it

starts to seem—to give his arguments about sex an impact and weight they would not have had if the Holocaust went entirely unmentioned.!” Theweleit has frequently been criticized for being inattentive to the various levels at which his argument operated: the level of the fascism-loving masses, the level of the soldier male, the level of the dyed-in-the-wool Nazi, or indeed the level of Western bourgeois men in general—a prob-

lem he actually engaged quite openly himself, only in order to dismiss it (see, for example, ME 2:118, 213, 348-49). What has not been noticed is

that his argument also worked at the level of the Holocaust, and precisely the ensuing ambiguity is what gave Theweleit’s argument, in his time, its power. In fact, volume 2 of Male Fantasies opened with the problem of trying

to explain Nazi anti-Semitism, pointing rightly to the limitations of traditional leftist analyses in which anti-Semitism was above all explained as a technique for diverting anticapitalist impulses among the masses toward Jews. Theweleit stressed “that this point is secondary. What we find at the core of German anti-Semitism is instead a coupling of ‘Jewishness’ with a 101. Michael Rogin, “Fascist Fantasies,” review of MF in The Nation, 18-25 July 1987,

p. 65. See also the brief consideration of this problem in Jessica Benjamin and Rabinbach’s extremely interesting foreword to MF 2:xiv. 102. One way Jews continually reappear is as part of the standard triumvirate of things fascist men were said to hate: women, Communists (or proletarians), and Jews (as in

a sort of tired rattling-down of the three analytic categories of gender/class/race). But what is interesting here is the way Theweleit often makes this threesome fit better into his argument by linking Jews with sex, or in other words by subsuming Jews into his sexual argument, as in such phrases as “contagious Jewish lust” (MF 2:162) or “lascivious or avaricious

Jews” (ME 2:348).

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Dagmar Herzog

‘contagious’ desire for a better life” (ME 2:9). But quickly, in comments

both before and after this particular one, it becomes apparent that once again, for Theweleit, fascism was about fear of the female and fear of

bodily delight. Thus he stressed that the fascistic soldier male had within him “a concentration camp, the concentration camp of his desires” (MF 2:6). (Indeed, at another point Theweleit stated that “I do not believe it is at all exaggerated to claim that [Auschwitz commandant Rudolf] Héss

and his contemporaries treated concentration camp internees in precisely the same way as they treated their own desires, the productive force of

their unconscious: for both they had nothing to offer but incarceration, the labor of dam-building, and death” [ME 2:237]).'° And it is on this

basis then that Theweleit could once more conclude confidently that “the core of all fascist propaganda is a battle against everything that constitutes enjoyment and pleasure” (MF 2:7). So again, as for the earlier 68ers—although with more attendant angst and interpretive contortions—mass murder turns out to be primarily about sexual repression.'** The book gives evidence of an extremely earnest and heartfelt, even if at times rather confused, effort to update 103. And as an antifascist strategy he recommended the following type of analytic treatment for a soldier male: since he is “locked .. . in his totality-armor,” “analysis might perhaps involve guiding him toward an acknowledgment of his bodily openings and of the interior of his body, in order to protect him from immediate inundation by the fear of dissolution if his bodily periphery becomes pleasurably invested” (MF 2:261; also compare 2:267-68 on “political work with potential fascists”).

104. It is notable that also in a much more recent essay, Theweleit is still preoccupied with the pleasure-evil nexus. On the one hand, Theweleit makes this (really rather compelling) remark about Guatemalan torturers (while explicitly comparing them to Nazi torturers and referring to his own scholarship on Nazis):

They enjoy the ritualized knowledge of being allowed to act in the regions of the utmost transgression of human laws. The biggest joy on earth is acting in total criminality, and not being punished for it. On the contrary: being a criminal in the name of justice, sheltered by the power of THE LAW. That seems to be the (boyish) sensation at the heart of all torture actions all over the world . .. being the absolute criminal and being a good boy at the same time, teaching lessons about “Good and Evil.” Also compare this remark: “Guatemalan soldier-kids, ... Gestapo people or SS men: we see them teaching, correcting, lecturing on ‘the Truth, that means torturing, killing, loving their miraculous powers, giving death while starting to live, feeling happy, having fun.” On the other hand, Theweleit is still quite attached to the idea that these men can be explained as suffering within their own bodies. The torturer, Theweleit asserts, “transforms the other

person into a part of his own body; a part of his body he wants to get rid of. The tortured thus are treated as parts of the body ofthe torturer: parts of his body the torturer doesn’t have under control; parts of his body the torturer hates; parts of his body the torturer feels himself forced to kill.” As in Male Fantasies, so also here, torturers/soldier-men are like some psy-

chotic children, who achieve bodily wholeness through destructive acts. “The elimination of threats within one’s own body is pure pleasure: killings are a pleasure that leave no room for any other feelings. ... Inflicting pain on others diminishes the pain in the torturers’ bodies” (Theweleit, “The Bomb’s Womb and the Genders of War [War Goes on Preventing Women

from

Becoming

the Mothers

of Invention],”

in Gendering War Talk, ed. Miriam

Cooke and Angela Woollacott [Princeton, N.J, 1993], pp. 305, 303, 300, 303).

Post-Holocaust Memory and the Sexual Revolution

{59

and refine the old 68er notion that sexual repression was the root of all evil. But what the book wound up doing was circling around this problem, gnawing at it, trying to put the same point in endlessly different ways, and yet running up against obstacles and inconsistencies at every turn. Because what the book ultimately in its hundreds of pages once again made clear is that it was indeed intensely difficult to theorize a sexual revolution—to link pleasure and goodness, sex and progressive politics—in a country in which only a few decades earlier so many people appeared to have taken such delight in doing harm. What emerged was a text wrestling with the contradictory cacophony of “lessons” postwar commentators had put forward on the subject of Nazism, a text ultimately unable to sort through satisfactorily the swirling mess of puzzle pieces the postwar era had produced—all the while offering a compendium of the traces of precisely those pieces.

It has become routine, both in the U.S. and in Germany, to criticize

postwar Germans for their callousness around the Holocaust. A growing body of scholarship has focused on church and theological leaders in particular, documenting how many failed both to acknowledge the perniciousness of the long history of Christian anti-Judaism and to engage the question of how Christianity might need to change in the wake of the Judeocide. Although there were clearly exceptions—and increasingly so—the German churches were slow to confront Christianity’s complicity in making the Holocaust possible. And too few theologians were willing to let go of the notion that Christianity possessed the truth and that ultimately what God wanted was for Jews to convert.'” There has also been,

at least since the early 1980s and continuing into the 1990s, an outpouring of moving and articulate critiques—including autocritiques—of West German 68ers’ and West German feminists’ too easy (indeed at times tellingly and disturbingly vehement) hostility to Israel, too glib generalizations about Jews, too loose invocations of Holocaust rhetoric in attempting to score points against “fascistic” conservative opponents, and too shortsighted unwillingness to confront the complicity either of the working class or of women in the persecution and murder machineries 105. See, among other things, Frank Stern, The Whitewashing of the Yellow Badge: Antisemitism and Philosemitism in Postwar Germany, trans. William Templer (Oxford, 1992); Auschwitz

als Herausforderung fiirJuden und Christen, ed. Giinther B. Ginzel (Heidelberg, 1980); Eberhard Bethge, “Shoah (Holocaust) und Protestantismus” and Kurt Meier, “Die Judenfrage’ im historischen und theologischen Horizont des deutschen Protestantismus seit 1945: Ein Litera-

turbericht,” in Der Holocaust und die Protestanten: Analysen einer Verstrickung, ed. JochenChristoph Kaiser and Martin Greschat (Frankfurt am Main, 1988), pp. 1-37, 241-69; and Heschel, “Anti-Semites against Anti-Semitism,” Tikkun 8 (Nov.—Dec. 1993): 47-53.

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of the Third Reich.'°° How, then, can we acknowledge these entirely apt

criticisms and still also see that postwar attempts to understand the sexual lessons of Nazism involved not only an evasion but also an engagement with the Holocaust? In part, when postwar combatants over matters sexual invoked the

Third Reich they simply reflected a broader phenomenon, for bludgeoning each other with the country’s past indisputably became a sort of lingua franca of postwar West German political culture, saturating ideological conflict over all manner of issues. Thus, for instance, antinuclear activists from the 1950s to the 1980s could warn that nuclear war would mean “a burning oven far more imposing than the most terrible burning

ovens of the SS-camps,”!”” or a catastrophe compared to which “Auschwitz and Treblinka were child’s play.”!°* Or—to give an especially challenging example—the above-mentioned Hermann

Peter Piwitt could in the late

1970s in the pages of Konkret confidently describe global economic injustice as “a murderous conspiracy measured against which the consequences of Hitler’s ‘final solution’ seem positively charming.” Indeed, this Holocaust-as-a-hammer technique was used as vigorously by conservatives as it was by leftists. And it is worth pointing out that those trying to sensitize non-Jewish Germans about the dangers of this technique could at times fall into a similar trap. (The classic instance here is provided by Henryk Broder himself, who apparently could find no more forceful way to criticize the tendency of German leftists and feminists to 106. On these and related points, see Broder, “Thr bleibt die Kinder Eurer Eltern’ ‘Euer Jude von heute ist der Staat Israel’: Die neue deutsche Linke und der alltagliche Antisemitismus,” Die Zeit, 27 Feb. 1981; Die Verléingerung von Geschichte: Deutsche, Juden, und der Paldstinakonflikt, ed. Dietrich Wetzel (Frankfurt, 1983); Rabinbach and Benjamin, “Germans, Leftists, Jews,” and Marion Kaplan, “To Tolerate Is to Insult,” in New German Critique

31 (Winter 1984): 183-93, 195-99; many of the essays in Germans and Jews since the Holocaust; Corinna Coulmas and Friedlander, “German Leftists Come to Grips with the Past, a Case Study,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 6, no. 1 (1991): 33-44; Grossmann, “Feminist Debates about Women and National Socialism,” Gender and History 3 (Autumn 1991): 350-58; Elisabeth Domansky, “‘Kristallnacht, the Holocaust, and German Unity: The Meaning of No-

vember 9 as an Anniversary in Germany,’ History and Memory 4 (Spring-Summer 1992): 60-94; and Heschel, “Configurations of Patriarchy, Judaism, and Nazism in German Feminist Thought,” in Gender and Judaism: The Transformation of Tradition, ed. T. M. Rudavsky (New York, 1995). One of the very best of the autocritiques, one which is both personal and broadly relevant, rigorously self-critical without any self-pity, is Hartung, “Errinyen in Deutschland: Uberlegungen zur ‘Historikerdebatte’, zum Faschismusbegriff der ’68er’ und zu Peter Schneiders Selbstkritik,” Neemandsland: Zeitschrift zwischen den Kulturen 2, no. 1

(1987). 107. Hermann

Sauer, “Zwischen

Gewissen

und Damon:

Der 20. Juli gestern und

heute,” Junge Kirche (1955): 426.

108. This was a prevalent 1980s peace movement slogan; quoted in Detlev Claussen, “In the House of the Hangman,” in Germans and Jews since the Holocaust, p. 61. 109. Piwitt, “Niemand mu

hungern: Das Gerede von der ‘Uberbevélkerung’ ist ein

verbrecherischer Mythos. Zwei Amerikaner haben ihn zerstért,” review of Food First: Beyond the Myth of Scarcity, by Joseph Collins and Frances Lappé, Konkret (Aug. 1978): 39.

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play the comparison game too carelessly than by accusing them of “continuing ... the work of Adolf Eichmann” and preparing “the second phase of the final solution.”)!!° But there is something special about sex. There is some way in which the invocation of Nazism and the Judeocide within sexual conflicts is not merely a way to lend metaphorical heft and punch to one’s statements. For there are also a great variety of complex ways in which sexual matters—from the sexual demonology saturating anti-Semitic rhetoric; to the Nazis’ central obsession with controlling reproduction; to the sexual humiliation,

abuse,

and

sadism

that

occurred

within

concentration

camps—were close to the heart of the genocidal project of German fascism since its inception (to say nothing of the much-puzzled-over question of what role the production and/or suppression of human desires had to do with the success of fascism in the first place). The relationships postwar West Germans articulated between sex and the Holocaust were many and convoluted, and the phenomenon of this relatedness is not reducible to any one explanation. The links between the two themes have taken the most diverse forms. In some cases, postwar commentators articulated a sort of causal connectedness, with

the most direct example being the 68ers’ assertion that sexual repression was the cause of cruelty. In other instances, the relationship was deployed in a more analogic or metaphorical way, or as a substitution or displacement. Meanwhile,

however,

contemporary

commentators

are

often

pro-

foundly dismissive of 68ers’ preoccupation and struggles with sex. One recent example typifies the general tendency of self-distancing and ridicule: In March 1997, Die Zeit ran an opinion piece by Achim Schmillen, a thirty-something Green politician annoyed with the now-aging 68ers’ condescension towards his generation for its purported lack of political courage. His opening volley, in response, was to refer sarcastically to the main “achievements” of the 68er era as “street battles, sexual liberation, communal horninesses.” “Must we really,’ he asked his readers, “dive

around [in this little murky basin] for treasures, if we want to become mature politically?”!"! Politicians, journalists, and many scholars continue to consider sex too trivial, mundane, dirty, and/or private a matter to warrant sustained analysis, even as they are certainly not above throwing

in references to sex for laughs. And even when sex is taken seriously as a scholarly subject, as it increasingly is, it is still too often thought to involve no politics beyond gender politics. Yet for many German 68ers, sex and their broader political concerns were inextricably connected, and to neglect the sexual parts of their at110. Broder, “‘Ihr bleibt die Kinder Eurer Eltern. ‘Euer Jude von heute ist der Staat Israel,” p. 11. 111. Achim Schmillen, “Wir sind besser als die Alten!” Die Zeit, 14 Mar. 1997, p. 22.

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tempts at revolution is to miss a great deal. The 68ers’ relationship to the Holocaust is a remarkable case in point. Conflicts over sex became a key site at which West German 68ers worked through their anxieties about their generation’s relationship to the mass murder in the nation’s recent past. In this respect, perhaps one of many, the West German 1968 was unique. The 1950s were morally conservative in other countries, too, and

were followed by student rebellions. But nowhere else did the insistence on sexual conformity seem so hypocritical, so inexcusable; nowhere else

could it seem to the young such a patently obvious displacement of a deeper unresolved guilt (and probably also continued anger about that guilt).!!* The 68er, labor organizer, and feminist activist Barbara Koster

in the 1980s retrospectively summarized her own and her generation’s coming-of-age this way: I was raised in the Adenauer years, a time dominated by a horrible moral conformism, against which we naturally rebelled. We wanted

to flee from the white Sunday gloves, to run from the way one had to hide the fingernails behind the back if they weren't above reproach. Finally then we threw away our bras as well... . For a long time I had severe altercations with my parents and fought against

the fascist heritage they forced on me. At first I rejected their authoritarian and puritanical conception of childrearing, but soon we came into conflict over a more serious topic: the persecution of the Jews. I

identified with the Jews, because I felt myself to be persecuted by my family.''% This can be read for what it is: a disturbing and simplistic, even offensive,

appropriation of the suffering of others. But it can also be read for what it also is: an important, urgent, even desperate flailing to free oneself from the cloying and everywhere inadequately acknowledged toxicities of the supposedly so clean post-1945 period. In sum, then, 68ers deliberately invoked the horrors of the Holocaust to strengthen their case for sexual liberation, even as, precisely in so doing, they displayed singular insensitivity to the victims and survivors

of those horrors. Whether there is anything poignant here, or whether this is just repugnant, is a question that remains open. 112. Although the intensity of the 1960s intergenerational confrontation in countries that had collaborated with the Nazis was not nearly as great as in Germany, there were some similar features. Compare for example Luisa Passerini, Autobiography of a Generation: Italy 1968, trans. Lisa Erdberg (Hanover, N.H., 1996).

113. Barbara

Késter, “Riisselsheim Juli 1985,” interview by Daniel Cohn-Bendit,

in

Wir haben sie so geliebt, die Revolution, ed. Cohn-Bendit (Frankfurt, 1987), p. 244. Késter (who

eventually visited Israel, which caused the final break with her parents) was not alone. As she put it: “It was a permanent and painful topic, and it was only when I got to know other students that I understood that this was not just my problem, that the shame about the persecution of the Jews had brought many to rebel against parental authority!” (ibid.).

Post-Holocaust Memory and the Sexual Revolution

163

But what all the 68ers’ texts, including Male Fantasies, do make clear is how much the extant consensus on the notion that West Germans— before the airing of the Holocaust miniseries in 1979—primarily engaged in repression or amnesia about the Judeocide requires revision. In fact, the so often applied terms of repression or amnesia may not really offer the best way to describe postwar Germans’ relationship to the Third Reich at all. Instead, despite the recurrent announcement that taboos around the

subject needed to be broken, it appears that postwar Germans have been talking about Nazism constantly.''* And in a peculiar but crucial way the Holocaust has been at once absent and present in all that talk. For example, while the centrality of the Judeocide to the Third Reich is the very thing that is constantly being evaded when facile comparisons are put forward in the context of other political agendas, it is also—however paradoxically—precisely the Holocaust’s existence that allows self-definitions in Opposition to fascism to serve as a sort of shorthand to anchor and assert the legitimacy and morality of one’s own claims. Furthermore, and this is a separate and even more significant matter, when it came to con-

flicts over sexuality, 68ers in particular really were talking about the Holocaust itself; they were genuinely and deeply concerned to make sense of the puzzle of the relationship between pleasure and evil. Even though they found the argument that the Holocaust was a product of sexual repression almost impossible to sustain in the face of contradictory empirical evidence, it is also quite possible that on some level they were onto something extremely important. Certainly the debates on this and related matters show no signs of being closed.'!® The generally prevailing analysis of the German 68ers is that while they brought the subject of the Third Reich back into public discussion, they continued the silence of their elders on the subject of the Holocaust,

treating it (as Andrei Markovits among others has observed) as “ancillary” to German

fascism, rather than its central event.!!© The German

68ers

114. Other scholars who are starting to make this point—coming from different but related perspectives—include Grossmann, “Unfortunate Germany,’ and Moeller, “War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany,” American Historical Review 101 (Oct. 1996): 1008-48.

115. Just to give two examples: The undecidability of the relationship between pleasure and evil—or, to put it another way, the problem of sadism—was one of the almost everywhere undertheorized but also ubiquitously present elements of the frenetic debates about Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New

York, 1996). Meanwhile, the relationship between certain kinds of gender socialization and the proclivity to cruelty continues to exercise a wide range of feminist theorists in numerous disciplines. 116. See Markovits, “Coping with the Past: The West German Labor Movement and the Left,” in Reworking the Past, pp. 262-75. See also Rabinbach, “Introduction: Reflections on Germans and Jews since Auschwitz,” in Germans and Jews since the Holocaust, pp. 3-24, and Sophinette Becker, “Bewusste und unbewusste Identifikationen der 68er Generation,” in Erinnern, Wiederholen, Durcharbeiten: Zur Psycho-Analyse deutscher Wenden, ed. Brigitte Rauschenbach (Berlin, 1992), pp. 269-75.

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continued, in this view, the repression or amnesia about the Holocaust

thought to characterize the attitude of their parents’ generation as well. My own sense is that while the Holocaust may indeed officially have been an “ancillary” concern for the 68ers, it was nonetheless potently and pervasively present, seeping into the most intimate aspects of their lives. Something more complicated than either repression or amnesia was at work. Reconstructing the postwar conflicts over sexuality—which both blocked a direct engagement with the racial politics and most acute horrors of German fascism and also continually invoked these—can shed light, I want to suggest, not only on postwar Germans’ evasion of the memory and legacy of the Judeocide, but also on their irresolvable obsession with it.

“They Repeatedly Lick Their Own Things”

Steven Feld

There is nothing that commends a story to memory more effectively than that chaste compactness which precludes psychological analysis. And the more natural the process by which the storyteller forgoes psychological shading, the greater becomes the story’s claim to a place in the memory of the listener, the more completely is it integrated into his own experience, the greater will be his inclination to

repeat it to someone else someday, sooner or later. — WALTER BENJAMIN, “The Storyteller” The body schema is a lexicon of corporeality in general, a system of

equivalences between the inside and outside which prescribes from one to the other its fulfillment in the other. The body which possesses senses is also a body which has desires, and thus esthesiology expands into a theory of the libidinal body. —MAuRICE MERLEAU-PONTY, “Nature and Logos: The Human Body” This is about the experience of stories, about how they layer, conjoin, and linger. The stories I’ll speak of are both my own and those of Bosavi I gratefully acknowledge the research support of the National Science Foundation,

the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. I am also grateful to Bambi B. Schieffelin, Kulu Fuale, Da:ina

Ha:waba:, and Ayasilo Ha:ina for their collaboration transcribing Ganigi’s stories, and to Edward L. Schieffelin for his insights into Bosavi cosmology and dramaturgy. Keith Basso, Lauren Berlant, Alison Leitch, and Lowell Lewis suggested revisions that greatly aided the exposition. A rough guide to the pronunciation of Bosavi vowels is as follows: a as in father; a: as in fat or feather; e as in face; i as in feet; u as in fool; 0 as in foam; 0: as in fought. Bosavi consonants are pronounced very much like their closest American English equivalents.

165

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Steven Feld

people who live in the rain forests of the Great Papuan Plateau, in the Southern Highlands of Papua New Guinea. Some were first heard in the Bosavi region; others are an overlapping accumulation of later tellings and retellings. Biographically intertextual and intervocal, these stories

are positioned in two distinct languages, in a variety of monologic and dialogic moods. They travel through twenty years of changing locations and through frequent shifts of speaker authority. Of the intertwined strands of Bosavi stories and my own that I could explore, it is the stylized, coarse texture of male evocation that concerns

me here. Listening to how some male voices across lifeworlds and locales perform their gendered intersubjectivities, I mean to question ways culture making is revealed in storied intimacies. Above all, I want to attend to momentary collisions of male voices, voices that are typically situated in radically distinct historical space-times, and to explore the ironies of those collisions, the spaces of what they absorb, deflect, and exchange

about bodies and desires. To do this is to question the place of storied intimacies in cultural poetics and politics, to question the workings of narrative allegory. I ask how a story’s temporal patterning, its sequential revelation of events, can create a figure and ground of deeper and shallower slippages in everyday meanings. How, in short, do stories live lives of reinvention? How, as recyclable goods, are they always in the process of expansion and contraction? Figuring and refiguring in relation to the interpretive desires of both their immediate tellers and hearers and the larger social fields through which they reverberate, today’s narratives become tomorrow’s anecdotes, next month’s punch lines, next year’s memory cues. This way, stories always seem to relocate and replace earlier locations and placements,

thereby making a “claim to a place in the memory of the listener.” And, as stories make that claim, they track, or articulate, or disrupt the unfolding of naturalized, taken-for-granted embodiments and socialities,

the “lexicon of corporeality in general.”

December 1994: I am living in the village of Bolekini, in the central Bosavi area where people call themselves Kaluli. Late one afternoon, I find myself surrounded by old friends and acquaintances, all of us conversing and watching as a pig is butchered and the meat divided for cooking. Blood is running freely along the beds of banana leaves; the meat is

Steven Feld is professor of anthropology at New York University. He is the author of Sound and Sentiment (1990); Voices of the Rainforest (1991); with Charles Keil, Music Grooves (1994); and editor, with Keith Basso, of

Senses of Place (1996).

“They Repeatedly Lick Their Own Things”

167

piled high, and the dogs are doing all in their power to get in on the action. Seyaka, a close friend and the younger son of Yubi, my first mentor in things Kaluli, is actively assisting by shooing dogs away from the butchering area. Challenging the dogs with menacing gestures, taunts, and hissing sounds as they dart in to lick at the blood, Seyaka suddenly lets out a whoop. And then, idling up to me, he starts to say the words I know he will. As he begins, I overlap and echo: “enowo: enendo: a:dababo:!!” (they repeatedly lick their own things!!). Immediately we are laughing uncontrollably, and Seyaka grabs onto my biceps with both his hands, as if breaking a fall to the ground, but practically dragging me down instead. Mutually off balance, yet somehow holding each other up, we catch ourselves alternately glancing at the dogs in ridicule and disgust, and at each other in fondness and deep play. We are pressed together in the moment, in a particular space of male intimacy created by a collision of overlapping biographies.

Eighteen years earlier, December 1976: I am standing on the back verandah of the small thatch house in Sululeb that was my first home in Bosavi. It is here that I have been living and studying language and expressive culture, particularly the relationship of birds and forest ecology to the poetics of Kaluli weeping and song.' Binoculars pressed to my eyes, I am watching a Hooded butcherbird in a nearby breadfruit tree. Suddenly my concentration is broken by an energetic outburst from a surprised and familiar voice. “Wai!! kabo nafa!! alano:!!” (wow!! nice pig!! big one!!). It was Gigio, voicing his encounter with the Polaroid image propped up on my work table. Without breaking the stream of sound he began clucking softly to himself, both admiring and somewhat coveting what he saw. ‘Aunbake! gasa ko.lo:!” (not like that! It’s a dog!) I retorted, coming into the room toward him. My voice couldn’t contain my bemusement; the snapshot actually depicts me holding my bloodhound puppy. But Gigio was not about to take me at my word. “The face and head are like a pig,” he said, still inspecting the image. “Yes, but the tail is long like a dog,” I said.

“True, but the ears are big and floppy like a pig,” he said. “Yes, but the feet and toes are like a dog,” I said. “True, but the back is like a pig,” he said, “and it is so large.” That

struck him, and before I could form a response out came Gigio’s question: “Do you yellow skins have large dogs, large like our Bosavi pigs?” “Yes it’s like that,’ I said, nodding, figuring we were now getting somewhere. 1. See Steven Feld, Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression (1982; Philadelphia, 1990) and Voices of the Rainforest, Rykodisc RCD10173, 1991.

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“What’s its name?” he then asked. “Pluto, its name is Pluto,” I said, repeating the name distinctly. “Ah, Baludo, a pig named Baludo,” he said, bringing the photograph closer to his face. “Not that! Pluto is my dog’s name! I keep no pigs!” I responded, emphatically. “Really, you keep no pigs?” he asked, now somewhat astonished. “None,” I said, opening my palms out and forward, and fanning them to the sides. Gigio then looked at me rather blankly and softly said, “ha:tyo: ni Sidif;’ a “sorry, my Steve” that carried a strong sense of “too bad, I feel for you.” So, from challenging whether Pluto was a dog, Gigio’s affect turned rather quickly to feeling sympathy for the lack of pigs in my

life. And there the discussion abruptly ended. The next evening, sitting in the cookhouse with Gigio while tending

to some bamboo tubes ofcrayfish, the topic of the photograph resurfaced. “Uh... your dog... ,” he started to say. “... yes my dog named Pluto,” I overlapped. “Well... .” he continued, “that dog is enormous, and that is why you yellow skins are so big and have so many things, it is because you have large dogs to hunt for your meat, that is what I am thinking.” ~ And so we moved on to the meanings of the beast and, thus, of each

other. Having now somewhat accepted my word that Pluto was a dog despite his marked resemblance to a pig, Gigio rationalized, the Bosavi way, why we others might indeed keep and value large dogs. The logic was Clear: if small dark-skinned people with tiny dogs hunt and eat little meat, so big light-skinned people with big dogs must hunt and eat a lot of meat.

I was not surprised that Gigio would read the size of the dog as an index both of why we were physically different and why yellow skins had so much more material wealth than Bosavis. In my experience Bosavi people were quick to notice and interpret bodily differences as genuinely significant. But I was surprised at what Gigio left out of his remark, some-

thing that by then was already becoming familiar to me. Namely, to one another, Bosavi men routinely blamed their scrawny dogs for their hunting misfortunes. At the same time, men routinely asserted the great prow-

ess of their dogs, and in private they displayed equal amounts of affection or revulsion toward them.

Gigio was suggesting that our bodies, our abilities, had something to do with our dogs’ bodies, with their appetites. But there was more than a hint of ambiguity in his words. I could tell he was suspicious about the close and confident way I held an enormous dog, one whose weight was well more than half my own. But why? Was he wondering what strange

power, what unsettling command could reside in the body of a white man far less muscled, unquestionably less strong than he? I thought I could

“They Repeatedly Lick Their Own Things”

169

hear desire in his voice, but wasn’t sure if an edge, maybe of fear or of danger, was there too.

A few nights later, Gigio secretly came to my house after dark. Holding the picture up close again in the lantern light, he told me that he had been longing for a dog just like Pluto. As I thought about how to respond to his unstated request, he twitched his shoulders in a shivering motion,

murmuring “tagidab!” (I’m afraid!) with an expression somewhere between smirk and grimace. And then, putting the picture down on my table, he exited the house as quickly and as quietly as he had entered it.

June 1977: Ganigi is about to tell me and Kulu the story of gasa no: gis, the origin of enemy relations between dogs and animals. I had heard lines, phrases, or sections of the story several times and in varied settings.

I had even heard punctual versions from a few local elders. But I greatly anticipated a rendition from Ganigi, who, crippled for many years, had

been brought from his village to mine for a week of visiting with friends and relatives. Ganigi’s repertoire of Bosavi stories was wide, ranging over narratives of historical encounters, of mythocosmic origin figures, and of animals and birds. Where others narrated these stories in punctual form,

Ganigi was renowned for his elaborate tellings, replete with voices and sound effects, and vivid depictions of scenes and dialogues.

Here is an English representation of Ganigi’s telling, meant to evoke some significant details of his oral performance, like his patterning of pauses to structure lines and phrases, and his uses of repetition and poetic parallelism. Through such devices Ganigi creates an episodic structure cued by voice qualities and coordinated gestures. His episodes consist of stagings of locales and scenes, followed by short stretches of action. His telling is punctuated by side talk to me and by interjection from Kulu, adding to the complex layerings of dialogue and reported and quoted speech. In this retelling the contextualizing moves mark both my ethnographic interests in how stories make local histories and my linguistic interests in poetics and pleasure. These converge around the aesthetics of voicing as a site for cultural memory. Ganigi:

about counting the dogs that one hasn't been said here yet? /into the microphones I'd just set up in front of him] Kulu: it was said but tell it again Ganigi: he’s right now about to really hear it again, so... animals wild pigs cassowaries

rats kangaroos

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coouunnting them all they were all staying together there dog yea big like that one there on the side /pornting to the corner of the house] there at the front end comes up where the so-k sleeps going across to the other side wild pig filled up the space Let me break Ganigi’s narrative now, as I will do repeatedly, to indi-

cate some important features of his telling. When Ganigi draws out the word “coouunnting” he touches his right index finger to the tip of his outstretched left hand. Then he sweeps his right hand across the left palm, up the forearm, shoulder, neck, and along the left cheek to the bridge of the nose, then continues across the right cheek and down the neck and right shoulder, fluidly sweeping his right hand back to its out-

stretched place in parallel to his left arm. Bosavi people count up and down the upper body in precisely this fashion; from number one, the little finger of the left hand, around the fingers and up the palm, wrist, forearm, elbow, biceps, shoulder, neck and face to number seventeer at

the left nostril. Number eighteen is the midpoint, at the bridge of the nose, then the numbers and body points descend in mirror image from nineteen at the right nostril, then down the right cheek, neck, shoulder,

arm, and hand to number thirty-five, the little finger of the right hand. This numerico-bodily symmetry mirrors the built spatial symmetry of the Bosavi longhouse cohabited in the story by the dogs and animals. A Bosavi longhouse is typically divided by a central hallway. To each side is a mirrored row of front-to-rear sleeping platforms, with regularly spaced fireboxes. Men sleep one to each side of the boxes, and behind this row of them, across a half wall, women sleep to each side of a parallel set, again spanning front to rear of the house. A large women’s cooking and socializing firebox sits at each side of the hallway at the front of the house. At the back end of the house there are two corner fireboxes around which boys and bachelors sleep, and, between them, an elevated

men’s socializing area and firebox just at the point where the central hallway ends. Ganigi now lines out the house in this fashion. He enumerates and segments a social universe by transposing the bodily symmetry of counting the dogs and animals to the lived spatial symmetry of the longhouse and its fireboxes.

He begins with the first firebox at the front, spatially

locating Kulu and me, his audience, in relation to the nearby longhouse, where the so-k, or local headman typically slept in the first bed. So-k, the word for cloth (originally bark cloth, until calico was introduced by exploration patrols from the late 1930s), refers to the uniform that the colonial government issued to each locally appointed headman.

“They Repeatedly Lick Their Own Things” then going across to the next middle-inside bed toage rat and a little skinny dog one on each side of the firebox still going across to the next middle-inside one fudula:n kangaroo and a dog one on each side of the firebox still going across to the next middle-inside one long-nose mahe bandicoot and female dog one on each side of the firebox still going across to the next middle-inside one toothy pig and dog with huge balls one on each side of the firebox still going across to the next middle-inside one uh-wasiodo kangaroo with one one on each side of the firebox continuing to the end bed female pig and female dog one on each side of the firebox that’s it for that side on the other one uluwa cassowary and wild pig—no-I mean and big dog one on each side of the firebox continuing across gusuwa cassowary and big dog one on each side of the firebox and in the middle fireplace the middle fireplace a big wild pig and big dog one on each side continuing across fudula:n kangaroo and dog one on each side of the firebox continuing across kase and dog one on each side of the firebox continuing across toage rat and dog one on each side of the firebox continuing over to the sixth one here pig with big teeth and dog at the end one on each side of the firebox seventh here kaliya wallaby and big dog at the center firebox one on each side there on the other side of it

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bandicoot and dog one on each side of the corner firebox [aside to Steven Feld] like yours around the corner through the door there Feld: uh huh Ganigi: on the other side around back short-nose bandicoot and skinny dog one on each side of the other corner firebox they all stayed there just stayed there

Now Ganigi has set the longhouse stage and introduced the actors in the drama that is about to unfold. The body has become the body social, the longhouse embodying sociability, with the primacy of pairing and bonding marked by the close proximity of different species sleeping together at the fireboxes.

wild pigs by themselves would go dogs by themselves would go going around together dogs can get food the pigs too can get food and they can all bring it and stay and eat while toage rat and skinny dog were sitting together [taking the rat’s voice] “xexe you've really been scoffing it up xexce” toage says then the dog “hxhx” would do the same together they would sit laughing and staying toage rat and dog they would always stay and eat like that and wild pig and yokali rat-no-I mean big dog “hxhx” would also do like that while eating uluwa and dog “uuf” like that they'd sound while eating together and after they’d sleep then morning would come up and they would go around together again dogs together [prompting Feld to rhythmically overlap] Feld: uh huh Ganigi: pigs together Feld: uh huh Gamgi: like that they'd go round and round early evening they'd come back wild pigs came back first to the house and put themselves in Feld: uh huh

-

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Ganigi: and then they'd be eating and the dogs would follow next behind Feld: uh huh Ganigi: and then the pigs put down what belongs to them right there to give to the dogs evenings the dogs put down what belongs to them and together with the pigs they would eat after doing like that they would all sleep then they would sleep mornings the other dogs would all go around together other pigs would go after doing that the pigs would first cook and eat food uluwa wasiodo fudula:n kaliya toage

mahe

hase what was theirs they would first cook and eat then the dogs would come back the dogs would eat later after they came back while that was happening what belongs to the pigs they could eat their own food first the dogs would eat in the afternoon and with the pigs together they would all eat that food they would always eat and stay like that there pigs would go and take dogs would go and take they would always eat their food together like that some days the dogs would eat first and the pigs would eat theirs later in the afternoon they'd spend their time like that that’s what it was always like The longhouse stage set, Ganigi turns now to establishing the familiar feel of Bosavi hospitality and camaraderie, the reciprocal come and go and give-and-take of everyday affairs.? Ganigi begins by taking several voices and acting out an ideal scene of sociable talking and joking while 2. See Bambi B. Schieffelin, The Give and Take of Everyday Life: Language Socialization of Kaluli Children (New York, 1990); Edward L. Schieffelin, The Sorrow of the Lonely and the Burning of the Dancers (New York, 1976); and Edward L. Schieffelin, “Reciprocity and the Con-

struction of Reality,” Man 15 (Sept. 1980): 502-17.

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eating. He then goes on to emphasize the way food is shared; the fluid

manner of going around together or apart; and the ease of returning to the house in the afternoons to cook, eat, and sleep together. Throughout he uses the word for pigs to stand for all animals, given that wild pigs are the largest and most important animals in Bosavi. As he closes off this

segment Ganigi’s voice slows and softens in emphasis: “that’s what it was always like.” The next segment begins even more softly, to foreshadow a narrative secret, a backstage transgression about to be revealed.

the pigs all gone dogs too have all gone and then another dog the little one who sleeps with the mahe bandicoot in the corner firebox he was hidden away sleeping there sleeping in the far corner firebox [aside to Feld] one like yours straight through and stacked up in there [gesturing toward Feld’ sleeping platform, out of sight in the ~ adjoining room]

so mahe bandicoot was gone but the little dog was still secretly sleeping in his place Feld: ub huh Ganigi: secretly staying there on the side then the pigs were gathering first after gathering like that they would eat their food “hey!” one would shout having lit many fires they would be eating “about the dogs when they come back after the rain from the wet grass why do they repeatedly lick their own things themselves their own things they always lick they kill fleas in their coat they all make that (teeth on teeth) sound #### at the same time all of them doing it I’m wondering what they are all thinking about doing that?” said wild pig then toage says “ha:ha:ha:ha: it’s true ha:ha:ha:ha:” said like that toage says then this little dog here in the ashes the skinny dog that usually stays in the back corner firebox with bandicoot mahe while they were all talking

“They Repeatedly Lick Their Own Things”

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staying out of sight the dog kept on hearing it all the things that were just said thinking sadly about them thinking about them and staying there they kept on saying it-uh-wuwa uluwa kept saying it gusuwa kept saying it kaliya kept saying it wasiodo kept saying it mahe kept saying it kase kept saying it toage kept saying it “they repeatedly lick their own things they repeatedly lick their own things they repeatedly lick their own things!” saying like that they started in and kept laughing laughing at the dogs again and again they kept on like that and when they quieted down the dogs came up and met and hav— ah!! no!! when they stopped laughing like that the skinny dog here silently got up and secretly snuck out Rupture and provocation. Ganigi begins with the animals’ laughter, joking, and gossip, again taking their voices. He participates in both the enthusiasm of the animals and the upset of the lone dog by contrastive voice amplitude, speed, coarseness, and grain. By the time he lists all the offending animals and underscores their echoing punch line, his own excited and progressively more animated voicing leads to a crescendo. At this point he starts to get ahead of the tale, then catches himself and selfcorrects. Switching back to a softer voice and slowing down, he delivers

the last line about the little dog sneaking out of the house. Now that the animals have gossiped behind the backs of the dogs, the stage is set, in the classic New Guinea way, for a scenario of opposition and payback. The dogs are about to get hot under the collar. secretly gone at the clearing just at the edge of the bush he was staying there staying there a while some other dogs came up and met him some wet with dew falafala shaking themselves off the little dog watched them and then here toward him they all

gathered having gathered they were staying there then the skinny dog staying in place there

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laughing” he said “gusuwa wasiodo

kaliya fudula:n mahe toage

all doing it ha:zha: like that!”

“so why?” says one [in a mocking tone, as ifspeaking as an animal] “well when dogs come back they turn their heads around and down then their own things like that they always lick

[as he speaks this last line Ganigi dips his head down miming the gesture]

they were laughing at all of us laughing at us like that!”

“why is it like that?” says another “is it right to laugh like that? do you laugh like that at those with whom you live? when we all go back to the house we won't sit at the

>

fireboxes we'll sit along the center hallway you all will lick your own things youll all do like that” he said

“what they’re wondering about we'll really show it to them” says the big dog [aside to Feld] the one with the large nose not like that smaller one

like the one you put over there first Unleashing a spontaneous parodic gesture in my direction, Ganigi here compares the big dog’s nose to my microphone, a fist-thick Sennheiser MD 21 with military gray metal body, and silver wire grill. All of a

sudden my tape recorder not only hears, but sniffs and absorbs the smell of his story. What is being suggested by this shift, this analogy at just the height of the dogs’ plotting to further provoke the animals? That I am a big dog to his little animal, hunting someone from the bush with whom I momentarily share a firebox? That he is using the story’s spaces of self and other to allegorically remagine us? What new space of intimacy, what heightened juxtaposition of bodies, of sensualities and desires has Ganigi now opened up by exposing how my “nose” is relentlessly in his face? In what new ways might I now listen to his narrative production of difference?

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so they all went to line up along the central hallway lined up from the center firebox at the back all the way to the front—finished! with their backs turned to the pigs all together facing into the center hallway they were lined up like that from one end to the other licking at their own things continuously licking their private parts repeatedly that’s when toage rat started going “ha:ha:ha:ha:” wild pig “huhuhuhu” was going like that uluwa cassowary “hohohoho” was going like that gusuwa cassowary “ha:sha:sha:s” was going

like that kaliya kangaroo “siiiis” was going like that mahe bandicoot “xhxhxh” going like that

all making those sounds staying there the dogs didn’t notice they licked all over themselves they licked all over themselves they licked all over themselves they licked all over themselves they licked all over themselves they licked all over themselves on top of the skin until there was nothing left from the tails in they repeatedly killed their own fleas and then they finished completely finished they all shook themselves off from the front to the sides then laid down by the fires when they finished that the animals all showed their teeth grinning then from the back to the front of the house to the rear center and corner fireboxes all at the same time “he!” they laughed and while they laughed the dogs just stayed sleeping Rubbing it in is the deep embodying metaphor so familiar to this central moment in narrative tension. Ganigi exaggerates the excess through parallelism and repetition: the animals laugh as the dogs lick. As the opposition intensifies, the stakes escalate, and retaliation will take

the form of extreme punishment. The dogs are about to be licensed to revise the body social by tearing apart the physical bodies of their animal counterparts.

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Steven Feld

before dawn they all were asleep in the darkness morning time you can see them still asleep next morning they were still sleeping in the dark there not getting up cassowary went “huuf” going by wild pig staying just by here bandicoot staying just by here kangaroo staying just by here wallaby staying just by here they went down the hallway and out and after they’d been out a while the dogs went out too “don't we all go just split up one at each place then when they are eating their food each of you to the one with whom you share the firebox break his bones” one told them “everyone do the same thing at the same time we'll do it like that we'll do it like that > don’t just hurt them kill them really kill them all because they said bad things when we were staying together we'll do it like that” that said they all heard it then they went to find food came up to the house ate their food many had already been asleep a while then in the thick of the rain animals came back up to the house cassowary shook his fur side to side wild pig rubbed his backbone fur like this rat flicked his malformed tail skin tip like this bandicoot “ko:f” sniffed like that into his bed into his bed into his bed into his bed all like that lit fires and were eating their food the dogs’ eyes lit like the fires they were opening their eyes they were opening their eyes they were opening their eyes all the animals were looking down at their food and eating

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and each one who shares a firebox there with them they really killed them one by one one by one one by one one by one one by one one by one one by one one by one one by one Repetition

keys momentum.

As the dogs rest and

build

their

strength, the animals variously depart, variously return, variously settle—“into his bed . . . into his bed.” Settled in, the animals light fires to eat, and in the same moment, the eyes of the dogs light like fires to kill.

This understated juxtaposition quickly yields to the apex of Ganigi’s repetitive listings, the heightened enunciation of counting the killings “one by one ... one by one” along three main areas down one side of the house, three across the back, then three up the other side. It is the thor-

oughness of this retaliation, delivered with crisp poetic elegance, that so recalls the elegance of Ganigi’s initial enumerations of sociality, with “one on each side of the firebox.” Thus Ganigi has developed the story by remaking the house from a space of togetherness, of primal sociality, to a space of separation, of primal violence. And that violence leads to the full refiguration of social space, as the dogs drive the remaining animals into the bush and kill them there. they did it like that until they completely finished uluwa cassowary tried to get back at them but lost his nerve toage rat with skin tail pointing back going by where the little dog was sitting the dog followed and chased to kill it went down the track just like down over there to the Kida:n creek just went down near the crossing and held it there “leave me” toage said he killed it and put it there after he killed it and put it aside others like that chased them to the edge of the water could go and kill them that way gusuwa and uluwa cassowaries at the house here would be

killed fudula:n and kaliya kangaroos ran away like down there on Sulu hill

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like that they'd be killed

a place like that one there at Yolo hill they'd be killed like that a place like that flat land there

they could be killed there at the edge of the bush like that they'd be killed like that they could kill them

putting them in lines pulling them up into the yard here and here and here and here and here The reinvention of social space, of the corporeality of living, is now in process. The animals run away from the house toward five illustrated

peripheries of the village longhouse, only to be chased and killed at each site. Consequently, the dogs claim the house by controlling its center courtyard space, pulling the dead animals up into it, “here . . . and here” from the five directional routes along which they took flight. Ganigi then

takes five dog voices to animate a discussion about what’s to be done with the piles of meat.

“what’s mine is for my mother” “what’s mine is for my father” “what’s mine is, for my mother’s brother” “what’s mine is for my distant relations” “what’s mine is for my cross-cousin” so like that dogs decided to give one animal to each then they decided to distribute them like that they were waiting awhile then the little skinny dog pulling up a dead animal realized he could try the blood sitting there “it’s good!” he thought and luccked it again and again “it’s good!” he thought

Wrapped in quoted thought, Ganigi mimetically reveals the moment when the little dog discovers that he can lick animal blood as easily and pleasurably as he can lick his own thing. Now we are fully in the joy of revenge, and Ganigi voices the excitement as if the meat were right in front of us.

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cut and ripped all the way open he smelled the shit stink beginning inside there stinking like that he pulled it out and put it aside the liver he tried eating

“it’s good!” he devoured it

the thigh like that to eat “it’s good!” he devoured it

the tip of the tail like that to eat “it’s good!” he devoured it the backbone like that to eat

“it’s good!” he devoured it ate them

then the shoulder like that to try “it’s good!” he finished it

finished the other thigh finished the whole side he tried the head bone

“it’s good!” he finished it

like the liver he already finished

Kulu: Ganigi:

like the kidneys he finished did in the other insides same with the insides around the backbone that finished he was swollen up did others eat? his mother father mother’s brother cousin

grandparents distant relations he put some aside for all of them then he swelled up like yea big then he went out and others realized he was coming across the

yard Kulu: Ganigi:

maybe he’s going to show them how to eat it? he lined all of them up went around the outside corner and into the house

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Kulu: Ganigi:

“what are you all doing in here?” tell it like that

“sa:a:” little dog says, and others realize he is there

Ganigi’s excitement so completely captures Kulu’s imagination that he then joins the story, first with a simple question, then a further conjec-

ture, and finally a fully conarrative intervention, prompting Ganigi by suggesting what a dog might say. To this Ganigi overlaps by taking that dog’s voice, and then he is off and more animated, filling out the conver-

sations and voices of the five dogs. As the story closes, Ganigi’s first counting, of animals and dogs sociably filling the house, receives its final oppositional parallel. He closes by listing animal body parts consumed by dogs, giving us images of the swollen bodies of overgorged dogs performing their insatiable greed to the dismay of their own families. “oh, he’s stuffed” one says

“what’s with you?” says another “what are you going to do with your meat?” he says back

“mine is for grandmother” “mine is for aunt” “mine is for father” “mine is for distant relation” “mine is for mother”

“why are you saying that?! this was really good!! I threw away all the shit I didn’t eat the shit I finished off toage rat completely!!”

having broken up and killed the other animals they went eating

gorging and swelling up finish nothing left they left all the shit they left all the heads they ate all the tails they ate all the livers finished off all the thighs kangaroo heads they left they ate all the thighs the backbones all the livers all the lungs

like that they finished them all off left the heads left the guts “the guts stink” he said as he felt the smell “huf” tweaking his nose and sensing the stink

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“oh, leave it” he said

they went like that all swollen up like that they went to their father’s place “why is it like that?” asks father (gesturing to the dog’s belly) “we killed them because they laughed at us” “you didn’t bring us what you should have” [in a tiny pathetic voice] “we said ‘this is for father’ but the little one there said ‘they’re good!’ so we ate them” so like that dogs and animals became enemies that’s it Actually it’s just the beginning. Ganigi’s story provides plain enough charter for why Kaluli consider dogs distinct from other animals. But you wouldn't necessarily have to hear the story to know that. The distinction is represented rather more mundanely in the Bosavi language, where the term gasa (dog) cannot be included in the general class no: (animal). The two terms operate at roughly the same level of generality and abstraction. Two kinds of pig, kabo and tko:, signifying the domestic and wild varieties, can be included in the animal term. Words aside, it is immediately obvious to even a casual observer of the Bosavi scene that dogs and pigs share some similarities as domestic animals that distinguish them from all surrounding creatures. They have personal names given by their owners, which come in special and distinct

dog and pig name sets. Their owners look after them and have special calls for them, again, in distinct dog and pig sets. They handle and fondle them and can display affection toward them in public. Plenty of differences are clear, too. Dogs, while owned by both men and women, are more obviously the pets of men and sleep with them in the longhouse at their fireboxes. Pigs, however, are kept and valued by both men and women. Women tend to be more involved in caring for young pigs, taking them between the house and their gardens or sago places, carrying them in netbags, feeding them, even prechewing food for them as they do for their own infants. Men tend to fence building and tethering to keep larger pigs out of gardens and from running wild. If pigs are lost, killed, or stolen, owners become seriously distraught, mobi-

lize others to help search, or ask a spirit medium to do so, or seek compensation for their loss. It’s not the same for dogs. Even today, when a Bosavi man might walk several days and pay a large sum in cash for a dog from the Papua New Guinea highlands, the feelings and actions that might surround its loss are of generally far lesser magnitude. The strategic value that accrues to Bosavi men and women through their pigs is pretty straightforward. Pigs will grow and fatten. Their economic utility increases over time in proportion to the effort of caring for them. Like children, they provide a security in assets for transaction. This

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is particularly so in transactions controlled by men, pigs being essential

items in male-orchestrated bridewealth exchanges and compensation payments. Otherwise, pigs can be butchered, cooked, and distributed, for

example as ceremonial gifts, thereby socially situating the owner to receive a proportional exchange at a later date. Dogs carry no such exchange value, and the suggestion that they might stand in for a pig in

any one of these roles would be quickly met with the kind of local look one gets for unleashing a very sick joke in utterly bad taste. Nonetheless, if one man kills another’s dog, he is liable to a compensation claim, given that the loss of the dog might potentially mean the loss of meat to its owner. That’s the more rational side of it; there’s also a more cosmological dimension to these matters. Bosavi people consider part of the unseen

world to be populated by mysteriously powerful mamul people who live on the remote lands of Mt. Bosavi. Mamul are known to Kaluli by their ceremonies, which show through dramatically into the visible by materializing as the thunder and lightning of mountain storms. Unlike other reflections in the unseen, mamul appear in the Bosavi world as wild pigs and cassowaries. Kaluli spirit reflections roam on mamul grounds in the

unseen, while wild pigs and cassowaries roaming Bosavi grounds in the visible are often reflections of the mamul. Thus Kaluli and mamul lives and

deaths are always linked. When Kaluli kill wild pigs or cassowaries, mamul die; when

mamul

kill wild pigs or cassowaries,

Kaluli die. When

mamul

held a bao a, a men’s ceremonial hunting lodge devoted to intensive hunting over a roughly fifteen month period, a Bosavi epidemic would result. Likewise, when Bosavi men held a bao a, the activity was imagined to result in many mamul deaths.

Moving into the realm of the quotidian, the animals in the story are not the only ones in Bosavi who get to laugh at the expense of dogs. In fact it is a pretty typical feature of everyday life. Jokes and snickering remarks about dogs—especially about their pungent and frequent droppings, and more especially the red pandanus seed variety, and even more especially when that variety is freshly found in early morning hours near

the place where one sleeps or walks—are part of the familiar litany of disparaging dog discourse in the immediate longhouse area. Informal interaction with Kaluli families during meal times makes clear how characteristically dogs are tempted, teased, and invited, particularly to food, and particularly by men. And how equally characteristically dogs are chased, hit, threatened, taunted, cursed, or laughed over.

Some men say that such treatment, and withdrawal of food offers generally, will toughen dogs for hunting. But whatever ruggedness dogs presumably acquire by taunting, men equally characterize them as grubby, unscrupulous, thieving, and filthy. And to this their generally mangy, emaciated, and flea-bitten appearance readily attests. Hunters in particular lament that dogs might ruin a hunt by greediness, and indeed, the

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ultimate insult a Kaluli hunter must endure is often enough a double one. First the companion dog steals, devours, or ruins the game. Then,

it loyally returns to the longhouse in advance, announcing the master’s imminent arrival by puking up the prize on the master’s very own bed platform. Dog taunting reaches spectacle proportion when the dogs are so brazen as to flaunt their sexual desires publicly, hence most unnaturally, in

the central yard in plain sight of the longhouse community. Typically they quickly get stuck together, at which point they begin to yelp and howl vociferously while trying to maneuver apart. This leads to extraordinary bodily contortions, more yelping that sets off all surrounding dogs in chorus, and general embarrassed hilarity for the crowd. People yell insults, throw sticks and rocks, and whoop and holler as if calling out a party invitation: “the ddooggss are ddooiinngg itttt . . . aassss to aassss!” Such taunts are a regular reminder that the way dogs do their thing animates a vocally iconic relationship between excess and greed. Along with this joking and verbal abuse, it is possible to go so far as to call another person (young or old, male or female) a dog. This is extremely insulting and generally carries an underlying angry accusation about stealing or not sharing food. Curious that I’d never heard “you pig!” as a Bosavi insult, I once asked Gigio if it could be said. He stared back at me with that vapid look that usually signifies inability to decode an ungrammatical sentence. Not knowing just what kind of response I was getting, I offered that in my place people could be called pigs if they

overate or hoarded food and that men might be called pigs if they spoke or acted out bad ideas about women. Gigio looked at me even more blankly this time, then shrugged his shoulders and said, somewhat sheepishly, “Well, I guess our Bosavi pigs think their women are all right.” An-

other discussion ended Some months later man named Yubi about place in the context of

abruptly. I was having a private conversation with an older why bats are not considered to be birds. This took my attempts to understand the anomalous local

imagination concerning bats (who fly but don’t otherwise act like birds)

and cassowaries (who act like birds but don’t fly). While speaking about bats the topic of enemies came up and that is where Yubi mentioned that bats are ane mama, the “gone reflections” or spirits of people locally known as Namabolo, once among major Bosavi enemies. Known to anthropologists as Faso, these Namabolo people live to the southeast of Bosavi near the Kikori river, an area that is densely populated with several varieties of large flying fox. I asked Yubi when he had been to this area, and he located a time,

as Kaluli typically where Kaluli men time of that place, I took the occasion

do, by naming a place. The specific place was one had held a ceremonial bao a—thereby marking the of that activity, and uniting them together in memory. to ask whether bats were the spirit reflections of other

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traditional enemies, like the Wasamo to the west (the people known to anthropologists as Bedamini), or the Yo:li to the north (the people known to anthropologists as Etoro or Etolo). But Yubi continued to talk about the bao a, now animated by the topic. He asked me what I had heard about it. Actually, at that point I knew little, save that Bosavi men had discontinued the institution in 1964 with the advent of major outside contact. Missionaries had arrived to build a local airstrip, and they called out for laborers. This intrusion both

drew out the youths participating in a nearby bao a and so threatened the nature of the institution’s secrecy that it was rather quickly given up. Anyway, I told Yubi that I had not yet been schooled about the bao a, but either anticipating the topic, or wanting to impress him, or both, I mentioned that I knew about the homosexual activities of inseminating young boys and the belief that this would lead them to properly mature into able-bodied men. While I knew this was one of the secrets of the bao a, | had not, at that point heard detailed accounts of it, except from Edward L. Schieffelin, who had studied the bao a during his fieldwork in the mid-1960s.° Then, quickly, several of the topics circulating in our talk coalesced in Yubi’s next remark, like this: “You know, those Yo:li people, up there over the other side to the north, we used to fight and kill them, you know about that. Well, those Yo:li, their spirit reflections are mountain dogs, not bats like Namabolo, actually mountain dogs, that’s the way they go.

And those Yo:li people, like that they are truly disgusting. They don’t do it like us. They give it to the boys in the mouth! Just like dogs! Acchh!!

Us Bosavi men, we give it to them in the ass—the right way!” It is hard to cite Yubi’s comment without immediately footnoting it, as I did mentally then, with a sentence from Raymond Kelly, anthropologist of the Yo:li, from the introduction to his book Etoro Social Structure: “The Kaluli are traditional enemies of the Etoro, and the Etoro particularly revile them for their initiatory practices which are regarded as totally

disgusting. (The feeling is probably mutual.)”* But in its immediate moment the tone of Yubi’s remark most forcefully reminded me, again, of how much dogs are complicated male bag-

gage. Bosavi men project proud toughness through the tenacious grubbiness of their dogs. But cultivating dogs for hunting seems often as much male posturing, keeping a distance from the domestic sphere, as

readying for meat collection. In many instances trapping is a far simpler 3. See Edward L. Schieffelin, “The bau a Ceremonial Hunting Lodge: An Alternative to Initiation,” in Rituals of Manhood: Male Initiation in Papua New Guinea, ed. Gilbert Herdt (Berkeley, 1982), pp. 155-200. 4. Raymond Kelly, Etoro Social Structure (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1977), p. 16. See also Tom

M. Ernst, “Onabasulu Male Homosexuality: Cosmology, Affect, and Prescribed Male Homosexual Activity among the Onabasulu of the Great Papuan Plateau,” Oceania 62 (Sept. 1991): 1-11.

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and certainly more dog-proof way to get small game. And while hunting large game with bow and dog is locally considered the best method, one often sees how such scenes set dogs more as the attendants, the parade marshals, the others who trail behind or run ahead of their strutting masters. There’s another way that dogs are complicated male baggage. When men have a pathetic story to tell about their time in the bush, the dogs are likely to be scapegoated in the tale. There seems a somewhat transparent “can’t hunt with them, can’t hunt without them” quality to this rou-

tine, calculated to thoroughly displace attention from hunting as male separation. When the outcome is otherwise—and of course there are some very highly skilled hunters in Bosavi, and houses full of trophy jaws to remind all of it—credit is hardly bestowed upon the dogs in any way. Indeed, skilled hunters generally show no concern to reward their dogs with a part of the game. Men are thus adept at acting toward dogs precisely as dogs are adept at acting toward men. My own intuition is that the ambivalence that characterizes relations between Bosavi men and their dogs comes down to this: dogs are much too much like men because both were once reduced to killing and eating their enemies. The mythical revenge signaled by dogs licking animal blood transforms their most remarkable trait, the habit of licking their own things. It also allegorizes the tongue of revenge, the mouth of human warfare, the embodiment of ritual cannibalism. This is consistent with a powerful local image, of an invisible se or “witch” taking the visible form

of a dog and moving about a village at night, searching for people to devour. In these stories dogs are arguably the worst in men, their most disgusting reflections. Men create a necessary distance by publicly despising dogs both for their long-tongued greediness and for what else they are able to do with their tongues. At the same time, however, men express characteristic affection for their dogs. They carry them about and sleep with them by their sides, away from pigs, who, when

in the village sleep under

the

house and away from women, who sleep in their own separate section of the house. What seems to emerge here is the way Bosavi men are looking for a hopeful return on an extremely risky investment. They feel predictably upset when their investment is a failure, yet guardedly optimistic about its potential in some unspecified future. That guarded optimism shows in the way having dogs makes Bosavi men feel lucky, even powerful, despite the potential danger that inheres in the baggage. There is an additional dimension to how Bosavi men and their dogs might be imagined to socialize one another into a complex ambivalence. In a structural relationship permitting a certain brutality, it is the master’s reflex to openly display stereotypic affection as easily as sadistic control. In the intensely heteronormative Bosavi world, gender separation becomes male bodybuilding, with secret male anal sex the “right way” for

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elders to make boys “hard.” Against this necessity dogs may be cast as disgusting others, repugnant

enemies

fiercely allegorized at the site of

the wrong orifice for making men. At the same time dogs may be cast as the truest of allies, always part of the male inner circle, always physically closer to men than are women.

This would be the right place to ask whether Kaluli pigs have depth associations to women that parallel any of these complexities linking dogs to men. Certainly one can't help notice that being tenderly cared for, tethered, fattened for butchering and exchange, or hunted when they go wild are potentially ripe metaphors to explore. Neither local male nor female commentary seem to take these possibilities very far at all, despite the clear structural inequity available for elaboration. That inequity shows most clearly because Bosavi men and women participate rather equally in the work and valuation surrounding domestic pigs. But it is men, particularly in the bridewealth arena, who disproportionately control the

ownership of pigs and the manipulations and rewards surrounding their distribution and circulation. This male circulatory control of women and

pigs seems to parallel a male circulatory control of story space, one that creates a seeming female emptiness, and through it asserts a hegemonic male discourse of classificatory regulation. : When they led anywhere, my attempts at local discussions of these matters usually led back to the mamul of Mt. Bosavi, for there men

are

represented as the wild pigs and women as the cassowaries. This latter image resonates with a conventional local male analogy linking the texture of women’s skirts, and the motion of their walk, with the swaying, silky black plumes of the cassowary. Bosavi men who are desirous of women dream of hunting cassowaries. And men who want to be beautiful

and

provocative

dress in ceremonial

headdresses

dominated

by the

plumes of the cassowary, bird of paradise, and other birds represented as female in local symbology. At ceremonies men attempt to attract the attention of women by dancing in a flowing motion that accentuates the swing and sway of cassowary and bird of paradise plumes. Here, as elsewhere, Bosavi male sociality is locally imagined and practiced as excessive. In forms of vocal and bodily performance that expressively saturate public space, Bosavi men produce and overtake difference by overimitat-

ing, indeed overwhelming it. Animal foils: why do they figure so prominently in the mimetic, parodic, mythic, ludic, narrative, allegorical? Why are Bosavi men talking

about their dogs to talk about themselves? As I was thinking about that a story came to mind. In the early 1980s there appeared a single issue spoof of Playboy called Playboar. This mall gift shop item appeared at holiday time and satirized Playboy by having pigs take the accustomed place of female models. The pigs were of various sizes and shades, and variously propped up in high-heeled shoes, or on satin sheets, draped with lace,

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189

and eating chocolates. In all the images, and especially the centerfold, pigs were displayed in anatomically explicit positions. In addition to these images, the magazine’s other pages consisted of stories, cartoons, advertisements, even interviews. As satires go the inversion of male pig minds to female pig bodies was rather facile and obvious, at least to an adult. Playboar was obviously not meant as highbrow humor, just the sort of coarse stuff that might have some holiday shopping appeal to teenage boys. Perhaps because I was raised in isolation from pig products I was initially amused to get a personal copy of Playboar as a Hanukkah present from my Bosavi coresearchers, inscribed with some funny words speculating on the possible career of soft pig porn in the New Guinea highlands.

But after a first flick-through, Playboar seemed

little more

than

confirmation of Gigio’s initial admonition to me about the lack of pigs in my life. But then I saw something in the back that produced unabashed toage ratlike chuckling. It was a column headlined “Missing Pigs Bulletin,” and

it contained black-and-white passport sized snapshots of missing pigs, with underscored listings of physical markings and where they had last been seen. Of course, in any Bosavi village, discussion of missing pigs is a very fraught matter, and providing a graphic description of a missing one is a serious moment in local discourse. But my laughter had nothing to do with that. It was because one of the pictures was of a bull terrier. It is stories like that one that lead me to ask if it is ever possible to “hold my tongue” long enough to get to “the meat of things”? Or are ethnographers always led back to the place where their stories become completely intertwined with the tales they’ve heard elsewhere? Ethnographic encounters of course produce new spaces of pressing together, refigured intimacies destabilizing tacit senses of self and other. It is as if with each day one wakes to a warning that flashes: ethnographer beware! the mundane may soon appear unintentionally surreal. Like this: imagine my surprise, and then my queasiness, the morning I opened my news-

paper to this panel of Gary Larson’s The Far Side. From behind, a car with two large dogs in the front seat, one at the driver's wheel.

In the back

seat, a puppy. Scanning to the bottom of the frame the car has a rear bumper sticker, and it reads: “Have you licked your kid today?” So I’m led to realize how I can’t stop telling my own stories when I work at a retelling of Ganigi’s gasa-no: gis story. But this is not to mute or replace local memory and practice, for by continually asserting their own stories Bosavi men produce extensive commentaries on both this story and Ganigi’s specific telling. Often enough those local commentaries focus on how things got to be the way they are. Dogs are used to hunt animals; animals do naturally live in the bush; domestic ones will run wild if not guarded. Others focus on ethnographic substances—classification, categories, logics of practice—like rationalizing animal and human be-

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havior in mutually reflexive terms, establishing the nature of domestic

and wild, creating the organization of living space as the body becomes a body social, making parallel the visible and invisible spirit realms, validat-

ing the way xenophobia licenses murder. Still others visit the story at the sites of its concern with order and disorder: fluid reciprocity as the primal social norm, the breakup of sociability in the destruction of the longhouse community, the nature of revenge in aggravated injury, social greed as a replacement for social sharing, emergent hierarchies of domination as

the new social order. Local commentaries on Ganigi’s performance also underscore the powerfully affective dimensions of these themes, embodied in his mimetic

voice qualities: the ease of hospitality, the desire for congeniality, the destructiveness of gossip, the power of insult, the abusiveness of mockery,

the dangerousness of joking, the suspicion of the other, the disgust of excess, the secret pleasures of being behind the scene. One way or an-

other, these commentaries and retellings seem to say that the dogs and animals got what they each deserved, and they’ll continue to get just that, especially from their relations with Bosavi men.° All that said, one might conclude that stimulated by their manner of taking vocal control of local affairs, not to mention by a dog-nosy ethniog-

rapher, Bosavi men seem intent on producing thick readings, ones that combine two conventional senses of story—stories as the events that make up lives and identities, and stories as artistic discourse. At the same time

they can call the story forth in a manner far thinner in tone, as when their ethnographer is revealed to own a dog that looks like a pig, or when the act of butchering pigs provokes dogs to their limits, or, most simply, when dogs just get together and do their thing. This seems the juncture where, to rejoin both Benjamin’s storyteller and Merleau-Ponty’s body schema, the corporeality of Bosavi stories indexes their poetic indeterminacy. In other words, the density of material encoded by a story and the

concomitant multiplicity of readings that it brings forth is somewhat predictive of that story’s power to resonate inventively in cultural memory, to map bodies and sensibilities by voicing them from inside to out, and from outside to in. Opening up Ganigi’s story takes me to these densities in a particular way, through intimacies I know in storied reservoirs of a maleness. What seems familiar to me is the production of those storied reservoirs in gregarious talk, in male vocal claims that dominate social space, in jokes and especially snickering asides and one-liners, in double entendres filled with a confidence approaching bravado, in overly self-assured boasts and quick maneuvering from articulate and polished to crude and coarse talk, 5. See Edmund Leach, “Anthropological Aspects of Language: Animal Categories and Verbal Abuse,” in New Directions in the Study of Language, ed. Eric Lenneberg (Cambridge, Mass., 1964), pp. 23-63.

“They Repeatedly Lick Their Own Things”

191

in a full-on desire for vocal engagement. Men and their stories, men and “their own things”; men and the point they make, the score they tally. What is this storied-out kind of maleness, this stylized assertion of a ver-

bal knowingness, of exclusionary rights, this hegemony of being in on it at the expense of separated and absented others? Why are these storiedout masculinities familiar enough that I feel like I’m on the inside here,

like I get it? Why have I become so comfortable mixing metaphors across languages, imagining myself as discursively set up to lick my chops in anticipation of someone else’s punch lines? Why aren't I surprised by the seemingly tacit and naturalized ways Seyaka, Gigio, Ganigi, or Yubi include me in their vocal space of intimate separation, in their masculine stories? Here is where stories can produce one of their most powerful effects, the participatory complicity that arises from an intimate collision of biographies and sensibilities. This is a space where my listening is intervocally overtaken by the power of Ganigi’s telling, a space of rapid exchange, of seductive participation, a confusion of culture sensually overflowing and taking hold in my voice, urging me to retell the story as my own. This rhythm is so pleasurable that I can only interrupt it when I interfere with that ease, create a hyperattention, and then very precisely remind myself of my difference, remind myself of how much Bosavi men are locally con-

structed and stereotyped as the emotionally excessive gender, remind myself of how the agency and practice of everyday Bosavi male emotionality is remarkably difficult for me to naturalize as my own. This is the juncture where I can most fully acknowledge how performance paves the hegemonic path of discourse. It is the place where I sense how deeply the story’s telling performs a politics of gender investments, the place where I realize how much Ganigi’s allegorical production implicates my own. As a listener, I have been drawn into an intimate complicity in this embodiment of male separation. As a reteller I both reproduce and amplify that complicity and its discursive effects. Opening up Ganigi’s story produces yet another intimacy, a more poetic one, unique to us two. This is the intimacy specifically embodied by voice, in intervocality.® It is an intimacy produced by the dozens of times I have listened to my tape recording of Ganigi telling his story, the dozens of times I have echoed it out loud as he speaks, practicing its 6. Intervocality is a term I use to signify the inherently dialogic and embodied qualities of speaking and hearing. Intervocality underscores the link between the felt audition of one’s own voice, and the cumulatively embodied experience of aural resonance and mem-

ory. An exposition of the term and exploration of its kinship with both iéertextuality and intersubjectivity are found in my forthcoming book Vocal Knowledge: The Affecting Presence of a Papuan Acoustemology. Related explorations can be found in Don Idhe, Listening and Voice: A Phenomenology of Sound (Athens, Ohio, 1976); David Appelbaum, Voice (Albany, N.Y., 1990); David Burrows, Sound, Speech, and Music (Amherst, Mass., 1990); and, in a more provoca-

tively gendered formulation, Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen’ Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire (New York, 1993).

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rhythms, repeatedly imitating its pacing and mimicking its sound effects, “one by one... one by one.” And then there are the times I have transformed these to an English version that I could perform in place of dis-

tributing a printed text. Of course from this comes the intense immediacy and pleasure of hearing Ganigi’s voice speaking whenever I look silently at his words set out on a printed page, and whenever I speak them, in whatever language. So Ganigi’s voice, like the many Bosavi voices I hear now whether the tape recorder is on or off, becomes Bosavi within my

own voice. This is one way that stories resonantly give voice to places and to difference, by making of them an intimate vocal knowledge. This vocal knowledge joins what Benjamin imagined as the warmth of stories, their feeling of comfort, to what Merleau-Ponty imagined as corporeal fulfillment, their yearning and desire. This juncture of comfort and desire is

the vocal knowledge that produces here an allegorical intimacy: like mouths speaking, stories repeatedly lick their own things.

After hearing me tell Ganigi’s story and a few of my own at the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1990, David M. Schneider proceeded to thereafter greet me, in lieu of a handshake, by reaching into

his sweater vest pocket and producing a dog biscuit. The last time I saw David, shortly before his death in October of 1995, he nonchalantly repeated this gesture. Then as George, his poodle, bounded toward us, David grinned, put his hands over the dog’s ears, and gruffly whispered to me, “I wouldn't let him lick you; I’m not sure where his tongue has

been today.”

Jody

Michael Hanchard

“If you don’t get it, Jody’s gonna get it” was the advice given to me by a coworker at Bloomingdale’s in 1981, the second stop in a series of terminal jobs I held during my first two years after college. His advice concerned a woman I was seeing at the time, who later became my wife. He thought she was nice and attractive and for that reason concluded that others, Jody in particular, would feel the same way about her. Though Jody was not an employee at Bloomingdale’s, he nonetheless worked there. Jody is always on the job, even if he is not gainfully employed. As many older people in black communities across the United States know,

Jody is both a person and nonperson. He does not exist, but then again he is everywhere. Jody’s principal characteristic is his ability to exist at the margins of others’ love relationships, rather than at the center of a relationship of his own. He appears in the emotional and libidinal fissures that often exist between

lovers, with promises

to sate unfulfilled,

un-

quenchable desires. Money or gifts might be exchanged in Jody’s process of seduction, but they are factors, not determinants.

Sometimes

he is known

as the

Postman or the Milkman; or, in the case of an aspiring writer like Richard Wright who once sold insurance, Jody might absolve debts with the cur-

rency of sex. It was only after listening to my friend’s warning about Jody, and then subsequently hearing references to him in discussions, that I considered the possibility that Jody was not always straight. Jody stands Much

thanks to Lauren

Berlant and the editorial collective of Critical Inquiry, who

pushed me towards ideas and insights I might not have reached independently;

Lise

McKean and Sandra Richards for their helpful comments on an earlier version; and Leon

Forrest for suggesting Their Eyes Were Watching God.

193

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Michael Hanchard

at the intersection of three types of sexuality—heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual. At each corner, in each stance, he is an object of desire, admiration, fear, and revulsion. His gaze is always predatory; his natural

enemies are those whose love relationships are threatened by Jody, the erotic scavenger. His entanglements are always furtive and clandestine, without public acknowledgement or responsibility, except in whispers and loud denunciations. He often communicates through gestures: a nod of the head, an arch of an eyebrow, a coiled forefinger may intimate surprise, a beckoning or cautionary message to one watchful, mindful woman in a crowd. A

principal feature of Jody’s heterosexual incarnation is, to borrow a phrase from Julio Cortazar, private indiscretion. Jody does not transform or revolutionize bonds of marital and/or cohabitational fidelity so much as he circumvents them.

I first met Jody in the summer of 1979, though I did not recognize him at first. As a day laborer for a black contracting company that had been assigned to replace apartment walls in a housing project on Gates Avenue in Brooklyn, N.Y., I obtained glimpses of the lives in those apartments when I brought Sheetrock to the carpenters. One morning, after hauling yet another piece of Sheetrock that would be transformed by the tapers into a new wall in an apartment on an upper floor, I rode the elevator with two residents, two middle-aged men. They were acquain-

tances clearly, though not necessarily good friends. One man rushed out to work, headed for the subway train. The other man lagged behind, looked me in the eye conspiratorially and said, “You see that guy?” I acknowledged that I did. “Have that I had, the day before. The brown-skinned sister who looked He then leaned closer to me in

you seen his woman?” I acknowledged woman in question was an attractive, to be in her late thirties or early forties. the elevator and said, “He thinks he’s

raising hell when he’s sleeping with her, but he ain’t shit.” He paused for effect and then said, “I know, because she told me so, and I’m with her sometimes when he leaves.” I was stunned by the revelation, not because of the possibility or probability of the acts between them, but because of his candor. Jody was carelessly and uncharacteristically frank, a mistake that could have gotten

him hurt or killed if Ihad happened to be friends with the man in ques-

Michael Hanchard is associate professor of political science and African American studies at Northwestern University. He is the author of Orpheus and Power: The Movimento Negro of Rio de Janeiro and Séo Paulo, Brazl, 1945-1988 (1994) and editor of the forthcoming Racial Politics in Contemporary Brazal.

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tion. Yet all of Jody’s other characteristics were visible enough to suggest his presence—the manner in which he maintained a furtive relationship that not only required his stealth but another’s absence. Days later I saw the secret couple together in the elevator, and by the glances exchanged I surmised that there was something going on besides the elevator’s descent. I had no idea what this particular Jody did during the day, aside from his reputed trysts. I had no idea what her view on this relationship was. Jody only seemed concerned with his sexual performance relative to her companion. This told me little about her needs or desires in relation to either one of them. She looked at neither one of us,

but stared straight ahead. What interests me about Jody are his representations and multiple incarnations in black popular culture and the manner in which his presence reveals much more than a triangular relationship of trust, fidelity, and betrayal involving black women and men. Though neither Jody nor any of the aforementioned human expressions of feeling in love relationships are peculiar to African Americans in the United States, their specific

resonance in black popular culture allows for the possibility of his critical examination in relation to black cultural production. Among other things, Jody’s presence as a cultural icon represents an opportunity to consider the intersections of black gender and sexual politics with the material conditions of labor and racial inequality. Beyond my theoretical pretensions, this essay is a call for more historicized discussion of contem-

porary black popular culture and recognition of its simultaneous distinction from and interdependence with mass culture. More broadly, I am interested in situating certain features of black

popular culture against a backdrop larger than the figurative—and literal—outlines of individual popular icons, their feuds, and their record

companies. Through an analysis of Jody’s presence in U.S. African American literature, song lyrics, rural folklore, and contemporary popular culture, I believe we can glimpse his yearnings as well as the insecurities and passions of black men and women who are somehow connected to him, or

whose relationships are mediated through him. Ever watchful of errant desires, Jody represents a particular type of male gaze, one that must also acknowledge the gazes of reproachful, jealous, and potential lovers in turn. He is at his best when other men are not watching him; their public preoccupations with work, paying the rent, and being a man often obscure their vision. Indeed, it is often a man’s idea of black manhood and

masculinity as being individuated, separate from other members of his community, as well as his wife or companion, that undermines

the very

sand castle of masculinity he aims to construct. Jody is the liminal figure in the blind spots of that perspective. Jody’s presence may enable us to comprehend the relationship between gender and male vulnerability in relations of domestic reproduction, and may bring us closer to an under-

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standing of the political economy of black male-female relations than most forums on the subject in U.S. mass media.' Songs like “Jody’s Got Your Girl and Gone,” “Games,” “Creep,” and “O.P.P.” belie conventional images of black male strength, anger, rage, and repression.” By watching

Jody, I believe we obtain insight into a political economy of desire that often frames black eros. Examining Jody’s presence can enable students 1. A more genealogical analysis of Jody could reveal a richer understanding of his evolution and roles in U.S. African American culture as well as U.S. popular culture more generally. The sparse references to Jody in written text—scholarly or otherwise—necessitated archival research and interviewing that I could not undertake at the time of this writing. There are possibilities that Jody might be related to Ghede, the phallic deity of West African origin (by way of Haiti and Voudun) who presides over both creation and death. Maya Deren, in Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (London,

1953), writes that Ghede

“is lord of that eroticism which, being inevitable, is therefore beyond good and evil and is beyond the elations and despairs of love. Of this he is neither proud nor ashamed; if anything he is amused by the eternal persistence of the erotic and by man’s eternally persistent pretense that it is something else” (p. 102). There are other similarities between Jody’s behavior and that of Exu, Anansi, and Legba, but it is altogether possible that these are resem-

blances rather than relations, and that Jody could have sprung from other sources, African or non-African. 2. The Jody-related material analyzed in this article is by no means exhaustive.~The songs and prose selected here are a representative sample of Jody figures in black folklore, literature, and popular culture. There are many other cultural documents that comment not only on Jody but his relational possibilities in black communities, as narrated by former, current, and future lovers, competitors, guardians against, and not-so-innocent bystanders. Among popular songs that speak to his paradigmatic presence in both male and female behavior are Aretha Franklin, “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man,” Aretha’ Greatest Hits, Atlantic CS 8295, 1971; John Hammond, “Backdoor Man,” Big City Blues, Vanguard 79153-4, 1964; Me’Shell NdegeOcello, “If That’s Your Boyfriend (He Wasn't Last Night),” Plantation

Lullabies, Maverick Recording Company Wise,”

Women

Be Wise, Storyville STCD

9 45333-2, 8024,

1993; Sippie Wallace, “Women

1993; Stevie Wonder,

“Part-Time

Be

Lover,”

Tamla 4548TG, 1985. See also the following listing of Jody-specific songs: Jeff Beck Group, “Jody,” Rough and Ready, Epic KE 30973, 1971; Art Blakey, The Best of Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers: Art Collection, Concord Jazz CCD-4495, 1992, 1978; Dee Dee Bridgewater, “The Jody Grind,” Love and Peace: A Tribute to Horace Silver, Verve Records 314 527 470-2, 1995; Ida Cox, “Four Day Creep,” Complete Recorded Works, 4 disks, Document Records DOCD5325, 1927, 1995; Vernon Garrett, “Jody Can Ease the Pain,’ Gator G1201, 1991; Big John

Hamilton, “I Finally Caught Up with Jody,” SSS International Records SSS-835, 1991; Slim Harpo (James Moore), “Jody Man,” Slim Harpo Knew the Blues, Excello Records 8013, 1970; Jerry Kennedy, “Jody and the Kid,” Jerry Kennedy Plays with All Due Respect to Kris Kristofferson, Mercury SR-61339, 1971; Peggy Lee, “Is That All There Is?” All Time Greatest Hits, Curb Records D2-77379, 1990; Kenny Price, “Jody and the Kid,” Charlotte Fever, RCA Victor LSP4605, 1971; Bob Seger, “Jody Girl,” Beautiful Loser, Capital 4N-91424, 1975; Del Shannon, ‘Jody,’ Runaway,

Big Top 45-3067,

1950(?), 1970; Horace Silver, “The Jody Grind,” Blue

Note 84250 2, 1992, 1978; Status Cymbal, “Jody,” In the Morning, RCA Victor LSP 3993, 1968; Johnnie Taylor, Who's Making Love, Stax SCD-4115-2,

1990 and “Standing in for

Jody,” Stax STX-1023, 1972; Justin Tubb, “Jody and the Kid,” Things I Remember Very Well, Dot Records DLP 25,922, 1969; Joe Williams, Jr., “Don’t Let Me Catcha Jody,’ Triode Records 119, 1992; and Charles Wright, “Run Jody Run,” Rhythm and Poetry, Warner Bros. BS 2620, 1972.

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197

of black popular culture to chart the ways in which fidelity, sexuality, and propriety are intertwined and correlated in black cultural production. Jody bears certain obvious similarities with venerable figures in the cultures and religions of the African diaspora. With his brash sexuality and contravening ways he resembles Yemanja, Ghede, Legba, and, more colloquially, trickster figures like Anansi. His absolutely secular character,

however, distinguishes him from the cosmological sexuality of a Ghede.* Though danger pervades Jody’s being, Jody does not traffic in the dualities of life and death, fire and water, as would Yemanja or Oxun. Beyond discretion, Jody must exercise the sort of caution and prudence that no deity would have to abide by. Ironically, though, Jody presents stability. His is a corrective exis-

tence, independent of his own behavior, in relation to sexual companionship and fidelity. Jody’s identity is less individual than it is relational. By himself, Jody has no identity. He represents both a promise and a caution, the embodiment of “or else.” Johnnie Taylor’s song entitled “Jody’s Got Your Girl and Gone” describes Jody’s depredations: Every guy I know, tryin’ to get ahead, Workin’ two jobs till you’re almost dead, Working your fingers down to the bone, Now a cat named Jody sneakin’ around in your home Now there’s a cat named Jody in every town Spendin’ lots of cash, just ridin’ around Ride on Jody, Jody ride on with your bad self

[refrain] Ain't no sense in goin’ home

Jody’s got your girl and gone Jody leaves ashes in your ashtray Footprints on your carpet while you work all day He even got the nerve to sleep in your bed Sit down at the table, eat your bread When you get home after workin’ hard all day Jody’s got your girl and he’s gone away [refrain]

When you discover that your role is neglected It'll be too late to give your woman respect You hunt down Jody dead or alive Ten thousand dollars for Jody’s hide [refrain] 3. See Deren, Divine Horsemen.

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Michael Hanchard

You'll meet him alone one day Jody took my girl and he’s gone away Had enough sense to express himself Told her how good she looked Told her how cute she walked Told her how pretty she talked [refrain]|*

These lyrics detail the prototypical Jody. His full name in Taylor's lyrics is Jody Rider, an innovation upon the term easy rider used to describe a man’s coital virtuosity while in bed with a woman.° The lyrics describe the predictable correlation between a woman’s infidelity and male violence, which predominate in songs of betrayal written from a male heterosexist stance. The object of violence in this instance is male. Men respond to Jody’s—as opposed to their lovers’—behavior. Jody displaces the aggrieved male as the proprietary subject by displacing the woman as the proprietary object. In this sense, the Jody figure represents a paradox. Boasts of male sexual virtuosity abound in most popular music idioms, and it is presumed that “all mens is dogs” as a woman told me once on a bus in Yonkers, N.Y. Conversely, a man must deny Jody’s existence in himself in order to generate sexual fidelity and thus be the opposite of Jody. Yet the sense of betrayal in Taylor’s lyrics suggests that while Jody may be male, not every man is Jody. There is then an internal tension within this narrative about black masculinity because Jody, almost by definition, cannot be betrayed by a woman who is not “his” in the first place. Several questions emerge from the silences in Taylor’s Jody lyrics. What were some of the preconditions and circumstances that would lead to Jody’s appearance? Why would Jody appeal to women in the first place, particularly if he was precisely the sort they were socialized to avoid? The absence of the woman’s old man during the day is the first prerequisite. The equation woman/home/property and the absence of protection leaves a man’s home susceptible to the theft of his woman. Jody, by the

car he drives and the money he flashes, represents leisure time, something the poorly paid but gainfully employed man has precious little of. Unlike his hard-working male counterpart, Jody assumes none of the risks of the everyday. If he is not wealthy or merely self-sustaining, he is generally understood to be making fast money that can also be spent fast, far more easily than someone who is working for menial wages and uses those wages to sustain a home. Why does Jody have this leisure time, 4. Taylor, “Jody’s Got Your Girl and Gone,” Stax STX-1021, 1977. 5. See Guy B. Johnson’s “Double Meaning in the Popular Negro Blues,” in Mother Wit from the Laughing Barrel: Readings in the Interpretation ofAfro-American Folklore, ed. Alan Dundes (New York, 1981), pp. 258-66. C.C. Rider is another term that conveys a similar virtuosity.

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especially during the day, while other men are working often the first of two jobs? People can do innumerable things with their time, however, including nothing, so there is no inevitability to Jody’s presence in “another man’s home.” The song provides certain clues to a more complicated set of motivations, which are significant. “When you discover that your role is neglected/It'll be too late to give your woman respect” betrays a deeper level of tension in the relationship. It occurs when the hard-working man is home, but it could also denote a more general sense of lack on behalf

of his companion, a desire for certain pleasures that are not provided for in their relationship in particular, or in monogamous relationships in general. “Had enough sense to express himself” suggests a desire or expression on the part of the domestic male that went unarticulated. Taylor’s good sense here is related to sensuality and sensibilities, which in turn form part of a common sense about cohabitational relationships. Therefore, it would seem that the betrayed males in these instances lack the good sense to express themselves or, even worse, the very sensuality and sensibility that Jody can not only summon but convey. Jody’s principal attribute in relation to certain women who are attracted to his charms may be his ability to imagine a feminine heterosexual subjectivity, that is, to imagine a woman’s desires in relation to black masculinity that is independent of the trappings of conventional black masculinity itself. Tellingly, in a live version of the song, Taylor has a call-and-response exchange with the audience in which he asks rhetorically, “You know the one thing I like about Jody? He had enough sense to express himself,” to the cheers of women

in the audience, which disrupts the male-identified

narrative of betrayal and revenge. The distinction between studio and live performance is significant because it accentuates a positive dimension of the Jody figure in relation to the idealized working-class male. In paying homage to Jody, Taylor’s lyrics suggest, among many things, that no cohabitational relationship is ever hermetically sealed or distanced from possible interlopers. The family unit is never solely the family unit; people and propositions articulated and unarticulated lurk at its borders. The private sphere is always vulnerable to intrusions from the outside and, even more radically, from the longings of those who imagine the need for a Jody in their lives. The neat little distinctions of public and private are exposed for what they are, constructions of the economy and political society that can be undone just as easily as they are created. As Althusser has suggested, the distinctions between public and private are necessarily bourgeois.° The purported inviolability of home in middle-class culture is lost upon those at the margins of a politi6. See Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation),” “Lenin and Philosophy” and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York, 1971), pp. 127-86.

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cal economy,

where indigence, domestic turmoil, and many other vari-

ables deemed interior to determine potential risks unit. Jody can be added privacy (and their related

a home or family are evaluated by the state to to society or persons within a particular family to the list of factors that bring intimacy and norms) into the exterior and socialize them, all

of which are conveyed in law, policy, mass media, and, in the specific case

of Jody, discourse communities. Not only are the symmetries of fidelity destabilized, but those of status as well. Possible shifts in status include but are not restricted to the shift from married to fooling around, from respectability to ill-repute, from stability to instability, but also from longing to satiation. In all of these shifts, the instability within the domestic relationship itself leads to the externalized instability that Jody thrives on. Moreover, the nuclear family does not exist apart from the internal conflicts and contradictions of those who live within them.

Twice Thwarted: The Alienation of Love and Labor Jody’s presence within a relationship not only represents issues of fidelity and betrayal but of alienation as well. His presence is a consequence—not a cause—of the erotic alienation between two people. An understanding of the evolving, shifting meaning of economy can enable us to comprehend the duality of alienation that the Jody figure represents when situated in someone’s home. The term economy was originally meant to describe “the management of a household and then the management of a community before it became the description of a perceived system of production, distribution, and exchange.”’ This original definition has

double repercussions for analyzing black sexual politics (the old Lasswellian who gets what, where, when, and why). In one sense, the original concept could apply to families and communities regardless of race, cultural, or religious distinctions. Within

the term economy itself, the movement away from a highly personal and relatively unmediated form of human interaction and material reproduction to an increasingly abstract, impersonal system of production, distribution, and exchange corresponds with the increasing alienation of individual

labor

amidst

the

industrial,

postindustrial,

and

now

information-based economic revolutions. The increasing mechanization of labor tasks coupled with the overcredentialization of those working in information-based professions have made wage laborers, particularly those in unskilled and semiskilled occupations, more marginalized by the late twentieth century than ever before under capitalism. With the feminization of labor and industry both in the overdevel7. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York, 1977), p. 11.

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oped world and outside the West, male monopoly of wage labor has diminished greatly, though gender equality in the workplace or shop floor

has not necessarily followed. Yet whether it is Rosie the Riveter or an Indonesian female factory worker sewing the latest Air Jordan, the structural shifts within national and transnational political economies have had their repercussions not only in particular industries but within indi-

vidual households themselves, as female workers’ wages supplement or supplant male wages and consequently threaten to destabilize gender hierarchies within both economies, the domestic and extradomestic.

The trajectory of marginalization for black labor and its impact upon black domestic and sexual politics is invariably bound up with this general process, but with important qualifications. Within the political economy of slavery, the domestic and nation-state economy were one because

both the labor and the product of labor were the result of production, distribution, and exchange. When we consider the history of domestic economies across the African diaspora, the relative lack of leisure time

affected not only play or attention in relationships but prospects for reproduction as well. In Jamaica and other plantation societies utilizing slaves as a dominant mode of production, the excessive hours devoted to labor often made slaves too tired to procreate.® After slavery, the tendency for black men, whether in the United States, Colombia, Brazil, Jamaica, or elsewhere in the New World, to hold better but fewer jobs in relation to

their female counterparts underscores the precariousness of household economies and the relationships within them. U.S. African American domestic economies have been viewed as pathological because of their matrifocal, rather than patrifocal tendencies. This view has become the basis for critiques of the black family, most notedly by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, but also by more contemporary scholars who, while denouncing Moynihan’s conclusions, accept the patrifocal logic. Hortense Spillers suggests that via the logic of Western racial slavery, black bodies—male and female—do not belong to themselves. In reconstructing the gendered distinctions of and between black bodies, Spillers demonstrates how patriarchal civilizations within the West relegate matriarchal socie-

ties to the realm of the dysfunctional. Spillers writes that “the captive female body locates precisely a moment of converging political and social vectors that mark the flesh as a prime commodity of exchange.”!” Racial slavery, a master’s and mistress’s imposition of patriarchy and servitude upon black families and individuals, made the selection of 8. See Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas, ed. Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan (Charlottesville, Va., 1993).

9. See Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” U.S. Department of Labor, Washington, D.C., 1965, and William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged (Chicago, 1987).

10. Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17 (Summer 1987): 75.

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Michael Hanchard

lover, partner, husband, or wife among slaves more than simply a matter of “free choice,” will, or intention. A black man

might consort, consult,

conspire with or confront a black woman, but he could not “own” her in the way in which a white male could literally own a black woman or figuratively own a white one. Though such proprietary ambitions would be problematic even if white slave owners were not part of this picture, they do highlight peculiar sources for certain types of black male alienation around matters of sexual expression.'! Spillers writes that black women’s bodies were

twice-mediated,

the object and source

of the black man’s

powerlessness in a white, male-dominated society. They symbolized, according to Spillers, “signifying property plus.”!?Black men could neither

own black women as white women did nor protect them against assaults by white or black men. In some instances, black women

were depicted as

the object and source of black male social emasculation." In contemporary black popular culture, anxieties about white male access to black women’s bodies recur with great frequency in videos and lyrics. Works by Public Enemy, E.P.M.D., and X-Clan exemplify this anxi-

ety, which is often veiled in a physical confrontation and defeat of invasive white men and state power. An entirely different problematic emerges, however, when men

encounter

other men

who could potentially enter

their personal or domestic space, not through coercion, but through sensuality, sensibility, and stealth.

The commonality Jody shares with white men and/or state power, however, is his penchant for treating cavalierly something (marriage) or someone (a woman) that a certain black man holds so dearly. Jody’s triumphs are more wounding to the male ego, however, because unlike the state or the plantation owner, overseer, or contemporary boss, his powers

are seductive, not coercive. When Jody appears, a betrayed male cannot blame “the man,” the state, or racial slavery; the murky passions of hu-

manity often supersede societal forces as sources of explanation for “errant” or “deviant” behavior. Not only is the role and function of the betrayed man’s wife or companion in his/their home, indeed the very home itself, usurped, but the betrayal also signifies the incommensurabil-

ity of the domestic and societal economies. Seeming success in one economy does not provide compensation, solace, or protection from losses in another economy, as is often construed in certain male-centered rational-

izations of being king of the castle. Jody is parasitic upon two different productive spheres. Here, the alienation of desire and wage labor congeal as two distinct meanings of economy merge. Jody the hustler (like any petty criminal or Mafioso) is a parasite upon formal or external relations of production through the sale 11. See Robyn Wiegman, American Anatomies (Durham, N. C., 1995).

12. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,’ p. 65. 13. See Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice (New York, 1968).

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203

of illicit goods and services. Jody as Lothario is a parasite upon the totality of the domestic economy: “footprints on your carpet while you work all day”; “sit down at the table, eat your bread.” Thus, Jody is a parasite upon both leisure and labor time (other peoples’, that is) and can, as a

consequence, be thought of as a capitalist of leisure and labor. In Talking Black, Roger Abrahams considers the gendered differences between male and female discourses on fidelity in a love relationship. For both black men and women, home has been the locus of respectability, which is why

a man

whose woman

has taken off with Jody, as well as a

woman whose man sleeps around, are in danger of having their home undermined: “this private sphere of activity will be under constant attack from the more public street world, and that it is in the inevitable confronta-

tion between these worlds that a female is able to enact being a woman.” 4 Yet the enactment of being a woman or man is not only located in their respective ability to fend off interlopers but also in the enactment of the relationship itself. If this enactment is incomplete, and a woman decides to procure/imagine Jody, then part of her self-satisfaction as a woman is mediated by Jody. Digging even more deeply into this malecentered anxiety, we discover the work a woman must do to make herself

available to Jody; she must separate her home from her sex, her body, and her labor. Abraham suggests that the different consequences for men and women who fool around rest upon the loss of name and reputation for women,

less so for men, though one wonders about the verity of this

reputational differentiation in the 1990s or even earlier. Betty Wright's “The Cleanup Woman” is a woman who thrives on the dissatisfactions men have with women, and her lyrics suggest no shame or reputational loss due to her “cleanup” status.!°

Assailants and Consorts Acts of retribution against a cheating wife or companion, if not Jody himself, are quite common in blues songs. This is evidenced in the lyrics of, among others, Jimi Hendrix’s classic blues rendition of “Hey Joe.”

Hendrix assumes the role of first-person singular in a conversation between Joe, the man

whose woman

has betrayed him, and a friend who

asks at the outset of the song, “Hey Joe, where you goin’ with that gun in your hand?” to which Joe replies, “I’m goin’ down to shoot my old lady, 14. Roger D. Abrahams, Talking Black (Rowley, Mass., 1976), p. 66. Where I grew up a common reference among male friends for a black

(New Rochelle, N.Y. in the 1970s),

man’s girl friend was “homepiece,” which fused the vectors of home and woman, whether a

male lived with his girlfriend or not. It also suggested, more implicitly, that one could have access to a woman in a relationship that was not at/his “home.” 15. See Betty Wright, “The Cleanup

COL-CD-5118,

1989.

Woman,”

Golden Classics, Collectibles

Records

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Michael Hanchard

I caught

her messin’

around

with

another

man.’!®

This

response

to

Jody’s—and his old lady’s—transgression places heterosexual transgression at its most elemental, basic level. While “Hey Joe” intimates the brutal consequences of such a transgression, it does not address the causes, sources, and reasons behind the transgression itself. Monogamy, it would seem, is only legitimated through coercion.

There is another type of betrayal song written from a masculinist perspective that I find more interesting because of the manner in which it attempts to rationalize the transgression and recuperate the relationship with an errant, fickle woman. While there are innumerable songs that contain the pleading, plaintive sounds of one falsetto or another attempting to rekindle an eroding love partnership, they are usually structured to account for an initial transgression on the man’s part that, if one follows the logic of the lyrics, precipitated the woman's cheating heart or departure. Less common are songs that acknowledge the possibility that even under ideal circumstances, what a certain man materially and romantically provides for a certain woman just may not be enough. An example of this political economy can be found in a moderate hit

by Chucku Booker entitled “Games.” Jody is present in action (though not in name) in the most subtly crafted video on the subject of betrayal I have seen. In “Games” Booker plays the role of the man whose woman has an ongoing affair with a Jody type, a smooth, well-dressed man who is older than Booker, one who understands the pact of amorous subterfuge as a given of his relations with another man’s woman—secret rendezvous, gifts presented behind the closed door of a hotel room. Booker’s lyrics express the befuddlement of a man who provides for his love and loves her exclusively but still leaves her unsatisfied. The first stanza of the lyric reads as follows; Would you be with me, if Ihad nothing, if Icouldn't buy ya... something,

Now you've got your shed, look whose paying I got your thing together, and you're not staying, I worked hard to get the things I have, I’ve worked hard to get the things you need, and I wanna know, why you wanna play on me? Followed by the refrain, “Why ya wanna play your games on me?”!”

As I have previously suggested, there are variations on these lyrics in love songs across the idioms of blues, country, rhythm and blues, rock 16. Jimi Hendrix, “Hey Joe,” Jimi Plays Monterey, Reprise 9 25358-2, 1986. 17. Chuckii Booker, “Games,” Niice ’n’ Wiild, Atlantic 82410-2,

1992.

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205

and roll, indeed in whatever idiom or language love songs and songs of betrayal are presented. But Booker’s “why . . . ?” attempts to pry open the Pandora’s box of ulterior desires that are not his own and are not shared by or with him. Not only has he provided for his love materially, he has given her a mode of consumptive ascension as well. This reverses the nurturing role of male-female, mother and son relationships where it is the woman who does the providing. Or does it? Now that he’s helped her get her thing together, she intends to leave, presumably with the Jody figure in the video. Is this but another version of daughter leaving father or husbands who leave wives ? Among a range of explanatory possibilities, the one I believe is most

appropriate is the chasm between material provision and desire. Helping her get her thing together is not the equal to satiation. There are other things a man can or needs to provide in a relationship. The woman in the video is a very elegant, poised, brown-skinned

woman

who seems

more a sly match for the sartorially sophisticated Jody than for Booker’s character, which suggests, in keeping with the lyrics, that she may be an acquisitive gold digger. The subtextual rejoinder to Booker’s question is encapsulated in the existence of sexual and other communicative

needs that Booker, for all

of his righteousness, does not meet. As in the first instance, Jody is a man who can imagine women; through experience, he knows what a woman in certain situations needs. The immense popularity of a figure like Barry White in the 1970s and 1990s can be partially attributed to, I believe, a

fairly predictable but nonetheless constant promise in his songs to consider a woman’s needs before his own. The standard masculinist correlation between male provision and female compliance is in high relief, only to be undermined by his love’s transgression. Neither he, his money, nor his hard work are enough. The

emphasis on hard work and not leisure time, especially in a consumptionoriented economy of the late twentieth-century United States, is an anachronism. In addition to whatever shortcomings Booker’s wounded male might represent to this game-playing woman, her actions also reveal the attraction of hidden play in leisure time that cannot be captured in daily life, nor can it be encompassed in the fruits of aman’s labor. The song’s last two lines conclude with “Why you wanna trick on me, pretty girl?/I give you everything that you wanted, honey, ooh.” Here

“trick” has an ambivalent connotation. Nothing from the video or lyrics would suggest that she is a prostitute, but she is “tricking” Booker by stepping outside the boundaries of the relationship. The correlations among the domestication of women’s sexual desire, monogamy, and male

material reproduction are blurred because her encounters with Jody are now implicitly equated with faithlessness and prostitution. Do Jody’s and Booker’s relationships with the same woman emanate from the same cor-

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Michael Hanchard

relation? If one were to agree with Catharine MacKinnon, then they certainly do.'® Ultimately, Booker’s refrain, “why you wanna play on me?” suggests that Booker’s public expression of yearning for a far less contingent, conditional, or circumstantial long-term relationship is the opposite of Jody’s praxis. Jody thrives on the latent, underdeveloped, or unarticulated aspects of other people’s relationships, those things most people want their partners to provide but do not. Booker’s sense of betrayal evolves from the friction between the publicly acknowledged (the relationship itself) and the privately held (literally and figuratively) indivisi-

ble desire. It is not Jody as much as it is an escape from the drudgery of daily life that seduces Jody’s potential partner. He represents newness, a flight from ennui that, when understood as such, distinguishes “Jody’s Got Your Girl and Gone” from continuous, extramarital romance or

fleeting encounter. To be fair to the male character in this video, however, one must also

acknowledge the possibility that his “pretty girl” finds the ostentatious man more desirable precisely because of his promise—as opposed to his deliverance—of material riches. On the flip side of rap music’s depiction of black urban culture as a sepia-toned wasteland is its presentation of young black men as Jay Gatsby; scenes of abandoned buildings, shootouts, and barking rottweilers compete with endless backdrops of fancy cars, mansions, and vacations on Anguilla. Poor people, whether urban or rural, do not find romance in this very “American” vision, as the

male voice in “Games” discovers.

Brave New Jody Jody’s incarnations in more contemporary black popular culture, particularly that of the hip-hop generation, suggests an altering of the

correlation between male labor, female domesticity, and sexual fidelity that is so prominent in rhythm and blues and blues lyrics. Gone is the presumption of a male-headed household and the hegemonic correlation between male and principal wage earner. Part of the answer to Booker’s “Why you wanna play on me?” can be found in TLC’s

1994 hit “Creep,” which contextualizes the dearth of

affection and attention that would lead a sister to step outside the boundaries of her relationship with an inattentive man and stealthily creep towards an unnamed lover or series of lovers. The cognitive key to creeping is her primary lover’s ignorance of both Jody’s intervention and her alternative, transgressive desires. The lyric’s suggestion that “he just wouldn't understand” can be interpreted as a male’s inability to comprehend the 18. See Catharine A. MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (Cambridge, Mass., 1987).

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207

act of creeping within the context of the previously analyzed games, a lack of consciousness about a subversive formation of desires that would lead one to step out in the first place. This construction of female desire discards the one-man woman formula for one that considers fulfillment rather than monogamy as a singular goal. TLC’s “Creep” is a contemporary version of earlier female creepers. Ida Cox’s “Four Day Creep” describes a female version of Jody who can claim another woman’s man whenever she desires, in spite of her obesity and ugly looks.'® Another incarnation of Jody is the sensitive male who acknowledges the role he is “serving” (and again, this term has had a dual connotation in black heterosexual politics) in addition to his acting upon his own desires. Bryan McKnight’s 1995 hit “On the Down Low” recounts the entangled passions within the erotic space where a woman and her contingent lover meet, away from the conscience, consciousness, and space shared with her husband, on the “down low.” Sung in the second person, the lyrical refrain whispers the furtive proposition of one five-foot, nineinch Maxine who is said to whisper, “my body wants you so, for what I miss at home, nobody has to know, keep it on the down low.’*° Here is an

unwitting Jody. Maxine sought him out. In propositioning him, Maxine imagines/creates the Jody figure for her consumption. Not only does this expose women’s agency in Jody’s actions, but it forces us to realize that ontologically Jody is never “all man”; his identity is generated and implemented by women, not men. Unlike many other men, Jody is capable of inhabiting a feminine imaginary, what some men might crudely characterize as “knowing the female psyche” or some other such fiction. The conventional parameters of romance and seduction require entreatments like roses or chocolates, considered surefire (a phallocentric term if there

ever was one) ways of attracting or maintaining a love interest, but often neglected by male partners. Jody might revitalize a love feeling, if not love itself, by resuscitating such devices to convey the sense of romance

and passion dulled by daily life. At one point, McKnight melodically utters the synopsis of the male

provision/female fidelity equation that has him betwixt and between: “he thinks that she’s content because he bought a car and he pays the rent.”?! It is a lyrical rejoinder to earlier male-centered lyrics, such as B. B. King’s “IT Pay the Cost to Be the Boss”; the “down

low” is a refutation of the

notion that material cost is the only price a man has to pay to keep a woman happy and obedient. It is also a rejoinder to Gwen Guthrie’s 1986 19. See TLC, “Creep,” CrazySexyCool, LaFace Records 26009-2, 1994, and Ida Cox, “Four Day Creep,” Complete Recorded Works, 4 disks, Document Records DOCD-5325, 1927,

1995. See also Mimi Clar Melnick, “I Can Peep Through Muddy Water and Spy Dry Land: Boasts in the Blues,” in Mother Wit from the Laughing Barrel, pp. 267-76. 20. Brian McKnight, “On the Down Low,’ J Remember You, Mercury 314 528 280-4, 1995. 21. Ibid.

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Michael Hanchard

hit “Ain’t Nothin Goin’ on But the Rent,” which evoked peals of righteous

laughter and acknowledgement by black women on dance floors in New York City clubs, if my memory serves me correctly.” McKnight’s lines sug-

gest a paradox for the hard-working male, a materiality that is not essential to the actual reproduction of home and those within it but nonetheless essential to the maintenance of feeling between and among its members. Perhaps the fullest expression of anew Jody is encoded in one of the most erotically egalitarian songs of black popular culture in recent years,

Naughty by Nature’s “O.P.P” (Other People’s Property).?*? The double P symbolizes an obvious equation here, but it also displays what I believe is new about the late modern Jody figure. Curiously, the triad of a woman’s love, sexual fidelity, and a man’s labor is abolished. Both men and women

are capable of poaching other people’s sexual property; in this construction the anatomic connotation drops out. This creates the possibility of a female Jody, one who is capable of being an interloper without being a home wrecker. TLC’s female creeper comes to narrative life in “O.P.P.,” duplicitous with her male counterpart

in the act of cheating. Treach, the lead rapper of “Naughty by Nature,” invariably subordinates the egalitarian aspects of “O.P.P”: the female Jody falls hard for her male counterpart, who remains unfazed by their dalli-

ance. Ireach chastises the female Jody for wanting to remain in bed while his “real” woman is fast approaching and says “now chil’ please” in a manner which suggests that it is the male Jody, after all, who needs to remind the female Jody of her transitory place in his lair. De Certeau tells us that “everyday life reinvents itself by poaching in countless ways on the property of others.”** While preoccupied with the interactive relationship between

production and consumption, between

consumer and mass market, de Certeau’s idea of the role of poaching in everyday life is a useful conceptual window onto the machinations of Jody. His distinction between strategy and tactic helps to locate Jody within the realm of the tactical, for a strategy “assumes a place that can be circumscribed as proper and thus serve as the basis for generating relations with an exterior distinct from it” (PEL, p. xix). The institution of marriage is the “place circumscribed as proper,’ a strategic relation to the rest of the world, the exterior distinct from it. A tactic, in contrast, repre-

sents a practice that is generated from outside a territorially “proper” space/relation. As a consequence, de Certeau argues that the tactic is the 22. See B. B. King, “Paying the Cost to Be the Boss,” Live at the Apollo, GRP Records GRC-9637,

1991, and Gwen Guthrie, “Ain't Nothin’ Goi’ on But the Rent,” Good to Go Lover,

Polydor 422 829-532-4, 1986. 23. See Naughty by Nature, “O.P.P,” Naughty by Nature, Tommy Boy TBCD 1044, LOGIE 24. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley, 1984), p. xu; hereafter abbreviated PEL.

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209

sphere of the other: “a tactic depends on time—it is always on the watch for opportunities that must be seized ‘on the wing. Whatever it wins, it

does not keep. It must constantly manipulate events in order to turn them into opportunities” (PEL, p. xix). If anything, Jody is an opportunist, a tactician, one who seeks his fortune outside the process of labor

while indirectly profiting from that very process. Jody is hardly interested in deferred gratification. A prime example of Jody as a tactical entity can be found in Zora Neale Hurston’s classic, Their Eyes Were Watching God. Janie, the main character in the novel, is pressured by her grandmother into marrying Logan Killicks, a relatively prosperous man many years Janie’s senior. She abides

by her grandmother's wishes, but it is a loveless marriage. The years pass and she grows more isolated in the relationship, working on a sixty-acre farm with her Logan. One day while pumping water from the well she encounters a man walking down the road on his way to Florida, a man named Joe Starks, “a cityfied, stylish dressed man with his hat set at an angle that didn’t belong in these parts. His coat was over his arm, but he didn’t need it to represent his clothes. The shirt with the silk sleeveholders was dazzling enough for the world.”* For the rural Janie, Joe Starks represents the panache of the city, the lure of amore cosmopolitan life. She engages him in conversation and discovers that in addition to approximately three hundred dollars in his pocket, a considerable sum for a

working-class black man at the time, Joe Starks was a man of considerable He had always wanted to be a big voice,” ag says dreams and ambition. Janie. He decided to stay in town to rest “a week or two,” he says surreptitiously in order to court her (TE, pp. 48, 49). After their first encounter, they meet daily to talk about his dreams and his plans for her to bask in his luminosity. Then one day he says to her, “‘You ain't never knowed what it was to be treated lak a lady and Ah wants to be de one tuh show eee

yuh. Call me Jody lak you do sometime’” (TE, p. 50).

She eventually leaves her town and Logan to go off with him. They are destined

for Eatonville,

Florida, where Joe Starks will become

the

most prominent personality in the new black town. Over time, he comes to dominate Janie and the town in a way that makes everyone shrink in his presence. The town and all his possessions, Janie included, help constitute a shrine to Joe Starks. A revealing description of the spittoons in their home, the most palatial in Eatonville, gives the reader a sense of desire and lack that Jody, or Joe Starks, embodies:

He bought a little lady-size spitting pot for Janie to spit in. Had it right in the parlor with little sprigs of flowers painted all around the 25. Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (Urbana, Ill., 1978), p. 47; hereafter abbreviated TE.

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Michael Hanchard

sides. It took people by surprise because most of the women dipped snuff and of course had a spit-cup in the house. But how could they know up-to-date-folks was spitting in flowery little things like that? It sort of made the rest of them feel that they had been taken advantage of. Like things had been kept from them. Maybe more things in the world besides spitting pots had been hid from them. [TE, p. 76] Thus, what was both exciting and intimidating about Jody was his ability

to place things and feelings before women that they either could not afford to acknowledge or simply did not know existed. It was not merely the spittoon as commodity or thing but the world from which it came that brought attraction, curiosity, and resentment. Like Jody’s clothing and Jody himself, the spittoon came from elsewhere. Part of his attraction was his ability to convince Janie that she could accompany him elsewhere, away from a drudgery she no longer needed to know. Elsewhere brought mystery, the possibility of a new existence and the chance to explore a part of herself that was denied on Logan’s sixty acres. Jody was de Certeau’s tactical poacher, as evidenced in his daily rendezvous with Janie while Logan worked on the farm. Subsequently, Janie and Jody’s relationship diminishes over time, as she tends the grocery store while Jody manages the town post office and other businesses. Because he settles down, Joe Starks is no longer Jody and is transformed from the peripatetic seducer to the bourgeois, banal Joe Starks. Eatonville is no longer elsewhere; Janie is metaphorically chained to her existence as housewife and supplicant. Once again, her dreams are squashed by a prosperous man.

Jody’s Instability Janie, however, is able to escape the drudgery—and the subsequent wrath—of Logan Killicks, even though a newly repressed stability is the consequence.

Not so fortunate, however, are the women

whose creeping

is uncovered. While the murderous intent of Joe in Hendrix’s classic song and Booker’s plea for recuperation in “Games” represent two distinct, consequent paths after betrayal, the rupture of trust and surety in the relationship is what immediately ensues from the discovery of a lover’s tryst. It is then that both lovers must decide whether the relationship can withstand an incident, or even more, the memory of a clandestine relationship within the relationship. The full consequences of Jody’s behavior are felt and his parasitic nature is most evidenced then because he rarely suffers from the consequences of relational disruption. At the same time, he also recognizes what he has helped destroy, something larger than himself and individual desires. The structural transformation of the domestic economy is initiated by the rupture, and the woman must be prepared for a life beyond

Jody

211

her domestic partner if he decides he’s had enough. Robert Cray’s “Right Next Door” conveys insight into a seldom-seen emotional aperture in Jody’s armor, as a neighbor who listens in on a domestic fight he has caused: I can hear the couple fighting right next door, Their angry words sound clear through these thin walls Around midnight I hear him shout “unfaithful woman” And I knew right then the ax was gonna fall It’s because of me It’s because of me I heard him shout “Who is he?!” She mumbled low

He said, “Baby don’t you lie to me no more” And I’m listening through these thin walls in silent shame As he called out my name I was right next door It’s It’s It’s It’s

because because because because

of of of of

me me me me

[Refrain]

She was right next door and I’m such a strong persuader But she was just another notch on my guitar She’s gonna lose the man that really loves her In the silence I can hear their breaking hearts

At daybreak I hear him pack and say goodbye I can hear him slam the door and walk away Right next door I hear that woman start to cry

I should go to her, but what would I say It’s because of me It’s because of me Because of me

Young boy

[Refrain repeated three times]?° Beautifully rendered in these lyrics are Jody’s wistful recognition of what he has wrought and the relative cheapness of his rap as a strong persuader in relation to the first man’s broader, more noble aims. Whatever

shortcomings or limitations of the first man, he loved this woman nonetheless. This love was the basis of the cheated man’s dependability, stabil26. Robert Cray, “Right Next Door (Because of Me),” Strong Persuader, Mercury/Hightone Records UDCD 564, 1986.

212

Michael Hanchard

ity, perhaps his banality, in contrast to Jody’s characterization of his next-

door consort as “just another notch on my guitar.” The unpredictability and variability of his labor as a musician makes Cray’s guy-next-door a prime Jody suspect. The phallic symbolism of the guitar and the tabulation and inscription of conquest upon it stands in contrast to the shattered union on the other side of the wall. The social and spatial context of cohabitation are on full display at the point of rupture. A series of relationships that helped bind and differentiate the love relationship are now reconstituted. The suspecting male companion discovers that he is part of a triangle, not a dyad, and is still unaware that the man next door knows what he knows. As another notch on the guitar,

the creeping woman cannot find the same love in her erstwhile companion and must reconstruct her life in the wake of her ex-old man’s departure. Jody’s account of this scene betrays remorse, the “silent shame,” an unusual sentiment for a Jody figure. In contrast to Taylor’s “Jody,’ Hendrix’s “Hey Joe,” or Booker’s “Games,” the cheated male of “Right Next Door” leaves the scene of love and betrayal without resorting to violence or pleading. Like Logan Killicks, the betrayed male was steady, if nothing else, again obviating the intersection of two types of economy. The fact that such steady men are read out of these narratives raises several interesting questions. Is the steady working-class male simply a quaint artifact, to be relied upon but not desired? Is the price of cohabitation with such men a dullness that leads women to Jody? Perhaps Jody was once one of those men who decided, after experiencing the guile of a guy-next-door, that conventional domesticity had little virtue. The moment of rupture makes clear that rarely is there such a thing as “free love,” as Jean Carn duly noted years ago in a song of the same name, a detached sexual intercourse without individual, social, or mate-

rial consequence.”” Only the wealthy are structurally unencumbered by the departure of a domestic partner and can therefore engage in a more “free” love, though that too is not without existential dilemmas. Individual passions could only be free if they were expressed without consequence to themselves or anyone else.

Sources of Emancipation ? In late modern black popular culture, several Jody figures express an increasing self-consciousness about women’s sexual and material autonomy. The link between female compliance, male sexual propriety, and labor is ruptured, at least within the public realm of representation in 27. See Jean Carn, “Free Love,” Jean Carn, Philadelphia International Records PZ34394, 1976.

Jody = 213 popular culture. Like Jody, however, such representations must be considered within the context of a broader political economy as well as another historical and socioeconomic dimension, the circulation of cultural

productions as commodity forms in the post-civil rights era. With the desegregation of consumption in the post-civil rights era, blacks

and

whites

could

appear

in mass

media

forums,

albeit under

highly choreographed circumstances. Yet no matter how mightily Madison Avenue and Hollywood attempt to present black subjects as “new” and “innovative” in the late twentieth century, the combination of U.S.

African American stereotypes and caricatures with the pressures of entertainment capitalism betray racial integration through common consumption and representation as little more than marketing ploys that exploit extant imagery for the purposes of profit. Much contemporary visual media represents U.S. African Americans in situations of leisure and eroticism, suggesting a population that is either chronically wealthy or chronically underemployed. As suggested earlier, the absence of a working-class presence within most rap videos projecting black love and romance conveys a sense that black desires persist largely in fantasies based more upon class and status shifts than real relationships within actually existing lives. One of the consequences, I believe, of these representations is that sexually expressive figures, whether male or female, are semiotic stand-ins for entire communities.

In short, the black community zs Jody. Black women and black men have followed quite distinct paths to contemporary commodity representation, as I have outlined in the first

portion of this essay. Much of the discussion about positive images and role models in black communities,

so persuasively critiqued by Mercer

and Lubiano, is informed by the legacy of racial (mis)representation of

black people in national mass media.** Though some criticisms bear a certain prudishness, others are influenced by the fear of misrepresenta-

tion, which encompasses highly emotional,

the hegemonic characterization of blacks as

performative,

corporeally expressive, and intellectu-

ally suspect. In this context, black women and men come to symbolize the embodiment of sexuality and taboo, icons of immorality and subversion for

the ideological Right, and representations of resistance for those white, black, and otherwise who don't know any better. There is a certain historical irony to these representations of black men and woman as “free” sexual beings, since white depictions of their supposed wantonness have been used as justification for their rape and sexual abuse since racial slavery. From Venus Hottentot, whose genitalia are still on display in a Paris 28. See Kobena Mercer, “Black Masculinity and the Sexual Politics of Race,” Welcome

to the Jungle (New York, 1994), and Wahneema Lubiano, “But Compared to What? Realism,

Essentialism, and Representation in Spike Lee’s School Daze and Do the Right Thing,” Black American Literature Forum 25 (Summer

1991): 253-82.

214

Michael Hanchard

museum,

to the former Miss America Vanessa Williams, whose selection

was seen in some circles as another pioneering advance for the black race even as white feminists and black womanists were critiquing the very idea of a beauty pageant, the presumption of easy sexual access to black women underscores the different paths of black and white women to gender representation in mass media and the racially mediated expression of black aesthetics and eros, by whites as well as blacks. The video to SWV’s

1993 hit single “Downtown,”

for example, por-

trays the swimsuit-clad singing group in a luxurious pool of water, notso-subtly directing potential lovers to assume the role of Submariner.?? My suspicion concerning SWV’s remonstrations about going “Downtown” has less to do with this very feminine articulation of desire than with the commodification and representation of black people’s desires in the post-civil rights era. This is why, for example, the ephemeral furor over a rap performer

like Lil’ Kim is so racially specific, at the same time that it is largely ahistorical. Before Lil’ Kim there were Bessie Smith and Millie Jackson among a litany of raunchy, exuberant black female performers. Debates concerning their representativity of the race do not resonate in discussions about Madonna or Courtney Love because the stakes of race and gender representation are not present, at least not in the same manner. At stake here are not only the politics of racial representation but of a certain freedom of erotic representation in mass media, that is to say, individual representation without racial correlation, which U.S. African

Americans have never had. In keeping with U.S. history the cultural logic of contemporary U.S. capitalism differentiates between white women and black women in the formation of commodity symbols, only now the representation of black women and their sexualities is correlated with other forms of marketbased, consumptive “freedoms,” from Virginia Slims cigarettes®® to Cha-

nel No. 5 to cunnilingus.*! The irony of such “freedoms” is that they 29. See SWV, “Downtown,” Jt’s about Time, RCA 66074-2, 1992.

30. The temporal disjuncture here parallels Vanessa Williams’s “pioneer” status. The relentless drive for new markets has forced post-Vietnam consumer capitalism to desegregate both the marketing and consumption of commodities in a racially segregated society—no mean feat—and present the emergence or prominence of U.S. African Americans in certain positions and occupations as “advances” amidst the actual decline of particular culture industries or commodities.

In the case of cigarettes, the increasing use of black models in

advertisements in the 1980s came as the tobacco industry struggled to diversify its product line and image in response to shrinking domestic markets and lawsuits in response to its willful retail of aharmful product and its concealment of carcinogenic chemical properties in the manufacture of cigarettes. 31. This portion of my argument was motivated in part by Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106 (June 1993): 1707-91. Harris explains the material implications of whiteness in U.S. public law largely as an outcome of racial inequality, but without much discussion of the repercussions of whiteness for black commodification and subjectivity. By way of amplification and extension, I would like to extend Harris’s analysis

Jody

213,

come, like Vanessa Williams’s beauty queen status, when the very cultural

legitimacy of the ritual itself is in question or, in the case of cigarette and alcohol consumption, the benefits of a particular object of consumption are in doubt.

This difference pervades the race and gender distinctions in representations of black and white women. Advertisements for luxury items, particularly cars and houses, invariably house well-coiffed, middle- and

upper-class white women. Like the commodities they are presented with, they require deferred gratification—saving and investment. Black women

are rarely found in advertisements for luxury cars, refrigerators,

exotic vacations, and homes (except for HUD homes), in contrast to their

relatively increased visibility in advertisements for comestibles or cosmetics.

In the encounter between the expression of black sexualities and market forces, I believe one should be suspicious of what is actually being

hawked, by whom, and for what purposes. The newness of the location of certain black icons in mass and elite commercial representation should not be confused with the icons themselves, which existed before their rerepresentation as objects of white fantasy or revulsion. In certain white gazes, Jody is a symbolic stand-in for black men writ large; Lil’ Kim, MC Lyte, and other sexually explicit female rappers are merely their female

equivalents. Both are often perceived in Tipper Gore-like fashion as men-

aces to youth purity. Outside black communities, Jody may not have the same explanatory power, due to the difference and distance between black public discourse and commercial representation of such discourse for largely white audiences.

Conclusion Johnnie Taylor’s admiration for Jody’s ability to express himself suggests, at the very least, an ability to perceive and relate to a constellation of senses different from his own. The very idea that Jody would appeal to some women, if only for instrumental purposes, suggests that some women contextualize rather than subordinate their sexual and sensual satisfaction in relation to home,

marriage, or domestic

stability. In other

words, these women are no different from their domestic counterparts who happen to be male. by emphasizing the materiality of whiteness as the outcome of a dynamic process in which whiteness and blackness have been allocated distinct material values in racial representation in the U.S. Thus while whiteness in the sense I am writing of in this section of the essay is a more valued commodity, its value can only be comprehensively assessed in relation to the racial representation of black aesthetics, expression, and material culture as an inferior or less valuable commodity form.

216

Michael Hanchard This in itselfis a subversion of conventional domesticity, though not

without risk. The pleasure and reality principles clash with one another here, for what is pleasurable may not be useful or beneficial to other aspects of a woman’s or man’s life. For as Marcuse argues, “the fact that

the reality principle has to be re-established continually . . . indicates that its triumph over the pleasure principle is never complete and never secure .... What civilization masters and represses—the claim of the pleasure principle—continues to exist in civilization itself”? In the space and time of the Jody figures, the Freudian distinction between pleasure and reality principles blurs, and the time of paid labor becomes arbitrary. The reality of people working different schedules (day,

swing, and night shifts, for example), intermittent employment, underemployment, and unemployment increases the possibility of circumstan-

tial encounters occurring at moments when one person’s workday ends and another begins, or while one person works and another does not.

Some married men I know expressly forbid their wives to allow men into their homes while they are at work. The imposition of labor time upon people’s daily lives is often underscored, not by the conventions of labor time itself, but by people who do not labor under the temporal rubric of nine to five (not to mention those who do not labor at all). Those who do not labor under the fictitious nineto-five rubric, like the homeless, are often looked upon with condescen-

sion, distrust, or scorn. Obversely, the few who are capable of earning huge sums of money with few routinized daily constraints are often looked upon with envy. Those whose relationship to labor or a “straight” profession is not immediately or easily discerned are often viewed suspiciously—drug dealers, hustlers, musicians—particularly if they do not seem worse off for their abstention. When one considers perceptions of labor time in daily life and how such perceptions relate to sex and romance, one has only to think about how many songs have begun or ended with couples who have flouted the clock by having sex in the morning and have thus arrived late to work, or if the moment moves them they have forsaken work altogether—at least for a day. Labor once again serves to underscore its conflicts with other dimensions of temporality or human time; our body clocks have erotic and circadian rhythms that of-

ten clash with the temporal responsibilities of wage or salaried labor. The sexual and ethical tensions of what one could call Jodyness emerge when people are forced to acknowledge his presence within and decide whether he should roam and thereby rule. Principles concerning the husband, wife, boyfriend, or girlfriend who is off limits are brakes upon Jody. The erosion of distinction between pleasure and reality principles and a recognition that Jody lurks within all of us, male and female, 32. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Ciwilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston, WISN), ore TNS:

Jody

27:

may provide a perspective on Jody’s trespasses so that they do not end in murder,

maiming, or mayhem. The ending of relationships, their revi-

sion, or the beginning of new ones, along with the acknowledgement of human weakness, may be the more appropriate responses.** Thus, Jody becomes an outlet for satisfaction, frustration, or revenge, depending upon the predicaments of the women

with whom

he

becomes involved. Involvement with Jody could be a woman’s response to a philandering or inattentive spouse, as Taylor noted, or to a girlfriend who praises Jody’s talents. This last point, the sharing of information be-

tween women concerning a Jody highlights the manner in which Jody operates as a referent for certain female desires that are often articulated within a community of women, with full knowledge of his limitations as a provider, husband, boyfriend, or father figure. Women

have an invest-

ment in the formulation of magic when their relationship has none. Jody serves to underscore the incompleteness of pleasure repression within oneself and in another and, if only momentarily, provides some magic. Ultimately, the conundrum of race/not-race helps frame the reception of the Jody figure. The lyrics of virtually all Jody and Jody-related songs narrate the normative matrix of cohabitation and sexual fidelity to be found

in many

societies, cultures, and peoples.

It is only when

the

cohabitational relationship of two people who happen to be “black” gets _ read as “black domesticity” that the trials and tribulations of love relationships are interpreted as threats to the black family in general and black men and women as potential lovers in particular. The burden and overburden of racial representation then conflates a more general problematic with cultural specificity and, consequently, allows much less space for black people to be human. Jody’s ability to imagine a certain type of black woman and her frustrations in relation to black masculinity and heterosexuality means that he at least recognizes the alterity of black women. He neither accepts nor respects the presumed linkages among home, labor, male virtuosity, and

female virtue. The idea that there are never enough black women or men to go around is not merely an economy of a particular population, but an economy of that population's desires. This is where Jody comes in.

33. Referring to his wife in the second person, George Clinton said in an interview that “if you just gave somebody some pussy I might pout for three, four, five hours. But I ain't leaving so ain't no sense in me go runnin’ about ‘you dirty bitch.” For Clinton, there is something going on besides his own feelings and desires, as well as something beyond the rent (George Clinton, “Brother from Another Planet,” interview by Vernon Reid, Vibe [Nov. 1993]: 48).

Coupling

Photographs by Laura Letinsky

Foreword by Joel Snyder

We may avow a theoretical advantage permitting us to see through the most ordinary accounts of what photographs are, but it is nearly impos-

sible to look at Laura Letinsky’s pictures without taking them, at least at first glance, as reports about, or evidence of private moments in middle-

class bedrooms, propped as they are with slept-in and loved-upon beds, wrinkled sheets, carelessly furled blankets, cups and toothbrushes, bed-

steads and mirrors carrying displaced images, counterparts of the lives lived in these rooms—lives lived with apparent unselfconsciousness. But Letinsky’s photographs are not candid; they are not the products of surveillance made from behind a one-way mirror, or by a camera controlled

from a distance, or by a secreted camera programmed to take exposures at random moments. The photographer is present to the subjects, at tames the photographer is a subject, and, so, what is represented in the “Coupling” pictures is difficult to name. The apparent immediacy of the pictures, the way they strike us, our response to their evident privacy—these must give way to a much more complicated arrangement of thoughts that in turn provoke a different understanding of the pictures: the photographer arranges the scene, establishes the relations and positions of the people who live in these rooms, directs them and so makes them into players, composes the pictures, and snaps the shutter. These pictures are display pieces, meant to be seen in public exhibition, enlarged to twenty by twenty-four or thirty by forty inches. Reading and viewing pictures in books are insular, private activities, even when performed in public; they

are akin to listening to music with headphones. The activity may be out in the open, but the experience remains situated in the listener, unavailPhotographs © 1998 by Laura Letinsky. Used with permission.

218

Coupling

21g

able to bystanders. But Letinsky’s photographs are meant to be seen in the company of bystanders, meant to be understood as having been produced for an “us” and not for an “I,” and, as such, they deform the conditions we had thought were constitutive of the difference between public and private. The actors in the photographs do not perform for each

other; they follow the directions of the photographer who means for them to perform not for her, but for us. There is then no need for them

to pretend we are not there, that we are not part of what is being represented. The pretense of unselfconsciousness before the camera is not re-

quired by these pictures. There is no need for the actors to engage in the fiction of being unaware of the camera lens that is the condition of their representation—of being oblivious to us in our presence. These pictures are not the counterpart of traditional theater or film.

In a remarkable doubling of the doubling already built into these pictures, Letinsky turns her back and her nakedness to us (fig. 2), shows us her undress (and, of course, as

a member of her own audience, shows

it to herself in the form of this picture) while in her mirrored reflection she gazes at herself covering her undress by withholding the view of her body from herself and from Eric who lies on the bed looking at her and seeing what we and she can see in the mirror; but he cannot engage her nakedness as we can. Eric, the condition of Laura’s intimacy, cannot achieve the intimacy with her that we as viewers already have until he becomes one of us—one of the members of her public. There is then, in the project of “Coupling,” a trading of traditional places, a productive

negotiation between viewers and viewed. In these pictures, the relationship of intimacy begins simultaneously with publicity.

Joel Snyder is professor and chair of the department of art history at the University of Chicago. He is a coeditor of Critical Inquiry and author

of numerous essays on photography. Laura Letinsky is assistant professor on the Committee of Art and Design at the University of Chicago. She has exhibited her work at the Chicago Humanities Institute; Le Mois de la Photo, Quebec; the San Francisco Museum of Art; and White Columns Gallery, New York, among others.

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On Diasporic Intimacy: Ilya Kabakov’s Installations and Immigrant Homes

Svetlana Boym

Russian émigré writer Nina Berberova tells a story of domestic embarrassment. Some time in the early 1930s the writer Ivan Bunin paid a visit to Berberova and poet Vladislav Khodasevich in their little flat in the working-class outskirts of Paris that were populated by immigrants. The apartment hardly had any furniture and no particular dinner was served that night. Yet Bunin was irritated by Berberova’s precarious domesticity:

““How do you like that! They have an embroidered cock on the teapot!” exclaimed Bunin once as he entered our dining room. “Who could have imagined it! Poets, as we all know, live in a ditch, and now it turns out

they have a cock on the teapot!’”' The embroidered cock symbolized a certain intimacy with everyday objects that appeared to be in profoundly bad taste for Russian intellectuals in exile. For Bunin, it was an example of domestic kitsch that compromised the purity of Russian nostalgia. The

embroidered cock seemed like a cover-up of exilic pain; it betrayed a Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own. 1. Nina Berberova, The Italics Are Mine, trans. Philippe Radley (New York, 1991), p. 338. Historically, the term émigré has referred to political exiles. Hence, it would apply to

Berberova and the Soviet exiles who came to the United States as refugees and until glasnost could never go back. However, my discussion of diasporic intimacy has broader implications and in this context I use the terms immigrants, exiles, and émigrés interchangeably. It is not within the scope of my paper to discuss the social, political, and economic differences among them (which are often far from obvious: not all émigrés belonged to the upper or middle class, and not all immigrants are poor). It should be noted however that exiles and

émigrés usually cannot go back “home.” Diasporic intimacy is an inclusive rather than an exclusive category. For further inspiring discussion of diaspora, cosmopolitanism, homeland, and immigrant poetics, see the journal Diaspora, and Nation and Narration, ed. Homi

Bhabha (New York, 1990).

226

On Diasporic Intimacy

Za7.

desire to inhabit exile, to build a home away from home. Berberova confesses to love that other deliberately chosen and freely inhabited domesticity that “is neither a ‘nest’ nor biological obligation” but something “warm, pleasant, and becoming to men.” She did not give up her embroidered

teapot, whose decorative cock turned out to be a dangerous

exilic bird. This embroidery was a handmade gift sent to Berberova from the Soviet Union by a woman friend who ended up in Siberian exile for having contacts abroad. Hardly an item of domestic kitsch, it was a souvenir of transient, exilic intimacy. The notion of intimacy is connected to home; intimate means “inner-

most,” “pertaining to. . . one’s I will speak about something intimacy that is not opposed constituted by it. In the late themselves

displaced from

deepest nature,” “very personal,” “sexual. that might seem paradoxical—a diasporic to uprootedness and defamiliarization but twentieth century millions of people find 99 66

3

their places of birth, living in voluntary or

involuntary exile. Their intimate experiences occur against a foreign background, where they are aware of the unfamiliar stage set whether they like it or not. Immigrants to the United States, moreover, often bring with them different traditions of social interaction, often less individualis-

tic than those they encounter in their new surroundings. In contemporary American pop psychology one is encouraged “not to be afraid of intimacy,’ with a presumption that intimate communication can and should be made in plain language. You’d have to feel at home to be intimate, “to say what you mean.” Immigrants—and

many alienated natives

as well—can't help but dread this kind of plain language. To intimate also means “to communicate with a hint or other indirect sign; [to] imply

subtly.’* Diasporic intimacy can be approached only through indirection and intimation, through stories and secrets. It is spoken in a foreign lan-

guage that reveals the inadequacies of translation. Diasporic intimacy does not promise an unmediated emotional fusion but only a precarious affection—no less deep, while aware of its transience. In contrast to the

utopian images of intimacy as transparency, authenticity, and ultimate belonging, diasporic intimacy is dystopian by definition; it is rooted in 2. Berberova, The Italics Are Mine, p. 338. 3. American Heritage Dictionary, s. v. “intimate.” 4. Ibid.

Svetlana Boym is professor of Slavic and comparative literature at Harvard University. She is the author of Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (1994), Death in Quotation Marks: Cultural Myths of the Modern Poet (1991), and of the play and film The Woman Who Shot Lenin. She has just completed her next book, The Future of Nostalgia.

228

Svetlana Boym

the suspicion of a single home. It thrives on unpredictable chance encounters, on hope for human

understanding.

Yet this hope is not uto-

pian. Diasporic intimacy is not limited to the private sphere but reflects collective frameworks of memory that encapsulate-even the most personal of dreams. It is haunted by images of home and homeland, yet it

also discloses some of the furtive pleasures of exile. Intimacy has its own historical topography. In the Western tradition it reflects the colonization of the world by a private individual. The maps of intimacy expand through the centuries: from precarious medieval re-

treats—a corner by the window or in the hallway, a secluded spot behind the orchard, a forest clearing—to the ostentatious bourgeois interiors of the nineteenth century, with their innumerable curio cabinets and chests of drawers, to the end of the twentieth century’s transitory locations—the back seat of a car, a train compartment, an airport bar, a home page on the web. It might appear that intimacy is on the outskirts of the social; it is local and particular, socially superfluous and noninstrumental. Yet, for

better or for worse, each romance with intimacy is adulterated by a specific culture and society. The revulsion against the embroidered cock on the teapot might surprise an American reader for whom the pursuit of domestic happiness goes together with spiritual fulfillment, not in opposition to it. While intimate experiences are personal and singular, the maps

of intimate sites are socially recognizable; they are encoded as refuges of the individual.® Intimacy is not solely a private matter; it may be protected, manipulated, or besieged by the state, framed by art, embellished by memory, or estranged by critique.

The twentieth century embraced intimacy as an ideal and also rendered it deeply suspicious. Hannah Arendt, for instance, criticizes intimacy as a retreat from worldliness. Whether the middle-class cult of intimacy or a special relationship cherished by a pariah group, a form of

brotherhood that allows one to survive in a hostile world, intimacy, as Arendt sees it, is the shrinking of experience, something that binds us to

a community (even if it is a pariah community), to home and homeland, rather than to the world.® Similarly, Richard Sennett argues that in contemporary American society the cult of intimacy has turned into a form of seductive tyranny that promised warmth, authentic disclosure, and boundless closeness and effectively led to the detriment of the public sphere and sociability.’ Sennett’s critique is directed against the late twentieth-century commercialized 5. See Philippe Aries, introduction

version of the Protestant cult of auto Passions of the Renaissance,

trans. Arthur Gold-

hammer, ed. Roger Chartier, vol. 3 of A History of Private Life (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 3:1-7, and Orest Ranum, “The Refuges of Intimacy,” in A History of Private Life, 3:207-63. 6. See Hannah Arendt, “On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts about Lessing,” trans. Clara and Richard Winston, Men in Dark Times (New York, 1968), pp. 15-16. 7. See Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York, 1977), pp. 337-40.

On Diasporic Intimacy

C27

thenticity that could make everyday life inartistic, humorless, divested of

worldliness and public significance. In this case intimacy is no longer a retreat from but a fulfillment of the dominant cultural ideology. This ideology of intimacy—not so much as actual experience but as promise, even as an entitlement—pervades all spheres of American life, from slick fresh breath advertisements of family values to informal support groups and minority communities. The diasporic intimacy that interests me is neither the touchy-feely imperative of the fresh breath commercial nor the fraternal/sororial warmth of a minority group. Diasporic intimacy does not promise a comforting recovery of identity through shared nostalgia for the lost home and homeland. In fact, it’s the opposite. It might be seen as the mutual enchantment of two immigrants from different parts of the world or as the sense of the fragile coziness of a foreign home. Just as one learns to live with alienation and reconciles oneself to the uncanniness of the world around and to the strangeness of the human touch, there comes a surprise, a pang of intimate recognition, a hope that sneaks in through the back door, punctuating the habitual estrangement of everyday life abroad. A cultural genealogy of diasporic intimacy leads us away from the history of private life. We have to look for its modern beginnings in the alienating and illuminating experiences of the metropolis, in the double consciousness of the urban wanderers at once estranged from and engaged with the life around them. In his well-known essay on Baudelaire,

Walter Benjamin speaks of a love at last sight in which a wanderer encounters an unknown woman in an urban crowd and experiences a shock of recognition and a sexual shudder.* The passerby disappears into urban anonymity, leaving behind a few declarations oflove in the future perfect.

This intimate shock occurs in the impersonal city crowd, not in the designated private refuge. Yet this extravagant love at last sight could be quite gratifying. Rather than seeming a melancholic sorrow, it reveals itself as

a miracle of possibilities. Love at last sight strikes urban strangers when they realize they are on stage, at once actors and spectators. Georg Simmel, too, describes modern sociability as a playful and artistic form of association, “related to the content-determined

concreteness of associa-

tion as art is to reality.”® What might appear as an aestheticization of social existence to the “native,” strikes the immigrant as an accurate depiction of the condition of exile. That is, of course, when

the first hardships are over and the

8. Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” I/wmimations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Arendt (New York, 1968), p. 169.

9. Georg Simmel, “Sociability,” On Individuality and Social Forms: Selected Writings, ed. Donald N. Levine (Chicago, 1971), p. 130. Iam grateful to Gabriella Turnaturi for bringing it to my attention. See Gabriella Turnaturi, Flirt, seduzione, amore: Simmel e le emozioni (1994).

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immigrant can afford the luxury of leisurely reflection. Immigrants always perceive themselves onstage, their lives resembling a mediocre fiction with occasional romantic outbursts and gray dailiness. Sometimes they see themselves as heroes of a novel, but such ironic realizations do not stop them from suffering through each and every novelistic collision of their own lives. As for the sexual shock, it becomes a commonplace.

What is much more uncommon is a recognition of a certain kind of tenderness that could be more shuddering and surprising than a sexual fantasy. Benjamin’s love at last sight is the spasm of loss after the revelation;

the tenderness of the exiles is about a revelation of possibility after the loss. It is when the loss has been taken for granted that one can be surprised that not everything has been lost. Tenderness is not about complete disclosure, saying what one really means, getting closer and closer. It excludes absolute possession and fusion. It defies symbols offulfillment and is not very goal oriented. In the words of Roland Barthes, “Tenderness ... is nothing but an infinite, insatiable metonymy” and a “miraculous crystallization of presence.”!® In tenderness, need and desire are joined. Tenderness is always polygamous, nonexclusive. “Where you are tender you speak your plural.”'! The reciprocal enchantment of exiles has

a touch

of lightness

about

it. And,

as

Italo

Calvino

points

out,

lightness does not mean being detached from reality but cleansing it from its gravity, looking at it obliquely but not necessarily less profoundly.'” Diasporic intimacy is belated and never final; objects and places were

lost in the past, and one knows that they can be lost again. The illusion of complete belonging has been shattered. Yet, one discovers that there is still a lot to share. The foreign backdrop, the memory of past losses, and the recognition of transience do not obscure the shock of intimacy but rather heighten the pleasure and intensity of surprise. I would leave the reciprocal enchantment of exiles for future scholarly elaboration and focus, instead, on the imagination of home and on

deliberate domesticity in exile. My site of diasporic intimacy is the “second home,’ which preserves many archeological layers of underground homemaking, fantasmic habitats, clandestine spaces of escape and intimacy. Here aesthetic and everyday practices become closely intertwined. One cannot theorize intimacy without exploring a few particular instances that have to be culture specific. My examples should not be seen as exemplary but rather as contradictory and somewhat contingent on my own background and research. However, I hope that, while particular, they will not be seen as local and exceptional. After all, it is precisely

the common experience of dislocation that makes intimacy possible. We 10. Roland Barthes, A Lover’ Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (New York,

1978), pp. 224, 225. 11. Ibid., p. 225. 12. See Italo Calvino, “Lightness,” Six Memos for the Next Millennium (Cambridge, Mass.,

1988), pp. 3-31.

On Diasporic Intimacy will start with home

231

as art and then visit the homes of exile and their

displays of diasporic souvenirs.

Intimate Art: Ilya Kabakov’s Toilets and the Palace of the Future The Russian word for intimacy—intimnost’—is of foreign origins and is registered only in twentieth-century dictionaries. Intimacy was decried as a dangerous bourgeois remainder in the 1920s during the campaigns against “domestic trash” and the aftereffects of the New Economic Policy. Intimnost’ came to be fashionable in the 1960s when private life became a kind of escape from the official public life. Intimate spaces were created with the help of those much coveted Yugoslav standing lamps with bright lampshades, which provided a focalized lighting, illuminating the secret spaces of unofficial interaction. Yet, intimnost’ was neither a family value nor even the experience of a couple, but was staged against some sort of collective background. This background might have been the official collective or a communal apartment, where most urban dwellers resided

and from which they dreamed of escaping, or it might have been an intimate circle of friends that carved out their own alternative communality within the official edifice.'* In the early 1960s, at the time of Khrushchev’s

thaw, such gatherings were humorously called “kitchen salons” and could be seen as the nucleus of civil society under the Soviet regime. In Brezhnev’s time the kitchen salons gave way to the apartment exhibits of unofficial or antiofficial art. Artist Ilya Kabakov pays tribute to those shared experiences of paradoxical Soviet intimacy. In the 1990s he created a series of labyrinthine “total installations” that represented the Soviet home in exile. Defamiliarizing home and inhabiting the uninhabitable are the two main obsessions that drive his work. Each installation stages an intimate encounter of the artist with his past and invites the viewers to do the same. Yet, this kind of intimate encounter with the past is never strictly personal; rather, it unfolds against the background of Soviet ruins, the ruins of the last mod-

ern utopia. One of his most “intimate” projects, The Toilets, provoked a national scandal after which he never returned to Russia. In the 1970s Kabakov was close to the Moscow conceptualist movement, the last unofficial and occasionally underground art group, which became known in that decade through a series of apartment art exhibits (called aptart), samizdat editions, and events, some of which resulted in

13. For a further discussion of the campaign against domestic trash, the communal apartment as a cultural site, and the conception of public and private, the aesthetic and the everyday in Russian and Soviet contexts, see my “The Archeology of Banality: The Soviet Home,” Public Culture 6 (Winter 1994): 263-92 and my Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge, Mass., 1994).

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Svetlana Boym

direct confrontations with the Soviet police and arrests. These artists created a rebuslike language of Soviet memory in which the official ideological symbols coexisted with trivial objets trouvés, unoriginal quotes, slogans, and domestic trash. The works of the conceptualists were often regarded as a Soviet parallel to pop art, but there was one significant difference:

instead of advertisement culture they used the trivial and drab rituals of

Soviet everyday life, too banal and insignificant to be recorded anywhere else, made taboo not because of their potential political explosiveness but because of their sheer ordinariness, their “all-too-human” scale. The con-

ceptualists “quote” both the Russian avant-garde and socialist realism, as well as amateur crafts, kitsch, and collections of useless objects by ordinary people. Kabakov’s work always contains a dialogue between the ordinary and the utopian. Ifin the Soviet Union his work took the form of albums and

fragmentary collections of Soviet objets trouvés, in exile Kabakov embraced the genre of total installation. Yet this totality is always precarious, and there is always something incomplete in his works, something about to break or to leak.'* The artist’s fate embodies many of the paradoxes of post-Soviet memory—from his own personal identification to the public reception of his work. Kabakov, according to the fifth line (“Nationality”)

in the Soviet passport, is Jewish; he was born in Dnepropetrovsk, the area in the Ukraine most heavily populated by Russians, and spent most of his life in Moscow. Even after the breakup of the Soviet Union and his departure from Russia, he called himself neither a Russian nor a Ukrainian artist, but a Soviet artist. That, of course, is an ironic self-definition. The

end of the Soviet Union has put an end to the myth of the Soviet dissident artist. Sovietness, in this case, does not refer to politics but to a common culture. In what way is Kabakov a nostalgic Soviet artist? He embraces the idea of collective art; his installations offer an interactive narrative that could not exist without the viewer. Moreover, he turns himself into a

kind of ideal communist collective made up of his own embarrassed alter egos, which include untalented artists, amateur collectors, and the “little

men”

of nineteenth-century

Russian

literature—Gogolian

characters

with Kafkaesque shadows—as well as the Soviet “little men,” the anonymous communal apartment dwellers. Kabakov’s installations evoke collective memories of intimate experiences of the Soviet era. We will begin our tour of the Kabakovian home with its most private

part—the toilet. Kabakov’s installation The Toilets was presented at the 1992 Kassel Documenta show. An exact replica of provincial Soviet toilets, 14. This progression from fragment to totality is not a one-way street. Moreover, each total installation in itself embodies the Kabakovian work of memory, creating a complete environment which includes Kabakov’s earlier works, fragments from his albums, paintings,

everyday objects, the collectibles of obsessive communal apartment neighbors, sketches by untalented artists, and communal trash. Each installation becomes a kind of museum for Kabokov’s earlier work, something like matreshka dolls, with many layers of memory.

On Diasporic Intimacy

Fic. 1.—Ilya Kabakoy, The Toilets, 1992. Installation. Documenta, the artist.

293

Kassel. Courtesy of

the kind that one encounters in bus and train stations, was brought to

Kassel (fig. 1). Kabakov describes them as “sad structures with walls of white lime turned dirty and shabby, covered by obscene graffiti that one cannot look at without being overcome with nausea and despair.”!® The original toilets didn’t have any stall doors: everyone could see each other answering the call of nature in what in Russian was called “the eagle position,” to be assumed while perched over the black hole. Like ordinary people’s residences, toilets were communal. Voyeurism became nearly obsolete; rather, one developed the opposite tendency, less tempted to eavesdrop than to close one’s eyes. Everyone who used the toilet had to accept the conditions of total visibility. Women’s and men’s toilets looked alike. The toilets were placed behind the main building of Documenta, just where the outside toilets would normally be. Viewers had to stand in line to enter. Once

inside, they find themselves

in an ordinary Soviet two-

room apartment, one that might be inhabited by “some respectable and quiet people” (J, p. 162) (figs. 2 and 3). Here, side by side with the black hole, everyday life continues uninterrupted. There is a table with a tablecloth, a glass cabinet, bookshelves, a sofa with a pillow, a reproduction of an anonymous Dutch painting, and children’s toys, creating the sense of a captured presence: the dishes have not yet been cleared; a jacket has 15. Ilya Kabakov, Installations 1983-1995 (Paris, 1995), p. 162; hereafter abbreviated J.

}

¢

The 2.—Kabakov, Fic. Toilets.

On Diasporic Intumacy

Fic. 3.—Kabakov,

Dee

The Toilets.

been dropped on a chair. Where are the apartment residents? They might have just stepped out for a moment to visit the Documenta exhibit. Kabakov’s exhibits are never entirely site-specific; rather, they are about displaced homes. They never include the human figure: it is the

visitor to the exhibit who becomes a protagonist in Kabakov’s narrative by inhabiting his empty interiors. In an interview, Kabakov declares that

the project had two points of origin: his childhood memories and the circumstances that brought the installation to life. The artist tells the fol-

lowing story: After he was accepted as a child to a boarding school for art in Moscow, his mother decided to quit her job and move from Dneprope-

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Svetlana Boym

trovsk to be with him. But she could not rent anything in the city, not even

a corner, without a residence permit. So she became a laundry woman in the boarding school and slept in the laundry room, actually an old bath-

room in which the toilets still remained. She arranged her folding bed there and kept the room meticulously tidy. Then the cleaning lady informed on her to the director and she was chased out. In Kabakov’s own words, his mother felt “homeless and defenseless vis-a-vis the authorities, while, on the other hand, she was so tidy and meticulous that her honesty

and persistence allowed her to survive in the most improbable place. My child psyche was traumatized by the fact that my mother and I never had a corner to ourselves” (J, p. 163). Yet, Kabakov

does not dwell for too long on his childhood

sorrows

but displaces the story onto another level. His tale of the project’s conception is a tongue-in-cheek story of apoor Russian artist summoned to the sanctuary of the Western artistic establishment, the Docwmenta show, much to his embarrassment and humiliation:

With my usual nervousness I had the impression that I had been invited to see the Queen or to the palace where the fate of the arts is decided. For the artist this is a kind of Olympic Games. . . . The poor soul of a Russian impostor was in agony in front of these legitimate representatives of great contemporary art. Finding myself in this terrifying state, on the verge of suicide, I distanced myself from those great men, approached the window and looked out.... “Mama, help”—I begged in silence. . . . At last, my mother spoke to me from the other world and made me look through the window into the yard—and there I saw the toilets. Immediately the whole conception of the project was in front of my eyes to a minute detail. I was saved.

LU, pp. 163-64]'° This is a Cinderella tale of a post-Soviet artist who, with the help of his mom—at once a fairy and a muse—discovers his miracle toilets. The two origins of the toilet project are linked—the mother’s embarrassment is reenacted by her artist son, who feels like an impostor, an illegal alien in the home of the Western contemporary art establishment. The toilet becomes the artist’s diasporic home, an island of Sovietness with an insup-

pressible nostalgic smell that persists even in the most sanitized Western museum. Yet, for Kabakov, the museum is not simply a space of institutional alienation, quite the contrary, the museum can be intimately inhabited, turned into a perfect stage for diasporic intimacy. In his museum installation

of Soviet toilets, Kabakov

redeems

the panic and embar-

rassment of his childhood through humor and aesthetic play. This redemption, of course, remains tantalizingly incomplete.

Another point of origin for Kabakov’s toilets is to be found in the 16. Then Kabakov proceeds to argue with Dante that it is not love that inspires art but fear and panic.

On Diasporic Intimacy

Fic. 4.—Marcel Duchamp, Fountain,

227

1917.

Western avant-garde tradition. There is a clear toiletic intertextuality between this project and Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, the mass-produced porcelain pissoir that Duchamp placed on a pedestal, signed with a pseudonym (R. Mutt), and proposed to exhibit at the American Society

for Independent Artists (fig. 4). The exhibition’s jury rejected the project, saying that while the urinal was a useful object, it was “by no definition, a work of art.” In twentieth-century art history, this rejection has been seen as the birth of conceptual art and as an artistic revolution—one that happened to take place in 1917, a few months before the Russian Revolution. Subsequently, the original “intimate” pissoir splashed by the artist’s

signature vanished under mysterious circumstances, and the artistic pho-

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Svetlana Boym

tograph by Alfred Stieglitz made from the “lost original” added the aura of uniqueness

to radical avant-garde

gesture, making the pissoir look

“like anything from a Madonna to a Buddha.”!” In 1964, Duchamp himself made an etching from Stieglitz’s photograph and signed it with his own name. The permutations of the best-known toilet in art history perform a series of defamiliarizations, both of the mass-produced everyday object and the concept of art itself, ending with a paradox: by the end of the century, Duchamp’s artistic cult imbued everything he touched—if only by a signature—with an artistic aura, securing him a unique place in the modern museum. In comparison with Kabakov’s toilet, Duchamp’s pissoir really does look like a fountain—clean, Western, and individualistic. Besides, scato-

logical profanity itself became a kind of avant-garde convention—part of early twentieth-century culture as represented by Bataille, Leiris, and so forth. Kabakov’s installation is not merely about radical defamiliarization and recontextualization but also, more strikingly, about inhabiting the most uninhabitable space, in this case the toilet. Instead of Duchamp’s sculpturelike ready-made, we have here an intimate environment that invites walking through, storytelling, and touching. The artist’s own artistic touch is visible throughout. Kabakov took great care in arranging the objects and things in the inhabited

rooms

side by side with the toilet,

those metonymical memory-triggers of Soviet everyday life. It is revealing, though, that there is no representation of a human

figure in Kabakov’s work. One is reminded of Benjamin’s description of his memory

work in Berlin Chronicle, where the writer speaks about re-

membering places of his childhood but not the faces of people. The place appeared emptied, estranged, devoid of its inhabitants, but it preserved

the aura of their glances, traces of encounters, many archeological levels of recollections. Kabakov offers a similar kind of topography of memory with his domestic interiors, inhabited oases next to the toilet.

Kabakov tried to resist the interpretation of the project as a single symbol or metaphor. This, however, was beyond his control. In the Russian press he was reviewed very negatively: in spite of the political differences among his reviewers, they all seemed to agree that the toilets were an insult to the Russian people and to Russian national pride. Many reviewers invoked a curious Russian proverb, “Do not take your trash out of your hut” (“ne vynosi sor iz izby”), which counsels not to criticize one’s

own people in front of strangers and foreigners. The proverb dates back to an ancient peasant custom of sweeping trash into a corner of the dwelling and burying it inside rather than outside, since it was feared that evil people might use the trash to cast spells on the occupants.'® In recalling 17. Quoted in Dalia Judovitz, Unpacking Duchamp: Art in Transit (Berkeley, 1996), pp. 124, 125; see also pp. 124-35. 18. See Vladimir Dal’, Tolkovyi slovar’ zhivago velikorusskogo iazyka, 4 vols. (St. Petersburg,

1882), 4:275.

On Diasporic Intimacy

ae

this superstition, the reviewers called for intimate memories—in Kabakov’s case, shared intimate memories with clear collective Soviet frame-

works—to be hidden, especially from the international community or from one’s own estranging gaze. Kabakov’s domestic trash from the Soviet era was regarded as a profanation of Russia. Kabakov shunned this negative symbolic interpretation of his project. It is hard to imagine Duchamp’s pissoir being interpreted as an insult to French culture. It was seen as a slap in the face of art in general, beyond national boundaries. Kabakov re-created his toilets with such meticulousness—working personally on every crack on the window, every splash of paint, every stain—that the inhabited toilet turned into an evocative memory theater, irreducible to univocal symbolism. Yet, the insults that Kabakov received are part of being a “Soviet artist” —a role that he chose for himself not without inner irony and nostalgic sadomasochism. Russian critics expropriated the artist’s toilets and reconstructed them as symbols of national shame. Russian national mythology had no place for ironic nostalgia. The largest of Kabakov’s total installations, shown at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in the summer of 1996, was, in a way, his ironic homage to the never realized Palace of the Soviets, the most grandiose of Stalin’s

projects, imagined on the site of the destroyed Cathedral of Christ the Savior. The installation, entitled This Is How We Live, represents a major construction site of the Palace of the Future, with a grand panel representing the city of the future in the center and workers’ barracks around it (figs. 5 and 6).!° As one walks through the exhibit one begins to realize that the construction of the Palace of the Future has long been abandoned and that the scaffoldings are nothing but ruins and debris. The temporary workers’ houses became permanent; everyday life took root on the site of an unfinished utopia. When Benjamin visited Moscow in 1927 one of the few Russian words he learned was remont (repairs) from

the signs that were everywhere. In Kabakov’s exhibit repair becomes a key metaphor—the exhibit is a utopia under repair. A utopia tends to be sanitized and antiseptic. Its ruins, on the other hand, are intimate and

domesticated. The exhibit uses the actual basement of the Centre Pompidou, and the imported trash of the Palace of the Future peacefully coexists with the garbage of the palace of modern art. The museum, for Kabakoy, is at

once a sanctuary and a dump for cultural trash. A visit to the exhibit is all about trespassing the boundaries between the aesthetic and everyday life. One is never sure where the total installation begins and ends. Visi19. The construction site is surrounded by barracks of different shapes and forms where workers and their families lived. In the basement where the foundations of the unfinished Palace of the Future have been laid are several “public rooms” in which cheerful Soviet songs are playing, each room decorated by a single socialist-realist painting representing labor, leisure, and the bright communist future.

sos NAAN

Fic. 5.—Ilya Kabakov, This IsHow We Live, 1996. Installation. Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Courtesy of the artist. The large panel represents a utopian model of the Palace of the Future. aaa

Ait vw

\

;, 6.—Overview of This IsHow We Live, with the workers’ barracks.

On Diasporic Intimacy

241

Fics. 7-9.—This Is How We Live. Domestic interiors of the workers’ barracks.

tors begin by not being able to find the exhibit: instead of feeling they have come across workers’ barracks, they might think they have mistakenly wandered into the Pompidou’s storage area, where someone has collected funky furniture from the 1950s (figs. 7, 8, and 9). Paradoxically,

these nostalgic oases of interrupted Soviet life are the only seemingly unguarded spaces in the museum. Here the museum officials actively encourage you to touch everything you wish. Visitors to the exhibit are invited to inhabit the workers’ barracks, to relax on the plush sofas, to

touch the personal souvenirs.”° Indeed, wandering through the exhibit one might always find a couple of exhausted tourists or immigrants reclining here and there. After all, the museum

is still a relatively inexpen-

sive urban refuge; it is cheaper than going to a cafe, and sometimes even free. Kabakov promotes tactile conceptualism; he plays hide-and-seek with aesthetic distance itself. Kabakov remarks that of all utopian palaces under repair, the Centre

Pompidou will probably survive the longest. His total installations reveal a nostalgia for utopia, but they return utopia back to its origins—not in life but in art. While dwelling on his own diasporic souvenirs from his 20. These souvenirs are not exclusively Soviet; Kabakov has internationalized his nostalgia. One may find Soviet journals from the 1970s, a Russian translation of a Hungarian novel, or a post-Soviet business quarterly. One may touch the shaded glass of the cabinet and the French family photo that stands side by side with a Disney souvenir. The visitors to the exhibit seem to have accepted Kabakov’s invitation to touch and to inhabit.

Sata eee

y)a

Fic. 9

On Diasporic Intimacy

Sieh

Soviet childhood, Kabakov goes to the origins of modern utopia and reveals two contradictory human impulses: one to transcend the everyday in some

kind of collective fairy tale, and the other to inhabit the most

uninhabitable ruins, to survive and preserve memories. Post-Soviet nostalgia is not the same as nostalgia for the Soviet Union. “Sovietness” in this case is not merely a political reference but rather a reference to the common culture of childhood and adolescence, to the shared cultural text that is quickly forgotten in the current rewritings of Russian history. Total installations are Kabakov’s homes away from home; they help him dislocate and estrange the topography of his childhood fears and domesticate it again abroad. Jean-Francois Lyotard suggests an interesting category, “domestication . . . with no domus,” which I understand as a way of inhabiting one’s displaced habitats and avoiding the extremes of both the domus of traditional family values and the megalopolis of cyberspace.*! While some of the works of post-Soviet artists reveal the postmodern strategies of multiple narrative, hybridization, and pastiche, they do not engage in euphoric celebrations of nomadism and perpetual identity play. Kabakov’s commemorations speak of the pain of estrangement, the embarrassment of memory, and the panic of oblivion; they reveal the pre-

cariousness of the human habitat and the fragility of intimacy. In his essay “On Emptiness,” written after his first departure from Russia, Kabakov

remarks in the Russian prophetic mode that at the end of the twentieth century we all seem to live on tiny islands in the midst of the oceans of emptiness, like scholars in “tents in the uninhabited and icy Antarctic”:

“Of course, one can go visiting, drink tea or dancing, moving from one tent to another, from the Soviet to the American and vice versa,’ but we

must never forget the emptiness that surrounds us.”*?

Immigrant Homes and Diasporic Souvenirs In counterpoint to Kabakov’s artistic work, I will explore the interac-

tion between the aesthetic and everyday practices of commemoration by 21. Jean-Francois Lyotard, “Domus and the Megalopolis,” The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, Calif, 1991), p. 199. An-

dreas Huyssen in his new book Twilight Memories claims that the current memory boom is not a result of further kitschification of the past, but “a potentially healthy sign of contestation; a contestation of the informational hyperspace and an expression of the basic human need to live in extended structures of temporality, however they may be organized... . In that dystopian vision ofahigh-tech future, amnesia would no longer be part ofthe dialectic of memory and forgetting. It will be its radical other. It will have sealed the very forgetting of memory itself: nothing to remember, nothing to forget” (Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia [New York, 1995], p. 35).

22. Kabakov, “On Emptiness,” trans. Clark Troy, in Between Spring and Summer: Soviet Conceptual Art in the Era of Late Communism (exhibition catalog, Tacoma Art Museum, 15 June-9 Sept. 1990; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 1 Nov. 1990-6 Jan. 1991), p. 59.

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Svetlana Boym

looking at the actual homes of ex-Soviet exiles in the United States and their collections of diasporic souvenirs. Virtually stripped of identity, citizenship, and most of their personal belongings, they arrived in the

United States as political refugees in the late 1970s and the early 1980s with their two suitcases per person and an allowance of ninety dollars.” Ten years later these Soviet refugees became “hyphenated Americans,” like many immigrants before them. Yet they continue with their memory rituals, which tell an alternative story of acculturation and survival in ex-

ile—one that fits neither the genre of the American dream nor that of the Russian melodrama of insufferable nostalgia. The people whom I interviewed were roughly of the same age and social group: they were born before or right after World War II and belonged to the low-middle level of the urban intelligentsia—engineers, accountants, schoolteachers—that

is representative of this immigrant group. Larisa F., an elementary school teacher in Queens who came to the United States in 1978, told me that “Russian émigrés can’t stand white walls.” Many cover such walls with wallpaper to domesticate them, or else decorate them exhaustively with as many tchotchkes as they can find. “We don’t want our room to look like a hospital.”** White walls, the great achievement

of modern

design,

are

associated

with

official spaces;

it

seems that overcrowdedness itself becomes a synonym for cosiness and intimacy. Each home, even the most modest one, is a personal memory museum. Emigré memorabilia is often located on the bookshelves.2° Bookshelves are at once a status symbol for members of the intelligentsia and a meeting place of personal souvenirs: nestling matreshka dolls, wooden

spoons and khokhloma bowls, clay toys, shells from exotic seaside resorts, ceramic vases purchased in Estonia during the 1970s, precious items 23. Most, but not all, of this “third wave” of emigration from the Soviet Union was of

Jewish extraction. Before departure the emigrants were told that they would never be able to return, even if they were leaving behind aging relatives and parents. Joseph Brodsky speaks about this in his essay “In a Room and a Half,’ dedicated to the memory of his parents who died in Leningrad in 1985 and whose funerals the poet wasn’t allowed to attend. See Joseph Brodsky, “In a Room and a Half,” Less Than One: Selected Essays (New York, 1986), pp. 447-501. 24. Larisa FE, interview with author, Queens, N.Y., May 1995. Kabakov and Brodsky, among others, have commented on the depressive homogeneity of Soviet interiors. They speak not so much about white walls as about the familiar blue line that was painted on all the walls of Soviet establishments—what Kabakov calls the unifying blue line of the Soviet horizon. Kabakov nostalgically repaints this blue line in each of his installations, a reminder of Sovietness. Even when the installation is collectively executed, he takes the task of drawing the blue line of the Soviet horizon upon himself. 25. The books, however, were not purchased in Russia (immigrants were unable to bring them due to customs restrictions). Moreover, Larisa, for one, never actually possessed

complete sets of books but only dreamed of having them and continuously borrowed volumes from her more fortunate friends. These precious volumes of Russian and foreign classics in Russian were purchased in the United States.

On Diasporic Intimacy

245

Fics. 10-13.—Private “collections” on bookshelves. Immigrant apartments in Queens, New York, and Boston, Massachusetts,

1995-96. Photos: author.

found in New York yard sales, treasures from the trash (figs. 10, 11, 12,

and 13). Souvenirs on the immigrants’ bookshelves are actually quite international:

an exotic bestiary of Chinese

ducks, Thai

lions, and

tiny

American dinosaurs found in Red Rose tea boxes all have been rescued from consumerist oblivion by Russian immigrants. Discarded exotic animals become domestic pets. These rescued treasures from trash present a challenge to the culture of disposable objects. There was a time when immigrants themselves got rid of their trash and lost many of their personal belongings. Now they feel it’s their turn to preserve and collect— no matter what. The recovery of objects from garbage, no longer a practical need at all, turns into a ritual rescue of the past, even if the past is not

actually theirs. One of the favorite rescued objects that I saw was an old clock that no longer functioned and always showed the same time. I was reminded of the words of the nineteenth-century writer Aleksandr Herzen, who observed that the clocks of the émigrés have stopped at the hour of exile. This is, of course, only a metaphor, for most people grow more efficient and punctual in the United States. Yet they are still fond of their useless objects. Many homes were decorated with outdated Russian calendars, often souvenirs from the immigrant’s first journey back to the former homeland, or gifts from Russian friends. These outdated calendars

cease to be efficient organizers of the present and turn into memory grids. Nostalgia easily yields itself to kitsch; a whole nostalgia industry exists in the United States and now also in Russia, where one may find items

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Svetlana Boym

Fic. 11 =

from Gorby dolls to Nicholas II Easter eggs. Yet with regard to immigrant souvenirs, the opposition between

kitsch and aesthetic experience, be-

tween the aesthetic and everyday practices, becomes blurred.*° A souvenir could be a mass-produced object, but a memorial narrative endows it with an aura of singularity. Recalling Milan Kundera’s reflection on kitsch and the human condition, one could say that those souvenirs truly are “stopover[s] between being and oblivion.”*’ There is no shortage of Soviet-Russian folk art on émigré bookshelves.?* Curiously, several people

told me that they never displayed matreshki and khokhloma when they lived in Russia because then they seemed kitschy. That was in the 1960s, when 26. For instance,

Felix R. found the 1889 real estate agreements

for his American

house in his attic. He framed them and proudly displays them in his living room. 27. Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, trans. Michael Henry Heim (New York, 1984), p. 278.

28. These miniature matreshki, for instance, appeared on the bookshelves of Russian émigré Liza after the Soviet borders first opened in 1990 and her friend was able to visit her in Brighton, Massachusetts. At that time it was virtually impossible to get any gifts for a moderate sum of money. So she took the miniature matreshki from the kindergarten where she worked. Those nesting dolls became memorials to the first border-crossing between the USSR and the United States and to the rediscovery of friendship. The only Russian folk souvenirs that many émigrés brought with them were clay toys that in the 1970s were seen as representative of an authentic Russian village culture in opposition to the official folklore. The toys, once admired by Benjamin, were rediscovered in the 1970s and appreciated for their cheerful brightness, ornamentality, and sheer fun, which brought some color to the drudgery of existence. Furthermore, because of their moderate price and the adventure of seeking them out in villages or at village fairs, they were the most typical collectibles of the Moscow intellectuals of the 1970s.

Fic. 13

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Svetlana Boym

the Soviet intelligentsia waged a taste war against “philistinism and middle class values” (meshchanstvo). Larisa recalls that in the 1960s she

used to be an avid reader of the journal Amerika, a rather aseptic, propagandistic magazine published on very good, pleasant-smelling paper. Larisa particularly admired the photographs of the apartment interiors of radical students from Berkeley. In a gesture of emulation, Larisa decided to throw out the Soviet furniture purchased by her parents before

the war and got herself a mattress and a red cloth to create a progressive, “Western” interior. Obviously, the mattress with the red cloth signified very different things in the culture of overabundant commodities than it did in the culture of material scarcity (in which, however, an excess of red

cloth was used for banners and public decorations). In the 1960s Larisa was proud of her American-style radicalism. Some ten years later, when she actually arrived in the United States and had to live on a mattress, like many other immigrants, her perspective changed. From the perspective of absence, uprootedness, and exile, she longed to re-create the cozy,

overcrowded interior that she was so eager to destroy in the good old Moscow of the 1960s. The displays often reflect the eclectic identity of the owner. Many

contained various religious artifacts: a cheap menorah box on one shelf and Orthodox Easter eggs on another. In Larisa’s kitchen another still life is formed by the Russian toys on the shelf; a Passover plate on the wall; and tea cups, toast and jam, and a box of matzos on the table (fig.

14). Religious objects are treated also as artifacts and souvenirs. Larisa was Jewish according to the fifth line in her Soviet passport, but never practiced any religion in the Soviet Union. Now she says that she celebrates all holidays—the more the merrier. She remarked, however, that she would never have put the plate on the wall in Moscow. It would have been seen as a statement, rather than as decoration.

The collections of souvenirs have both a nostalgic and an aesthetic function.*”? On her kitchen shelf Larisa collected colorful museum badges from the Metropolitan Museum ofArt, where she brings her pupils regularly “because it helps to open up their horizons, and shows them that there is a whole world out there, beyond Queens” (fig. 15).°° The standard kitchen in the émigré home is enlivened by this colorful collection

of museum badges, the cheapest objets trouvés that the museum offers. For 29. My understanding of the aesthetic function in popular culture is very different from Pierre Bourdieu’s, as discussed in his Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, Mass., 1984). I have benefited greatly from Elaine Scarry’s work on artifacts and from Susan Stewart’s discussion of souvenirs, but I believe it

is very important to contextualize the practices of souvenir collecting, to make them more culture-specific. See Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York, 1985), and Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, N. C., 1993). This is discussed in detail in my Common Places,

pp. 157-60. 30. Larisa FE, interview with author.

On Diasporic Intimacy

249

‘gh ii

Fic. 14.—Kitchen in the immigrant apartment, decorated with Passover plate and Russian clay toys. May 1995. Photo: author.

an émigré the proverb “My home is my castle” doesn’t quite work. “My home is my museum” would be more appropriate. Home and museum are connected memory sites. Benjamin’s statement “to live means to leave traces” is perhaps the shortest formulation of what this is all about.*! The aesthetic and everyday practices of inhabiting and preserving memories are Closely linked. It is that deliberately chosen intimacy of the home abroad that Berberova spoke about. Each apartment collection presents at once a fragmentary biography 31. Benjamin, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,’ Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms,

Autobiographical Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York, 1978), p. 155.

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Fic. 15.—Kitchen shelves, decorated with badges from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. May 1995. Photo: author.

of the inhabitant and a display of collective memory. They set a stage for intimate experiences. Their ways of making home away from home reminded me of old-fashioned Soviet interiors where each object had an aura of uniqueness—whether it was grandma’s antique statuette, miraculously preserved, or a seashell found on the beach of some

memorable

Black Sea resort in the summer of 1968. For the generation of people born before or right after World War II, material possessions were often scarce and hard to obtain; in earlier days they could be expropriated, but they were never to be disposed of voluntarily. The American culture of the disposable object was most unfamiliar to them. It embodied their desires and fears: consumerist luxury, on the one hand, and a sense of

transience, a perpetual whirlpool of change that reminded them acutely of their exile, on the other. So in their collections of souvenirs many immigrants preserve a certain “crypto-Soviet” attitude towards the object,

even when the object itself and the context is different.** Their idea of privacy and intimacy retains the memory of their abandoned homeland, where privacy was forever endangered. Soviet domestic rituals originated in response to and in opposition to the culture of fear, where home search 32. Several people confessed with a good sense of humor that their first year in America they never threw away paper cups and paper plates, but secretly saved them. Now, “Americanized,” they no longer do that. Such a practice is hardly unique to immigrants from the former Soviet Union. One could observe similar immigrant rituals in Chinese, Vietnamese, and Puerto Rican communities in the United States, for example.

On Diasporic Intimacy

21

was a fact of daily life and any pursuit of domesticity precarious and vulnerable.

Moreover,

for the lower strata of the urban

intelligentsia, the

private or the intimate was often understood as a space of escape that wasn't limited to an individual or a nuclear family, but more often to a group of close friends. The social frameworks of memory (formed, in this case, in the Soviet urban context) have merged with individual practices of inhabiting a home; they provide a minimal continuity of self during the immigrant’s period of displacement and resettlement.** The immigrant households share traces and frameworks of the Soviet urban memory of the 1970s, yet their narrative, their way of making sense of their environment, is radically different. “T don’t think of returning back to Russia, only of visiting,” says Lar-

isa. “This is my home now.’** There are many nostalgic objects on the immigrant bookshelves, yet the narrative they tell on the whole is not the predictable tale of nostalgia. Diasporic souvenirs do not reconstruct the narrative of one’s roots but rather tell the story of exile. The former country of origin itself turns into an exotic place represented through its arts and crafts, objects usually admired by foreign tourists. New collected memories

of exile and acculturation

shift the old cultural frameworks;

even Russian or Soviet souvenirs can no longer be interpreted within their native context. Now they are a cipher for exile itself and for a newly found exilic domesticity.*° Their rooms filled with diasporic souvenirs are not altars to the unhappiness of the émigrés, but rather places for communication and conversation. The immigrants cherish their oases ofintimacy—away from the homeland and not quite in the promised land. If in Kabakov we observe the desire to inhabit in the most trivial, everyday manner the sacred spaces of the artistic establishment, in the

immigrants’ homes we notice the aesthetic desire to make everyday existence beautiful and memorable. This is a peculiar aesthetic practice that transforms kitschy souvenirs into safe logs of memory, yet does not allow for a centralized nostalgic narrative. It does not cover up the common loss and pain of displacement but allows one to survive it, to go beyond it, at least temporarily. The common wound could become a community bond, but it would be misleading to view diasporic intimacy solely as a search for identification through suffering or as a nostalgic reconstitution of past identity. This would not dojustice to the efforts of so many immigrants who make their home abroad. They don’t manage to live in the 33. As paradoxical as it may seem, the Soviet émigrés, many of whom were politically overtly anti-Soviet, managed to preserve the memory of the everyday life of the “era of stagnation” better than people who stayed in the Soviet Union, whose memory was forever affected by the sweeping changes of the last ten years. 34. Larisa FE, interview with author. 35. The majority of people whom I interviewed—whom a social worker might have characterized as “adjusted immigrants”—said that exile was like a second life, or even like a second childhood where they could play again with the foreign reality.

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eternal present of the American myth, but neither can they dwell in the past. Diasporic intimacy is possible only when one certain imperfect aesthetics of survival and learns to inhabit asporic intimacy is an affectionate farewell to the motherland. accent—in both languages, foreign and native.

afford to masters a exile. DiIt has an

The State of Shame: Australian Multiculturalism and the Crisis of Indigenous Citizenship

Elizabeth A. Povinelli

I know I have hurt you. But I want to make (it) up to you, repair the rupture, bridge the rift between us, heal the pain that I have caused. I want us to imagine a place where the possibility of our hurting each other does not exist. Where we can each be our different selves without shame, without fear, without alienation. True partners in peace. A world of brothers and sisters. A world of recognition and

enhancement. This is the right thing to do: to heal, to move on, to found and enter a New Society.

1. The Tip of the Clitoris In Western Europe and the United States, public anxieties about cultural diversity and national identity are often expressed at the tip of the clitoris. In the late 1990s, an economically depressed and politically terrorized France could not agree on the grounds for excluding from the nation the North African diaspora living there but could, at least initially, agree on

the necessity of outlawing the “‘genital mutilations” some in this commuResearch for this essay was supported by the National Science Foundation and the Wenner Gren Foundation. I would like to thank Lauren Berlant for her critical intellectual and editorial contribution to this essay, as well as Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Biddy Martin, Susan Edmunds, Jessica Klingender, Tony Young, Tom Keely, Deborah Bird Rose, and audiences in the Johns Hopkins University’s Institute for Global Studies and the Chicago Humanities

Institute’s conference,

“Dislocated

States,’ where

versions of this essay were

presented. And of course, foremost and finally, I thank the men and women coming and going from Belyuen.

229

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nity inflict on its young girls.' In 1996, the U.S. Congress outlawed clitoridectomies and directed U.S. representatives to the World Bank and other international financial institutions to withhold billions of dollars in aid to

twenty-eight African countries if they did not sponsor education programs aimed at eradicating the practice.? A putatively pro-diversity President signed this bill in a national “post-civil rights” context in which

“most Americans believe themselves and the nation to be opposed to racism and in favor of a multiracial, multiethnic pluralism.’* In 1997 some

members of the Illinois legislature proposed a bill that would stiffen this federal legislation in the state. The urgency they expressed, which suggested that the Midwest was in the grip of a clitoridectomy epidemic,

was perhaps rather more motivated by their anxiety that urban areas like Chicago were haunted by the black Muslim movement.* In France and

the United States, state officials and public figures struggled to maintain a utopian image of a national culture against the pressure of transnational

migration and internal ethnic divisions by holding up this clipped bundle 1. Celia W. Dugger, “Tug of Taboos: African Genital Rite vs. U.S. Law,” New York Times, 28 Dec. 1996, p. Al. The same article notes that France used already existing legislation prohibiting violence against children to outlaw the practice of clitoridectomy. The French state’s discipline of a North African practice has an uncanny relationship to its past war in Algeria and to its present-day political relationship with Algeria. The New York Times, for example, noted, “The war has at times come to bear an uncanny resemblance to the war of Algeria’s independence. Then, too, the guerrillas, Algeria’s National Liberation Front, used

methods of startling savagery—including disembowelment, decapitation and the mutilation of genitals—to shatter the middle ground in society. Then, too, the authorities, represented by the French Army, responded with torture and indiscriminate killing. Then, too, the war

spilled over into France, dividing its society and destroying the Fourth Republic” (Roger Cohen, “Troubled Tie: France Hears Alarming Echoes of Colonial Past from Algeria,” New York Times, 6 Dec. 1996, p. Al2).

2. The legislation was sponsored by Representatives Pat Schroeder (D-Colorado) and Harry Reid (D-Nevada) as part of the Immigration Act. See Dugger, “Genital Mutilation Is Outlawed,” New York Times,

12 Oct.

1996, p. A27, and Sharon Lerner, “Rite or Wrong?”

Village Voice, 26 Mar.-1 Apr. 1997, pp. 44-46. 3. Christopher Newfield and Avery F. Gordon, “Multiculturalism’s Unfinished Business,” in Mapping Multiculturalism, ed. Gordon and Newfield (Minneapolis, 1996), p. 77. 4. A social geography of the practice is emerging in the mass media. The New York Times, for instance, educates the public on the regions where women are at the greatest risk thus: “New York and Newark are among the metropolitan areas where the largest number of these at-risk girls and women live” (Dugger, “Genital Mutilation Is Outlawed,” p- A27).

Elizabeth A. Povinelli is professor of anthropology at the of Chicago and editor of Public Culture. She is the author of The Power, History, and Culture of Aboriginal Action (1993). Her The Cunning of Recognition: Sexuality, Indigenous Citizenship, and of Multicultural Australia, is forthcoming in 2001.

University Labor’ Lot: new book, the Making

Shame and Australian Multiculturalism

299.

of nerves to public scrutiny as the limit of a “civilized” nation’s tolerance of its internal cultural diversity. State and public figures made the clitoris a commonsense limit of nationalism and thereby produced a “civil nation” around this limit not simply or primarily by referring to the universal principles that the practice violated but by evoking complex affective reactions. They did what Gramsci insisted was necessary to hegemonic projects: they cohered a national will through passionate dramas and experiences of intimate community, not for the most part through pedantic argument.® Whereas the trappings and dramas of religion were critical to the consolidation of a national will in Gramsci’s time, now the putatively preideological truth of shame or, as Lauren Berlant has argued, the politics of sentimental

feeling,® is critical to “the formation of a national-popular collective will” that the state can use to produce “a superior, total, form of modern civilization.”’ As if they deeply understood these thoughts, state and public figures trumpeted the national shame of allowing “such practices” of savagery and barbarism, of ignorance and superstition, to take place within its borders. The phrase “such practices” acts to expand the field of shame and cast a pall over unnamed subaltern practices across spaces in which no national-popular collective will would be possible and over entire continents where such practices are imagined to occur.® For the moment this national fetish seems to allay the contradictions and ambivalences of liberal multiculturalism.? But when official spokes5. See Antonio Gramsci, “The Modern Prince,” Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans.

and ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York, 1971), esp. pp. 132-33. 6. See Lauren Berlant, “The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy, and Politics,” in Cultural Pluralism, Identity Politics, and the Law, ed. Austin Sarat (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1997).

7. Gramsci, “The Modern Prince,” p. 133. 8. The mass media often conflates a diverse set of non-Western cultural practices and represents these as “premodern” or “precivil.” For instance, the New York Times writes, “a much broader struggle [is] taking place across Africa. Throughout much of the continent, from the ritual slavery of the Ewe to female genital mutilation to polygamy, ancient practices that strike both Westerners and many Africans as abhorrent coexist side by side with modernity” (Howard W. French, “Africa’s Culture War: Old Customs, New Values,” New York

Times, 2 Feb. 1997, p. D1). Public culture is currently struggling over how to understand the (il)legitimacy of these practices when they occur among immigrants to the United States. How should U.S. law treat underage marriage, polygamy, and wife beating when they occur in immigrant communities? See Nina Schuyler, “When in Rome: Should Courts Make Allowances for Immigrant Culture at Women’s Expense?” In These Times, 17 Feb.—2 Mar. 1997, pp. 27-29. 9. In the wake of the U.S. Congress’s act to outlaw clitoridectomies, the left and center

mass media reported divisions among communities affected by the law, as well as within the medical community. For instance, the New York Times reported that U.S. health care officials were split in their opinions on whether it was better to permit moderated and medically supervised clitoridectomies (giving a “ritual nick of the prepuce”) or to condemn the prac-

tice to untrained persons who would perform the operation illegally (Dugger, “Tug of Taboos,” p. A9). These divisions within the medical community and the community of practice are noted but underemphasized in Lerner, “Rite or Wrong?”

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persons of national culture repudiate subaltern practices by evoking the nation’s aversion

to them, they encounter

the difficulty of discursively

grounding their moral claim within a multicultural discourse.'? And they encounter the double-edged nature of using shame as a tool for building national collective wills. On the one hand, as the ban on clitoridectomies shows, certain subaltern practices can produce the experience of a national collective will, even in the midst of public debate, by producing as an experience of intimate communal aversion the barbaric, uneducated,

and savage practices that we as a civilized nation cannot allow to occur within our borders. A particular body of belief is, at least temporarily, elevated to the status of a universal principle primarily through pageantries of corporeal shame and revulsion.'! But, in this case as in others, liberal democratic societies are now haunted by the specter of mistaken intolerance. They now know that in time their deepest moral impulses may be exposed to be historically contingent, mere prejudices masquerading as universal principles. In particular, past colonial and civil rights

abuses cast a shadow over present moments of national and individual intolerance.

In the “historical mutation”

of the modern

liberal demo-

cratic society, not only is every “universal grounding . .. contemplated with deep suspicion” but every moment of moral judgment is potentially a moment of acute personal and national embarrassment.'? Popular and critical thinkers suffer their (in)tolerance; they do not simply decide to be tolerant or intolerant. Liberal members of democratic societies stumble, lose their breath, panic, even if ever so slightly, when asked to say why, on what grounds, according to whom, a practice is a moral, national limit of tolerance. And, as they panic, they show how the logic of multicul10. Stanley Fish has outlined the contradictions and ambivalences in various models of multiculturalism. He and others distinguish weak and strong forms of multiculturalism by the degree to which any moral judgment is seen as based on universal grounds exterior to the particularities of cultural logics or all moral judgments are seen as excretions of cultural logics or historical discursive positions. Fish argues, however, that both models are incoherently formulated. According to Fish, even the most critical proponents of strong multiculturalism eventually stumble upon a case of cultural difference that they feel they should refuse to support or that they do refuse to support for reasons that sound universalizing, but now cannot be defended as such. This is famously evidenced in the Salman Rushdie and NAMBL (North American Man-Boy Love) cases. See Stanley Fish, “Boutique Multiculturalism, or Why Liberals Are Incapable of Thinking about Hate Speech,” Critical Inquiry 23 (Winter 1997): 378-95. For a general discussion of the discursive impasse of multicultur-

alism in liberal democratic society, see Chicago Cultural Studies Group, “Critical Multiculturalism,” Critical Inquiry 18 (Spring 1992): 530-55; David Theo Goldberg, “Multicultural Conditions,” introduction to Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader, ed. Goldberg (Oxford, 1994),

pp. 1-41; and Gordon and Newfield, introduction to Mapping Multiculturalism, pp. 1-16. For a critical discussion of the instability of both universalist and particularist grounds for moral claims, see Ernesto Laclau, “Universalism, Particularism, and the Question of Iden-

tity,” in Emancipation(s) (London, 1996), pp. 20-35. 11. See Laclau, “Universalism, Particularism, and the Question of Identity,” p. 35. 12. Laclau, introduction to The Making of Political Identities, ed. Laclau (London, 1994), Dale

Shame and Australian Multiculturalism

O57.

turalism disorganizes the discursive and imaginary field that every limit to it coheres. The lost certainty of its moral groundings wracks national hegemonic projects and helps explain the force of cultural censure in those moments when some national collective will can be found or forged. The nausea created by these shifting grounds becomes especially clear in public debates over particular national intolerances, in which the difficulty of grounding (in)tolerance in specific instances spreads and threatens the general notion of the nation itself, along with a nation-based identity and

identification. These anxious national debates circulate through national and transnational mass media and intellectual publics, expanding into much broader crises of modernism, liberalism, humanism, and the democratic polity. After all this history, whose nation is any one nation, after all? Who, after all this history, owns modernity and its hallmarks, human-

ism and democracy? What groups do humanism, democracy, and the common

law serve, protect, and maintain?

This is the nerve ending this essay seeks to understand: how the state uses a multicultural imaginary to solve the problems that capital, (post)colonialism, and human diasporas pose to national identity in the late twentieth century. And, more specifically, it seeks to understand how

these state multicultural discourses, apparatuses, and imaginaries defuse struggles for liberation waged against the modern liberal state and recuperate these struggles as moments in which the future of the nation and its core institutions and values are ensured rather than shaken. The essay’s argument unfolds primarily through an analysis of a 1992 Australian High Court ruling on the native title rights of indigenous Australians, Mabo and Others v. The State of Queensland, and of a 1989 land rights case heard in the Northern Territory of Australia, the Kenbi Land

Claim. I argue that the High Court and those state and public officials who supported their decision understood Mabo to be the fulfillment of the promise of the common law and the national civilization for which it stands. In their eyes, Mabo rejected past (pre)judicial racial and cultural intolerance and now recognized native title to be a legitimate part of a newly reconstituted multicultural nation."* In the first part of the essay, I show instead how native title acts as a fetish around which law, state, and

public organize and displace their anxieties about the nation’s political, cultural, and economic worth and identity. And I show how the court and

state construct native title as a legitimate part of state multiculturalism only to plough it into the ground of a new, transcendental, monocultural nation. At this switch point, when multiculturalism becomes the grounds for 13. Native title is a form of beneficial title colonial subjects hold based on their traditional laws and customs. The state holds radical title, a form oftitle that gives the sovereign

paramount power to create interests in land by grant of tenure. For a discussion of native title and state sovereignty in the context of Mabo, see, for example, Sydney Law Review 15

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Elizabeth A. Povinelli

a new form of national monoculturalism, the state’s struggle for hegemony depends on representing its practices and intentions in two very different registers. On the one hand, the court and state deploy an abstract language of law, citizenship, and rights—a principled, universaliz-

ing, pedantic language. On the other hand, they deploy a language of love and shame, of haunted dreams, of traumatic and reparative memory,

of sensuality and desire. State functionaries engage dominant and subordinate social groups in an intimate drama of global discourse and capital, of national identity, of history and consciousness. As they do so, the court and state make shame and reconciliation—a public, collective purging of

the past—an index and requirement of a new abstracted national membership. But the law and state do not require all citizens to undergo the same type of public, corporeal cleansing, the same type of psychic and historical reformation. In the final sections of the essay, I detail the con-

tradictory demands the law places on indigenous subjects, namely, that indigenous persons at once orient their sensual, emotional, and corporeal

identities towards the nation’s ideal image of itself as worthy of love and reconciliation and at the same time ghost this being for the nation.'* Indigenous persons must desire and identify in a way that just so happens, in an uncanny convergence of interests, to fit the national imaginary. With the help of lawyers and anthropologists like myself, they must make the incommensurate discourses, desires, and imaginaries of the nation and its subalterns arrive at a felicitous, although unmotivated, endpoint. If

indigenous persons slip, if they seem to be being opportunistic, to be speaking to the law too much or not enough or in a cultural framework the court recognizes as its own, they risk losing the few judicial and material resources the state has made available to them. To weigh the political stakes of these national hegemonic projects, our analyses must be as mobile as the projects themselves; must engage, as they do, the discursive and the global, the microdiscursive, the imaginary, and the corporeal currents through which new relations of social dominance are currently being articulated. The Australian juridical, state, and public commitment to multicul-

turalism provides an especially interesting example of the role a multicul(June 1993). For a more general discussion, see State Sovereignty as Social Construct, ed. Thomas J. Biersteker and Cynthia Weber (Cambridge,

1996).

14. See Slavoj Zizek’s discussion of the critical ideological role played by images in which the nation and its citizens appear likable to themselves and worthy of love in The Sublime Object of Ideology (London, 1989), p. 105. See also Etienne Balibar’s provocative reading of Althusser on ideology: “Just as the accumulation of capital is made of ‘living labor’ (according to Marx), so the oppressive apparatuses of the State, Churches, and other dominant institutions function with the popular religious, moral, legal and aesthetic imaginary of the masses as their specific fuel” (Etienne Balibar, “The Non-Contemporaneity of Althusser,’ in The Althusserian Legacy, ed. E. Ann Kaplan and Michael Sprinker [New York, 1993], jon 1a)

Shame and Australian Multiculturalism

259

tural discourse and fantasy play in cohering national identities and allegiances and in defusing and diverting liberation struggles in late modern liberal democracies.

In response to very different social, historical, and

geopolitical conditions than the United States experienced, Australian nationalism came to mean something other than descent from the convict, ruling, or immigrant classes who arrived from Britain and western Europe. And more firmly and publicly than the United States, the Australian state claims to have renounced the ideal of “a unitary culture and tradition” and instead now “recognise[s]” the value and worth of “cultural

diversity within, . . . as the basis of... a more differentiated mode of national cohesion.”'’ Australian state officials represent themselves and the nation as subjects shamed by past imperial, colonial, and racist attitudes that are now understood as having, in their words, constituted “the dark-

est aspect” of the nation’s history and impaired its social and economic future.'® Multiculturalism is represented as the externalized political testament both to the nation’s aversion to its past misdeeds, and to its recoyered good intentions. Rather than just some general acknowledgment of shameful past wrongdoings and some limited tolerance of present cultural differences,

Australia has putatively sought a more radical basis of national unity. In state and public discourse, the multicultural Australian nation aspires to

be “truly multicultural.” What is meant by this? In contemporary Australia, official spokespersons claim that multiculturalism

is an assemblage

of the diverse and proliferating social identities and communities now composing the nation’s internal population with no one social position’s or group’s views serving as an oppressive grounding discourse. Cleansed by a collective moment of shame and reconciliation, the nation will not only be liberated into good feelings and institutions but will also acquire the economic and social productivity necessary to regain its political and economic hegemony in the Asia-Pacific—or at least to keep the nation from falling further and further behind its northern neighbors. But this new national formation remains a utopian fantasy at best, an experience possible only through the suppression of countervailing tendencies. In the first place, Australian multiculturalism is exemplary of late modern liberal understandings and institutionalizations of difference. In this liberal imagination the state apparatuses, as well as its law, principles of governance, and national attitudes, need merely be adjusted to accommodate others; they do not need to experience the fundamental alterity of, in this case, indigenous discourses, desires, and practices or

their potentially radical challenge to the nation and its core institutions and values such as “democracy”

and the “common

law.” Likewise,

the

15. John Frow and Meaghan Morris, introduction to Australian Cultural Studies: A Reader, ed. Frow and Morris (Urbana, Ill., 1993), p. ix. 16. Mabo and Others v. The State of Queensland, in The Mabo Decision, ed. Richard H. Bartlett (Sydney, 1993), p. 82; hereafter abbreviated M.

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state and its normative publics imagine that their experience of radically other cultures and practices can be unhinged from horror and abjection.

Alterity is not seen as a threat or challenge to self- and national coherence but is seen, instead, as compatible with an incorporative project, an “invitation to absorption.”'’ In short, in this liberal imaginary, the now recognized subaltern subjects would slough off their traumatic histories, ambivalences, incoherencies, and angst like so much outgrown skin rather than remain for themselves or for others the wounded testament

to the nation’s past bad faith.'* The nation would then be able to come out from under the pall ofits failed history, betrayed best intentions, and

discursive impasses. And normative citizens would be freed to pursue their profits and enjoy their families without guilty glances over their shoulders into history or at the slum across the block. Second, these new models of the multicultural nation and its citizenry have not displaced classic liberal models of the state and citizen-

ship, nor do many state and public spokespersons intend them to. These older models of citizenship continue to inform state function, public discourse, and individual feelings about what it is right and wrong to de-

mand from the state and its normative publics. On the one hand, the Australian state has always had and continues to reserve the power to discriminate—and to discriminate against—those social and cultural differences

considered

harmful

to individual

citizens or the nation’s so-

called core values. Clitoridectomies are a case in point of this state process, as are the U.S. laws against polygamy and homosexual sodomy. Rather than displacing this classic disciplinary power, Australian multiculturalism has added a new dimension to its function. The state now has

both the right to sanction “harmful” social practices and identities—that is, to sanction cultural difference—and the right to discern when a social or cultural difference has ceased to function as a difference as such. The state, in other words, has expanded its discriminatory powers, not restricted them. It is now empowered to prohibit and to (de)certify cultural

difference as a rights- and resource-bearing identity. Yet, Australian state apparatuses and public discourses continue to ground citizenship in ab-

stract juridical identities supposedly neutral in relation to social identities, identifications, and practices. Once the state decertifies an individual or community, once it no longer recognizes the form of cultural difference they possess, these persons and communities are “liberated” back into the community of abstract citizenship. The Australian state and law are not, however, simply acting in bad faith, and Australian multiculturalism is ideological not only in the sense 17. Wendy Brown, “Injury, Identity, Politics,” in Mapping Multiculturalism, p. 150. 18. Several essays on identity, difference, and democracy have critically attended to the politics of “wounded” subjects in late modern liberal societies. See, for instance, Brown,

“Injury, Identity, Politics”; Berlant, “The Subject of True Feeling”; and Fish, “Boutique Multiculturalism.”

Shame and Australian Multiculturalism of masking

a dominant

class interest.

Instead, Australian

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multicultur-

alism is a deeply optimistic liberal engagement with the democratic form under conditions of extreme torsion as social and cultural differences proliferate and as capital formations change. This engagement is generating “‘utopian’ narratives of possible” if, in the end, “failed alternative histories,’ which, nevertheless, “point towards the system’s antagonistic character” and thereby “‘estrange’” the nation from “the self-evidence of its established identity.”!° The real optimism of Australian multiculturalism is what this essay troubles and is troubled by. These hopes and optimisms and the individual and national telos they describe seduce critical thinking away from an analysis of how dominant social relations of power rely on a multicultural imaginary and discourse in order to adjust core state institutions and narratives to new discursive, capital, and state conditions, not to transform them.

2. The Shame of Legal Discrimination In Mabo,”° the nation-state’s highest juridical body considered a case from a representative of “a people” in whose vicious colonization the common law was implicated and whose continuing structural impoverishment was widely discussed in national and transnational public spheres.*! On behalf of a Torres Strait Islander group, Eddie Mabo claimed that his native title had never been extinguished and, therefore,

that he and his group retained proprietary rights over their land. Up until this case, court after Australian court had refused to recognize that 19. Zizek, “The Spectre of Ideology,” introduction to Mapping Ideology, ed. Zizek (London, 1994), p. 7.

20. The volumes written discussing the impact and meaning of Mabo on property and sovereignty are too numerous for me to give a full bibliography here. The following legal collections were useful to the preparation of this essay: Sydney Law Review 15 (June 1993) and University ofNew South Wales Law Journal 16 (Jan. 1993). Also useful were these collected volumes: After Mabo: Interpreting Indigenous Traditions, ed. Tim Rowse (Carlton, 1993); In the

Age of Mabo: History, Aborigines, and Australia, ed. Bain Attwood (Sydney, 1996); and Make a Better Offer: The Politics ofMabo, ed. Murray Goot and Rowse (Leichhardt, 1994). In an insightful reading of the Mabo decision that critiques liberal theories of society and justice,

Paul Patton highlights how critical thinking fell for the seduction of legal recognitions of difference as a path towards a differential concept of society rather than as an inhibitor. See his two related essays, “Mabo, Freedom, and the Politics of Difference,” Australian Journal of Political Science 30 (Mar. 1995): 108-19 and “Sovereignty, Law and Difference Australia— After the Mabo Case,” Alternatives—Social Transformations and Humane Governance 21 (Apr.— June 1995): 149-70. 21. Between 1992 and 1995 several Australian Commonwealth commissions were established to investigate both the large number of Aboriginal deaths in custody and the poor quality of health in Aboriginal communities.

In addition, Amnesty

International investi-

gated the high rate of incarceration of Aboriginal men as a possible violation of their human rights.

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indigenous Australians had had sufficient social organization and the proper cultural beliefs to have evolved property interests (native title) in Australian lands at the moment of colonial contact. In a defining moment on 3 June 1992, the court broke with tradition in a six to one decision. It overturned the doctrine that Australia was terra nullius (a land belonging to no one) at the point of settlement and decided, instead, that Aboriginal Australians had and retained native title

interests in the land. Where the Australian state had not explicitly extinguished native title, Aboriginal Australians had and still held that title if they maintained the traditional customs, beliefs, and practices that cre-

ated the substance of their difference. The judicial majority argued that it was no longer tolerable to make sovereignty contingent upon representing native peoples as “‘so low in the scale of social organisation” that it was “‘idle to impute to such people some shadow of the rights known to our law’” (M, p. 27). The justices could have limited their decision to the case at hand: did these particular people (Mabo and this group of Torres Strait Islanders) have native title interests in this particular land or not? For the court to do so, however, a majority of justices would have had to sign, name by name, onto the savage conditions to which most Australian indigenous people were historically and are still subjected, conditions broadcast globally by multinational and transnational organizations like the United Nations, Amnesty International, and various nongovernmental indigenous

organizations, and mass cultural figures like Sting. And it would have had to sign away the relevance of the nation’s highest court to the social welfare of its most discriminated-against people, leaving their fate to state largesse or their own political acumen. In 1992, six High Court justices would not cast their names into a current of legal history now widely understood to be propelled by racial and cultural intolerance. Writing that the common law was shamed by its racist history and the gaze of the international community, the justices

took the occasion to alter fundamentally the grounds of Australian sovereignty. They chose to sign their names under the signifier Social Justice and to differentiate this new version of justice from an older version to which the same common law had subscribed in colonial times. In other words, in these justices’ hands, the common law was represented as the fertile inner kernel of justice that a selective reading of precedent could release from the inert husks of racial prejudice. The justices relied on the great optimism and utopianism of the common law, which holds that good judgment will in theory always emerge from the archive of precedent. This belief licensed these justices to use the very tools that had legislated and institutionalized racial and cultural prejudice to free national institutions from that prejudice without performing an ideological critique of the institutions themselves. And here the High Court marked its deep commitment to liberalism, implicitly declaring that good inten-

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tions and good precedents are sufficient to make institutions good versions of themselves. But neither the High Court justices nor those who supported their decision relied simply on the supposedly universal principles of justice embodied in the common law. They also relied on national passions and affects organized around the imaginary of a shamed and redeemed nation. The High Court argued not only that the common law could not tolerate the racial foundations of terra nullius but also that law and liberal democratic states were shamed by their continued adherence to what the court called the “‘barbarian’ theory underpinning the colonial reception of the common law of England” (M, p. 26). The justices and the Labor Party, which supported the ruling, argued that “the fiction of terra nullius” was a racist, humiliating betrayal of the Good that the common law and liberal democratic state was, sought to be, and represented to the nation,

as well as of the expectations and values to which the Australian people aspired.” Past uses of cultural discrimination were held up as shameful, though excisable, cancers on the root good of the common

law. In short,

the precedent of the common law’s shame or virtue came to figure national history, critical national aspirations and diversions, and national

morality. And hegemonic national history and consciousness came to be figured as the archive of precedent. Even at the moment of this inclusion into the liberal multicultural state imaginary, specific indigenous histories, memories,

and

practices were

irrelevant.

Instead,

these

diverse,

sometimes fragmentary elements had to be reformulated to fit the common

law and statutory law, along with whatever

native title legislation

resulted from the decision. The court was engaging in and helping to define public debates over the proper affective response of the nation to its settler past. It was not alone in this project. For instance, an editorial in The Australian asked

readers to consider whether shame or guilt was the proper and most nationally productive emotional response towards Australia’s indigenous groups. In so asking, the editorial reiterated and fixed the social location of the normative citizen as Anglo-Celtic. The addressee of the editorial,

the community of anxiety that it engaged, remained a loosely defined “Anglo-Celtic,” like the writer, forced to (re)think its “whiteness” against

colonial history and, as we will see, contemporary regional realignments of states and capital in the Asia-Pacific. The editorial begins by quoting the High Court majority decision: With justices William Deane and Mary Gaudron, the matter was put as clearly and truly as it could be. The dispossession of the Aborigines was ‘the darkest aspect’ in the history of Australia. It had bequeathed 22. P. J. Keating, “Australian Update: Statement by the Prime Minister, The Hon. P. J. Keating Commonwealth Response to High Court Mabo Judgment, Canberra, 18 October 1993,” Aboriginal Law Bulletin 3 (Oct. 1993): 18; hereafter abbreviated “AU.”

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us a legacy of ‘unutterable shame. While this legacy remained unacknowledged and unrepaired in law, the spirit of our nation was diminished.?* According to this editorial, to be Australian necessitated not a “collective

guilt over the dispossession of the Aborigines” but an “embeddedness” and “implication” in the nation’s history, “in a way outsiders or visitors cannot be.” Pride in national achievements, such as that felt by the nation for the soldiers who fell at Gallipoli, is no better suited for the task of nation building than shame at national wrongdoings.** What is crucial is that the state, law, and public collectively engage in the pride and shame

occasioned by historically specific and nationally differentiated colonial and civil rights struggles. An embeddedness, implication, and engage-

ment in the nation’s historic brutality towards its colonial subjects is rewritten as the necessary condition of nation making in late modern liberal democratic societies. It is the crucial affective element in the definition of its borders, interiors, discourses, imaginaries, and identities.

But the High Court decision and public statements supporting it leaned not only on images of the shamed national subject but also on images of a national subjectivity now fully conscious of its past mistakes. Their statements continually referred to a repaired social body, to an equitable society, and to a nonracist white subject, made possible through the passage of Mabo and the Native Title Act that was a legislative response to it. Court judgment and legislative act would be the political

testament to the good intentions of the state and its normative publics. Repairing the law and national attitudes would break the nation’s legacy of racial and cultural intolerances. These repairs, however, were primarily

to the torn images and institutions of Anglo-Celtic Australians—the real addressees of the court. That is, the High Court and its supporters constructed their legal act as a journey to a promised land in which the possiEe,

23. Robert Manne, “Forget the Guilt, Remember jou TUL

the Shame,” The Australian, 8 July

24.

Talk of sharing in a collective guilt over the dispossession of the Aborigines is one thing; however, talk of sharing in a legacy of historical shame is altogether another. This distinction is most easily explained by analogy. Conservatives .. . would have no difficulty in feeling admiration and a kind of pride in, say, the resourcefulness shown by the pioneers or the courage shown by the soldiers at Gallipoli. I am sure, too, that they would hope that other Australians would share in their admiration and their pride. Yet if it is possible and just to feel pride in the achievements of forebears, it surely cannot be regarded as impossible or unjust to feel shame about past wrongs. The case I am making can be put simply. To be an Australian is to be embedded or implicated in this country’s history in a way outsiders or visitors cannot be. To be implicated in this history opens—as conservatives easily acknowledge—the possibility of reasonable pride. But to be open to the possibility of pride in achievement is also necessarily to be open to the possibility in shame in wrongdoing. [Manne, “Forget the Guilt, Remember the Shame,” p. 11]

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bility of social discrimination would cease because good attitudes and good legislation would repair the unnatural deformations of the law’s good intentions and, thereby, those of the state and its normative citizens.

The potential radical alterity of indigenous beliefs, practices, and social organization was not addressed. Instead the court decision and the public discourse surrounding it urged dominant society on a journey to its own redemption, leaning heavily on the unarguable rightness of striving for

the Good and for a national reparation and reconciliation.

3. Tides of History The court’s invitation to the nation to enter history anew, in a re-

freshed and cleansed version of a persisting, unchanged ideal image of itself, was not extended to the indigenous subjects around whom it organized its shame. I noted above that the court found that Aboriginal Australians retained their native title interests in land if they retained the traditional customs, beliefs, and practices that created the substance of

their difference. This “if” curtailed the history-bearing capacity ofindigenous tradition, making the legal standing of Aboriginal traditional customs, beliefs, and practices more limited than might be suggested by the language of the court. On the one hand, in this particular decision, the court stated that Aboriginal traditions could change and adapt to new circumstances but that they still had to embody and perform the ideal of “tradition” and “locality.’®? The High Court held that “when the tide of history has washed away any real acknowledgment of traditional law and any real observance of traditional customs,” the foundation of native title disappeared (M, p. 43).*° As if merely substituting culture for an older version of race, the court argued that if Aboriginal culture interbred with another “heritage” to some underdefined degree, it forfeited these rights. On the other hand, some traditions, some features and some practices of

customary law were and remained prohibited under statutory and common law. Clitoridectomies, ritual group sex, murder, and certain marriage practices, for instance, shamed

the common

law and the nation’s

25. “Where a clan or group has continued to acknowledge the law and (so far as practicable) to observe the customs based on the traditions of that clan or group, whereby

that traditional connection with the land has been substantially maintained, the traditional community title of that clan or group can be said to remain in existence” (M, p. 2).

26. In 1993, during a televised address to the nation presenting and defending his decision to enact legislation based on the Mabo ruling, Prime Minister Paul J. Keating summarized the conditions the court imposed on the legal productivity of Aboriginal traditions: “The Court accepted that native title existed where two fundamental conditions were met: that their connection with the land had been maintained, unbroken down through the years, and that this title had not been overturned by any action of agovernment to use the land or to give it to somebody else” (P. J. Keating, “Prime Minister’s Address to the Nation,” in Make a Better Offer, p. 236).

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core values. These Aboriginal traditions had no legal standing; they were allowed to exist only as nostalgic traces of a past, fully authentic Aboriginal tradition. As traces, neither fully forgotten by law or public nor ever

fully present to them, these prohibited practices continue to haunt all contemporary representations of Aboriginal tradition, casting an aura of inauthenticity over present-day Aboriginal performances of their culture. In other words, although the court may engage history, Aboriginal Aus-

tralians express at their own risk their engagement with the democratic form of capital and governance within which they live; the memorial forms of their own histories; and their ambivalences towards these traditions, identities, and identifications.

The court confined its ruling to a legal recognition of only those traditions not already prohibited by common and statutory law, a limitation that seems in no way to have cast a penumbra of doubt around the common law’s claim that in the Mabo decision it recognized the value of Aboriginal law in recognizing native title.?” But it was still faced with the difficult job of separating the common law and Aboriginal law at the historical moment when cultural interchange defines the global system; when anxieties about national identity, status, and power dominate public discussion; and when an older means of distinguishing cultural types is

widely held to be racially intolerant. If a group’s culture is to be the object of juridical inquiry, then laws, cultures of law, and cultures that have produced systems of law have to be theoretically separable and the act of separation must signify a (post)racist practice. Gone, the court claims, are

the days when the other’s law could be univocally deemed “barbarian” and discarded as legally irrelevant. For the state to base contemporary social policy and law on such colonial frameworks exposes it to international charges of racial and cultural intolerance. The techniques of cultural discrimination the court established have a fairly straightforward structure. First, they separate and make relative Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal cultural systems even while establishing a formal relationship of value among types of Aboriginal cultural performance. Next, they differentiate the site from which European and Aboriginal legal systems obtain their value and seek their telos. And, finally, they bind the attainment of native title rights to the successful judicial performance of this fantastic separation, origination, and destiny. The court’s achievement of a commonsense, (post)racist separation is in part an effect of the recursivity of pronominal reference. By refer-

ring to the shame of “our” law and “our” nation and the good of recognizing “their” laws, “their” culture, and “their” traditions, the court is able 27. For a discussion of the potential of Mabo for expanding recognition of Aboriginal customary law, see Rob McLaughlin, “Some Problems and Issues in the Recognition of Indigenous Customary Law,” Aboriginal Law Bulletin 3 (July 1996): 4-9. For a fuller discussion, see The Law Reform Commission, The Recognition of Aboriginal Customary Laws (Canberra, 1986).

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to cite and entrench an understanding of the nation as confronting its own discriminatory practices and facing up to and eliminating a dark stain on its history even as it iteratively reproduces the nation as AngloCeltic and “ours.” Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating’s public statements supporting the implementation of the Mabo ruling mirrored the court in critical ways. In a speech commemorating the Australian launch of the International Year for the World’s Indigenous People, Keating trumpeted the “historical ... reconciliation” between Aboriginal and nonAboriginal Australians and announced his government's intention to use Mabo to establish “a prosperous and remarkably harmonious multicultural society.”** According to Keating, this “socially just” new multicultural society could be painlessly achieved with no serious costs or losses for “Australians”—that is, “we” non-Aboriginal Australians.?? Moreover, it would not challenge, threaten, or set into crisis the basic values of Aus-

tralians (including “our” right “to enjoy beaches and other recreation areas, including national parks”) (“AU,” p. 18). Reconciliation and the socially just new multicultural society to which it would be a testament simply meant “acknowledging” and “appreciating” Aboriginal Australians and providing a “measure of justice” for them (“AU,” p. 18; my emphasis).*° Thus, like the High Court and the mass media, in his public addresses and policy papers, Keating framed the legal dilemma of Mabo as a symbol of the moral dilemma multiculturalism posed to Anglo-Celtic Australians: the “plight of Aboriginal Australians continues to be our failure” and the common law and the social and judicial values under threat are “ours,” as is the cultural system into which Aboriginal Law (their law) is being accommodated (“SH,” p. 4).*! The deictical field the court cites and iterates (“ours” and “theirs”)

to separate Australian and Aboriginal laws and cultural practices makes it possible, even expected, to differentiate the sites from which these “legal

systems” obtain their value and seek their telos and to represent this differentiation, this cultural discrimination, as a nondiscriminatory project.

For instance, the court confidently states that native title obtains its value 28. Keating, “Speech by the Honourable Prime Minister, P. J. Keating MP Australian Launch of the International Year for the World’s Indigenous People, Redfern,

10 Decem-

ber 1992,” Aboriginal Law Bulletin 3 (Apr. 1993): 4—5; hereafter abbreviated “SH.” 29. “The message [of Mabo] should be that there is nothing to fear or to lose in the

recognition of historical truth, or the extension of social justice, or the deepening ofAustralian social democracy to include indigenous Australians” (“SH,” p. 5). See also “AU,” p. 18.

30. Keating is referring to the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation (CAR). He stated that the mission of this council was “to forge a new partnership built on justice and equity and an appreciation of the heritage of Australia’s indigenous people” (“SH,” p. 4). For a critical account of the CAR, see also Daniel Lavery, “The Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation: When the CAR Stops on Reconciliation Day Will Indigenous Australians Have Gone Anywhere?” Aboriginal Law Bulletin 2 (Oct. 1992): 7-8. 31. See M. J. Detmold, “Law and Difference: Reflections on Mabo’s Case,” Sydney Law Review 15 (June 1993): 159-67.

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from its ability to signify fixity, stasis, and resistance to a historical dialectic: “native title has its origin in and is given its content by the traditional laws acknowledged by and the traditional customs observed by the indigenous inhabitants of a territory” (M, p. 42). In contrast to native title, common law’s value arises not from a fixed, locatable territory but from

its historical dialogue with elite international institutions. As opposed to the origin and telos it assigns native title, the court locates the preeminent

value of common-law doctrine in its ability to “reflect” a historically progressive dialectic of nationality and internationality and, in reflecting this dialectic, to embody truth and justice. It is in this purified air that the history, culture, and social worth of Australia (and Western humanism more generally) is said to originate and proceed; however, its own history

threatened the legitimacy of its present and its future: “Ifitwere permissible in past centuries to keep the common law in step with international law, it is imperative in today’s world that the common law should neither be nor be seen to be frozen in an age of racial discrimination” (M, p. 28).

These discursive moves dictate that every time an Aboriginal group performs its local traditions in order to substantiate a native title or land claim it is drawn into playing out the conditions and limits of multicultural law in late modern

democracies.

First, multicultural law demands

that a discriminatable cultural difference be presented to it in a prepackaged form. In this case, indigenous performances of cultural difference must conform generally to the imaginary of Aboriginal traditions and more specifically to the legal definition of “traditional Aboriginal owner.” But this demand for a preformed cultural difference generates second-order demands—in main, a demand for the law to be cautious and suspicious of the indigenous traditions presented to it. This suspicion is inscribed in the heart of the law’s form and purpose: “The nature and incidents of native title must be ascertained as a matter of fact by reference to those laws and customs” (M, p. 42). To ascertain cultural differ-

ence, the law demands that the Aboriginal suppliant face and speak to it. And the court looks at these suppliants speaking to it, not speaking among themselves where their “true” beliefs and feelings are imagined to be expressed. In a juridical setting, indigenous people are not a representative of objective cultural difference, but rather

a membrane of cultural

difference, a membrane that could be hiding a fullness of difference or an absence thereof—hiding a blackface, a whiteface, or a face whose color and/or culture cannot be discerned and totalized.** The already abandoned or hidden artifacts of a previously disciplined indigenous practice haunt every performance of cultural difference. Genital operations, retri-

bution killers, and ritual group sex always draw the law’s eye towards a nostalgic but disciplined past, making it just ever so suspicious of the 32. See Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague, 1979).

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authenticity of present traditions. No Aboriginal subject and _performance before the law escapes this suspicion. All irritate it because all mark law’s limit: the impossibility of achieving what it imagines is possible but is not, a form of legal cultural performance not oriented to power, not

already an alterity whose internal composition is the hybridized history of colonial

identifications,

prohibitions,

and

incitements.

Even

if such

a

form of pure cultural difference untouched by and not oriented to state colonial history did exist, the law itself negates the affective productivity of its legal agency. For the law must be able to comprehend the cultural narrative presented before it, be able to encompass it in its understanding even as it experiences this narrative as other than cultural narratives it commonsensically

understands

as its own

(or, our) cultural

narratives.

This is the aporia of the cultural difference the court iterates and faces: resist being (Australian) for me/do not resist me; to discriminate against

you is not to discriminate socially/to discriminate against you is to discriminate socially; to understand you is to suspect you are me (Australian, engaged in history)/not to understand you is to suspect you are not (Australian). As if using post-Fanonean theory as a handbook, legal practitioners in actual land claim cases produce not quite black/not quite white subjects before the law.** Finally, every native title or land rights case must bear the burden of national anxieties it cannot solve. The law is not simply scrutinizing local traditions, their genealogy and trajectory, but the meaning of recognizing every particular traditional performance in terms of national aspirations. In seemingly remote land claim hearings, national fantasies, frustrations, and anxieties flood legal interpretations; unfix critical reading; catch the actor up in an imaginary of national redemption and national shame,

national tolerance and national intolerance; and lead the eye to a sublime object.** In so doing, they distract national critical consciousness from the law’s actual aim: the resubordination of the Aboriginal society vis-a-vis European law and society. I always pause here. Publics and politicians were moved by the High Court’s breathless moral confidence. The justices wrote as if they were paramount

circus performers, able to walk suspended in analytical air,

cutting the ropes to cultural discrimination while confidently walking along them. The court marked all previous discriminations as ideological—in a sense similar to that proposed by Terry Eagleton, who has defined ideology as the points at which our cultural practices are interwoven with political power—without casting doubt on their own eschatological evocations of the Good Society towards which their discriminatory prac33. See Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York, 1967), and Homi K. Bhabha, “The Other Question: Stereotype, Discrimination, and the Discourse of Colonialism,” The Location of Culture (New York, 1994), pp. 66-84. 34. See Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology.

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tices aim.*° It is as though they truly believed their discriminations would resist history, that their acts represented the lifting of necessity and the allowance of freedom. The present can be good, even if the past is bad. Their good intentions, unlike those of the justices who sat before them,

would resist the relentless unfurling of discourse. And it is as if the repetitive failure of past eschatological images never decreases the power these images hold over the present: the New Deal, the New Society, the New Left, the New Right, the New Covenant. All seem to fix critical thinking, on the left and on the right, on the abjected and civilized and redeemed.

What about this moment in national time allows the law to incite national and subaltern memory on behalf of a new collective self-understanding in a way that makes the rewriting of history seem a recognition of and accounting for that history; that allows the (re)entrenchment of cultural discrimination as a technology of state power; and, as if these were not enough, that makes this new technology of state power seem like a means to liberate subalterns from the state? To begin answering some of these questions, we can return to the court’s claim that the common law was shamed by its racist history and the gaze of the international community. We might ask: to which racist histories and to which international and transnational communities and conditions is the court referring?

4. Banana Republics On 14 May 1986, Keating, then treasurer in the Hawke government, described Australia to Australians as a “Fledgling Banana Republic.’*® Although an economist and not a Deleuzian by training, Keating never-

theless acted as if he sought to bend “the outside” inward “through a series of practical exercises” —speech acts, economic policies, and labor practices—in order to reformulate Australian subjectivity along a rationalized spatial economy.*’ He saw this realignment of national identity as a prerequisite to the nation’s economic productivity, and thus to its social 35. See Terry Eagleton, introduction to Ideology: An Introduction (New York, 1994), palit

36. Quoted in Richard Higgott, “Australia: Economic Crises and the Politics of Regional Economic Adjustment,” in Southeast Asia in the 1980s: The Politics of Economic Crisis, ed. Richard Robison, Kevin Hewison, and Higgott (Sydney, 1987), p. 178. Meaghan Morris also notes this as a significant moment of national time: “By 1986, as the Treasurer began to warn of our ‘banana republic’ tendencies and burgeoning foreign debt, viewers were in the words of one angry critic, ‘treated nightly to the spectacle of economic commentators pronouncing on the government's political performance. . . . It was as though foreign traders, rather than Australian voters, had become the arbiters of political taste in this country”

(Morris, “Future Fear,’ in Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Changes, ed. Jon Bird et al. [New York, 1993], p. 33). 37. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Sean Hand (Minneapolis, 1986), p. 100.

Shame and Australian Multiculturalism

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well-being, in the conditions of late capital. Keating was, however, simply

eloquently and passionately engaged in Labor’s more general campaign to make the Australian public literate in economic rationalism: how “culture(s) and identity (or, better, the processes

through

which

they are

formed)” are a “resisting ‘environment’ of the economic system that has to be made more economically ‘rational’ and ‘productive.”*® Nearly ten years later, now as prime minister, Keating proclaimed on national television, “I am Asian,” replacing the banana republic image with a new mapping of Australia in the world to shake what he saw as the national fantasies and complacencies that affected economic growth. Keating’s cartographical imaginary aimed to provoke Australians to consider the profits available to them if they would understand their identities and identifications to be flexible and strategic and dislodge questions of ontology from essentialized corporeal and historical grounds. But in reiterating Australian ethnic identity while locating it in Asia, Keating repeated the very assumptions his metaphor was suppose to be shaking. The addressee of Keating’s comments remained a loosely defined AngloCeltic, like Keating, forced to think of his or her “whiteness” at a double

economic margin—at the margin of Europe and the United States and at the margin of the Asia-Pacific. Social and political-economic conditions in these margins have undergone significant transformations since the emergence of the East Asian so-called miracle economiesin the 1960s and 1970s. Because of these transformations, Keating had good reason to be passionate about the nation and its citizens’ futures. He spoke at a moment when Australians were already experiencing a crisis of identity, if (173 not yet a “‘crisis of authority ’” due to significant global, state, and capital realignments.*? For the first sixty-odd years of Australian federation, the nation had “the highest living standards and the most equal distribution of income in all the ‘developed’ nations,” primarily as the result of the Labour Accord (the state’s direct control over wages, industrial relations, and tar-

iffs).*° But this economic stability was also a result of Australia’s longstanding trading partnership with England, in which Australia provided the primary materials for British industry and imported from Britain manufactured and consumer goods and received capital investment. Most Anglo-Celtic Australians, indeed, were living the good life, beachside and basking in the glow of a well-functioning state and economy. Citizens could, for a while, imagine themselves living in a “lucky country” if they forgot about the indigenous people interned in diseasestricken detention camps in the far north and west of the nation.*! The 38. Michael Pusey, Economic Rationalism in Canberra: A Nation-Building State Changes Its Mind (Melbourne, 1991), p. 225. 39. Gramsci, “State and Civil Society,” Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 210.

40. Pusey, Economic Rationalism in Canberra, p. 213. 41. Donald Horne, The Lucky Country: Australia Today (Ringwood, 1964).

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everyday conditions of these unlucky others did not often puncture public representations in which Australians felt good about themselves, their future, and their national self-understanding as a white nation advancing Western humanism in the Asia-Pacific.*?

The Australian standard of living began to change significantly in the early 1970s joined the EEC, partner. Battered state and capital

acle economies

when England, after a leaving Australia bereft by a number of global expanded long-standing

period of economic instability, of its major historical trading economic crises, the Australian trading patterns with the mir-

of the Asia-Pacific, and most importantly with Japan.*

But even as it changed economic partners, Australia’s economic profile remained remarkably stable. Japan was in need of industrial raw materials and Australia remained in need of capital investment, and manufac-

tured and durable consumer goods. Yet, Australian businessmen discovered that the global conditions of

capital had changed by the time they refigured their trading partners. The Asia-Pacific was not simply a new site of capital accumulation but an innovator in forms of capital organization. Japanese capital, in particular,

developed novel production techniques, as firms “rationalized” their manufacturing operations by establishing multilayered subcontracting systems and by relocating production facilities to geographical areas unaccustomed to Fordist wage and consumption standards.** Subcontracting firms and production facilities increasingly transgressed national borders, leading not only to Japanese economic dominance in the region but to the formation, if not of an integrated, then of an interdependent

Asia-Pacific political economy—the creation of dense linkages among the organization of modes and sites of productions, consumer patterns, and material extraction and manufacturing. And while Japan’s South East Asian trading partners nursed lingering suspicions about the possible emergence

of a new Japanese

imperialism

in the area, a regional bloc

nevertheless began to congeal and harden by the middle of the 1970s. As a result of these changing capital formations, Australia began to

face “mounting economic challenges due to falling commodity prices, rising debt burden, and inefficient and uncompetitive industries.”*°The na42. See Brian Murphy, The Other Australia: Experiences of Migration (Cambridge, 1993). 43. After periods of sustained growth from 1960 to 1974, the Australian economy suffered a stagflationary recession in 1974. Unemployment peaked at 9.9 percent in 1982 but stayed above 7 percent from 1982 to 1988. At the same time Australia’s gross external debt rose sharply from under $10 billion to just under $140 billion. See Barrie Dyster and David Meredith, Australia in the International Economy, in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1990), esp. p. 269. See also Ken

Buckley and Ted Wheelwright,

No Paradise for Workers:

Capitalism and the Common People in Australia 1788-1914 (Melbourne, 1988), p. 247.

44. See Alvin Y. So and Stephen W. K. Chiu, East Asia and the World Economy (London, 1995).

45. Steve Chan and Cal Clark, “The Rise of the East Asian NICs: Confucian Capitalism, Status Mobility, and Developmental Legacy,” in The Evolving Pacific Basin in the Global

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tion was becoming “Latin Americanized.”** In every financial quarter it seemed, the national economy shrunk relative to the emerging so-called flying geese of the Asia-Pacific. Jobs were harder to find, although the Labour Accord kept the minimum wage high. Whole generations of Anglo-Celtics, “our kids,” were on the dole or on the dole roller coaster. In the midst of these economic horrors, the mass media ran story after story of Asian capitalists buying up choice Australian real estate, of the lifestyles of the Asian new millionaires, and of the “Asian” social and cultural values

putatively at the basis of the miracle economies.*’ Still, the mass media rarely discussed the underside of capital transformations, although it did cover the occasional collapsed building in Malaysia and Indonesia. What the Australian mainstream media did discuss were the cultural differences separating Australian and Asian societies, typically the former state’s commitment to a notion of universal human rights, rights that appeared to be threatened by these new forms of the economic good. Western humanism’s fragility and defensiveness at the double margin ofAsiaPacific and Euro-American hegemony is suggested by the newspaper headlines I read when I arrived in Sydney on 18 September 1996. In front-page stories, both the Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian reported that in a speech in Jakarta, the Liberal prime minister, John Howard, had defended the Europeanness of Australian nationalism: “We are immensely proud of our distinctive culture, our distinctive history, and our distinctive traditions, and we yield to nobody in asserting their great quality and enduring value.”** The mainstream media weighed these cultural issues against the economic, social, and political profits that might accrue to Australians if they thought of themselves spatially, from a bird’s

eye perspective, as a point on the globe, rather than primarily historically, as descended and therefore essentially beng from another point on the globe. While Australia may have needed the strong economies of Asia, did the identification with or as them cross the discursively thin line preserving European culture and its political and social institutions at the nation’s core? At what cost would Australians maintain or erase these social and cultural differences and traditions? And, finally, no matter the

political-economic sense that his statement might have made, did statements like Keating’s “I am Asian” constitute a form of race betrayal for Political Economy: Domestic and International Linkages, ed. Clark and Chan

(Boulder, Colo.,

1992) pe ore 46. See Dilip K. Das, The Asia-Pacific Economy (London, 1996), p. 17. 47. Depending upon their theoretical orientation, economists explain the cause of this realignment of capital accumulation by free-market forces, cultural attitudes (Confucianism), state policy, and relations of dependency. For a good overview, see So and Chiu,

East Asia and the World Economy. 48. Patrick Walters and Michael Gordon, “We’re a Culture Apart, PM Tells Asia,” The Australian, 18 Sept. 1996, p. Al. See also Michael Millet and Louise Williams, “PM Defends

Soft Line on Indonesia,” Sydney Morning Herald, 18 Sept. 1996, p. Al.

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those in the nation who still worried whether they would be swamped both by Asian immigration and economic power? During this period from the 1970s through the early 1990s, the state also began to shift financial and social resources into Aboriginal communities in response to a transnational indigenous liberation movement that highlighted the disjunction between the state’s ideal image of itself as a postimperial exemplar of Western humanism in the Asia-Pacific and the state’s actual laissez-faire brutality towards its own internal colonial subjects. By the mid 1980s indigenous culture and politics had gained a public luminosity, political legitimacy, and economic base unparalleled in Australian history. Almost ten years had passed since the first Commonwealth land rights legislation had been enacted with the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act of 1976 (ALR), spawning similar, if less effective, copies in most Australian states and giving indigenous communities, activists, and publics access to capital, bureaucratic, and public institutional bases. Moreover, Aboriginal culture had been successfully marketed nationally and internationally primarily through the medium of art and music. “Good Aboriginal art” (paintings, sculptures, and artifacts) went on tour, so to speak, and was exhibited in international galleries to critical acclaim.*® Aboriginal activist-artists, such as members of the

band Yothu Yindi, and popular figures, such as Sting and the rock band Midnight Oil, popularized indigenous land rights struggles globally. “Bad Aboriginal art” was sold in tourist stalls across Australia and beyond.°° But both high and low cultural forms contributed to a new global traffic in commodified indigenous culture. Particular indigenous knowledges were generalized into a natural commercial product. And they contributed to a global resignification of the “indigenous” in relation to social struggle. Indigenousness was unhinged and “liberated” from the specificity of actual indigenous struggles, from their differing social agendas and visions of a reformed social world, and from the specific challenges they posed to contemporary nation-based governmentality and capital. Freed from specific struggles, the signifier indigenousness began to function

as an aura, naturalizing any struggle or commodity

desire to

which it was attached. For instance, when the head of the Australian Children’s Television Foundation accused U.S. broadcasters of a “sinister new form” of cultural colonialism, she troped a national counterinsurgency as indigenous and countercolonial.®' She did this at the cost of effacing the struggles of actually existing indigenous groups against ongoing state co49. See Fred Myers, “Representing Culture: The Production of Discourse(s) for Aboriginal Acrylic Painting,” Cultural Anthropology 6 (Feb. 1991): 26-62. 50. See Eric Michaels, Bad Aboriginal Art: Tradition, Media, and Technological Horizons

(Minneapolis, 1994).

51. “Ms Edgar said [one] way to destroy a people was to detribalize them by taking away their stories and their dreams, replacing them with imported ones” (Robert Wilson, “Children’s TV Head Blasts ‘Sinister’ U.S.,” The Australian, 3 July 1996, p. 3).

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lonialism, struggles themselves drawing on transnational discourses and institutions including North and South American indigenous movements. But, in doing so, she also demonstrated the elasticity of the notion of indigenousness and its function in naturalizing even those social struggles that are potentially detrimental to actually existing Aboriginal people. The High Court’s claim in Mabo that the common law was shamed by its own racist history and an international gaze should be placed within the context of these other contemporary national mortifications of state, capital, and public and counterpublic realignments and struggles. In particular, we should pay attention to the justices’ concern that the Australian common law be brought “up to date” with other “civilized” First World Euro-American nation-states that had long ago recognized the mutual compatibility of native title and the state’s radical title (M, p. 18).°? At stake in Mabo is not simply a nation’s shame at its past as a colonizer, but its shame at its potential future as an economically and culturally colonized nation. Will the historical significance of the Australian nation be that it bore an impotent Western

humanism, a barren liberal

democracy, the only “white” nation on earth to be colonized because it was unable to produce wealth and status—“the good life”—for its citizens? When Mabo is placed in this context, native title appears as a fetish of national anxieties about the status, role, and future of the Australian

nation and helps explain the widespread public debates resulting from the case. Native title condenses and stands in for Australian aspirations for First Worldness (symbolically white, Euro-American) on the margins

of Euro-American and Asia-Pacific domination—the Aboriginal subject (indigenous blackness) standing as the material to be worked over for the nation to maintain its place in (Western) modernity. The court’s use of

the shamed Anglo-Celtic Australian fixed the ideal image of the nation as a white, First World, global player in the national imaginary.

Mabo’s politics of shame is not, however, simply a nightmare about the nation’s marginality. Instead shame allows the law to perform the adjustments necessary to recuperate its authority and values in a “postideological,” (post)colonial moment. By postideological I do not mean to suggest that capital and state relations are now transparent. Rather I mean to point to a characteristic of the contemporary moment, in which a feeling, shame, displaces issues and evidences of power, hegemony, and contradiction. As Berlant argues, feeling politics is experienced as beyond ideology, mediation, and contestation. Shame’s political pleasure, its sublime

politics, lies in conjuring an experience “beyond ideology” in a moment saturated with ideological readjustments of state discrimination. 52. See Susan Burton Phillips, “A Note: Eddie Mabo v the State of Queensland,” Sydney Law Review 15 (June 1993): 121-42.

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When

the court evoked a shamed

nation whose redemption de-

pended upon an acknowledgment of past wrongdoings, it accomplished

what a mere change of law could not. It created a focal point beyond politics for both business and subaltern antagonists of the state and the law’s multicultural project, the former who might see the project as too radical, the latter as too reformist. The fantasy of shame and reparation created an experience of intimacy—intimate

holding, intimate

under-

standing, intimate knowledge—between those who control the access to and those excluded from critical rights. Right-wing business leaders, who opposed the decision, had little recourse but to return the court’s own rhetoric as a preideological barometer of national well-being. So, for example, a coalition of business interests emphasized the shame of a white nation forced into an unnatural structural adjustment by a nonwhite coalition of transnational and subaltern groups. Rather than manipulating other nations, as a true First World nation would, Australia was like those

other nations in being controlled by international forces unknown. Subordinate groups and the left, shocked by the public pseudo-recognition of their position, were seduced towards the headlights of the law. In other words, by deploying a weapon once effectively wielded by the weak (subalterns, colonial subjects, African American civil rights activists, feminists,

gays and lesbians),°* those who controlled access to resources and rights were able to bind oppressed groups more tightly to the state and to looking to state law as the site from which a nondiscriminatory politics could proceed, thereby cohering a national collective will in the face of serious public and business apprehension. They did so not by refusing to accept the shame, but by embracing, foregrounding, and using it as a source of identification for their political projects. They did not simply trumpet the good of state law, but lamented its villainy, as if the state were not a part of its own institutionality. And in doing so they showed how institutions are claimed to have feelings and how these feeling institutions translate liberation struggles against them into their own legitimation.®° 53. Hugh Morgan of the Western Mining Corporation claimed that “the High Court had plunged property law into chaos and ‘given substance’ to the ambitions of Australian communists and the Bolshevik left” (quoted in Bartlett, “Mabo: Another Triumph for the Common Law,’ Sydney Law Review 15 [June 1993]: 178). For discussions of Aborigines and mining in Western Australia, see Bartlett, “Inequality before the Law in Western Australia:

The Land (Title and Traditional Usage) Act,” Aboriginal Law Bulletin 3 (Dec. 1993): 7-9, and

Aborigines and Diamond Mining: The Politics of Resource Development in the East Kimberley, Western Australia, ed. R. A. Dixon and M. C. Dillon (Nedlands, 1990).

54. See James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, Conn., 1985).

55. While Drucilla Cornell’s discussion of the normative grounding ofjuridical interpretation in implicit and explicit references to “the Good” has been helpful to this essay’s understanding ofthe technology ofdiscrimination, more attention needs to be paid to dominant hegemonic projects’ traffic in legal shame (Drucilla Cornell, “From the Lighthouse: The Promise of Redemption and the Possibility of Legal Interpretation,” Cardozo Law Review 11 [July—Aug. 1990]: 1688).

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5. Telecommunicating Cultural Traditions Meanwhile, indigenous people, their lawyers, and anthropologists were constructing the narratives requested of them by the state. In the same year Mabo was heard, in land rights cases throughout the Northern Territory of Australia, they were making practical decisions about how to

run cases under the provisions of the ALR. Who should be put forward as traditional Aboriginal owners for a tract of land—what slice of a community, family, or language group, based on what amalgamation oflocal, anthropological, and legal dictates? How should history and cultural change be presented? What constitutes the retention of traditional customs, beliefs, and practices? What is culture, history, alienation? What is

a group (can one person be a group)? What constitutes traditional land? Did pastoral leases alienate land? Did a Christian belief alienate an Aboriginal person from their traditional beliefs? The pursuit of ways to fit Aboriginal groups into the framework of the ALR ran alongside the intention of the land commissioner and the lawyers and anthropologists working on the behalf of Aboriginal groups to recognize and support cultural diversity as opposed to past state suppressions of it. Indeed, the ALR was intended to give a material basis (land) to Aboriginal cultural

beliefs and practices. These questions wracked the longest running land claim in Australia, the Kenbi Land Claim, where, in the final hearing, three Aboriginal groups were separately represented as the traditional Aboriginal owners of a peninsula and a chain of islands located on the west side of Darwin Harbour, the Cox Peninsula and Port Patterson Islands. Under claim since 1976, these areas are potentially worth millions in real estate and development.” This land is widely understood to be (or, to “have been”)

“Laragiya land,” or the land of the Laragiya people. Laragiya refers to the language spoken by a variety of social groups who lived in the greater Darwin hinterland at the time of colonial contact. Kenbi posed serious problems for a finding of traditional Aboriginal ownership under the terms of the ALR. The ALR stipulates that “traditional Aboriginal owners” be “a local descent group of Aborigines who— (a) have common spiritual affiliations to a site on the land, being affiliations that place the group under a primary responsibility for that site and for the land; and (b) are entitled by Aboriginal tradition to forage as of right over that “Dreamings”).°”

land”

(sacred

sites

are

colloquially

known

as

By the time of the first hearing, a number of land commissioners had noted that it was the “religious bond with the world around [them] that 56. See Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Labors Lot: The Power, History, and Culture of Aboriginal

Action (Chicago, 1993). 57. Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act, 1976 (Canberra, 1992), p. 5.

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the Parliament has endeavored to recognize by its definition of traditional

Aboriginal owner with its three elements: family ties to land; religious ties; and customary economic rights, i.e. to forage.”** Since the first set of land claims was heard, land commissioners have consistently sought to understand the multiple paths to land ownership and to recognize local

complexities of land tenure and Aboriginal identity.°? What may count as the recruitment principles that establish a “local descent group” or “family ties” has been consistently linked to local understandings of kinship and descent. The meaning of “primary” has also been expanded to allow for local Aboriginal traditions of differing but complementary rights and duties that place one or more groups in a “primary” relation to claim

lands. In most of these cases, land commissioners have tried to apply a benevolent and difference-recognizing intent of the ALR, but this occurs after the group the commissioner recognizes, or not, has been selected to fit the act’s terms of reference. Kenhi showed the court a kind of difference it had trouble recogniz-

ing. Two main Aboriginal social groups existed in relation to the land claim. The first were the Belyuen, a community of roughly two hundred people resident on the claim land who fulfilled the spirit of the ALR inso-

far as they had family, religious, and economic ties to the land. Their ancestors had been in the region living, conducting ceremony, and hunting since current residents could remember and since European records

were kept (beginning with the founding of Darwin in 1869). Their religious ties to the claim region had the form and content many Anglo-

Celtic Australians considered and colloquially referred to as “traditional blackfella business.” They had common enough beliefs and practices and were the only Aboriginal group conducting funeral and initiation ceremonies on the claim land. Finally, their economic rights and practices were unassailable. The Belyuen, however, were widely viewed as a collection of densely

intermarried migrant language and clan groups (eight language groups and twenty clan groups are represented in the community) whose traditional country was in the coastal Anson

Bay region, south of the claim

land. They had, in other words, serious problems establishing the recruitment

principles that constituted

them as a local descent group. They

themselves were often reluctant to use the phrase “traditional Aboriginal owner” in relationship to themselves, preferring to say they were “stuck” on the land. Thus as a group the Belyuen appeared primarily to be a contingency of settler history, not a local descent group with Dreaming connections to a sacred site on the land. Their ancestors are thought to 58. Aboriginal Land Commissioner, Timber Creek Land Claim (Canberra, 1985), p. 15. 59. See Aboriginal Land Commissioner, Daly River (Malak Malak) Land Claim (Canberra, 1982), Warlpu Kukatja and Negarti Land Claim (Canberra, Land Claim. 60. See Povinelli, Labor's Lot.

1985), and Timber Creek

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have been drawn to the region due to precolonial (“traditional”) ceremonial and economic ties to the land, new economic resources available from

the European settlement in Port Darwin, and the depopulation of Anson Bay from settler diseases and police massacres. The native affairs department forcibly interned their ancestors in an inland settlement, Delissaville, in 1941. In 1976, with the passage of the ALR, the community was

renamed Belyuen after a sacred water hole located at the rear of the community. A second group put forward as traditional Aboriginal owners were the Laragiya, descendants of the language group associated with the claim land but who, for the most part, had lived off the claim area for at

least two generations. Few members of this group had any experiential knowledge about the land, especially when compared to the Belyuen. Moreover, as a group the Laragiya were sociologically and culturally diverse. Rather than having a common set of beliefs about the spiritual nature of the claim land, the Laragiya had differing beliefs and practices, all of which varied significantly from those of the Belyuen. They had, in

other words, serious legal problems establishing the common spiritual affiliation that made them primarily responsible for Dreaming sites on the land. The claim was heard once in 1989-90. No traditional Aboriginal owners were found. This ruling was, however, overturned by the Federal Court and sent back to be reheard.®! When Kenbi was reheard in 1995-96,

the second land commissioner, Mr. Justice Gray, was faced not only with deciding what were the recruitment principles deemed relevant by the claimants (what constituted a “local descent group” locally) but also with deciding now competing, often hostile, claims by groups with significantly different cultural performances and social practices.® Having worked with the Belyuen for ten years, I was asked to act as their anthro-

pologist by them and the Northern Land Council. The Northern Land Council was established under the ALR and charged with investigating and litigating Aboriginal land claims in the northern half of the Northern Territory. The Belyuen claim angered many within the Laragiya. These Laragiya believed the Belyuen were trying to steal their country, a country theirs by

a Dreamtime

mandate,

or, as some

put it, by a “blood

right”—blood descent from a Laragiya ancestor gave them ownership rights to Laragiya land irrespective of the density of their economic or ceremonial practices in relationship to it. The Laragiya claim angered some Belyuen who believed many of the “town Laragiya” to be too genea61. Hill Northrop and J. J. O’Loughlin, “Northern Land Council and Others v Aboriginal Land Commissioner and Another,” ALR 105 (1994): 539.

62. As of the writing of this essay, he had not written his report on traditional Aboriginal ownership in the Kenbi Land Claim. 63. The ALR and the Native Title Act stipulate that every claim be accompanied by an anthropological report.

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logically and socially removed from the country and its Aboriginal culture to be “for it” in a way superior to themselves. The representational problems to which Kenbi exposed the ALR cannot be fully discussed here; the above simply suggests some of its structural difficulties. In the following, I want to suggest the problems the fantasies and architecture of new (post)racist multicultural discrimination

pose to representing contemporary indigenous struggles. My first case begins with a fax I sent from Belyuen to my partner at the time, who was at the Lotan Kibbutz in Israel visiting her daughter. The fax is dated 10 October 1995. I had returned to Belyuen for what was suppose to be the final hearing of Kenbi. I was charged to represent the interests of the Belyuen “migrants.” In what way did they have rights to the claim land according to native traditions and how would they be advantaged or disadvantaged by a successful claim by the Laragiya group? At the outset of the hearing, the Belyuen were not presented as claimants due to what were seen as insurmountable problems fitting them into the framework of the ALR. In consultation with Belyuen men and women, I wrote a report that addressed the legal barriers the Belyuen faced by outlining “local” beliefs about the mutual constitution of people and land, and the cultural processes

that transform

dislocation

(migration) to location (autochthonism).

Critical to this argument were the interpenetration of three concepts—maroi (conception), ngunbudj (sweat), and nyuidj (ancestral spirits)—their significance to the community’s relationship to the Belyuen

water hole, and the water hole’s significance to the larger claim area. This report resulted in a reassessment of the possibility of a Belyuen claim. And in the middle of the second hearing, they were officially put forward as claimants. The following is an approximation of what I wrote about these concepts in my final report. Marois used to refer to conception Dreamings, to a shade or essence of a being human or otherwise, and to one’s own personal Dreaming. All Belyuen say they have some maroi relationship to a water hole (Belyuen) found in the rear of the community. They were either born from Belyuen (a Dreaming personage living in the water hole) or were given their children by Belyuen. As a result, Belyuen is said to be “boss” for the Belyuen people and, because of underground passages (kenbi) from this water hole to other sacred sites in the claim area, he is said to be “boss” over the entire claim area. Ngunbudy refers to the sweat or smell emitted by every creature, and plays a complex role in land tenure and land management. Ritually applied sweat on hunting tools makes a locale productive to Belyuen people and dangerous for foreigners. Special formal and informal rites exist for using sweat to reform human bodies and hunting instruments so that claim land will recognize the user as “from the land.” Sweat produced during ceremonial action (singing, clapping, didjeridoo, dancing) 1s believed to travel through underground kenbi passages from sacred site to sacred site, deepening the relationship between the Belyuen and the land claimed. The washing of initiates by ceremonial leaders in Belyuen and at nearby sacred sites

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infuses Belyuen sweat and blood into the land. Sweat “put into” freshwater Belyuen, for instance, travels via the kenbi tunnels to the offshore islands, while sweat “put into” the saltwater sites travels counterclockwise around the entire claim region. Nyuidj are the spirits of deceased persons. In an earlier work, I described nyuidj as that part of “the self embodied at a site” after the death of a person—they are stuck im the places to which they were associated in life. These nyuidj often reappear to relatwes as they pass by.°* Hunting, camping, and living in a place for a long time attaches the essence of a person to a place. It is because of this that Belyuen say some dead relatives still reside in specific sites in the claim area. Rather than focusing on the immediate purpose of these nyuidj appearances, ngunbudj processes, and maroi attachments, Belyuen residents emphasize to each other and to researchers what such appearances signify for their attachment to the country, how they signify a mutual embodiment ofpeople and place—spurits, bodies, and bodily products coming from and sinking into regional lands, regional lands emitting Belyuen spirits— over the long period they and their ancestors have lived in the region. These underlying local traditions lay at the basis of their claims about how and why they are “stuck” to the land under claim and how and why they believe they should have equal say in economic decisions made concerning the land. In the middle of the hearing I sent the following fax to the Lotan Kibbutz. In between the time I wrote my report and when I sent my fax, I had returned to the United States for a few weeks. Hello. I am here w/ Theresa Singh and Gracie Binbin. I wake up and know where I am—what do you think that means?

Miss you and hope the flight was OK. The Nazis bombed a train in Arizona. That's all I can say but you know the rest. xxx Beth

Theresa Singh, whom I call aunt, helped me to send the fax from the Belyuen Community Council office. As she did, she asked me, “What

does this mean here, ‘I wake up and know where I am’?” I told her that often when I returned to the United States after a stay at Belyuen, for weeks on end I would wake up throughout the night not knowing where I was. “This time,” I said, “it was getting creepy.”

I would wake up at night and look at this old lady [my girlfriend at the time was fifty and more importantly had gray hair, or berluberlu] and I’d say to myself, “hey, who 7s this?” Camping up my story a bit, I described how in the dark quiet of autumn nights in upstate New York, I would peer closely at her and think very hard, “Who is this? Maybe Josie” (another Belyuen aunt of mine, who also has short gray hair and has lighter skin than Theresa). 64. Povinelli, Labor’ Lot, p. 162.

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Then I would think, “Oh, no! This isn’t Josie, this is some white lady!” By this time, my partner would wake up, look at me looking at her, and ask, “Do you know who I am, Beth?” “Nope.” “Do you know where you are, Beth?” “Nope.” On and on, over and over, this

same story, night after night. Theresa Singh, Gracie Binbin, and Marjorie Bilbil, who had entered the office by then and overheard the conversation, shook their heads saying that this pryawedjirr (madness) was serious, Belyuen had gotten my spirit, my maroi, in a way that now seriously threatened my health. We all

mused over Belyuen’s ability to reach to the United States and tug at my emotions and mind. Surely, the women said, this says something about the power the site had on people who had lived there for a long time, who believed, and who had been through ritual.

But the fax occasioned another discussion of piyawedjirr. After my fax story, Theresa told us of adream she had the night before. In her dream

she was on the witness stand in the Federal Court House in Darwin facing the land commissioner. The “judge” turned to her and asked “straight out” (directly, rudely), “You say you are a traditional Aboriginal owner of the Cox Peninsula, but you are not Laragiya. You are a migrant. What do you have to say about that?” Theresa then described her dreamtime panic (“What can I say, I panicked properly”) and her dreamtime courage (“I got brave now inside. ‘If we are going to win this land I am going have to talk directly

[rudely]

to this whiteman.

You’re

not

going

to be

shamed’”). In her dream she turned to the land commissioner and said,

“Yeah, I am not Laragiya. I have country in another place. But my spirit is here. All the Belyuen people have been born and died here, Belyuen.

Belyuen is boss. Belyuen is like that telephone, fax. He calls you. He rings up these places. He can travel. He knows who his people are.” Theresa Singh’s metaphorical reference to the telephone/fax is not unusual. To explain Belyuen to land commissioners, anthropologists, and themselves, older men and women often refer to the telephone system. They describe Belyuen as “like a telephone.” Belyuen travels through underground “cables” “ringing up” other Dreaming sites in its reach, telling them, “Hey, these are my kids. You must not harm them; you must take care of them.” Belyuen is the subject-force of the interlocutory moment, and the Belyuen community’s social power is “measurable” in terms of the nodal reach of its lines, not only in terms of the homogenized space between them but also in the eruption of “Belyuen power” at a distance. These short exchanges generate ethnographic and legal pleasure for the Belyuen claim insofar as they have a cultural specificity and directionality. The telephone and the fax machine are embedded in a specific tropic field through which I and Belyuen women and men think about the meaning, truth, and efficacy of their local beliefs and practices. Water holes are fax machines; kenbi tunnels are telephone lines. A Belyuen fam-

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ily group is formed, transformed, transported, and extended by the action of local practices and local beliefs about the communicative embodiment of people and place. Western technology, its global reach, is a metaphor for locality; Belyuen draw on technology not for itself but for themselves—we do not push or question too hard whether Belyuen and kent are telephones and faxes. Not questioning the metaphorical status of the metaphor, we can use these examples as prima facie evidence of the resistance of local culture to the global and fit Belyuen into stereotypes embedded in the ALR and in the Native Title Act that borrowed much of its language from it, regarding local mythic thinking and its antihistoricism bent. We can represent Belyuen thinking as recontextualizing globalization by enfolding new technologies and transnational communication and communities into local cultural logics. Rather than simply dwelling on the ethnographic pleasure and legal productivity of figuring local discursive power against new _ infotechnology, we might dwell on the strong temptation to do so when so

much depends upon producing a locale at once local and national, that is, a Belyuen in keeping with the ALR. In the Mabo-reinterpreted world, the trajectory of the local I have just sketched—outward from the local to enclose nonlocal “foreign objects”—can reinforce the romance of native fixity and mythic thinking and the hegemonic bent of the law in rewarding local resistance to change. And it reinforces the law’s injunction that Aboriginal Australians express at their own risk their engagement with the democratic form of capital and governance and their potential ambivalences about specific traditions and the identities and identifications necessary to maintain them. In this particular case, Theresa, myself, and the others engaged in this complicated conversation figure ourselves in a dislocated location, in a strange trajectory that has led all of us to have our self-identity and social relations most meaningfully expressed through that blue Belyuen water hole, itself now a point at the beginning

or the end of transnational telephone cables. And all of us rely on culturally hybrid communicative technologies to mitigate the legal effects of this dislocated location. These communicative technologies include faxes, email, and telephones that coordinate strategies across continents and

communities; their ability (and my ability) to find a legal language of persuasion; the Belyuen water hole’s ability to communicate the sweat and spirit of local people into regional claim lands; and, finally, my own much commented-upon (in)ability to avoid the first person plural when referring to “the Belyuen” and thus produce myself as a distant, objective observer in a court of law. The temptation to dwell on the discursive pleasure of our fax conversation also seems to me to be correlated to the desire not to focus on the profound anxiety and shame expressed by Theresa’s and my stories. ‘This anxiety and shame is essential to the production of new nation-based bodies, desires, and social hierarchies.

In this case, Theresa and the other

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women must find a way of making the incommensurability of local and state-mandated discursive and corporeal performance seem commensurate but not opportunistic. Belyuen understandings of maro1, ngunbud), and nyuidj are a locally produced reaction to the historical contingencies and brutalities of the colonial period rearticulating people, places, and bodily inhabitations; desires, dreams, and aspirations. But, at the same time, they and I work to articulate these discourses and embodiments in

response to the state demand that they both Le in relation to specific laws, social policies, and state identities and, simultaneously, erase any sugges-

tion that these cultural beliefs are an opportunistic being for these laws, policies, and identities—and erase, yet again, any local traditions sanctioned by statutory and common law. I am suggesting, in sum, that the anxiety these women confront does not simply come from difficulties in deciding what to tell state authorities but from how deeply they must establish an abject relation to their traditions and identifications that are deemed legally and publicly abhorrent.® For example, the performance of secret-sacred male and female initiation ceremonies on the land under claim is considered a primary index of land ownership under the ALR in this case and others. But the content of these ceremonies might be illegal under existing Australian statutory laws and might be considered immoral to most non-Aboriginal and some Aboriginal Australians. In the context of land claims, indigenous women and men must, therefore, consider what aspects of ceremony to reveal to nonlocal, non-Aboriginal persons. Moreover, land claims powerfully incite indigenous women and men to consider, once again, the morality

and legality of their ceremonial identities and identifications, bodily performances and sensualities. This corporeal anxiety and reflexivity is intensified by the material and psychic incitements of the land claim process—a desire to complete its puzzle without remainder and a shame at the idea of being beaten by it. The Belyuen and I stretch to reach the law’s demands and to hide from it those traditions that might shame us in order to increase the chances we can be freed from it. The difficulty of representing local culture becomes especially apparent when we compare the above case to how some Laragiya men and women figured the local in relation to transnational culture. Here again a discourse of shame framed Aboriginal rights. Shame was deployed as a political tactic of the subordinate (“you, the government, should feel shame and work towards a socially just reparation”). Inside and outside formal settings, many Laragiya persons talked about the shame of colonial and (post)colonial policies—the government’s forcible removal of children from their Aboriginal parents; the intentional spread of disease 65. “Renouncing dominant corporeal schemas is impossible, as Fanon so dramatically says, without a total making raw of the body” (Berlant, “68, or Something,” Critical Inquiry

21 [Autumn 1994]: 148).

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285

by settlers among the indigenous population; the police participation in or cover-ups of “minor” genocides; the continued high rate of Aboriginal deaths in custody and the continued low life expectancy of Aboriginal persons; and, finally, the shame of not being sure what is or was the content of their traditional practices or, given what they do know about some of them, whether they could reconcile these practices to their Christian beliefs.

Some of these issues were raised on a day of testimony in which an urban Laragiya family, the Fejos, tried to describe their spiritual relationship to the land under claim by referring to their family’s Christian evangelicalism, ESP, and New Age spirituality. In the sweltering buildup, on the northern coast of the Cox Peninsula, with Darwin visible across the harbor, the sound of Qantas airplanes often thundering overhead, and a

crowd

of fifty Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal

men

and women

sur-

rounding him, Wally Fejo told the land commissioner of “Larrakia . . . spirituality” and how through this he learned about sacred sites in the

claim area.® Wally Fejo was a spokesperson for the family and a wellknown and respected minister, the head of Nanggalinya, a missionary training school in Darwin. During a long personal and family history, he

described his changing Christian evangelical beliefs and practices and, among other metaphorical associations he employed, likened the Lara-

giya and Hebrew diasporas. At one point he described having “within my life span, a lot of mountaintop experiences, a lot of valleys, a lot of creeks,

and a lot of hurt feelings” (KZ pp. 4190-91). One of the mountaintop experiences he described was of“telecommunicating” with now-deceased Belyuen and Laragiya (Telecom is the AT&T of the Australian Commonwealth).

I don't want to talk for too long. I'd like to have others express their story as well but, might I go quickly yet slowly. I came over to Delissaville many times as a young person between the age of 18 and 25 for many reasons. And that was part of my search and putting down on paper as well as keeping it in my mind the kind of depth of spirituality Larrakia people’s spirit have. I’ve been amazed, I’ve been amazed that what eventuated. I—some of the people who here today, who’ve met me more who’ve come to my place or we somehow, somehow even prior to that we’ve been thinking of each other. And that’s the kind of relationship and telecommunications that we have. You know, we’ve—Telecom have come so far, technology, but we’ve had

it years and years. [KT, p. 4191] On cross-examination, a lawyer representing him and his family as part of the Laragiya group pressed Wally Fejo to be more site specific, a specificity inscribed in the ALR’s definition of traditional Aboriginal own66. Kenbi Transcripts (Indooroopilly, 1995), p. 4190; hereafter abbreviated KT:

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Elizabeth A. Povinelli

ers. He asked Wally Fejo whether now-deceased Laragiya men had told him about sacred sites in the claim area. Wally Fejo answered that they had not taught him “in a verbal way in which you and I are talking now.” The deceased men didn’t teach him the names of places or the mythic stories about the place: they “didn’t point out and say, look, here’s the demarcation, this is New South Wales, this is the Northern Territory. . . . No we had a better way of communication, as well as of teaching” (KT p.

4195). These better ways were evangelical and telepathic. His sister, Christine Fejo King, led the women’s side of the evidence. She told the Land Commissioner

her “special job,” her “spiritual role,”

for the Fejo family was “record keeper.” She then described sacred places she believed existed by referring now and again to a ledgerlike set of books she held in her lap. At one point, heard by all those in the background, Mirella Fejo urged her sister to tell the land commissioner about a seance they had held in which they called forth spirits of the dead. Telling Mirella she would have her turn to talk, Christine King continued her story. On cross-examination, Tony Young, an Anglo-Celtic lawyer

hired by the Northern Land Council to represent the Belyuen, asked Christine King whether she thought that dangerous sacred sites existed on the Cox Peninsula, sacred sites past which or over which one could not travel. “Yes,” she answered. In an attempt to establish the primariness of the Belyuen’s responsibility for the land under claim, he then asked

whether she knew where they were or how to treat them or whether she asked the Belyuen who did know.

CHRISTINE KING: I was told but I can’t tell you on a map. I don't know the names. But I was told that if Iwent there, I would feel that it was wrong. Mr Younc: I see. So, do you believe that if you went to one of these dangerous places, you might be in danger, or other people

might be in danger? CHRISTINE KING: You don’t—you go there, and the back of your hair, neck on the back of your hair stands up. It’s—, you know.

[KT, p. 4259]

A ripple of laughter and snorts passed through some of the nonLaragiya audience after that last “you know.” Christine King turned to Young and said that her feelings and beliefs were like his, like something he himself would know, like how we all “get a feeling.” The intimacy of the mimetic knowing she and Young experience disassembles the scene of cultural difference. The court, lawyers, anthropologists, and some Aboriginal subjects cannot feel the specific membrane of alterity on which multicultural rights are now based. Instead, they feel themselves to be abject, to be what must be purged from this scene of law. The metaphoricity of all moments of translation dissolves too fundamentally, and the law is forced to see too clearly its own and the colonial handprint in the

Shame and Australian Multiculturalism

287

scene. It is blackness telling whiteness we share the same feelings that makes whites uncomfortable. And this mimetic knowledge makes the scene a tense moment of cultural “difference”: it is you seen in me who are making yourself uncomfortable. During her turn to speak, Mirella Fejo took up the theme of ghosts and the speaking dead and deepened the abjection and shame of whiteness. She began by saying, “I just have one thing really of importance that I want to tell the Judge” (KT p. 4279). This was that the Fejos had “a gift” on “the spiritual side.” They can speak to the dead: “I really don’t care what anybody says about seeing ghosts or talking to ghosts or spirits for whatever you want to call it, but I do” (KZ, p. 4279). When pushed by her lawyer to be more site specific—to relate her powers to the land under claim—Mirella Fejo spoke of Aboriginal women’s ceremony. She had earlier introduced a null relationship between this and her family’s powers: “We have a gift in that we can speak to the dead. I talk with my uncles and my grandfather often. They come to visit. Now, I’m not a ceremony

woman. I have never gone through any ceremonies, but they come and visit, not only me, they come to my sisters” (KT) p. 4279). In crossexamination,

Mirella Fejo embedded

her ceremonial beliefs in the lan-

guage of the ALR (“spiritual affiliation”), invoking quasi-Jungian notions of “four elements.” In regards to women’s ceremony, as I said before, talking to the spir-

its of the ancestors, I’ve never gone through a ceremony but I am aware that, to have a proper women’s ceremony, you have to have the artifact or whatever it is, to go ahead and have a proper woman

ceremony. You just can’t have a women’s ceremony like that. That’s certain—you've got to have the spiritual affiliation, you’ve got to have the medicine man there. There’s certain things. There’s four

elements that have to be there in place for you to have a proper ceremony. Now, where it all is, I don't know. [KT pp. 4280-81]

Finally, Jessica King, Christine King’s daughter, took the microphone. Only a teenager, surrounded by her extended family, she said she

wanted to describe to the land commissioner her special relationship to her guardian bird, the sea eagle.

I have a special relationship with a creature in this country. It is a bird. And it is my guardian and I follow it because it'll take me to safe places. And wherever I go it will guard me. . . . And I also found that I can talk to the bird like I’m talking to you now. And I can understand what he says to me back. And if I concentrate I can hear everything he says in detail. [K7, p. 4295] Mimicking the young girl, the lawyer for the government opposing the claim prodded her to say more about her strange abilities. As she did,

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Elizabeth A. Povinelli

comments from non-Aborigines on the scene referred to “New Ageism,” “earth mothers,” and “crystal culture.” Other moans and voices of censure

stopped the cross-examination. This censure was not simply prompted by the horror and “shame” of witnessing a Northern Territory government lawyer bait a young Aboriginal woman, but by the evidence itself. With Jessica King’s evidence, we might say that the simulation and drift of signs of indigenousness have reached profound proportions. It is as likely that the cultural images and referents she relied on came from Santa Fe, from books like Mutant Message Down Under, and from films like The Last Wave as from the land under claim. As such, the “cultural obscen-

ity” of the evidence, as one non-Aboriginal person put it, was its “posture” as local, as “Aboriginal,” and, in the climate of competitive Aboriginal claims, as generating rights superior to those of the Belyuen. But at another level this reappropriation and redeployment of a cultural signifier, a hybridization of cultural hybridity, is a profound meditation on the meaning of urban Aboriginality’s relation to its traditional localities, under the disciplinary surveillance of state governance. Like Belyuen telecommunications, Fejo telecommunications are profoundly local meditations on the conditions of the local in transnational times no mat-

ter what their inflection or origin in New Age and pop-psychological forms of spirituality. Profound or banal, the question remains whether this land commissioner and other land commissioners and native title tribunals will recognize these forms of cultural difference as within the difference-

recognizing intent of the law, or whether they will recognize a plurality of differences as possible in relation to the same material space. Are these

the types of difference the state seeks to recognize and support with its legislation? Are these the kind of Aborigines the nation must reconcile itself to? Is this cultural difference you know when “you know” it? In any

case, we see how deeply the law desires to saturate the everyday discursive and imaginary frameworks of the subaltern with its own shamed and utopian visions of a multiculturalism that would revalidate the parking sticker of the nation-state and its core institutions at a moment when the

nation-state’s parking space is no longer perfunctorily renewed. Constructing these national identities and states in the context of global realignments of capital and power and new circuits of social struggle demands a new level of discursive and psychic saturation of public and counterpublic spaces. The law and state care deeply about subaltern bodies, desires, rhetorics, and words, seek to demonstrate their concern, to mirror these corporealities, to beckon them towards their remedial insti-

tutions. But as this essay suggests, intimacy, in the remedial hands of the law, advances national hegemonic projects rather than subaltern standards or dreamings.

Mediating Intimacy: Black Mothers and the Law

Deborah R. Grayson

In January 1990, Mark and Crispina Calvert, a middle-class couple of white and Filipina ancestry, hired Anna Johnson, a working-class woman

of African American and European descent, to serve as their gestational surrogate. In their arrangement, the Calverts were to pay Johnson $10,000 plus medical fees not covered by insurance. They also agreed to purchase a $200,000 life insurance policy for Johnson, who at the time had a four-year-old daughter, and pledged to provide her with emotional support. For her part, Johnson agreed to allow herself to be implanted with the zygote formed from Mark Calvert’s sperm and Crispina Calvert's egg. Pursuant to the terms of the contract, she agreed to carry the resulting fetus to term and, upon its birth, to relinquish the baby and “all

parental rights” to the Calverts.' During the time of the contract and before the child was born, relations between Johnson and the Calverts began to break down. By August 1990, when she was eight months pregnant, Johnson announced that she would file suit against the Calverts. In her lawsuit, Johnson sought to terminate her contract and to be declared

the baby’s legal parent. This lawsuit marked the first time that a surrogate mother without a genetic link to the child she had carried fought for custody of that child.? In September 1990, Johnson gave birth to a baby I wish to thank Lauren Berlant, Charles E. Moore, and Susan Squier for their incisive comments on earlier drafts of this essay. I would also like to thank my colleagues at the Georgia Institute of Technology, whose lively discussions of this paper provided valuable suggestions. A shorter version of this essay was presented at the “Biotechnology, Culture, and the Body” conference held at the University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee, 24-26 April 1997. 1. See AnnaJ. v. Mark C. et al., 286 Cal. Rptr., 372 (Cal.App.4 Dist. 1991). 2. See Anita Allen,

“The

Black

Surrogate

(1991): 17-31.

289

Mother,’

Harvard BlackLetter Journal

8

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Deborah R. Grayson

boy. The next month, Judge Richard Parslow ruled that she had no rights whatsoever to the child she had delivered. Comparing Johnson’s role in the birth of baby Christopher to those of a foster mother and a wet nurse, Parslow stated that the surrogate contract that Johnson had signed was enforceable, terminated her temporary visitation rights, and awarded full custody of baby Christopher to the Calverts.? Both the Court of Appeals and the California Supreme Court upheld Judge Parslow’s ruling, arguing that Johnson had neither a legal claim nor maternal rights to the infant. In October

1993, the Supreme Court refused to hear the case, a

move that assured the Calverts full custody of the baby.* Can a woman be the mother ofa child with whom she has no genetic connection—as was the case for Johnson? Or does the genetic material provided by the egg and the sperm donated to create the child determine who its natural parent or parents are? When does a woman become a mother—while she is pregnant or after she has delivered a baby? What of the bodily experience of pregnancy? Does a woman’s participation in pregnancy—her carrying the fetus in her uterus—have any bearing on determining who the “true” or “natural” mother is? In light of the choices made available by new reproductive technologies, can we sensibly argue, as was done in AnnaJ. v. Mark C., that genes and genes alone should be the determining factor in defining parental rights and relationships, or that custody disputes should be decided solely on the basis of the parental intent of the persons who supplied the genetic material? Who and what is a mother? Can a child, as Justice Joyce Kennard asked during the California Supreme Court hearing of Johnson v. Calvert, have two biological mothers?° 3. The Calverts named the baby Christopher. Johnson had given him the name Matthew. 4. For various accounts of the events in the case as they were reported in the media, see Andrea Sachs, “And Baby Makes Four: A New Custody Battle Intensifies the Debate over Surrogacy,’ Time, 27 Aug. 1990, p. 53; Susan Tifft, “It’s All in the (Parental) Genes: A California Court Rules That Bearing a Child Is Not Motherhood,” Time, 5 Nov. 1990, p.

77; Scott Armstrong, “California Surrogacy Case Raises New Questions about Parenthood: Mother Seeks Custody, but Has No Genetic Link to the Child,” Christian Science Monitor, 25

Sept. 1990, p. 1; Dan Chu, Nancy Matsumoto, and Lorenzo Benet, “A Judge Ends a Wrenching Surrogacy Dispute, Ruling That Three Parents for One Baby Is One Too Many,” People, 5 Nov.

1990, pp. 143-44; and Mark

Kasindorf, “And Baby Makes Four: Johnson v.

Calvert Illustrates Just about Everything That Can Go Wrong in Surrogate Births,” Los Angeles Times Magazine, 20 Jan. 1991, pp. 10-34, hereafter abbreviated “AB.” 5. See Kennard’s dissenting comments in Johnson v. Calvert 19 Cal. Rptr.2d, 506-18 (Cal. 1993); cert. denied, 114 S.Ct 206 (1993); hereafter abbreviated JC.

Deborah R. Grayson is assistant professor in the School of Literature, Communication,

and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technol-

ogy. Her book The Hyperinvisible Woman is forthcoming.

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Since the 1970s, medical technologies have changed the reproductive body and our relationship to it, in particular altering the process of reproductive decision making. With assisted reproductive technology, whose acronym, ironically, is ART, it is possible for a child to have at least two biological mothers.® Through the use of assisted reproductive technology, biological motherhood has been separated into competing components of genetics and gestation, a separation that has given rise to disputes over motherhood and its meanings. As a growing number of couples elect to hire gestational mothers to have their children, more and more people are finding themselves involved in legal battles over what used to be considered the definitive “fact” of maternal identity.’ In Johnson v. Calvert the parties disputed this very question. Both sides wanted the courts to decide whether the “natural” mother of the baby was Anna Johnson, the woman who carried the child in her womb and gave birth to it, or Crispina Calvert, the woman who, though unable to give birth, intended for the child to be born, supplied the ova, and made the necessary arrangements for the child to be (re)produced. In this essay I argue that what happens in Johnson v. Calvert is symptomatic of a general crisis in American culture over what constitutes a family. Section 1 addresses the ways in which the law tries to regulate familial property and the norms of what makes a family and explores the incoherence of the logic of courts and the law in making these determinations. Surrogacy extends the boundaries of intimacy and of traditional notions of familial kinship patterns by dispersing what was once thought of as a unified entity—mother—and making it into something without a definitive aspect or dimension. No longer belonging simply to the realm of the private acts and decision making of couples, the procreative pro-

cess has also become a collaborative process that takes place in the public spaces of the lab and the clinic. Within these public spaces, assisted reproductive techniques such as artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization, embryo transfer, and surrogacy allow a multitude of individuals to partic-

ipate in a couple’s attempts to conceive. For many couples, procreation now includes the participation of additional parties such as health care professionals; surrogates; donors; and, increasingly, the state. Now not only is birth a process mediated by the intervention of physicians but conception has become a more complex, drastically mediated process as well. The “private act of love, intimacy, and secrecy” of creating a child, 6. On this subject, see Nancy D. Polikoff, “This Child Does Have ‘Iwo Mothers: Rede-

fining Parenthood to Meet the Needs of Children in Lesbian Mother and Other NonTraditional Families,” Georgia Law Review 78 (1990): 468-73. 7. On this issue, see, for example, Andrea E. Stumpf, “Redefining Mother: A Legal Matrix for New Reproductive Technologies,” Yale Law Journal 96 (Nov. 1986): 187-208; Katha Pollitt, “When

Is a Mother Not a Mother?” The Nation, 31 Dec. 1990, p. 825; and Lisa

Sowle Cahill, “The Ethics of Surrogate Motherhood: Biology, Freedom, and Moral Obligation,” Law, Medicine, and Health Care 16 (Spring 1988): 65-71.

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as Sarah Franklin argues, has become a “public act, a commercial transaction, and a professionally managed procedure.”* Nevertheless, despite the increasingly public and collaborative process of procreation, the courts in Johnson v. Calvert and other such cases have attempted to main-

tain the priority of the metanotion of a private, genetically based family. Section 2 addresses the complicated and never fully articulated relations among gender, economics, and race and the ways they get expressed in the family form. I delineate the euphemized quality of the discourse

of reproduction that enables the family form to take such discursive priority that race, gender, and class hierarchies are ignored. Although these hierarchies are central to any reproduction, assisted or otherwise, their stories aren't being told at all because the family is perceived as an interlocked unit—an intimate, guarded entity that serves as a stand-in for the issues that don’t get worked out. Facilitating the lack of resolution of matters of family in Johnson v. Calvert is the iconicity of Johnson’s pregnant

black body as a signifier for a set of sublimated meanings about family

and race. Johnson’s body is at once too much body—a body that is laden with multiple meanings—and too little body—a body that is reduced to meaning very little at all. She enters the public discourse, as Valerie Hartouni notes, as a “densely scripted figure” that is “occupying and oceupied by the category ‘black woman.”® Indeed, during and after the various trials, Johnson was depicted as everything from a welfare queen and con artist to an extortionist. Her body is, then, both a site of explana-

tion and a body that creates, in a new way, a problem of meaning. Predictably, Johnson’s body is the only body that is explicitly raced in what is presented as merely a story of two mothers. The racial identity of Crispina Calvert, a Filipina American and the other mother of baby Christopher, is never acknowledged. In the eyes of the court and in the

8. Sarah Franklin, “Postmodern Procreation: A Cultural Account of Assisted Reproduction,” in Concewing the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction, ed. Faye D. Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp (Berkeley, 1995), p. 336. See also part 1 of a four-part series on infertility published in the New York Times. This article on high-tech pregnancies and the fertility market focuses on clinics and hospitals with specialties in in vitro fertilizations (IVF). This branch of medicine is reported to be part ofa “virtually free-market branch of medicine” that is a “$350 million-a-year business.” The article describes mostly affluent couples paying upwards of $25,000 for procedures, usually IVF, to assist them in conception.

Very few insurance companies cover IVF, making most of the financial burden fall on the couples themselves. Prices for the procedure described in the article include a $2,000 to $3,000 fee for egg donors for those women who are unable to produce their own eggs to a median cost of $7,800 for one procedure of IVF that lasts about the length of a menstrual cycle. Since most couples are not successful on the first try, many couples end up trying three to four more times before giving up. See Trip Gabriel, “High-Tech Pregnancies Test Hope’s Limit,” New York Times, 7 Jan. 1996, p. Al. 9. Valerie Hartouni, “Breached Birth: Reflections on Race, Gender, and Reproductive Discourse in the 1980s,” Configurations 1 (1994): 73-88; hereafter abbreviated “BB.”

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273

public debate surrounding the case, she becomes white.!° Mark Calvert, the father and a white man, is not negatively defined by race. The signs of race, specifically the signs of black race, operate as an often silent but

nevertheless powerful narrative motive within the trial and in its surrounding publicity. Race, specifically black race, is pre-scripted in this case by existing narratives in current and historical memory in the United States that define mothers and motherhood as bearers of social, cultural, and racial identity.'' Motherhood, in Johnson v. Calvert, is a

tightly policed border where racial, class, and sexual hierarchies are defined and maintained in the name of familial affiliation. Finally, in section 3 I suggest ways to move beyond the limited defi-

nitions of who and what is a mother. At issue is the question of whether or not the national public can imagine a public family. What does family stand for in American culture? More specifically, how does surrogacy raise questions about tacit knowledge of race and familial kinship? I argue that more diverse definitions of mother and, by extension, of father

and of family are both possible and necessary to accommodate the different methods used to reproduce and introduce babies into families. Drawing on Patricia Hill Collins’s concept of “shifting centers” in her analysis of motherhood and reproduction,’’ I argue that practices of assisted conception such as surrogacy require that we find ways to acknowledge rather than diminish or ignore the participation of all parents in these processes even if the effect is to destabilize previously held notions of the family.

I am not a slave. Semper Fi. —ANNA JOHNSON, letter to Geraldo Rivera (quoted in “AB,” p. 31)

There are many things that are neither new nor historically unique in Johnson

y. Calvert.

For

centuries,

a fundamental

concern

of black

women has been the struggle over reproduction. As Darlene Clark Hine has argued, the “productive and reproductive capacities” of black women have been central to determining which women can be gendered through 10. Crispina Calvert’s honorary white status, no doubt, can be attributed to the racist stereotype of Asian Americans as members of a “model minority.”

11. On this point, see Laura Doyle, Bordering on the Body: The Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture (New York, 1994), pp. 10-34. 12. Patricia Hill Collins, “Shifting the Center: Race, Class, and Feminist Theorizing about Motherhood,” in Representations of Motherhood, ed. Donna Bassin, Margaret Honey, and Meryle Mahrer Kaplan (New Haven, Conn., 1994), p. 59.

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motherhood.'® Johnson's decision to enter into the surrogate agreement and her subsequent struggle to win custody of the child she bore as a result of this arrangement bring to the forefront once again the issues Hine raises in her historical analysis. This is to say that Johnson’s contemporary situation represents a centuries-old struggle in which black women attempt to gain personal autonomy in the face of hegemonic social degradation. For a black woman to enter into a surrogate contract reanimates issues that, at least in some ways, have been juridically resolved. The disputes over surrogacy and maternity in Johnson v. Calvert make clear some of the negative consequences of dividing biological motherhood into competing components of gestational and genetic motherhood,

consequences that, as critics have noted, include the degradation of pregnancy and the exacerbation of class differences and racial inequality.'* In addition, however, disputes over surrogacy and maternity render more

visible already existing fractures in current cultural constructions of pregnancy as a disembodied experience.'® With the development of techniques in medical imaging that make fetal life visible, the growth of areas

of medical specialty such as neonatology, and the increasing arguments for fetal and father’s rights the experience of pregnancy is slowly being divested of its physical and emotional significance.'® In surrogate arrangements, for instance, pregnancy is presented as a form of alienated labor where women’s reproductive capacities are viewed as “services” that can be separated from their material persons. Women who agree to be gestational mothers are expected to transform their bodies—or rather, their body parts—into empty vessels distinct from their physiological and 13. Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West: Preliminary Thoughts on the Culture of Dissemblance,” Signs 14 (Summer 1989): ilies. 14. George Annas notes, for instance, that the women who bear the children in surrogate arrangements are often “lower-middle-class and lower-class” women (George Annas,

“Fairy Tales Surrogate Mothers Tell,” Law, Medicine, and Health Care 16 [Spring 1988}: 27).

Statistics from the congressional Office of Technology Assessment survey, Infertility: Medical and Social Chores, in fact demonstrate that surrogate mothers tend to be less educated and less financially secure than those who hire them. Only a small percentage of the women waiting to be hired as surrogates have ever attended college, and a large percentage of these women earn less than $30,000 annually. See Office of Technology Assessment, Infertility: Medical and Social Choices (Washington, D.C., 1988).

15. Emily Martin makes clear in her analysis how frequently women see themselves as separate from their bodies. Among the women she interviewed Martin describes a “fair amount of fragmentation and alienation in women’s general conceptions of body and self of which they did not seem aware” (Emily Martin, The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction [Boston, 1992], p. 89). 16. See, for instance, Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley, 1993); Karen Newman, Fetal Positions: Individualism, Science, Visuality (Stanford, Calif., 1996); Barbara Duden, Disembodying Women: Perspectives on Pregnancy and the Unborn (Cambridge, Mass., 1993); and Hartouni, “Fetal Exposures: Abortion Politics and the

Optics ofAllusion,” Camera Obscura 29 (1992): 130-49.

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299,

emotional selves. This notion of woman as fetal container is a growing phenomenon in current cultural discourse on pregnancy. Johnson decided that she could not simply be a carrier or a container for the Calverts. Citing California’s Uniform Parentage Act, she and her attorneys claimed that a legal precedent had been set for her to establish her right to be a mother to the child she carried even though she was not genetically related to it.'” Section 7003 of the act states that “the parent and child relationship may be established ... between a child and the natural mother. ... by proof of her having given birth to the child.”!8 While providing drastically different reasons for their findings, the rulings given by the trial court, the appellate court, and the California Supreme Court majority denied Johnson’s claim that she was the natural mother of the baby. Rejecting Johnson's interpretation of the Uniform Parentage Act, Judge Parslow, the presiding judge in the trial court, held that the statute does not say that a woman who gives birth to a child is its natural mother. According to him, the act merely states that, in addition to blood testing, one way to establish a parent-child relationship is by giving birth. Characterizing Johnson as a foster mother and a wet nurse rather than as a natural mother, Judge Parslow unequivocally stated that he was not going to find that the infant had two mothers—a situation he described as “ripe for crazy-making.”!? Instead, noting that blood tests of the Calverts demonstrated that there was a 99.999 percent probability that the Calverts were Christopher’s parents and that Johnson offered no evidence that the blood tests were inaccurate, Parslow held that Mark and Crispina Calvert were the natural parents of the baby because blood tests proved they were his genetic parents. For Judge Parslow, genetic maternity was the definitive form of motherhood. Or, to put it another way, for the judge, total ownership of the fetus depended on the condition of genetic ancestry. Like the trial court, the California Court of Appeal held that baby

Christopher could have only one natural mother and that the basis for determining his natural parentage should be genetics.” In their interpre17. The California version of the Uniform Parentage Act was introduced in 1975. The purpose of the act was to eliminate legal distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate children. It came about as a result of rulings by the United States Supreme Court that mandated equality between legitimate and illegitimate children. The Uniform Parentage Act “bases parent and child rights on the existence of aparent and child relationship rather than on the marital status of the parents” (JC, p. 497). Though the act obviously predates the situations assisted reproductive technology brings about, Johnson cited the act in an attempt to establish her parental rights. 18. Quoted in AnnaJ. v. Mark C., p. 377. 19. “California Judge Speaks on Issue of Surrogacy,’ National Law Journal, 5 Nov. 1990, p. 37. 20. Legal scholar Randy Frances Kandel argues that in the first two rulings on Johnson v. Calvert by the superior court and the court of appeals, the judges “put the cart before the horse” (Randy Frances Kandel, “Which Came First: The Mother or the Egg? A Kinship

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tation of the Uniform Parentage Act the appellate court ruled that genes were incontestable evidence of parentage. Providing a more detailed analysis of the Uniform Parentage Act in their ruling, the appellate court argued that its specialized provision authorizing biological evidence such

as blood as proof of parentage allowed them to conclude that the genetic relationship was conclusively more persuasive than the gestational relationship. As Randy Frances Kandel demonstrates, when viewed in this

way, disputes arising from surrogate arrangements will always inevitably favor the genetic mother as natural parent over the gestational mother. By focusing solely on biological markers such as blood to determine parentage, Kandel points out, the courts suggest that it is possible that “‘natural’ parenthood” can be “reduced to a single simple biological principle” (“WG,” p. 176). Kandel, as well as others, points to the kind of reasoning both the trial court and the appellate court used in their rulings on Johnson v. Calvert as examples of genetic essentialism, a mode that has been described by Dorothy Nelkin and M. Susan Lindee as “a way to talk about the boundaries of personhood, the nature of immortality, and the sacred

meaning of life.”*! According to Nelkin and Lindee, genetic essentialism “promises to resolve uncomfortable ambiguities and uncertainties” brought about by existing boundaries of class, race, gender, and, I would

add, family.*? Increasingly, the courts are using biological concepts to settle custody disputes involving infants born to gestational mothers, controversies over adoptions, and situations where babies have been switched at birth. Whereas previously the “best interests of the child” theory was

used in child custody suits, genetic evidence is now more often favored by the courts.** Solution to Gestational Surrogacy,’ Rutgers Law Review 47 [Fall 1994]: 174; hereafter abbreviated “WC”). Kandel argues that in both rulings the courts attempted to resolve the prior issue of whether Crispina Calvert or Anna Johnson or both women could be the natural mothers by first resolving the second issue of whether it was in the best interests of the child for both mothers (assuming the child had two mothers) to have custody rights. 21. Dorothy Nelkin and M. Susan Lindee, The DNA Mystique: The Gene as a Cultural Icon (New York, 1995), p. 41.

22. Ibid. p. 43. 23. See Nelkin, “After Daubert: The Relevance and Reliability of Genetic Informa-

tion,” Cardozo Law Review 15 (1994): 2119-28. In this article Nelkin questions the reliability

of court testimony that utilizes genetic evidence. She argues that testimony in the area of genetics should be more closely examined because ofits growing appeal in court cases and its impact on legal decision making. 24. In fact, as Kandel, Nelkin, and Rochelle Cooper Dreyfus have pointed out, the courts could have used the “best interest of the child” theory to settle the custody dispute in Johnson v. Calvert. This ruling would have been in line with the court’s attempts to maintain the traditional nuclear family that Crispina and Mark Calvert seemed to be able to provide. The courts could have also determined that Johnson had waived all parental rights to the child when she signed the surrogate contract. The question, as Kandel so aptly puts it, is, “Why, then, did the courts feel compelled to resolve the ‘natural’ parent issue using

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In the trial court, Judge Parslow described Johnson as a “genetic hereditary stranger” to baby Christopher, a descriptive category that has since been used in at least one other custody case.”° According to him,

Who we are and what we are and identity problems particularly with young children and teenagers are extremely important. We know that there is a combination of genetic factors. We know more and more

about traits now, how you walk, talk and everything else, all

sorts of things that develop out of your genes. ... They have even upped the intelligence ratio of genetics up to 70 percent now.?°

Similarly, the appellate court argued that There is not a single organic system of the human body not influenced by an individual’s underlying genetic makeup. Genes determine the way physiological components of the human body, such as the heart, liver, or blood vessels operate. Also, ... it is now thought

that genes influence tastes preferences, personality styles, manners of speech and mannerisms.” Issues related to the significance of biological predisposition that are being contested within scientific communities are being presented in the courts as if they were accepted fact. But, as anthropologist Marilyn Strathern notes, the “simple idea that one person pass[es] on a characteristic to another, like a piece of property” has been changed by a “sense of the complex way in which elements combine,” as our “primitive knowledge of the inheritance of characteristics is being displaced by knowledge about genetic mapping” and other scientific manipulations.** Relying on genetics as the only basis for determining parental status rather than as one component in a larger social, cultural, and legal context is problemthe [Uniform Parentage] Act?” (“WC,” p. 178). See also Rochelle Cooper Dreyfus and Nelkin, “The Jurisprudence of Genetics,” Vanderbilt Law Review 45 (Mar. 1992): 313-48. 25. See Nelkin, “After Daubert,” p. 2121.

26. Quoted in Janet L. Dolgin, “Just a Gene: Judicial Assumptions about Parenthood,” UCLA Law Review 40 (Feb. 1993): 685. 27. AnnaJ. v. Mark C., p. 380.

28. Marilyn Strathern, “Displacing Knowledge: Technology and the Consequences for Kinship,” in Conceiving the New World Order, p. 356; hereafter abbreviated

“DK.” See also

Strathern, Reproducing the Future: Essays on Anthropology, Kinship, and the New Reproductive Technologies (New York, 1992).

In tension with the emphasis on genes as indicators of parenthood is the language common in many surrogate contracts that stipulate that gestational mothers must refrain from smoking, drinking, or engaging in any other activities that might endanger the fetus. Gestational mothers are also frequently required to agree to follow all doctor’s orders, including those that force them to submit to invasive procedures or to curtail their normal physical activities. All of these strictures seem to suggest an awareness of how the environment of the birth mother’s body is interconnected with the fetus.

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atic because,

despite the appeal of using scientific evidence

to resolve

complex legal, cultural, and social issues related to reproduction and family, questions still remain about the facticity of this evidence. Scientific

communities and the public are still debating whether genetic knowledge constitutes knowledge at all. Shifting away from the biological reasoning of the two lower courts,

the California Supreme Court argued that the Uniform Parentage Act did not indicate a preference for blood test results over giving birth as evidence of natural parenthood. For this court, in instances where genetic

consanguinity and childbirth do not coincide in the body of one woman, the woman who intended to procreate the child and to raise it as her own is the natural mother.?? In the California Supreme Court hearing of the case, it would seem, a distinction was made between the “ruling ‘head’

and the laboring ‘body.”*° In this court’s estimate, the Calverts’ decision to have a child takes precedence over the work of Johnson’s laboring body,

since the intended parents’ initial decision to have a child was the reason that the child was brought into being. The California Supreme Court believed that Johnson’s entry into a surrogate agreement was not equivalent to exercising her own right to make procreative choices. Instead, according to this court, she was agreeing to provide a service to Mark and Crispina Calvert, the intended parents, and should have had no expectation that she would be able to raise the child she carried as her own.*! In a strongly worded dissent, Justice Kennard, the lone woman on the bench, disagreed with the majority that the woman who intends to have a child and contributes the ovum should automatically be considered its natural mother and found fault with the majority’s reliance on the rule of intent to resolve Johnson v. Calvert, stating that in its justification for

their intent test, the majority equated children or the right to children 29. For a more detailed analysis of the rule of intent, see Marjorie Maguire Shultz, “Reproductive Technology and Intent-Based Parenthood: An Opportunity for Gender Neutrality,’ Wisconsin Law Review, no. 2 (1990): 297-398. For a discussion of the rule of intent as it pertains specifically to Johnson v. Calvert, see JC. 30. Doyle, Bordering on the Body, p. 21. 31. On this issue, Elizabeth Spelman’s discussion of people of color and white women as “mere body” comes to mind. According to Spelman, those individuals defined by these categories are typically closely associated with the body and basic bodily functions—“sex, reproduction, appetite, secretions, and excretions” —and

as “given over to attending to the

bodily functions of others (feeding, washing, cleaning, doing the ‘dirty work’)” (Elizabeth V. Spelman, Jnessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought [Boston, 1988], p. 127). In Johnson’s case, the work of her body includes the “dirty work” of gestation and birthing. For discussions of reproductive freedoms, specifically as they refer to the right to procreate, see Larry Gostin, “A Civil Liberties Analysis of Surrogacy Arrangements,” Law, Medicine, and Health Care 16 (Spring 1988): 7-17; Cristyne Neff, “Woman, Womb, and Bodily Integrity,” Yale Jowrnal of Law and Feminism 3 (1991): 327-53; and Charlotte Rutherford, “Reproductive Freedom and African American Women,” Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 4 (1992): 255-84.

Mediating Intimacy: Black Mothers and the Law

2D)

with intellectual property.*? For Justice Kennard, both the genetic and gestational mothers have substantial claims to legal motherhood. And yet, as she points out, California law bestows the “rights and responsibilities of parenthood to only one ‘natural mother,” with no provision for what to do when a situation indicates that a child has more than one (JC, p. 507).

The “originator of the concept” or rule of intent argument, an argument Kennard describes as comfortingly familiar to the courts in instances where they were called to justify the law’s protection of intellectual property, is, in her view, wrong for determining parenthood and parental rights because it suggests that children and the right to children can be viewed as property comparable to a book, a software program, or any other

invention.

In addition,

she argued,

using the rule of intent

to

“break the tie” between the genetic and gestational mother of the child also suggests that “property transactions governed by contracts . . . ought presumptively to be enforced and, when one party seeks to escape performance, the court may order specific performance” (JC, p. 514).°° In addition to the objections Justice Kennard outlines in her dissenting arguments, the rule of intent raises several other issues that need to be considered. What about Johnson's parental intentions as gestational mother?

One

could argue that, like the Calverts, she also intended

to

procreate, demonstrating this intention when she allowed herself to be implanted with the Calverts’ zygote, carried it to full development at some risk to herself, and then changed her mind about relinquishing the baby once she had delivered it.** The courts, as I have mentioned, felt

that Johnson should have had no expectation that she would be able to keep and raise the child. After all that Johnson had invested in the pregnancy, the courts decided somehow that her desire to be a mother to the

child was “unnatural.” And while the Calverts obviously wanted Christopher and fought long and hard to keep him, there have been instances when genetic parents have reneged on contractual agreements with gestational mothers and refused to take their intended child once it had been delivered.* Finally, the rule of intent, as Anita Allen persuasively argues, 32. For an excellent analysis of the representation of procreation as analogous to authorship, see Mark Rose, “Mothers and Authors: Johnson v. Calvert and the New Children of Our Imaginations,” Critical Inquiry 22 (Summer 1996): 613-33. 33. Legal scholar Anita Allen suggests that one way to respond to this issue is to view surrogate arrangements as unenforceable personal commitments. See Allen, “Privacy, Surrogacy, and the Baby M Case,” Georgetown Law Journal 76 (1988): 1759-92. 34. Johnson had had a history of problem pregnancies—two miscarriages and two stillbirths before and after her daughter was born—a fact she failed to reveal to the Calverts when she entered into the agreement with them. Furthermore, some have argued that because the fetus and the gestational mother are unrelated, the gestational mother is at higher risk for severe complications during pregnancy, such as ectopic pregnancy, preeclampsia, and diabetes. On this point, see “WC,” p. 189.

35. In one situation a gestational mother gave birth to twins, a boy and a girl. The family, however, was only interested in the girl and left the boy behind. The gestational

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is often inconsistently applied because it assumes an equality between individuals that does not yet exist. Gestational mothers who renege on their

contracts—poor

mothers,

lesbian

mothers,

black

mothers,

and

other mothers thought to be functioning outside middle-class, fathercentered families—often find themselves without support or legal recourse in child custody disputes. Courts consistently rule against these groups of women, favoring instead configurations of the family that fit the nuclear family model of white, middle- to upper-middle-class heterosexual couples.*° At least for now, fetuses do develop inside and pass through the bodies of women.*” While the fetus that the gestational surrogate carries is mother sued and won the right to retain custody of both children. She later ended up on drugs and lost both children. The children were then placed in foster care. In another example, a child was born HIV-positive. Upon learning of the child’s HIV status, the contracting parents refused to accept the baby. In this situation, it is clear that thorough preconception medical and psychological screening did not take place. See R. Alta Charo, “Legislative Approaches to Surrogate Motherhood,” Law, Medicine, and Health Care 16 (Spring 1988): 96-112, and “AB.” 36. To highlight a few recent examples: Through the intentional use of artificial insemination, a lesbian couple became the parents of two children. After the dissolution-of their relationship and, ultimately, a custody battle for the children, a court ruled that both

women

should be denied parental and visitation rights. See “Lesbians Denied Custody

After Break-up,’ New York Times, 24 Mar. 1991, p. A22, and Bettina Boxall, “Laws Mean Lesbian Custody Battles Often Are One-Sided: Under Rigid Definition of Parenthood, Part-

ner Who Didn't Bear Child Usually Has Little Recourse,” Los Angeles Times, 27 Jan. 1997, p. Al. In another instance, Mary Frank Ward, a mother of three, went to court to attempt to

get additional child support from her ex-husband for their youngest child. The ex-husband, a convicted felon who had battered and eventually murdered his first wife, sued for custody

of the child and won. The court argued that because Ward and her oldest daughter were both lesbians and had live-in lovers, her home was a bad influence for her youngest child. A Florida court of appeals upheld the decision by the lower court. Ward, who eventually gave up her fight for custody of her youngest child, recently died of a heart attack. See Mireyz Navarro, “Appeals Court Rebuffs Lesbian in Custody Bid: Child Will Stay with Father Who

Killed,” New York Times, 31 Aug. 1996, p. A7; Robert Scheer, “Warped View of

What's Fit as Family Life,” Los Angeles Times, 10 Dec. 1996, p. B7; “Lesbian Who Sought Custody Dies,” New York Times, 23 Jan. 1997, p. Al9.

37. While scientists are currently able to construct artificial wombs, so far they have only managed it for animals, not humans. Scientists in Japan have developed a technique called extrauterine fetal incubation (EUFI). Using goat fetuses, the scientists have “threaded catheters through the large vessels in the umbilical cord and supplied the fetuses with oxygenated blood while suspending them in incubators that contain artificial amniotic fluid heated to body temperature.” The goat fetuses were able to survive in this environment for three weeks, although team physicians had difficulty with circulatory failure in the experiments, as well as encountering other technological problems. While scientists are quoted as saying that the “ideal situation for the immature fetus is growth within the normal environment of the maternal organisms,” they continue to pursue the technology for constructing artificial wombs for humans. Arthur Caplan, the director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, predicts that “sixty years down the line ..., the total artificial womb will be here,” arguing that this procedure is “technologically inevitable”

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301

not genetically related to her, it is also not wholly other to her. Instead, the bodies of both are interconnected in complex and contradictory ways that the rulings rendered by the courts in Johnson v. Calvert do not begin to address.** For the most part, the courts have only superficially begun to speak to the issues that reproductive technologies raise for how families are constructed and defined in American culture. The rulings of courts deal not only with the material world but also with the socialization of citizens and the development and maintenance of traditions. In their decisions, the courts have tended to “promote tradi-

tional views about marriage, procreation, and family relationships” that may dissuade individuals from entering into situations where traditional views will not be upheld.*® Surrogacy and other assisted reproductive practices call into question much of what we, as a society, have come to believe about personal identity, intimate

relationships, and the begin-

nings of life. The larger problem for the legal system in Johnson v. Calvert and other similar cases, then, is how to maintain traditional two-parent,

heterosexual families in the face of the ways assisted reproductive technology is changing this privileged family. Arguments about genetic relation or rules of intent in custody battles serve essentially as a means to contain the proliferation of meanings made possible by medical technology and its ways of constantly altering knowledge about intimate relations.

Our blackest nightmare. — MARK CALVERT’?

Race served as both a pretext and a subtext in the debate surrounding Johnson v. Calvert. The court decisions, the media coverage, and

the public’s response to the case were all predictably informed by race, (quoted in Perri Klass, “The Artificial Womb Is Born,” New York Times Magazine, 29 Sept. 1996, p. 117). 38. In the context ofa discussion about surrogacy, to make the link between gender and the body, as Carol Bigwood suggests, need not lead to the determination ofthe category

“woman” or “mother” as a fixed or closed biological identity. Instead, the female body in this instance is a body that is “open, sensate, procreative”—a body not forced into a pseudomale body(lessness) (Rosalind Pollack Petchesky, “The Body as Property: A Feminist Revision” in Conceiving the New World Order, p. 396). See also Carol Bigwood, “Renaturalizing the Body (With a Little Help from Merleau-Ponty),” Hypatia 6 (Fall 1991): 54-73. 39. Kenneth

L. Karst, “The

Freedom

of Intimate Association,’ Yale Law Journal 89

(1990): 628. 40. Mark Kasindorf notes that “a tabloid weekly outraged Mark Calvert by quoting him as calling Johnson ‘our blackest nightmare” (“AB,” p. 31).

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Deborah R. Grayson

despite arguments by parties involved that race “‘played no discernible role’” (“BB,” p. 83). Following the laws of racial designation and naming set in place in American culture long before such things as surrogacy were possible, the fact that having a black ancestor, let alone a black mother,

makes one black is reason enough to assume that race informed the courts’ and the public’s perceptions in the outcome of the case. To find that Johnson could be a legal and natural mother to Christopher would have meant that the court would have had to make Christopher black. Surrogacy, like race, forms yet another example of the ongoing crisis of

representation where “legal definitions contradict physical signs and social codes,” a crisis that is only heightened by the interplay of the two.*! Ironically, in the discourse surrounding the case, Johnson is the only

person who is described as having a problem with race. Attorneys for the Calverts painted her as so captivated by whiteness that she wanted to have a white baby (see “BB,” pp. 83-84). Johnson, of course, does have a problem with race, but it is not a problem of fetishizing whiteness. Instead, her problem has to do with the fact that as a black woman she is

defined by and is thought to embody race. But what does race mean here? Hartouni describes Johnson as “enter[ing] the public discourse an already densely scripted figure whose deviance, whatever its particular form, was etched in flesh” (“BB,” p. 75). Indeed, the portrayal of Johnson in the courts and in the media as a fraudulent welfare mother, con artist,

and extortionist play on beliefs long held by the public that black women are “less fit mothers, less caring mothers, and less hurt by separation from

their children” than nonblack women.* In representing Johnson as a welfare cheat, the media and the Calverts’ attorneys employed a form of shorthand not only for her blackness but also for the kind of person, and particularly the kind of mother, she would be. The unsubstantiated charges that Johnson had defrauded the government by receiving welfare payments she was not entitled to made it easier for some to make the point that she was untrustworthy, dishonest, and therefore an unfit parent. By identifying Johnson as a welfare recipient, a point that was repeatedly mentioned in press coverage throughout the trial, no one had to make explicit the racial grounds for their objections to considering Johnson a mother, in any sense, to Christopher. The welfare mother, as Wahneema

Lubiano notes, “can be seen as exempli-

fying the pathology of the category ‘black women.”** The representation 41. Eva Saks, “Representing Miscegenation Law,’ Raritan 8 (Fall 1988): 40. 42. Even the one, so-called ideal black mother figure, the mammy, a selfless nurturer

of white children (under the supervision of the white mistress), has been portrayed as “careless and unable to care properly for her own children” (Dorothy E. Roberts, “The Value of Black Mothers’ Work,” in Critical Race Feminism: A Reader, ed. Adrien Katherine Wing [New York, 1997], p. 313). 43. Wahneema Lubiano, “Black Ladies, Welfare Queens, and State Minstrels: Ideo-

logical War by Narrative Means,” in Race-ing Justice, En-Gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill,

Mediating Intimacy: Black Mothers and the Law

303

of “black woman” and “welfare mother” as the same that constructs evidence of the pathological nature of both operates in Johnson v. Calvert as a narrative means to shape public opinion regarding the intersection of race, motherhood, and surrogacy. Race, in Johnson v. Calvert, signifies not

only blackness but blackness as difference and deviance. The strongest images of black women circulating in American culture center on black women’s motherhood. Figures such as the mammy, the matriarch, and the welfare mother or welfare queen, all of which have their roots in nineteenth-century cultural discourse, continue to dominate cur-

rent discussions of black women’s motherhood.** As a legal and economic construct, slavery conferred a “breeder” status on black women and their

reproductive capacities.*° By reversing English law, which determined an individual’s legal status through the father, a peculiar system of racial specification and naming was designed under slavery that forced children to follow the condition of their mothers. Establishing the child’s legal status through the mother allowed slave owners to classify their biracial offspring as blacks and as slaves. In this way, slave owners ensured that their

slave labor force would be increased and that there would be no legal consequences for them regarding the biracial children that they fathered. The promotion of a breeder status for black women also served to sever their biological motherhood from their social and cultural functions as mothers. Black women were expected to perform the physical tasks of motherhood

as nannies

or wet nurses,

for example,

but were

not en-

trusted with the “moral duty” of providing children, their own or anyone else’s, with “proper values.”*° How ironic, then, that Judge Parslow in the

first hearing of the case referred to Johnson as a “wet nurse.” In addition to having demeaning racial undertones, by employing the available language of servitude, the phrase also works to resituate Johnson in her place as

laboring black body. In so doing, the history of conflating African American women’s reproductive labor with their labor as workers is recalled.* Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality, ed. Toni Morrison

(New York, 1992),

prog: 44. See, for instance Lisa Ikemoto, “The Code of Perfect Pregnancy: At the Intersec-

tion of the Ideology of Motherhood, the Practice of Defaulting to Science, and the Interventionist Mindset of the Law,” in Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge, ed. Richard Delgado (Philadelphia,

1995), pp. 478-97;

Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness,

and the Politics of Empowerment (Boston, 1990); Barbara Omolade, The Rising Song ofAfrican American Women (New York, 1994); and Deborah Gray White, Ar’nt I a Woman: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York, 1985).

45. Angela Davis notes that since slave women were classified as “‘breeders’” rather than mothers, “their infant children could be sold away from them like calves from cows” (Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race, and Class [New York, 1983], p. 7).

46. Ikemoto, “The Code of Perfect Pregnancy,” p. 483. 47. Allen provides a very careful analysis of why slavery and surrogacy are not the same thing. See Allen, “Surrogacy, Slavery, and the Ownership of Life” Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy 13 (Winter 1990): 139-49.

304

Deborah R. Grayson Current practices and perspectives on black women, fertility, and re-

production parallel earlier events in black women’s reproductive history. Advances in reproductive technology, including new methods of birth control, are frequently used by the state as a means of legal and social control of black and, often, poor women’s reproduction.** While all

women are increasingly subject to “regulatory incursions” with respect to reproductive technologies, black women, other women of color, and poor women are disproportionately affected by this type of intervention in the form of hospital and prison detention, forced sterilization (both tempo-

rary and permanent), and court-ordered medical procedures such as cesarean sections.*® Gestational surrogacy invites the singling out of black women for exploitation not only because a disproportionate number of black women are poor and thus more likely to turn to leasing their wombs as a means of income, but also because it is incorrectly assumed that black women’s skin color can be read as a visual sign of their lack of genetic relation to the (for the most part) white couples who seek to hire them.*°

Black women have long been asked to raise white children without having any parental rights to them. Now, it would seem, they can be asked to 48. Norplant, for instance, childbearing age who have been has been proposed in Louisiana financial incentives to women on

has been used as a criminal penalty against womert of convicted of child or drug abuse. In addition, legislation and Kentucky, to name just two states, that would offer welfare who “voluntarily” agree to use Norplant. Ironi-

cally, while access to publicly funded abortions is limited in most states, all but two states,

California and Massachusetts, fund Norplant through Medicaid. See, for instance, Deborah Krauss, “Regulating Women’s Bodies: The Adverse Effect of Fetal Rights Theory on Childbirth Decisions and Women of Color,’ Harvard Civil Rights—Civil Liberties Law Review 26 (1991): 523-48; Martha A. Field, “Controlling the Woman to Protect the Fetus,” Law, Medicine, and Health Care 17 (Summer 1989): 115-29; Lawrence J. Nelson, Brian Buggy, and

Carol Weil, “Forced Medical Treatment of Pregnant Women: ‘Compelling Each to Live as Seems Good to the Rest,” Hastings Law Journal 37 (May 1986): 703-63; Veronika E. B.

Kolder et al., “Court-Ordered Obstetrical Interventions,” New England Journal of Medicine, 7 May 1987, pp. 1192-96; and Nancy K. Rhoden, “The Judge in the Delivery Room: The Emergence of Court-Ordered Cesareans,” California Law Review 74 (1986): 1951-2030.

49. Attorney Deborah Krauss notes that in instances where the pregnant woman is a “member ofa racial minority or disadvantaged economic group,’ physicians are more likely to obtain court-ordered obstetrical interventions (Krauss, “Regulating Women’s Bodies,” p. 531). Eighty percent of the patients who were forced to undergo court-ordered cesarean sections were members of minority groups. Teaching hospitals play a critical role in this situation. Every documented request for a court-ordered intervention involved women who were patients at teaching hospitals or who received public assistance. See Krauss, “Regulating Women’s Bodies,” p. 531. 50. Critics of the Calverts have argued that this is exactly the reason why they chose Johnson to be their surrogate. To be fair, reports on the events of how Johnson and the Calverts came together have Johnson herself approaching the Calverts and offering to be their surrogate. Reading skin color as a sign of genetic claim, we should all know, is not a sign of anything. The activity of passing should have taught us this. Passing is successful because so many people continue to rely on skin color as a visual sign of race. In many instances, when attempting to make a visual identification of blackness using this scheme, people would be wrong in their assumptions.

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birth white children and have no claim to them.°! This is to say that from the point of view of reproductive contract law, black women’s surrogacy is the most alienated of labor. In contemporary national discourse on family and family values, with its focus on welfare queens and their “overreproduction,” black female maternal labor is granted no value except, of course, that given to it contractually in surrogate arrangements. In situations where black women’s maternity occurs for themselves and not for the benefit of others, it is deemed socially harmful.°

He looks just like us. —CRISPINA CALVERT (quoted in “AB,” p. 11) The issues public struggle Both the public gacy should be

contested in Johnson v. Calvert highlight the increasingly over assisted reproduction and its effects on the family. and the courts continue to grapple with whether surrolegal, who should be able to gain from the process, and

what its ramifications are for the construction of the family. Other questions that the case raises include determining what is fair and right for children in considerations of child custody disputes. What are the ultimate consequences for a culture that views its children as property—as

“things” that people can barter, sell, or have “rights” to? What does it mean

for the court to decide what is in the “best interests of the child,’

especially when the child’s interests appear to serve as a cover for the ideological and political interests of individuals and institutions seeking

to model specific behaviors and relationships? In California, the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws did attempt to re51. The now (in)famous Baby M case demonstrated to the mostly white couples who seek gestational surrogates that if they choose healthy white women who are unrelated to them to be their surrogate, they run the risk that the surrogate contract will be voided. Unlike Johnson, in the Baby M case Mary Beth Whitehead was actually the genetic and gestational mother of Baby M. Undergoing what is now referred to as “traditional surrogacy,’ Whitehead was artificially inseminated with Stern’s sperm. Whitehead was denied custody, but she was granted visitation rights based on her genetic tie with the child. Sull, the possibility remains that a surrogate mother under these circumstances would be granted full custody as well. 52. Ironically, while black women have an infertility rate that is one-and-a-half times higher than white women, they are the least likely to benefit from assisted reproductive technology or other infertility “treatments.” Cost tends to be a prohibitive factor in many instances. Rather than being supported in their desire to reproduce, black women’s attempts at reproduction are most often perceived as dangerous, something that should be controlled. But, as I will demonstrate in the next section, another reason why black women

make up a small percentage of the women who utilize assisted reproductive technology could also be their reliance on alternative models of mothering. In these models, as I will discuss, genetic relation is not considered imperative to establishing kinship ties.

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Deborah R. Grayson

spond to these questions by proposing the Uniform Status of Children of Assisted Conception Act (USCACA), a piece of legislation that addressed

most of the issues involved in Johnson v. Calvert. The legislation was never enacted. The failure to do so, I suspect, has a lot to do with the reluctance

of the legislature to go on record as taking a position on an issue that is considered to present such complex moral problems. As bioethicist James Nelson has said, politicians “run the other way” when legislation on sur-

rogacy comes before them because, on one hand, to make surrogate contracts unenforceable would be to limit the options of infertile couples attempting to have children and, on the other hand, to support surrogacy would mean that they might be seen as facilitating the “exploitation of women [and the cheapening] of the family” (quoted in “AB,” p. 13).°° What was once described as the “biologically rooted, racially closed, heterosexual, middle-class” family has been disrupted by the new knowl-

edge that assisted reproductive technology has made available (“BB,” p. 87). With assisted conception, as Strathern notes, there increasingly

“exists a field of procreators whose relationship to one another and to the product of conception is contained in the act of conception itself and not in the family as such” (“DK,” p. 352). In a discussion of the manner in which reproductive technologies are “displacing knowledge” about familial kinship, Strathern argues that “making visible the detachment of the procreative act from the way the family produces a child adds new possibilities to the conceptualization of intimacy in relationships” (“DK,” p. 353). In so doing, these technologies displace our sense of what we have come to know about health, life, and death. Still, the legal system has been slow to address how this expansion in knowledge and the resulting proliferation of meanings put people in the position of having to make new choices—to make different kinds of decisions based on this transformed information (see “DK,” p. 347). The belief held by the courts in Johnson v. Calvert that a child may have only one mother is inconsistent both with the new facts of life that technology has made possible and with some of the courts’ own models for reconfiguring the family in light of this technology. In fact, models

of family that are different from the nuclear family model were already available for the courts to choose from. These existing models would have allowed the courts to acknowledge the parental rights of the Calverts and Johnson without diminishing the role of either. Courts have acknowledged the division of procreative mothering from social mothering in decisions on adoption and stepparenting, for example. In both instances maternal status is extended to at least one other woman.

In addition, in

cases of egg donorship the courts have held that the woman who gestates and gives birth to a child formed from the egg of another woman and 53. Kasindorf also reveals that the United States Congress has ignored antisurrogacy legislation placed before it; see “AB.”

Mediating Intimacy: Black Mothers and the Law

307

who intends to raise that child as her own is considered the natural mother of that child. Various cultural models of mothering and communal parenting were also available for the courts to employ in developing their response to the case. Sociologist Patricia Hill Collins presents one such model in her account of the more inclusive, more collaborative parenting effort that takes place within African American communities. For Collins, the concept “motherwork” delineates a category that “soften[s] the dichotomies in feminist theorizing about motherhood that posit rigid distinctions between private and public, family and work, the individual and the collec-

tive.”** This notion of motherwork draws upon traditions in African American communities where multiple models of mothering relationships exist. While European American models of mothers and mothering are often limited to blood relationships, within many African American

communities mothering is conceptualized as a form of cultural work that incorporates the mothering relationships of non-blood relations as well.®° In addition to blood mothers, mothering roles such as “othermother” or

“community othermother” may be assumed by those who, in addition to blood relatives, take on the responsibilities of kin in black communities.*° In this configuration of family Johnson’s claim to motherhood would not have been viewed as unreasonable or unnatural. This particular model of motherhood allows for both Anna Johnson and Crispina Calvert to be viewed as mothers to Christopher without diminishing the role of either. In Johnson v. Calvert the California Supreme Court did acknowledge that there was undisputed evidence that both women could be mothers to baby Christopher. But the court then went to great lengths to describe why both could not be considered mothers to the child and why Crispina Calvert,

rather

than Anna

Johnson,

must

be considered

the natural

mother. In the communal, capacious model of motherhood that Collins describes, the weight of biological or genetic ties and their significance for defining familial relationships is shifted. Within African American communities, “those who tend, care for, [or] carry [children] are by defi-

nition those with authentic claims to be named owner of the things or people whose growth they nurture.””” Because black women’s gender has never included privacy, they are always forced to act as if the distinction between public and private is 54. Collins, “Shifting the Center,” p. 59. 55. See Stanlie M. James, “Mothering: A Possible Black Feminist Link to Social Transformation?” Theorizing Black Feminisms: The Visionary Pragmatism of Black Women, ed. Stanlie M. James and Abena P. A. Busia (New York, 1993), p. 44. See also Collins, “Shifting the Center” and Black Feminist Thought, and M. Rivka Polatnick, “Diversity in Women’s Liberation Ideology: How a Black and a White Group of the 1960s Viewed Motherhood,” Signs 21 (Spring 1996): 679-706. 56. James, “Mothering,” pp. 44, 47. See also Carol Stack, All Our Kin (New York, 1974).

57. Petchesky, “The Body as Property,” p. 397.

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Deborah R. Grayson

irrelevant in their day-to-day lives.** As Collins’s example demonstrates, black women’s maternity and kinship have already found multiple definitions. Instead of making biology or blood ties the definitive form of motherhood (or of fatherhood, for that matter), biology or blood ties represent simply one way of establishing familial relationships and bonds. Heredity is not given privileged status in this configuration of family. However, the alternative models of maternity and fictive kin that have been constructed by black women have been pathologized. Instead of being viewed as a useful example of the ways extended family can work, communal parenting in black communities is viewed by the national public as aberrant behavior, charged with being a kind of neglect, or with

enabling and promoting family forms that are not father-centered.

The emergence of assisted reproductive technology that is both “conflated with” and that “displaces ... nature” has disrupted naturalizing assumptions made about the categories of “mother,” of “family,” and of “nature” itself.°° As new conception narratives have arisen, the previously protected realm of categories such as these is, through technology, suddenly made visible and available for (re)interpretation and (re)inscrip-

tion. The suppositions of the Calverts along with other parties involved in the case—the judges, the lawyers, the press, and the public—are that the Calverts should get to keep Christopher because he is “like” them and that their desire for “likeness” in their child is a “natural” desire. “Likeness” for the courts, for the Calverts, and, no doubt, for other con-

tracting couples, serves as a visual metaphor for kinship and the right to ownership of children. Crispina Calvert’s comment that baby Christopher looks just like her and her husband, a comment that was repeated like a mantra in the press,

is both a statement about belonging and a statement about exclusion. It is about belonging because it represents a claim that Christopher, because of how he looks, is a part of both her and her husband. Christopher’s “likeness” to the Calverts is believed to demonstrate his “blood,” his ge-

netic and racial heritage, and therefore to reflect his link to the Calverts. The comment is also about exclusion because Christopher’s “likeness” serves not only as a (meta)physical and conceptual link indicating rights 58. On this point, see HortenseJ. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics (Summer

1987): 65-81. Clearly, this old adage as it is described

in Spiller’s title has been reversed in Johnson vy. Calvert, which seems to be a case of “Papa’s Baby, Mama’s Maybe.”

59. Franklin, “Postmodern Procreation,” p. 334. 60. PatriciaJ.Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), p. 226.

Mediating Intimacy. Black Mothers and the Law

309

to his parentage but also because “likeness” operates as a sign for blood— for the closed, racialized membership of family and race.°!

In addition to skin color, which has not always been a reliable sign of racial demarcation, a practice of using blood as a pseudoscientific explanation for race has existed for centuries in the United States.® Political and social movements and now medical technologies have complicated and redefined theories of blood and its value for determining identity. The continuing legacy of miscegenation laws which used, among other things, the trope of blood, specifically the “one drop rule,” to maintain distinctions and separations among groups of people place a high value on white skin—white blood—because those who can have it are strictly limited and monitored. As is also evident in the history of designating blood as a racial and therefore familial marker, the boundaries of these

rules shift and can be contradictory based on the needs and desires of the ruling class. To say that Johnson could be a mother to the baby she bore would be to indicate a willingness on the part of the courts and the public to relinquish or, at minimum,

to blur racial-familial boundaries. As Laura

Doyle has argued, in a “race bounded economy the mother is a marker of boundaries, a generator of liminality”; in giving birth, mothers reproduce both children and, through the lives of their children, the life of the racial divide.®* The notion of reproducing children “like” oneself, then,

reproduces the specific rights and privileges of particular cultural groups. These rights and privileges are connected to systems of value. White mothers and white children are considered valuable in a marketplace where white skin is valued; for black mothers and black children,

the converse is true. Much of the legal and popular discussion of Johnson v. Calvert draws on the historical devaluation of black women as mothers. Black women are frequently blamed for the effects of poverty on their children. They also serve as scapegoats in public policy for legal decisions related to issues of family, custody, and reproduction. The im-

age of black women as drug-using, child-abusing welfare recipients who live to breed at taxpayer expense is illustrative of this phenomenon. In Johnson v. Calvert we find a shift in the definitions and valuing of maternity, bodily integrity, and family. The courts are willing to reaffirm 61. See, for instance, Brackette F. Williams, “Classification Systems Revisited: Kinship, Caste, Race, and Nationality as the Flow of Blood and the Spread of Rights,” Natwralizing Power: Essays in Feminist Cultural Analysis, ed. Sylvia Yanagisako and Carol Delaney (New York, 1994), pp. 201-36. See also DonnaJ. Haraway, “Universal Donors in a Vampire Culture: It’s All in the Family. Biological Kinship Categories in the Twentieth-Century United States,” Modest_Witness@Second_Millentum.FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience (New York, 1997), pp. 213-66. 62. See, for instance, Winthrop

D. Jordan, White over Black: American Altitudes toward

the Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1968). 63. Doyle, Bordering on the Body, p. Oi

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Deborah R. Grayson

the primacy of a closed, privatized, and homogenous family and all of its

attendant qualities even if this means that they make inconsistent and contradictory decisions.

Like it or not, reproductive

technologies

have

destabilized this notion of family. The fact that what constitutes a family is now variable poses a problem for the efforts of the courts to limit and hierarchically arrange bounded,

private families. Even in their contor-

tions to maintain this version of family the courts have themselves in their rulings helped to open the door to different forms. In Johnson v. Calvert the tension between what constitutes a family versus what constitutes a mother is linked by the question of race. Even in light of the new reproductive technologies and other medical and scientific technologies that seem to make the assumption of a link more difficult, race is still the one remnant from the past that remains animated. What we are left with is a highly entrenched, racialized image of the family. As a culture we continue to trip over the notion of reproduction as a racial act. That this is true is demonstrated in the dogged reliance on pseudonatural forms of social categories of the body that seem most available to maintain intelligibility in the face of dramatic social and cultural change. Indeed, the improvisations that persons in the law and the medical sciences have to go through to keep renaming and reconftguring the so-called nuclear family form despite the changes reproductive technology, among other changes, has brought about are connected to the intelligibility of that form. The bodies of women who are poor, who are of color, or who reproduce outside of this family form are explained

by the rhetoric of degeneracy, considered markers of the “not proper” whose social positions cannot be destabilized by technology even while everything else around them changes. New reproductive technologies have simply made it possible to develop a new vocabulary that can continue to utilize these familiar representations.

Sex in Public

Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner

1. There Is Nothing More Public Than Privacy A paper titled “Sex in Public” teases with the obscurity of its object and the twisted aim ofits narrative. In this paper we will be talking not about the sex people already have clarity about, nor identities and acts, nor a wildness in need of derepression; but rather about sex as it is mediated by publics.' Some of these publics have an obvious relation to sex: pornographic cinema, phone sex, “adult” markets for print, lap dancing. Others are organized around sex, but not necessarily sex acts in the usual

sense: queer zones and other worlds estranged from heterosexual culture, but also more tacit scenes of sexuality like official national culture, which depends on a notion of privacy to cloak its sexualization of national membership. The aim of this paper is to describe what we want to promote as the 1. On public sex in the standard sense, see Pat Califia, Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex (Pittsburgh, 1994). On acts and identities, see Janet E. Halley, “The Status/Conduct Distinction in the 1993 Revisions to Military Antigay Policy: A Legal Archaeology,’ GLQ 3 (1996): 159-252. The classic political argument for sexual derepression as a condition of freedom is put forth in Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Cwwilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston, 1966). In contemporary prosex thought inspired by volume | of Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, the denunciation of “erotic injustice and sexual oppression” is situated less in the freedom of individuals than in analyses of the normative and coercive relations between specific “populations” and the institutions created to manage them (Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed. Carole S. Vance [Boston, 1984], p. 275). See also Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, vol. 1 of The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York, 1978).

SLT

SL,

Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner

radical aspirations of queer culture building: not just a safe zone for queer sex but the changed possibilities of identity, intelligibility, publics,

culture, and sex that appear when the heterosexual couple is no longer the referent or the privileged example of sexual culture. Queer social practices like sex and theory try to unsettle the garbled but powerful norms supporting that privilege—including the project of normalization that has made heterosexuality hegemonic—as well as those material practices that, though not explicitly sexual, are implicated in the hierar-

chies of property and propriety that we will describe as heteronormative.* We open with two scenes of sex in public. Scene 1

In 1993 Time magazine published a special issue about immigration called “The

New

Face of America.”*® The cover girl of this issue was

2. By heteronormativity we mean the institutions, structures of understanding, and practical orientations that make heterosexuality seem not only coherent—that is, organized as a sexuality—but also privileged. Its coherence is always provisional, and its privilege can take several (sometimes contradictory) forms: unmarked, as the basic idiom of the personal and the social; or marked as a natural state; or projected as an ideal or moral accomplishment. It consists less of norms that could be summarized as a body of doctrine than of a sense of rightness produced in contradictory manifestations—often unconscious, immanent to practice or to institutions. Contexts that have little visible relation to sex practice, such

as life narrative and generational identity, can be heteronormative in this sense, while in other contexts forms of sex between men and women might not be heteronormative. Heteronormativity is thus a concept distinct from heterosexuality. One of the most conspicuous differences is that it has no parallel, unlike heterosexuality, which organizes homosexuality as its opposite. Because homosexuality can never have the invisible, tacit, society-founding rightness that heterosexuality has, it would not be possible to speak of “homonormativity” in the same sense. See Michael Warner, “Fear of aQueer Planet,” Social Text, no. 29 (1991): 3-17. 3. See Time, special issue, “The New Face of America,” Fall 1993. This analysis reworks

materials in Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, N.C., 1997), pp. 200-208.

Lauren Berlant, a coeditor of Critical Inquiry, teaches English at the University of Chicago. She is the author of The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (1997) and The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life (1991). Michael Warner is professor of English at Rutgers University. His most recent works include The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (1999) and American Sermons: The Pilgrims to Martin Luther King (1999). He is also the author of The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (1990) and editor of Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory (1993).

Sex in Public

515

morphed via computer from head shots representing a range of U.S. immigrant groups: an amalgam of “Middle Eastern,” “Italian,” “African,” “Vietnamese,” “Anglo-Saxon,”

2

66

“Chinese,” and “Hispanic” faces. The new

face of America is supposed to represent what the modal citizen will look like when, in the year 2004, it is projected, there is no longer a white

statistical majority in the United States. Naked, smiling, and just offwhite, Time’s divine Frankenstein aims to organize hegemonic optimism

about citizenship and the national future. Time’s theory is that by the twenty-first century interracial reproductive sex will have taken place in the United States on such a mass scale that racial difference itself will be finally replaced by a kind of family feeling based on blood relations. In the twenty-first century, Time imagines, hundreds of millions of hybrid faces will erase American racism altogether: the nation will become a happy racial monoculture made up of “one (mixed) blood.”* The publication of this special issue caused a brief flurry ofinterest but had no important effects; its very banality calls us to understand the technologies that produce its ordinariness. The fantasy banalized by the image is one that reverberates in the law and in the most intimate crevices of everyday life. Its explicit aim is to help its public process the threat to “normal” or “core” national culture that is currently phrased as “the problem of immigration.”° But this crisis image of immigrants is also a racial mirage generated by a white-dominated society, supplying a specific ‘phobia to organize its public so that a more substantial discussion of exploitation in the United States can be avoided and then remaindered to the part of collective memory sanctified not by nostalgia but by mass aversion. Let’s call this the amnesia archive. The motto above the door is Memory Is the Amnesia You Like. But more than exploitation and racism are forgotten in this whirl of projection and suppression. Central to the transfiguration of the immigrant into a nostalgic image to shore up core national culture and allay white fears of minoritization

is something that cannot

speak its name,

though its signature is everywhere: national heterosexuality. National heterosexuality is the mechanism by which a core national culture can be imagined as a sanitized space of sentimental feeling and immaculate behavior, a space of pure citizenship. A familial model of society displaces the recognition of structural racism and other systemic inequalities. This is not entirely new: the family form has functioned as a mediator and metaphor of national existence in the United States since the eighteenth 4. For a treatment of the centrality of “blood” to U.S. nationalist discourse, see Bonnie

Honig, No Place Like Home: Democracy and the Politics of Foregnness (forthcoming). 5. See, for example, William J. Bennett, The De-Valuing of America: The Fight for Our

Culture and Our Children (New York, 1992); Peter Brimelow, Alien Nation: Common Sense about

America’s Immigration Disaster (New York, 1995); and William A. Henry III, Jn Defense of Elitism (New York, 1994).

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Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner

century.® We are arguing that its contemporary deployment increasingly supports the governmentality of the welfare state by separating the aspirations of national belonging from the critical culture of the public sphere and from political citizenship.” Immigration crises have also previously produced feminine icons that function as prostheses for the state—most famously, the Statue of Liberty, which symbolized seamless immigrant assimilation to the metaculture of the United States. In Time’s face it is not symbolic femininity but practical heterosexuality that guarantees the monocultural nation. The nostalgic family values covenant of contemporary American politics stipulates a privatization of citizenship and sex in a number of ways. In law and political ideology, for example, the fetus and the child have

been spectacularly elevated to the place of sanctified nationality. The state now sponsors stings and legislation to purify the internet on behalf of children. New welfare and tax “reforms” passed under the cooperation between the Contract with America and Clintonian familialism seek to increase the legal and economic privileges of married couples and parents. Vouchers and privatization rezone education as the domain of parents rather than citizens. Meanwhile, senators such as Ted Kennedy and Jesse Helms support amendments that refuse federal funds to organizations that “promote, disseminate, or produce materials that are obscene or that depict or describe, in a patently offensive way, sexual or excretory

activities or organs, including but not limited to obscene depictions of sadomasochism,

homo-eroticism,

the sexual exploitation of children, or

individuals engaged in sexual intercourse.”* These developments, though distinct, are linked in the way they organize a hegemonic national public around sex. But because this sex public officially claims to act only in order to protect the zone of heterosexual privacy, the institutions of economic privilege and social reproduction informing its practices and organizing its ideal world are protected by the spectacular demonization of any represented sex. 6. On the family form in national rhetoric, see Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority, 1750-1800 (Cambridge, 1982), and Shirley Samuels, Romances of the Republic: Women, the Family, and Violence in the Literature of the Early American Nation (New York, 1996). On fantasies of genetic assimilation, see Robert S. Tilton,

Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 9-33, and Elise Lemire, “Making Miscegenation” (Ph.D. diss., Rutgers University, 1996).

7. The concept of welfare state governmentality has a growing literature. For a concise statement, see Jiirgen Habermas, “The New Obscurity: The Crisis of the Welfare State and the Exhaustion of Utopian Energies,’ The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians’ Debate, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), pp. 48-70. Michael Warner has discussed the relation between this analysis and queer culture in his “Something Queer about the Nation-State,” in After Political Correctness: The Humanities and Society in the 1990s, ed. Christopher Newfield and Ronald Strickland (Boulder, Colo., 1995), pp. 361-71. 8. Congressional Record,

10 1st Cong., Ist. sess., 1989, 135, pt. 134:12967.

Sex in Public

53115)

Scene 2

In October 1995, the New York City Council passed a new zoning law by a forty-one to nine vote. The Zoning Text Amendment covers adult book and video stores, eating and drinking establishments, theaters, and

other businesses. It allows these businesses only in certain areas zoned as nonresidential, most of which turn out to be on the waterfront. Within the new reserved districts, adult businesses are disallowed within five

hundred feet of another adult establishment or within five hundred feet of a house of worship, school, or day-care center. They are limited to one per lot and in size to ten thousand square feet. Signs are limited in size, placement, and illumination. All other adult businesses are required to close within a year. Of the estimated 177 adult businesses in the city, all

but 28 may have to close under this law. Enforcement of the bill is entrusted to building inspectors. A court challenge against the bill was brought by a coalition that also fought it in the political process, formed by anticensorship groups such as the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), Feminists for Free Ex-

pression, People for the American Way, and the National Coalition Against Censorship as well as gay and lesbian organizations such as the Lambda

Legal Defense

Fund, the Empire State Pride Agenda, and the

AIDS Prevention Action League. (An appeal was still pending as ofJuly

1997.) These latter groups joined the anticensorship groups for a simple reason: the impact of rezoning on businesses catering to queers, especially to gay men, will be devastating. All five of the adult businesses on Christopher

Street will be shut down, along with the principal venues

where men meet men for sex. None of these businesses have been targets of local complaints. Gay men have come to take for granted the availability of explicit sexual materials, theaters, and clubs. That is how they have

learned to find each other; to map a commonly accessible world; to construct the architecture of queer space in a homophobic environment; and, for the last fifteen years, to cultivate a collective ethos of safer sex.

All of that is about to change. Now, gay men who want sexual materials or who want to meet other men for sex will have two choices: they can cathect the privatized virtual public of phone sex and the internet; or they can travel to small, inaccessible, little-trafficked, badly lit areas, re-

mote from public transportation and from any residences, mostly on the waterfront,

where

heterosexual

porn

users

will also be relocated

and

where the risk of violence will consequently be higher. In either case, the 9. Political geography in this way produces systematic effects of violence. Queers are forced to find each other in untrafficked areas because of the combined pressures of propriety, stigma, the closet, and state regulation such as laws against public lewdness. The same

areas are known to gay-bashers and other criminals. And they are disregarded by police. The effect is to make both violence and police neglect seem like natural hazards, voluntarily courted by queers. As the 1997 documentary film Licensed to Kill illustrates, antigay violence

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Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner

result will be a sense of isolation and diminished expectations for queer life, as well as an attenuated capacity for political community. The nascent lesbian sexual culture, including the Clit Club and the only video rental

club catering to lesbians, will also disappear. The impact of the sexual purification of New York will fall unequally on those who already have fewest publicly accessible resources.

2. Normativity and Sexual Culture Heterosexuality is not a thing. We speak of heterosexual culture rather than heterosexuality because that culture never has more than a provisional unity.'° It is neither a single Symbolic nor a single ideology nor a unified set of shared beliefs.!! The conflicts between these strands are seldom more than dimly perceived in practice, where the givenness of male-female sexual relations is part of the ordinary rightness of the world, its fragility masked in shows of solemn rectitude. Such conflicts have also gone unrecognized in theory, partly because of the metacultural work of the very category of heterosexuality, which consolidates as a sexuality widely differing practices, norms, and institutions; and partly because the sciences of social knowledge are themselves so deeply anchored has been difficult to combat by legal means: victims are reluctant to come forward in any public and prosecutorial framework, while bashers can appeal to the geographic circumstances to implicate the victims themselves. The legal system has helped to produce the violence it is called upon to remedy. 10. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley, 1992). 11. Gay and lesbian theory, especially in the humanities, frequently emphasizes psychoanalytic or psychoanalytic-style models of subject-formation, the differences among which are significant and yet all of which tend to elide the difference between the categories male/female and the process and project of heteronormativity. Three propositional paradigms are relevant here: those that propose that human identity itself is fundamentally organized by gender identifications that are hardwired into infants; those that equate the

clarities of gender identity with the domination of a relatively coherent and vertically stable “straight” ideology; and those that focus on a phallocentric Symbolic order that produces gendered subjects who live out the destiny of their positioning in it. The psychoanalytic and philosophical insights and limits of these models

(which, we feel, underdescribe

the

practices, institutions, and incongruities of heteronormativity) require further engagement.

For the time being, these works stand in as the most challenging relevant archive: Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discurswe Limits of “Sex” (New York, 1993); Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillan C. Gill (Ithaca, N.Y., 1985) and This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke (Ithaca, N.Y., 1985); Teresa de Lauretis, The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire (Bloomington, Ind., 1994); Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York, 1992); and Monique Wittig, The

Straight Mind and Other Essays (Boston, 1992). Psychoanalytic work on sexuality does not always latch acts and inclinations to natural or constructed “identity”: see, for example, Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge, Mass., 1995) and “Is the Rectum a Grave?” in AIDS: Cultural

Analysis/Cultural Activism, ed. Douglas Crimp (Cambridge, Mass., 1988).

Sex in Public

BANG

in the process of normalization to which Foucault attributes so much of modern sexuality.'? Thus when we say that the contemporary United States is saturated by the project of constructing national heterosexuality, we do not mean that national heterosexuality is anything like a simple monoculture. Hegemonies are nothing if not elastic alliances, involving dispersed and contradictory strategies for self-maintenance and reproduction. Heterosexual culture achieves much of its metacultural intelligibility through the ideologies and institutions of intimacy. We want to argue here that although the intimate relations of private personhood appear to be the realm of sexuality itself, allowing “sex in public” to appear like

matter out of place, intimacy is itself publicly mediated, in several senses. First, its conventional spaces presuppose a structural differentiation of “personal life” from work, politics, and the public sphere.!® Second, the normativity of heterosexual culture links intimacy only to the institutions of personal life, making them the privileged institutions of social reproduction, the accumulation and transfer of capital, and self-development. Third, by making sex seem irrelevant or merely personal, heteronorma-

tive conventions of intimacy block the building of nonnormative or explicit public sexual cultures. Finally, those conventions conjure a mirage: a home base of prepolitical humanity from which citizens are thought to come into political discourse and to which they are expected to return in the (always imaginary) future after political conflict. Intimate life is the endlessly cited elsewhere of political public discourse, a promised haven that distracts citizens from the unequal conditions of their political and economic lives, consoles them for the damaged humanity of mass society,

and shames them for any divergence between their lives and the intimate sphere that is alleged to be simple personhood. Ideologies and institutions of intimacy are increasingly offered as a vision of the good life for the destabilized and struggling citizenry of the United States, the only (fantasy) zone in which a future might be thought and willed, the only (imaginary) place where good citizens might be produced away from the confusing and unsettling distractions and contradictions of capitalism and politics. Indeed, one of the unforeseen paradoxes

of national-capitalist privatization has been that citizens have been led 12.

The

notion

of metaculture

we borrow

from

Greg Urban.

See Greg Urban, A

Discourse-Centered Approach to Culture: Native South American Myths and Rituals (Austin, Tex., 1991) and Nowmenal Community: Myth and Reality in an Amerindian Brazilian Society (Austin, Tex., 1996). On normalization, see Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan

Sheridan (New York, 1979), pp. 184-85 and The History of Sexuality, p. 144. Foucault derives his argument here from the revised version of Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, trans. Carolyn R. Fawcett and Robert S. Cohen (New York, 1991).

13. Here we are influenced by Eli Zaretsky, Capitalism, the Family, and Personal Life (New York, 1986), and Stephanie Coontz, The Social Origins of Private Life: A History of American Families, 1600-1900 (London, 1988), though heteronormativity is a problem not often made

visible in Coontz’s work.

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through heterosexual culture to identify both themselves and their politics with privacy. In the official public, this involves making sex private; rein-

tensifying blood as a psychic base for identification; replacing state mandates for social justice with a privatized ethics of responsibility, charity, atonement, and “values”; and enforcing boundaries between moral persons and economic ones.'* A complex cluster of sexual practices gets confused, in heterosexual culture, with the love plot of intimacy and familialism that signifies be-

longing to society in a deep and normal way. Community is imagined through scenes of intimacy, coupling, and kinship; a historical relation to futurity is restricted to generational narrative and reproduction.’? A whole field of social relations becomes intelligible as heterosexuality, and this privatized sexual culture bestows on its sexual practices a tacit sense of rightness and normalcy. This sense of rightness—embedded in things and not just in sex—is what we call heteronormativity. Heteronormativity

is more than ideology, or prejudice, or phobia against gays and lesbians; it is produced in almost every aspect of the forms and arrangements of social life: nationality, the state, and the law; commerce; medicine; and education; as well as in the conventions and affects of narrativity, ro=

14. On privatization and intimacy politics, see Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City, pp. 1-24 and “Feminism and the Institutions of Intimacy,” in The Politics of Research, ed. E. Ann Kaplan and George Levine (New Brunswick, N.J., 1997), pp. 143-61;

Honig, No Place Like Home; and Rosalind Pollack Petchesky, “The Body as Property: A Feminist Re-vision,” in Concewing the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction, ed. Faye D. Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp (Berkeley, 1995), pp. 387-406. On privatization and nationalcapitalism, see David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford, 1989), and Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York, 1992).

15. This language for community is a problem for gay historiography. In otherwise fine and important studies such as Esther Newton’s Cherry Grove, Fire Island: Sixty Years in Ameria’ First Gay and Leshan

Town

(Boston,

1993), or Elizabeth

Lapovsky

Kennedy

and

Madeline D. Davis’s Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (New York, 1993), or even George Chauncey’s Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Makings

of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (New York, 1994), community is imagined as wholeperson, face-to-face relations—local, experiential, proximate, and saturating. But queer worlds seldom manifest themselves in such forms. Cherry Grove—a seasonal resort depending heavily on weekend visits by New Yorkers—may be typical less of a “gay and lesbian town” than of the way queer sites are specialized spaces in which transits can project alternative worlds. John D’Emilio’s Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homo-

sexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970 is an especially interesting example of the imaginative power of the idealization of local community for queers: the book charts the separate tracks of political organizing and local scenes such as bar life, showing that when the “movement” and the “subculture” began to converge in San Francisco, the result was a new formation with a new utopian appeal: “A “community,” D’Emilio writes, “was in fact forming around a shared sexual orientation” (John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communi-

ties: The Making of a Homosexual Mmority in the United States, 1940-1970 (Chicago, 1983], p. 195). D’Emilio (wisely) keeps scare quotes around “community” in the very sentence declaring it to exist in fact.

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mance, and other protected spaces of culture. It is hard to see these fields as heteronormative because the sexual culture straight people inhabit is so diffuse, a mix of languages they are just developing with premodern notions of sexuality so ancient that their material conditions feel hardwired into personhood. But intimacy has not always had the meaning it has for contemporary heteronormative culture. Along with Foucault and other historians, the classicist David Halperin, for example, has shown that in ancient Athens sex was a transitive act rather than a fundamental dimension of personhood or an expression of intimacy. The verb for having sex appears on a late antique list of things that are not done in regard to or through others:

“namely,

speaking,

singing,

dancing,

fist-fighting,

competing,

hanging oneself, dying, being crucified, diving, finding a treasure, having sex, vomiting, moving one’s bowels, sleeping, laughing, crying, talking to

the gods, and the like.” '® Halperin points out that the inclusion of fucking on this list shows that sex is not here “knit up in a web of mutuality.” In contrast, modern heterosexuality is supposed to refer to relations of intimacy and identification with other persons, and sex acts are supposed to be the most intimate communication of them all.'* The sex act shielded by the zone of privacy is the affectional nimbus that heterosexual culture protects and from which it abstracts its model of ethics, but this utopia of

social belonging is also supported and extended by acts less commonly recognized as part of sexual culture: paying taxes, being disgusted, philandering, bequeathing, celebrating a holiday, investing for the future, teaching, disposing of a corpse, carrying wallet photos, buying economy size, being nepotistic, running for president, divorcing, or owning any-

thing “His” and “Hers.” The elaboration of this list is a project for further study. Meanwhile,

to make it and to laugh as oppressive, uncool, or practices that everywhere central organizing index

at it is not immediately to label any practice definitive. We are describing a constellation of disperses heterosexual privilege as a tacit but of social membership. Exposing it inevitably

16. Artemidorus, Oneirocritica

1.2, quoted in David M. Halperin, “Sex before Sexual-

ity: Pederasty, Politics, and Power in Classical Athens,” in Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, ed. Martin

Bauml

Duberman,

Martha

Vicinus, and Chauncey

(New

York, 1989)..p. 4.9.

17. Halperin, “Sex before Sexuality,’ p. 49. 18. Studies of intimacy that do not assume this “web of mutuality,” either as the selfevident nature of intimacy or as a human value, are rare. Roland Barthes’s A Lovers Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (New York, 1978), and Niklas Luhmann’s Love as

Passion, trans. Jeremy Gaines and Doris L. Jones (Cambridge, Mass., 1986) both try, in very

different ways, to describe analytically the production of intimacy. More typical is Anthony Giddens’s attempt to theorize intimacy as “pure relationship” in The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love, and Eroticism in Modern Societies (Cambridge, 1992). There, ironically, it is “the gays who are the pioneers” in separating the “pure relationship” of love from extraneous institutions and contexts such as marriage and reproduction.

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produces what we have elsewhere called a “wrenching sense of recontextualization,” as its subjects, even its gay and lesbian subjects, begin to piece together how it is that social and economic discourses, institutions,

and practices that don’t feel especially sexual or familial collaborate to produce as a social norm and ideal an extremely narrow context for living.'® Heterosexual culture cannot recognize, validate, sustain, incorporate, or remember much of what people know and experience about the

cruelty of normal culture even to the people who identify with it. But that cruelty does not go unregistered. Intimacy, for example, has a whole public environment of therapeutic genres dedicated to witnessing the constant failure of heterosexual ideologies and institutions. Every day, in many countries now, people testify to their failure to sustain

or be sustained by institutions of privacy on talk shows, in scandal journalism, even in the ordinary course of mainstream journalism addressed to middlebrow culture. We can learn a lot from these stories of love plots that have gone astray: about the ways quotidian violence is linked to complex pressures from money, racism, histories of sexual violence, crossgenerational tensions. We can learn a lot from listening to the increasing demands on love to deliver the good life it promises. And we can learn from the extremely punitive responses that tend to emerge when people seem not to suffer enough for their transgressions and failures. Maybe we would learn too much. Recently, the proliferation of evi-

dence for heterosexuality’s failings has produced a backlash against talkshow therapy. It has even brought William Bennett to the podium; but rather than confessing his transgressions or making a complaint about someone else’s, we find him calling for boycotts and for the suppression of heterosexual therapy culture altogether. Recognition of heterosexuality’s daily failures agitates him as much as queerness. “We’ve forgotten that civilization depends on keeping some of this stuff under wraps,” he said.

“This is a tropism toward the toilet.””° But does civilization need to cover its ass? Or does heterosexual culture actually secure itself through banalizing intimacy? Does belief that normal life is actually possible require amnesia and the ludicrous stereotyping of a bottom-feeding culture apparently inadequate to intimacy? On these shows no one ever blames the ideology and institutions of heterosexuality. Every day, even the talk-show hosts are newly astonished to

find that people who are committed to hetero intimacy are nevertheless unhappy. After all is said and done, the prospects and promises of heterosexual culture still represent the optimism for optimism, a hope to which people apparently have already pledged their consent—at least in public. Recently, Biddy Martin has written that some queer social theorists 19. Berlant and Warner, “What Does Queer Theory Teach Us about X?” PMLA

110

(May 1995): 345. 20. Bennett, quoted in Maureen Dowd, “Talk Is Cheap,” New York Times, 26 Oct. 1995, JOR AvA5).

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SFI

have produced a reductive and pseudoradical antinormativity by actively repudiating the institutions of heterosexuality that have come to oversaturate the social imaginary. She shows that the kinds of arguments that crop up in the writings of people like Andrew Sullivan are not just rightwing fantasies. “In some queer work,” she writes, “the very fact of attachment has been cast as only punitive and constraining because already socially constructed. . . . Radical anti-normativity throws out a lot of babies with a lot of bathwater. . . An enormous fear of ordinariness or normalcy results in superficial accounts of the complex imbrication of sexuality with other aspects of social and psychic life, and in far too little attention to the dilemmas of the average people that we also are.”?! We think our friend Biddy might be referring to us, although in

this segment she cites no one in particular. We would like to clarify the argument. To be against heteronormativity is not to be against norms. To be against the processes of normalization is not to be afraid of ordinariness. Nor is it to advocate the “existence without limit” she sees as produced by bad Foucauldians (“EH,” p. 123). Nor is it to decide that sentimental identifications with family and children are waste or garbage, or make people into waste or garbage. Nor is it to say that any sex called “lovemaking” isn’t lovemaking; whatever the ideological or historical burdens of sexuality have been, they have not excluded, and indeed may have entailed, the ability of sex to count as intimacy and care. What we have been arguing here is that the space of sexual culture has become obnoxiously cramped from doing the work of maintaining a normal metaculture. When Biddy Martin calls us to recognize ourselves as “average people,” to relax from an artificially stimulated “fear of normalcy,’ the image of average personhood appears to be simply descriptive (“EH,” p. 123). But its averageness is also normative, in exactly the sense that Foucault meant by “normalization”: not the imposition of an alien will, but a distribution around a statistically imagined norm. This deceptive appeal of the average remains heteronormative, measuring deviance from the mass. It can also be consoling, an expression of autopian desire for unconflicted personhood. But this desire cannot be satisfied in the current conditions of privacy. People feel that the price they must pay for social membership and a relation to the future is identification with the heterosexual life narrative; that they are individually responsible for the rages, instabilities, ambivalences, and failures they experience in their intimate lives, while the fractures of the contemporary United States

shame and sabotage them everywhere. Heterosexuality involves so many practices that are not sex that a world in which this hegemonic cluster would not be dominant is, at this point, unimaginable. We are trying to bring that world into being. 21. Biddy Martin, “Extraordinary Homosexuals and the Fear of Being Ordinary,” Differences 6 (Summer-Fall 1994): 123; hereafter abbreviated “EH.”

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3. Queer Counterpublics By queer culture we mean

a world-making project, where “world,”

like “public,” differs from community or group because it necessarily cludes more people than can be identified, more spaces than can mapped beyond a few reference points, modes of feeling that can learned rather than experienced as a birthright. The queer world

inbe be is a

space of entrances, exits, unsystematized lines of acquaintance, projected horizons, typifying examples, alternate routes, blockages, incommensu-

rate geographies.”? World making, as much in the mode of dirty talk as of print-mediated representation, is dispersed through incommensurate registers, by definition unrealizable as community or identity. Every cultural form, be it a novel or an after-hours club or an academic lecture,

indexes a virtual social world, in ways that range from a repertoire of styles and speech genres to referential metaculture. A novel like Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance relies much more heavily on referential metaculture than does an after-hours club that survives on word of mouth and may be a major scene because it is only barely coherent as a scene. Yet for all their differences, both allow for the concretization of a

queer counterpublic. We are trying to promote this world-making project, and a first step in doing so is to recognize that queer culture constitutes itself in many ways other than through the official publics of opinion culture and the state, or through the privatized forms normally associated with sexuality. Queer and other insurgents have long striven, often dangerously or scandalously, to cultivate what good folks used to call criminal intimacies. We have developed relations and narratives that are only recognized as intimate in queer culture: girlfriends, gal pals, fuckbuddies,

tricks. Queer culture has learned not only how to sexualize these and other relations, but also to use them as a context for witnessing intense

and personal affect while elaborating a public world of belonging and transformation. Making a queer world has required the development of kinds of intimacy that bear no necessary relation to domestic space, to kinship, to the couple form, to property, or to the nation. These intimacies do bear a necessary relation to a counterpublic—an indefinitely accessible world conscious of its subordinate relation. They are typical both of the inventiveness of queer world making and of the queer world’s fragility. 22. In some traditions of social theory, the process of world making as we describe it here is seen as common to all social actors. See, for example, Alfred Schutz’s emphasis on

the practices of typification and projects of action involved in ordinary knowledge of the social in The Phenomenology of the Social World, trans. George Walsh and Frederick Lehnert (Evanston, Ill., 1967). Yet in most contexts the social world is understood, not as con-

structed by reference to types or projects, but as instantiated whole in a form capable of reproducing itself. The family, the state, a neighborhood, the human species, or institutions such as school and church—such images of social being share an appearance of plenitude seldom approached in contexts of queer world making. However much the latter might

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B23

Nonstandard intimacies would seem less criminal and less fleeting if,

as used to be the case, normal intimacies included everything from consorts to courtiers, friends, amours, associates, and coconspirators.”° Along

with the sex it legitimates, intimacy has been privatized; the discourse contexts that narrate true personhood have been segregated from those that represent citizens, workers, or professionals.

This transformation in the cultural forms of intimacy is related both to the history of the modern public sphere and to the modern discourse of sexuality as a fundamental human capacity. In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas shows that the institutions and forms of domestic intimacy made private people private, members of the public sphere of private society rather than the market or the state. Intimacy grounded abstract, disembodied citizens in a sense of universal humanity.

In The History of Sexuality, Foucault describes the personalization of sex from the other direction: the confessional and expert discourses of civil society continually posit an inner personal essence, equating this true personhood with sex and surrounding that sex with dramas of secrecy and disclosure. There is an instructive convergence here in two thinkers who otherwise seem to be describing different planets.2* Habermas overlooks the administrative and normalizing dimensions of privatized sex in sciences of social knowledge because he is interested in the norm of a critical relation between state and civil society. Foucault overlooks the critical culture that might enable transformation of sex and other private relations; he wants to show that modern epistemologies of sexual personhood, far from bringing sexual publics into being, are techniques of isolation; they identify persons as normal or perverse, for the purpose of medicalizing or otherwise administering them as individuals. Yet both Habermas and Foucault point to the way a hegemonic public has founded itself by a privatization of sex and the sexualization of private personhood. Both identify the conditions in which sexuality seems like a property of subjectivity rather than a publicly or counterpublicly accessible culture. Like most ideologies, that of normal intimacy may never have been an accurate description of how people actually live. It was from the beginning mediated not only by a structural separation of economic and domestic space but also by opinion culture, correspondence, novels, and resemble the process of world construction in ordinary contexts, queer worlds do not have the power to represent a taken-for-granted social existence. 23. See, for example, Alan Bray, “Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England,” History Workshop 29 (Spring 1990): 1-19; LaurieJ.Shannon, “Emilia’s Argument: Friendship and ‘Human Title’ in The Two Noble Kinsmen,’ ELH 64 (Fall 1997); and Passions of the Renaissance, trans. Arthur Goldhammer,

ed. Roger Chartier, vol. 3 ofA

History of Private Life, ed. Philippe Ariés and Georges Duby (Cambridge, Mass., 1989). 24. On the relation between Foucault and Habermas, we take inspiration from Tom McCarthy, /deals and Illusions (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), pp. 43-75.

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Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner

romances; Rousseau’s Confessions is typical both of the ideology and of its reliance on mediation by print and by new, hybrid forms of life narrative.

Habermas notes that “subjectivity, as the innermost core of the private, was always oriented to an audience,’* adding that the structure of this intimacy includes a fundamentally contradictory relation to the economy:

To the autonomy of property owners in the market corresponded a self-presentation of human beings in the family. The latter’s intimacy, apparently set free from the constraint of society, was the seal on the

truth of a private autonomy exercised in competition. Thus it was a private autonomy denying its economic origins . . . that provided the bourgeois family with its consciousness of itself.?° This structural relation is no less normative for being imperfect in practice. Its force is to prevent the recognition, memory, elaboration, or insti-

tutionalization of all the nonstandard intimacies that people have in everyday life. Affective life slops over onto work and political life; people have key self-constitutive relations with strangers and acquaintances; and they have eroticism, if not sex, outside of the couple form. These border intimacies give people tremendous pleasure. But when that pleasure is called sexuality, the spillage of eroticism into everyday social life seems transgressive in a way that provokes normal aversion, a hygienic recoil

even as contemporary consumer and media cultures increasingly trope toiletward, splattering the matter of intimate life at the highest levels of national culture.

In gay male culture, the principal scenes of criminal intimacy have been tearooms, streets, sex clubs, and parks—a tropism toward the public

toilet.*” Promiscuity is so heavily stigmatized as nonintimate that it is often called anonymous, whether names are used or not. One of the most commonly forgotten lessons of AIDS is that this promiscuous intimacy turned

out to be a lifesaving public resource. Unbidden by experts, gay people invented safer sex; and, as Douglas Crimp wrote in 1987

we were able to invent safe sex because we have always known that sex 1s not, in an epidemic or not, limited to penetrative sex. Our promiscuity taught us many things, not only about the pleasures of 25. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), p. 49. 26. Ibid., p. 46. 27. On the centrality of semipublic spaces like tearooms, bathrooms, and bathhouses to gay male life, see Chauncey, Gay New York, and Lee Edelman, “Tearooms and Sympathy, or, Epistemology of the Water Closet,” in Nationalisms and Sexualities, ed. Andrew Parker et

al. (New York, 1992), pp. 263-84. The spaces of both gay and lesbian semipublic sexual practices are investigated in Mapping Desire: Geographies of Sexualities, ed. David Bell and Gill Valentine (New York, 1995).

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S15)

sex, but about the great multiplicity of those pleasures. It is that psychic preparation, that experimentation, that conscious work on our own sexualities that has allowed many of us to change our sexual behaviors—something that brutal “behavioral therapies” tried unsuccessfully for over a century to force us to do—very quickly and very dramatically. . . . All those who contend that gay male promiscuity is merely sexual compulsion resulting from fear of intimacy are now faced with very strong evidence against their prejudices. . . . Gay male promiscuity should be seen instead as a positive model of how sexual pleasures might be pursued by and granted to everyone if those pleasures were not confined within the narrow limits of institutionalized sexuality.”* AIDS is a special case, and this model of sexual culture has been typically male. But sexual practice is only one kind of counterintimacy. More important is the critical practical knowledge that allows such relations to count as intimate, to be not empty release or transgression but a common language of self-cultivation, shared knowledge, and the exchange of inwardness. Queer culture has found it necessary to develop this knowledge in mobile sites of drag, youth culture, music, dance, parades, flaunting, and

cruising—sites whose mobility makes them possible but also renders them hard to recognize as world making because they are so fragile and ephemeral. They are paradigmatically trivialized as “lifestyle.” But to understand them only as self-expression or as a demand for recognition would be to misrecognize the fundamentally unequal material conditions whereby the institutions of social reproduction are coupled to the forms of hetero culture.?? Contexts of queer world making depend on parasitic and fugitive elaboration

through

gossip, dance clubs, softball leagues,

and the phone-sex ads that increasingly are the commercial support for print-mediated left culture in general.*° Queer is difficult to entextualize as culture. 28. Douglas Crimp, “How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic,” October, no. 43 (Winter 1987): 253.

29. The notion of ademand for recognition has been recently advanced by a number of thinkers as a way of understanding multicultural politics. See, for example, Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, trans. Joel Anderson (Cambridge, 1995), or Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton, N.J., 1994). We are suggesting that although queer politics does contest the terrain of recognition, it cannot be conceived as a politics of recognition as opposed to an issue of distributive justice; this is the distinction proposed in Nancy Fraser's “From Redistribution to Recognition? Dilemmas ofJustice in a ‘Postsocialist’ Age,” New Left Review, no. 212 (July-Aug. 1995): 68-93; rept. in her Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition (New York, 1997).

30. See Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, and Yvonne Zipter, Diamonds Are a Dyke's Best Friend: Reflections, Reminiscences, and Reports from the Field on the Lesbian National Pastime (Ithaca, N.Y., 1988).

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This is particularly true of intimate culture. Heteronormative forms of intimacy are supported, as we have argued, not only by overt referential discourse such as love plots and sentimentality but materially, in marriage and family law, in the architecture of the domestic, in the zoning of

work and politics. Queer culture, by contrast, has almost no institutional matrix for its counterintimacies. In the absence of marriage and the rituals that organize life around matrimony, improvisation is always necessary for the speech act of pledging, or the narrative practice of dating, or for such apparently noneconomic economies as joint checking. The heteronormativity in such practices may seem weak and indirect. After all, samesex couples have sometimes been able to invent versions of such practices. But they have done so only by betrothing themselves to the couple form and its language of personal significance, leaving untransformed the material and ideological conditions that divide intimacy from history, politics, and publics. The queer project we imagine is not just to destigmatize those average intimacies, not just to give access to the sentimentality of the couple for persons of the same sex, and definitely not to certify as properly private the personal lives of gays and lesbians.*! Rather, it is to support forms of affective, erotic, and personal living that are public in the sense of accessible, available to memory, and sustained through collec-

tive activity. Because the heteronormative culture of intimacy leaves queer culture especially dependent on ephemeral elaborations in urban space and print culture, queer publics are also peculiarly vulnerable to initiatives

such as Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's new zoning law. The law aims to restrict any counterpublic sexual culture by regulating its economic conditions; its effects will reach far beyond the adult businesses it explicitly controls. The gay bars on Christopher Street draw customers from people who come there because of its sex trade. The street is cruisier because of the sex shops. The boutiques that sell freedom rings and “Don't Panic” T-shirts do more business for the same reasons. Not all of the thousands who migrate or make pilgrimages to Christopher Street use the porn shops, but all benefit from the fact that some do. After a certain point, a quantitative change is a qualitative change. A critical mass develops. The street becomes queer. It develops a dense, publicly accessible sexual culture. It therefore becomes a base for nonporn businesses, like the Oscar 31. Such a politics is increasingly recommended within the gay movement. See, for example, Andrew Sullivan, Same-Sex Marriage, Pro and Con (New York, 1997); Michelangelo Signorile, Life Outside: The Signorile Report on Gay Men, Sex, Drugs, Muscles, and the Passages of

Life (New York, 1997); Gabriel Rotello, Sexual Ecology: AIDS and the Destiny of Gay Men (New York, 1997); William N. Eskridge, Jr., The Case for Same-Sex Marriage: From Sexual Liberty to

Cwilized Commitment (New York, 1996); Same-Sex Marriage: The Moral and Legal Debate, ed. Robert M. Baird and Stuart E. Rosenbaum

(Amherst, N.Y., 1996); and Mark Strasser, Le-

gally Wed: Same-Sex Marriage and the Constitution (Ithaca, N.Y., 1997).

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Wilde Bookshop. And it becomes a political base from which to pressure politicians with a gay voting bloc. No group is more dependent on this kind of pattern in urban space than queers. If we could not concentrate a publicly accessible culture somewhere,

we would always be outnumbered

and overwhelmed.

And

because what brings us together is sexual culture, there are very few places in the world that have assembled much of a queer population without a base in sex commerce, and even those that do exist, such as the lesbian culture in Northampton, Massachusetts, are stronger because of

their ties to places like the West Village, Dupont Circle, West Hollywood, and the Castro. Respectable gays like to think that they owe nothing to the sexual subculture they think of as sleazy. But their success, their way of living, their political rights, and their very identities would never have been possible but for the existence of the public sexual culture they now despise. Extinguish it, and almost all out gay or queer culture will wither on the vine. No one knows this connection better than the right. Conservatives would not so flagrantly contradict their stated belief in a market free from government interference if they did not see this kind of hyperregulation as an important victory. The point here is not that queer politics needs more free-market ideology, but that heteronormative forms, so central to the accumulation

and reproduction of capital, also depend on heavy interventions in the regulation of capital. One of the most disturbing fantasies in the zoning scheme,

for example, is the idea that an urban

locale is a community

of shared interest based on residence and property. The ideology of the neighborhood is politically unchallengeable in the current debate, which is dominated by a fantasy that sexual subjects only reside, that the space relevant to sexual politics is the neighborhood. But a district like Christopher Street is not just a neighborhood affair. The local character of the neighborhood depends on the daily presence of thousands of nonresidents. Those who actually live in the West Village should not forget their debt to these mostly queer pilgrims. And we should not make the mistake of confusing the class of citizens with the class of property owners. Many of those who hang out on Christopher Street—typically young, queer, and African American—couldn't possibly afford to live there. Urban space is always a host space. The right to the city extends to those who use the city.°* It is not limited to property owners. It is not because of a fluke in the politics of zoning that urban space is so deeply misrecognized; normal

sexuality requires such misrecognitions,

including their

32. The phrase “the right to the city” is Henri Lefebvre’s, from his Le Droit a la ville (Paris, 1968); trans. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas, under the title “The Right to

the City,” Writings on Cities (Oxford, 1996), pp. 147-59. See also Manuel Castells, The City and the Grassroots (Berkeley, 1983).

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Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner

economic

and legal enforcement,

in order to sustain its illusion of hu-

manity.

4. Tweaking and Thwacking Queer social theory is committed to sexuality as an inescapable category of analysis, agitation, and refunctioning. Like class relations, which

in this moment are mainly visible in the polarized embodiments of identity forms, heteronormativity is a fundamental motor of social organization in the United States, a founding condition of unequal and

exploitative relations throughout even straight society. Any social theory that miscomprehends this participates in their reproduction. The project of thinking about sex in public does not only engage sex when it is disavowed or suppressed. Even if sex practice is not the object domain of queer studies, sex is everywhere present. But where is the tweaking, thwacking, thumping,

sliming, and rubbing you might have

expected—or dreaded—in a paper on sex? We close with two scenes that might have happened on the same day in our wanderings around the city. One afternoon, we were riding with a young straight couple we know, in their station wagon. Gingerly, after much circumlocution, they

brought the conversation around to vibrators. These are people whose reproductivity governs their lives, their aspirations, and their relations to

money and entailment, mediating their relations to everyone and everything else. But the woman in this couple had recently read an article in a women’s magazine about sex toys and other forms of nonreproductive eroticism. She and her husband did some mail-order shopping and have become increasingly involved in what from most points of view would count as queer sex practices; their bodies have become disorganized and exciting to them. They said to us: you’re the only people we can talk to about this; to all of our straight friends this would make us perverts. In order not to feel like perverts, they had to make us into a kind of sex public. Later, the question of aversion and perversion came up again. This time we were in a bar that on most nights is a garden-variety leather bar, but that, on Wednesday nights, hosts a sex performance event called “Pork.” Shows typically include spanking, flagellation, shaving, branding,

laceration, bondage, humiliation, wrestling—you know, the usual: amateur, everyday practitioners strutting for everyone else’s gratification, not unlike an academic conference. This night, word was circulating that the performance was to be erotic vomiting. This sounded like an appetite spoiler, and the thought of leaving early occurred to us but was overcome by a simple curiosity: what would the foreplay be like? Let’s stay until it gets messy. Then we can leave.

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A boy, twentyish, very skateboard, comes on the low stage at one end of the bar, wearing lycra shorts and a dog collar. He sits loosely in a restraining chair. His partner comes out and tilts the bottom’s head up to the ceiling, stretching out his throat. Behind them is an array of foods. The top begins pouring milk down the boy’s throat, then food, then more milk. It spills over, down his chest and onto the floor. A dynamic is established between them in which they carefully keep at the threshold of gagging. The bottom struggles to keep taking in more than he really can. The top is careful to give him just enough to stretch his capacities. From time to time a baby bottle is offered as a respite, but soon the rhythm intensifies. The boy’s stomach is beginning to rise and pulse, almost convulsively. It is at this point that we realize we cannot leave, cannot even look away. No one can. The crowd is transfixed by the scene of intimacy and display, control and abandon, ferocity and abjection. People are moaning softly with admiration, then whistling, stomping, screaming encourage-

ments. They have pressed forward in a compact and intimate group. Finally, as the top inserts two, then three fingers in the bottom’s throat, insistently offering his own stomach for the repeated climaxes, we realize that we have never seen such a display of trust and violation. We are breathless. But, good academics that we are, we also have some questions

to ask. Word has gone around that the boy is straight. We want to know: What does that mean in this context? How did you discover that this is what you want to do? How did you find a male top to do it with? How did you come to do it in a leather bar? Where else do you do this? How do you feel about your new partners, this audience? We did not get to ask these questions, but we have others that we

can pose now, about these scenes where sex appears more sublime than narration itself, neither redemptive nor transgressive, moral nor immoral, hetero nor homo, nor sutured to any axis of social legitimation.

We have been arguing that sex opens a wedge to the transformation of those social norms that require only its static intelligibility or its deadness as a source of meaning.* In these cases, though, paths through publicity led to the production of nonheteronormative bodily contexts. They intended nonheteronormative worlds because they refused to pretend that privacy was their ground; because they were forms of sociability that unlinked money and family from the scene of the good life; because they made sex the consequence of public mediations and collective self-activity in a way that made for unpredicted pleasures; because, in turn, they attempted to make a context of support for their practices; because their 33. On deadness as an affect and aspiration of normative social membership, see Berlant, “Live Sex Acts (Parental Advisory: Explicit Material),” The Queen of America Goes to Wash-

ington City, pp. 59-60, 79-81.

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Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner

pleasures were not purchased by a redemptive pastoralism of sex, nor by mandatory amnesia about failure, shame, and aversion.

We are used to thinking about sexuality as a form of intimacy and subjectivity, and we have just demonstrated how limited that representation is. But the heteronormativity of U.S. culture is not something that can be easily rezoned or disavowed by individual acts of will, by a subversiveness imagined only as personal rather than as the basis of publicformation, nor even by the lyric moments

that interrupt the hostile cul-

tural narrative that we have been staging here. Remembering the utopian wish behind normal intimate life, we also want to remember that we aren't

married to it.

34. The classic argument against the redemptive sex pastoralism of normative sexual ideology is made in Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?”; on redemptive visions more generally, see his The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge, Mass., 1990).

A Dialogue on Love

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

sf Patient (1992) Apparently it’s as a patient that I want to emerge. “Oh, I guess I’m sup-

posed to call you my client, not my patient,” Shannon said once, “but that’s the way they taught us, back in graduate school—seems like too much trouble to change.” Besides, I like patient. It is true I can be very patient. And Shannon is like this too, so the word doesn't feel like placing me at a distance. Then, it seems a modest word that makes no claim

to anything but—wanting to be happier and wanting, it’s true, someone else to shoulder a lot of agency in the matter of my happiness.

4 331

BoD

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

The day after I left my message, the phone offered a friendly, masculine voice with some hard midwestern sounds. Eve Sedgwick? Shannon Van Wey. Oh! Maybe I’m found? And then in the waiting room, do I have a mental image of him at all? The handsome, lean, well-dressed therapists female and male in this

large practice filter through the sunny room, greeting their patients, ushering them up or across. .. . I look expectantly at each of the men. And I’m trying now to remember it, the grotesque, reassuring shock of Shannon hovering down a few stairs into this view, mild and bristling with his soft gray nap,

big-faced, cherubic— barrel chest, long arms, short legs, Rumpelstiltskin-like and wearing, I’ve no doubt, a beautifully ironed

short-sleeved cotton shirt

the color of an afterdinner mint, tucked in

at his rotund waist. Ifitwas as hot as Durham usually is in early September, he had a handkerchief too for mopping his forehead. There would have been a substantial rumble of genial introduction. My tentative greeting maybe not quite audible in the middle of it. Was this ordinary for him—the first encounter in this familiar room with big, female middle-aged bodies deprecated by the softness of our voices? Maybe in some manual it’s the secret definition of depression. And yet (I told him, settled in his office upstairs), it’s not so clear to

me that depressed is the right word for what I am. Depressed is what everyone says— I'm weeping in a lot of offices these days

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick is the Newman Ivey White Professor of English at Duke University. Her current writing projects include The Raw and the Frozen: Essays in Queer Performativity and Affect and A Dialogue on Love, from which the present essay is extracted.

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(and I’m sure the tears slipped over my lids as I said it). But I think I know depression, I have my own history of it; and it felt, twenty years ago when I really was subject to it, so much less bearable than this does. So much. “And yet, you’re crying now.”

4 In an expensively renovated old building, a space. A large, rugless square made almost cubic by its lofty ceiling. The low bookcases hold not overly many books; the low desk shows a modest, tractable paper mess; framed prints, in a few neat sheaves on the floor, look as if they could wait years more for hanging. Under the tall windows there’s a scattering of the meaningful tchotchkes that I suppose people give their shrinks—many are made of glass. Big chairs flank a sofa bland with patches of pastel. Space not only light with sun and canister-lighting but, if there’s an appreciative way to use the word, lite, metaphysically lite. I’m wondering whether it reflects no personality, or already is one.

sd On record, the triggering event was a breast cancer diagnosis eighteen months ago. Shannon doesn’t produce an empathetic face at this or say, “That must have been hard for you.” He makes an economical nod. “T kind of did beautifully with it. I bounced back from the mastectomy, and when it turned out that there was some lymph node involvement too, I tolerated six months of chemotherapy without too many side effects. You know, I hated it, and it completely wore me down, but... .

“The saving thing was that for me it wasn’t all about dread. I know there are people whose deepest dread is to have cancer, to undergo surgery, to deal with the likelihood of dying.” I shake my head many times. Those are not my deepest dread. I dread every bad thing that threatens people I love; for me, dread only

Gat

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick I may stop knowing how to like and desire the world around me. “That’s it, what you mean by real depression?”

“Ohyyeah.’ In some ways the cancer diagnosis came at the best possible ttme— the best time if feeling ready to die is a criterion. It was about two months after a book of mine had come out. “What kind of books do you write?” I tell Shannon I’m a literary critic; I work in gay and lesbian studies.

The book was Epistemology of the Closet, and the writing, the organization of it had come very hard to me for some reason. “So I was amazed at how satisfying its publication was. As an object, the book itself looked lovely—everyone said so. And for an academic book it got a lot of attention, a lot of praise. “Tt was one of those happy times when you say to yourself, Okay, this

is good, this is enough; I’m ready to go now. When the diagnosis came I was feeling—as an intellectual—loved, used, appreciated. I would have been very, very content to quit while I was ahead.”