Beauvoir and Toril Moi: The Personal and the Philosophical

Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
     —Ralph Ellison, from the epilogue to Invisible Man

...the personal is not something given, it is a task (Beauvoir would surely say a 'project'); the personal is not a possession, but something to be learned and refined.
     —Toril Moi, What is a Woman?, 246

The meaning of a word is its use in the language. 
     —Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations §43

Thus we see that myths can be explained largely by the use that man makes of them.
      —Beauvoir, The Second Sex, N 1271 (trans. modified) 

One can say that the concept 'game' is a concept with blurred edges.—'But is a blurred concept a concept at all?'—Is a photograph that is not sharp a picture of a person at all? Is it even always an advantage to replace a picture that is not sharp by one that is? Isn't one that isn't sharp often just what we need?
     Frege compares a concept to a region, and says that a region without clear boundaries can't be called a region at all. This presumably means that we can't do anything with it.—But is it senseless to say 'Stay roughly there'? 
     —Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations §71



We hold these truths to be self-evident: Keep your ears stiff!
"Halt die Ohren steif!" This is what a friend blurted out as an example of the German phrases that he'd picked up. (A second one is "Do you like my tight pants?", but that perhaps belongs in a different blog). Literally, the phrase says "keep your ears stiff," and so in complete bafflement I asked what on earth it could mean. He explained that it was something like "keep a stiff upper lip," but another friend, with fluent German, insisted that it was less an exhortation to rigid stoicism and more like a wish for someone to "stay well" or "stay healthy." This brought up the question of how one would use the phrase, of when one would say it. It was, she explained, something you might say to a friend in parting. A fourth person, with fluent English and German, suggested that "keep your chin up" would be a better translation.

None of this sounds much like what we think of when we think of doing philosophy (or theory), but it's exemplary of the procedures of clarification that philosophy can--and in the work Beauvoir and Toril Moi, does--undertake.

Most philosophical texts wish to use language clearly, and one form this wish takes is a demand that key terms be used with definite and consistent meanings. This is sometimes far from a neutral demand, and indeed we began the semester examining a contest between Burke and Wollstonecraft over the meanings of contested terms, most centrally "manly," "sublime," "beautiful," and the "rights of men."

Burke, recall, objected to the abstraction of the rights of men from the social life in which those rights are agreed upon and secured; he felt the revolutionaries were practicing "political metaphysics," and opposed to this "the real rights of men," embedded in shared histories and social practices (Reflections 149). Wollstonecraft's response is instructive:

Reverencing the rights of humanity, I shall dare to assert them... The birthright of man, to give you, Sir, a short definition of this disputed right, is such a degree of liberty, civil and religious, as is compatible with the liberty of every other individual with whom he is united in a social compact, and the continued existence of that compact. (Vindication of the Rights of Men 259)

Like Burke, she accepts that the rights of human beings depend on our shared practices, our "social compact." But she disagrees with him about what those practices are (and should be), and in this passage she at once claims to be in a position to know and value them, and acknowledges the boldness of that claim: "I shall dare to assert them..."

It's hard to separate here claims about the meaning of a word from claims about how we (ought to) live together. And of course it would be a fantasy, characteristic of some ways of doing philosophy, to imagine that we could settle such an argument by getting the meaning or definition of "rights" right. To whom or what could we appeal for such a definition except to each other? And how, then, do "we" settle such an argument? If there's no truth about the "rights of humanity," perhaps the only real thing is the power that produces them? Such questions about truth and power have been at the heart of arguments by Anderson, Brown, Berlant & Warner--and, more distantly, Butler, Foucault, and Habermas--that we've been looking at for the past couple of weeks.

Wollstonecraft and Burke, significantly, are debating in print, in the public sphere as it existed in England in 1790: their clashing treatises are a perfect example of the sort of public debate that Habermas might hold up as an example of "communicative reason," or that Brown might wish to understand as grounded not in reason or Truth but in competing claims about "what I want for us." Indeed, Wollstonecraft's first sentence assumes that "the rights of humanity" are available in the way that truths are, even as it dramatizes their assertion by a finite self ("I"). The beginning of Jefferson's Declaration of Independence is also at once a statement and an act: "We hold these truths to be self-evident..." And yet they weren't so self-evident that they didn't need to be declared, not so true that it was unnecessary to give voice to them.

Does the truth depend on me, on us? If it does, can it be true?

And what does all of this have to do with stiff ears?

Wittgenstein and "ordinary language philosophy"
One way of doing philosophy seeks to get meanings right: questions about what a word means, about what the truth is, seek to bracket or eliminate the subjectivity of the philosopher and to arrive at objective answers.

A different way of doing philosophy replaces the question "what does x mean?" with "when--in what circumstances--would we say x?" This can sound like a flight from objectivity and an invitation to psychologism or relativism--what if you would say x in different circumstances than I would? Isn't it just a question about what's on my mind, or yours?

It may not be so, and in the case of an idiom like "halt die Ohren steif," the question of when someone  would say this seemed--spontaneously enough at the time, as no one was thinking about philosophy--like the only good way of sorting out its meaning. Even the equivalent we came up with, "keep your chin up," seems like an imperfect equivalent if it's true that "halt die Ohren steif" can be used as a cheerful way of saying good-bye to a friend--not a circumstance under which one normally says "keep your chin up." An online dictionary charmingly suggests "Peace out, player" as a translation. Here, there's no perfect translation because it seems like no English phrase has quite the same range of uses.

For Ludwig Wittgenstein, this kind of patient questioning of what we say when became a philosophical method. In his Philosophical Investigations (1951), Wittgenstein came to see language as inseparable from the ways of life, the human behaviors, in which it takes shape: "Shared human behavior is the system of reference by means of which we interpret an unknown language" (Philosophical Investigations §206). This view of the inseparability of ways of speaking from ways of living together justified Wittgenstein's claim that "the meaning of a word is its use" (§43). Philosophers who have taken up this method--J.L. Austin and Stanley Cavell are the most important figures for Moi--are sometimes called "ordinary language philosophers."

Toril Moi

Toril Moi's inspired argument in her essay on Beauvoir, "'I am a woman': the Personal and the Philosophical," is that Beauvoir, who obviously couldn't have read the as-yet-unpublished Philosophical Investigations when she was writing The Second Sex, is that Beauvoir is nonetheless doing philosophy in the same way as Wittgenstein.

When Beauvoir asks "What is a woman?" (5), she doesn't look in the first instance to history or biology or psychoanalysis--though she'll consider all of these sources of knowledge and more over the course of her book. Rather, she takes herself as the first source of insight about what a woman is:

What is a woman? 

Merely stating the problem suggests an immediate answer to me. It is significant that I pose it. It would never occur to a man to write a book on the singular situation of males in humanity. If I want to define myself, I first have to say, "I am a woman"; all other assertions will arise from this basic truth. (5)

Beauvoir's thinking here follows a course that we might put in Wittgenstein's terms thus:

What is a woman? When do I say "woman"? Well, I'm saying it here, now, as I write this book, The Second Sex. And no man would write this book. What does it tell us about the meaning of "woman" that I, a woman, feel compelled to write a book about women when no man would write a similar book about men?

As Beauvoir continues, she'll go on to think through other scenarios motivated by an underlying question about the circumstances in which one feels compelled to say, or not to say, "woman." One of these, which Moi comments on at length, is the conversation in which a man tells Beauvoir that "You think such and such a thing because you're a woman." Here, Beauvoir notes both the asymmetry--one doesn't say this sort of thing about and to men--and also the dilemma that she finds herself in in trying to respond: what such an attack tries to do is deprive her of her experience (Simone de Beauvoir's experience, which is, but isn't only, a woman's experience) as a valid source of insight. She feels compelled to respond to the man that "I think it because it's true." But the "I" in that sentence has had to disown a part of her experience; The Second Sex is Beauvoir's attempt to reclaim it—and not only for herself, but on behalf of all of us.


Speaking for you: philosophical voice and political exclusion
To reclaim a portion of experience on behalf of all of us—that may sound like an odd way to describe a work of theory, at least if we think of theory as

     i) being about ideas rather than experience, or as
     ii) concerned with conflict (argument) rather than consensus, or as
     iii) expressing the view of its author alone.

What gives Simone de Beauvoir the right to speak for you, or me?

This is a central question for ordinary language philosophy, as it has been in very practical ways—think back to the readings by Freidan, Lorde, and Johnson, among others—for modern feminists in their scrupulous attempts to speak in increasingly non-exclusionary ways about women’s experience, to forge alliances that acknowledge differences in race, class, and sexuality. How can a theorist writing about (for example) women presume to speak for women whose experiences and beliefs inevitably differ from hers in some respects?

Barbara Johnson, in a sentence I’ve quoted admiringly a few times before, formulates this problem as a conflict between theory and practice:

...deconstruction introduces a fissure between "woman" as a concept that can never be a proper name for all women and "feminism" as a movement that must--but cannot--consider "woman" as an epistemological ground for action. (The Feminist Difference, 7)

Notice that this formulation sees “woman” as a term with distinct boundaries, and takes that distinctness as a problem: no use of the term “woman” can include all the experience of all women, and so our very language condemns us to exclude one another; if we speak of “woman,” we should understand this as a practical compromise in a given situation.

I think Johnson’s position isn’t in the end too far away, in practice, from Moi’s and Beauvoir’s, but her presuppositions about language are different, and typical of deconstructionist approaches in that she

     [deconstructive reading]
    a) focuses on a single word,
    b) understands the word as making a truth claim, and
    c) sees concepts as having sharp edges.

Moi’s way of close reading differs from this in that she

     [ordinary language philosophy]
     a) tends to focus on statements or utterances (“I am a woman”) rather than single terms (“woman”),
     b) sees statements as making truth claims, but takes these as claims upon you, appeals to you, and
     c) sees (following Wittgenstein) concepts as usually having blurry edges—hence Moi's choice of the  
         blurred image of a woman for the cover of her book (see above)—and isn’t troubled by this.

What follows from this this view of concepts (like “woman”) is not a lack of concern about exclusion, but an emphasis on exclusion in particular cases, through particular utterances, and not as a problem that arises meaningfully at the level of concepts alone.

Moi also, because of this view of language, approaches the problem of what it means for one person to speak for another in a different way. One solution to this problem is, for example, for a theorist to qualify his theoretical statements with a full account of his subject position: "As a white, middle-class, heterosexual male, I think that..." But it's not clear that this is a solution at all, both because the list of qualifiers could be endless (American, San Franciscan, etc), and because knowing these things about the speaker may not help you to evaluate his claim--in the worst case, the implication is that if you don't share those traits, you may not need to take the claim seriously, or that I may not take you seriously as an audience. Moi sees the theorist's (any writer's) attempt to speak for you differently, as an inevitable and necessary feature of what it means to write philosophically. (See pp. 233ff on the philosopher's "arrogation of voice," a phrase that she borrows from Stanley Cavell). And so if Beauvoir makes claims about "women" that other women are unable to find themselves in, the hoped-for response isn't that Beauvoir will be accused of philosophical presumption, but rather that her reader will take the disagreement as an invitation to further thinking.

Theory as Unalienated Distance
What Wollstonecraft says to Burke is thus an implicit feature of any philosophical claim: "I shall dare to assert..." Every philosopher takes this risk, as must everyone who responds to her. And for many kinds of philosophical claim, it's crucial that the philosopher be able to take her own experience as exemplary of human experience--which doesn't at all mean assuming that everyone else is like her (see Moi's distinction between taking oneself as an example and generalizing from a particular case on 232).

This is the problem, for Beauvoir, with feeling that the only available response to a man who says that "you say that because you're a woman" is that "I say it because it's true": that utterance in that context "eliminates my subjectivity," she says (5). The point here isn't that she wants to say "it's true because I say it" or even "it's true because a woman says it"; subjectivity in these sentences isn't a ground for truth because these sentences misunderstand what subjectivity is, on Beauvoir's terms, insofar as they fail to address themselves to another subject who is as free as I am.

Any reasoned claim requires that the speaker take some distance from her own experience and subjectivity. But distance need not entail detachment from ("I'm a human, and not a woman") or misrecognition of ("I'm a woman, and not human") oneself. These ways of taking a distance from oneself are forms of what Beauvoir would call alienation, "the subject's tendency...to search for himself in things" (Second Sex 57, my emphasis), where "things" include others' ideas of what one should be. To be alienated is to accept oneself as Other:

In men's eyes--and for the legion of women who see through men's eyes--it is not enough to have a woman's body nor to assume the female function as mistress or mother in order to be a "true woman." In sexuality and maternity woman as subject can claim autonomy; but to be a "true woman" she must accept herself as the Other. (N 1272)

Theory as written by Beauvoir and Moi attempts to include, but never to retreat within, the writer's subjectivity: it sees the self from an unalienated distance.

If there's a danger in my describing Beauvoir's theory as an attempt to reclaim subjective experience, it's in the possible implication that that experience must lie somewhere in the past. But the implication I intend is that Beauvoir feels rather that for women under patriarchy, subjective experience hasn't yet been found as fully as it might be. The typical question of ordinary language philosophy, about "what we say when," can similarly be mistaken for a necessarily conservative question, one that will always favor tradition. But it needn't be so if the question appeals honestly to a living "us" in the present. And so Moi insists that Beauvoir's interest in when we say "I am a woman" isn't just an interest in how this sentence has been used, but an attempt to change how it will be used:

Beauvoir’s aim is nothing short of revolutionary: she wants to produce the dramatic changes necessary to make the statement ‘I am a woman’ appear as something else than a limitation, to place woman in a reciprocal relationship to man. (Moi, 236)

Looking Away
Questions about "what we say when" can appear to presume consensus, as if "we" will always be able to agree on such things. They can also seem to encourage introspection at the expense of empathy, as if the best I can do in answering the question of what we say when is to figure out when I would say it.

When ordinary language philosophy leans in these directions, there are gains as well as liabilities: an openness to dialogue, and a scrupulous testing out of one's own claims against one's experience. These gains are both intellectual and personal--a theorist who doesn't take her own experience as exemplary, writes Moi,

risks missing out on those exhilarating moments when one’s thought truly seems to illuminate one’s experience and vice versa, the moments when one finally recognizes that ‘this is how it is with me.’ Without such moments, many of us surely would not feel much satisfaction in intellectual work at all. (218)

In writers like Moi and Cavell, "how it is with me" has everything to do with how it is with others; the best writing in Wittgenstein's tradition is neither merely autobiographical, nor naive about the possibilities of consensus: Cavell writes that disagreements "pounced upon: for the explanation of it can hardly fail to be illuminating" (quoted in Moi, 219).

Still, I'd like to conclude this post by turning to a moment that's a hard to fathom as an attempt to figure out what we say when, but which seems important as an unexpected, sometimes unacknowledged part of doing so. Amanda Anderson, remember, concluded her essay with an argument for the political value of "disidentification." We see a low-key version of this in the following passage from Woolf, where she turns away from conversation rather than engaging in it:

If by good luck there had been an ash-try handy, if one had not knocked the ash out of the window in default, if things had been a little different from what they were, one would not have seen, presumably, a cat without a tail. The sight of that abrupt and truncated animal padding softly across the quadrangle changed by some fluke of the subconscious intelligence the emotional light for me. It was as if some one had let fall a shade. (Room, 11)

We talked about Woolf's playful development of this harmless, unnecessary cat into a teasing commentary on Freud's phallic symbols. But there's more going on here in the lovely, descriptive excess of this passage, in Woolf's emphasis on shifts of "emotional light" and "shade" subtler than any symbolism could allow for. As she looks away from her dinner party and becomes absorbed in the scene out the window, she begins a train of thought that leads her to attend not to the words people use, but to the "murmur" beneath those words, which suggests (but doesn't say) something about how the relations between the sexes have changed since the war. Woolf laughs, and asked to explain why, she can only "point[-] at the Manx cat" (13).

This is hardly a good-faith effort at engaging in what Habermas or Benhabib would be likely to call "communicative reason." Woolf's absorption in appearances and sensations here must seem to her companions like a queer sort of absent-mindedness, and to her readers it certainly doesn't convey a message with much efficiency.

In a wonderful recent book, Looking Away: Phenomenality and Dissatisfaction, Kant to Adorno, Rei Terada calls this kind of absorption in appearance and sensation "phenomenophilia," love of appearances (compare "philosophy," the love of wisdom), and she suggests taht such absorption can be a form of inchoate dissent, a registration of dissatisfaction with the given world.

To look out the window in the midst of a conversation isn't quite dissent or protest; to wonder what's behind appearances, what's in the murmur beneath the words, is perhaps to ask questions that can't be articulately answered in the present. Laughter isn't an argument. Yet it can be a way to resist the demand to accept what's here as all there is.

Terada wonders, looking back at the book she's completed, about her decision to write about four male philosophers and not to include writers like Woolf or Hannah Arendt:

In the twentieth century there are more female phenomenophiles; Virginia Woolf is a spectacular and complicated example. I don't, however, want to support the cliché that until recently women could not afford speculation, or some such idea, so I'm not satisfied with these reflections. The only thing that's clear to me is that I somehow write about male writers in order to write about myself... (28)

Is this one of "those exhilarating moments ... when one finally recognizes that ‘this is how it is with me’"? Perhaps. I'm not sure if it's quite exhilarating to find one's dissatisfaction reflected in strange faces. Phenomenal might be a better word.

On that note, since it's going to be a long couple of weeks... keep your ears stiff.

Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

Think only of the jump, I implored her, as if I had put the whole of my money on her back; and she went over it like a bird. But there was a fence beyond that and a fence beyond that.
     —Woolf, A Room of One's Own (1929), p. 92

     Are there even women? True, the theory of the eternal feminine still has its disciples; they whisper, "Even in Russia, they [elles] are still very much women"; but other well-informed people--sometimes, it's the same people--lament: "Woman is losing herself, woman is lost." ... What is a woman? "Tota mulier in utero: a woman is a womb," says one person. And yet speaking of certain women, the connoisseurs decree, "Those aren't women," even though they have a uterus just like the others. Everyone agrees to recognize that there are females in the human species... and yet we are told that "femininity is in peril"; we are exhorted, "Be women, remain women, become women."

     —Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949), pp. 3-4 (trans. modified)

     As the author of three books on the American family and its intersection with pop culture, I’ve spent thirteen years examining social agendas as they pertain to sex, parenting, and gender roles. During this time, I’ve spoken with hundreds, if not thousands, of men and women. And in doing so, I’ve accidentally stumbled upon a subculture of men who’ve told me, in no uncertain terms, that they’re never getting married. When I ask them why, the answer is always the same.

     Women aren’t women anymore. ...

     Fortunately, there is good news: women have the power to turn everything around. All they have to do is surrender to their nature – their femininity – and let men surrender to theirs.

     If they do, marriageable men will come out of the woodwork.

     —Suzanne Venker, "The War on Men," foxnews.com, 24 November 2012 (<---this date is not a typo)

Or in the words of another pundit: sisters are doing it to themselves.

Let's overlook for the moment Venker's curious decision to end an article that presumably intends to console single men with a metaphor that compares them to vermin being smoked out of a building--I guess they were hiding in that woodwork from all the scary single ladies?

And I'll even keep my cool in the face of the glorious good news of gender surrender, though I can't promise there won't be subcultural celebrations of the armistice later on: I can't think of anything that I and my long-embattled brothers-in-arms would rather do than surrender to our masculinity together. 

What I find irresistible, even more so than snapping up copies of The Flipside of Feminism: What Conservative Women Know--and Men Can't Say (2011, with a foreword by Phyllis Schlafly, the woman who saved women from the ERA)  and How to Choose a Husband (2013) from Amazon while supplies last... 

What I find irresistible here is the chance to praise Venker for discovering that women just aren’t women anymore, and that they (therefore?) must become women. This ranks with Pierre Ménard’s authorship of Don Quixote, the Insane Clown Posse’s discovery of miracles, and my finding my glasses this morning as one of the great achievements of the human mind this past century.

It’s not easy to discover for the first time in 2012 something that Simone de Beauvoir was writing about in 1949. Nor was Beauvoir the first to discover that gender norms could function ideologically, as imperatives to become what you already are so that “we” can go about our business undisturbed: that would have been news neither to Woolf nor to Wollstonecraft nor to François Poulain de la Barre (see pages 10-11) writing in the late 17^th century.

The Second Sex: Philosophical Context

Simone de Beauvoir

Beauvoir’s originality lies rather, first, in her understanding of how these norms have held sway and of the responses they require, and second in the originality of her writing itself: in The Second Sex's fluid movement from Beauvoir's first-person accounts of her own experience through evidence drawn, sometimes anecdotally and representatively, sometimes rigorously and systematically, from a rather stunning variety of intellectual disciplines, on its way to establishing its philosophical claims. Beauvoir's book is a work of philosophy, of theory, but it sometimes doesn't feel like one -- a challenging work to understand, it isn't really difficult to read in the way that, say, Judith Butler or Amanda Anderson can be, nor is it confined to an abstract discussion of concepts. And so Beauvoir's way of doing philosophy has sometimes made it hard for readers with different expectations about what philosophy looks like to recognize it as such. (I'm borrowing a lot already, in this discussion, from Toril Moi's understanding of Beauvoir).

Beauvoir's philosophical thinking is most importantly in conversation with--influenced by, responsive to, sometimes arguing against--that of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Paul Sartre. I'll try to introduce just a few basic ideas and key terms important to the sections of The Second Sex that we're reading. 

The key terms are especially useful for you to be aware of: some of Beauvoir's philosophical terms, like "existent" and "transcendence," are easily recognizable as philosophical, but others, like "situation" (and its relatives, situate, situated, etc) and "other" are ordinary words that have particular philosophical senses for Beauvoir.

Woman as "Other"
The first few pages of Beauvoir's introduction to The Second Sex build up to the claim that woman "is the Other" (6). That capital "O" signals a socially constructed asymmetry in the relations between men and women.

Understood as one consciousness relating to another, a man is an other for a woman in the same way that a woman is for a man--in the same way that any one person is for another. Yet Beauvoir understands this fundamental relation between persons in a particular way, influenced by Hegel's description of the master-slave dialectic (in Phenomenology of Spirit [1807]). For Hegel, she explains,

a fundamental hostility to any other consciousness is found in consciousness itself; the subject posits itself only in opposition; it asserts itself as the essential and sets up the other as inessential, as the object. (7)

For Hegel, whose philosophy became central to French intellectual life for Beauvoir's generation thanks to the lectures of Alexandre Kojève (Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 2nd ed., 1947), consciousness comes to know its own freedom through a kind of regulated violence. I think I'm free, but I need to test that freedom to be certain, and so I test it by risking my life in struggle with another consciousness, another person. Nothing less than total risk, the risking of my life, will suffice to establish total freedom; Lacan describes this feature of the existentialist reading of Hegel critically when he writes (with Sartre in mind) that in it "a consciousness of the other ... can be satisfied only by Hegelian murder" (from "The Mirror Stage," N 1168).

I can know myself as free only by compelling another other person to recognize me as free. This is, of course, unsatisfying in the end, because the very fact that recognition is forced will make it inauthentic; the forcing of recognition is an error, then, but one that has taken on reality in human history. Hegel's speculative story of the struggle between two persons is a way to narrate in miniature the interpersonal, social construction of human freedom, which has historically been established as the freedom of one group at the expense of others. Within the dominant group, recognition can be mutual, reciprocal. Between the dominant group and dominated groups, the positions of (free) self and other become rigid; we lose sight of their constructedness. And so one group will appear not just to have been made inferior, but to be inferior. That group is constituted as Other.  For Beauvoir, the two groups in question are men and women.

Beauvoir is interested in the effects that living out a role marked as Other has on the consciousness of a woman. And so her starting point, since this is a problem that she cannot study either wholly from the outside or wholly from the inside--no man or woman could--is to notice that her project of writing a book on the specificity of a gendered self is one that a man would be much less likely to undertake. It seems more normal to ask 'what is a woman?' than to ask 'what is a man?', and it seems for Beauvoir a necessary part of asking 'who am I?' to ask 'what is a woman?', as it wouldn't seem necessary--as it historically hasn't seemed necessary for philosophers like Descartes or Hegel--to ask 'what is a man?' in order to arrive at an answer to the question 'who am I?'

"If I want to define myself, I first have to say, 'I am a woman,'" writes Beauvoir (5)--and it's important to see the necessity in that statement ("I have to say") as constructed and not essential. It's something Beauvoir is curious about, something she sees as requiring explanation: why does she have to say this, and why doesn't a man have to say 'I am a man' to define himself?

Existence and essence; freedom and necessity; transcendence and immanence
The binaries just above are (very) roughly parallel to one another in Beauvoir's thinking (as in that of Sartre or Merleau-Ponty). She articulates a central tenet of existentialist philosophy in the following passage when she says that "essence does not precede existence": 

The fact is, deciding who she is would be quite awkward for her; the question has no answer, but not because the hidden truth is too fluctuating to be discerned: it's because in this area there is no truth. An existent [i.e. an existing being] is nothing other than what he does; the possible does not exceed the real, essence does not precede existence: in his pure subjectivity, the human being is nothing. He is measured by his acts. (N 1269, trans. modified)

It's crucial for Beauvoir that human beings are able to, and responsible to, fashion themselves, to act freely in the world--we should be judged by what we do; that's our truth. (Keats described a similar idea in a letter to his brother when he said that for each of us, earthly life is a "vale of soul-making.")

Yet it's not the case that we're all free to the same extent or in the same ways--the social and political world that we've freely made limits the freedoms that we have, and limits them for some more than for others--in most ways, for women more than for men. We can all transcend the given world to some extent, but we're also constrained by that given world; Beauvoir will often call the set of given conditions a person faces a dimension of "immanence." Immanence in her vocabulary is opposed to transcendence and freedom.

One thing we might discuss tomorrow is the relationship between Beauvoir's emphasis on existence and Butler's on performance: these emphases appear (and are) similar in many respects, yet in other ways the philosophical styles and and concerns of Butler and Beauvoir diverge.

Situation
While every human consciousness is free, it's also particular and embodied--it's freedom takes place and time, and is constrained by its historical moment.

Even before this, consciousness is conditioned by the body in which it finds itself. This is Merleau-Ponty's starting point in his Phenomenology of Perception: the body isn't an object of consciousness, but a condition for the possibility of consciousness. (Kant had earlier reasoned in a similar way when he argued that space and time are not objects of consciousness, but the conditions for the possibility of all consciousness and all perception).

Phenomenology, as a mode of philosophical inquiry, begins with a description of experience. (Hegel's original title for the Phenomenology of Spirit was Science of the Experience of Consciousness). Beauvoir builds on Merleau-Ponty's philosophy by thinking about the body as a sexed body. For a woman, consciousness inhabits a biologically female human body, and of course that body is marked in particular ways by the society and culture in which it lives--and so a woman comes to know herself, by no means entirely but significantly, in relation to the biological givens of her body (female anatomy, menstruation, the possibility and for many the actuality of pregnancy, etc) and to how others perceive her body.

The body itself, then, is for Beauvoir a situation. This doesn't mean that having a female body should or does determine any particular outcomes for a woman's life, and she'll say quite explicitly in later sections of the book that there is no reason that female biology should have differential sociopolitical consequences in modern society. That the body is a situation also means, though, that one can't do feminist philosophy without taking into account the particularities of the female body for women, and so she writes quite skeptically about those would argue that women are 'just' human beings without taking the body into account.

Pay careful attention, then, to "situation" and related words when they come up in Beauvoir's writing--this ordinarily bland word is weighted with consequence in her thinking.

A note on translations
The two sections of The Second Sex that we're reading are from two different translations: the Norton anthology uses H.M. Parshley's translation, while the text of the introduction is from the 2009 translation by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier. Parshley's earlier translation was somewhat abridged, mostly at the behest of the English-language publisher, and so the 2009 translation is significant as the first complete translation of the book into English. Borde and Malovany-Chevallier are sometimes more faithful to Beauvoir's philosophical vocabulary, but (like Parshley) neither of them are actually philosophers. Both translations make some mistakes--if you want to learn more about these, the best place to start is Toril Moi's review of the 2009 translation from the London Review of Books.

Sex in Public: Habermas, Anderson, Warner & Berlant

Let us put forward a general working hypothesis. The society that emerged in the nineteenth century--bourgeois, capitalist, or industrial society, call it what you will--did not confront sex with a fundamental refusal of recognition. On the contrary, it put into operation an entire machinery for producing true discourses concerning it. Not only did it speak of sex and compel everyone to do so; it also set out to formulate the uniform truth of sex. As if it suspected sex of harboring a fundamental secret.
     —Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. I, p. 69

Herbert Marcuse [in Eros and Civilization (1955)] interpreted  the contemporary phenomena of a sexual liberation that is controlled, socially regulated, and at the same time commercialized and administered, as "repressive desublimation." This analysis holds open the perspective of a liberating desublimation. Foucault starts from the quite similar phenomenon of a sexuality that has been disqualified, reduced to a medium of control, and stripped of all eroticism--but he sees in it the telos, the revealed secret of sexual liberation.
     —Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985; trans. 1987), p. 291

What are norms? (truth, power, normality, normativity)

Foucault argues that the real secret of sexuality is its harnessing of the truth about the self to coercive forms of power.

This is not, of course, what the construction of sex as a secret buried within the self was meant, by powers that are “intentional and nonsubjective,” to reveal.  Foucault wants to show how the search for sex as an inner, private truth is precisely a diversion from more efficacious forms of knowing and doing.

Yet what if Foucault himself has a secret? This is the claim of Jürgen Habermas, whose understanding of Foucault in the passage above we might relate to Sedgwick’s discussion of “paranoid” theories (which isn’t to say that Sedgwick would agree with Habermas altogether). Sedgwick notices that such theories keep exposing over and over again the same unhappy truths, and this is what Habermas points out above: the “secret” that Foucault himself reveals is always the same, always the coercive normalization enacted upon bodies by truth-power.

For Habermas, though, the important secret in Foucault’s critique lies one level deeper than this. He thinks what lies hidden—unexamined, unexplained—in Foucault’s writing is the normative basis of Foucault’s own critique of norms. In other words, Foucault’s writing exposes the forms of power exerted upon children, homosexuals, prisoners, and others through coercive regimes of truth. Yet his reasons for focusing his (and our) energies on these gestures of exposure, and for caring about them, must themselves be normative, must depend on true beliefs about what is just and good.

Ideas about what is just and good, about what should be done, what we should do, are called norms.

Are norms true and reasonable, or are they essentially coercive, a way to exert power masked as truth?

It’s on this latter question that many of the authors we’re reading this week disagree. They argue in the wake of a debate between Foucault and Habermas on this question. The basic sticking point of their conflict is about the relation of truth and power in norms.

For Foucault, truth and power are always coextensive. What we do in arriving at norms is to normalize, to create standards that will be oppressive in proportion as one deviates from them.

For Habermas, as for much of the Enlightenment tradition that Foucault critiques, norms are truth but not power. That is, norms should be a form of rational, consensually agreed upon truth. We need norms as rational guidelines for the just use of power, and for the critique of unjust power. Habermas is not naïve about the extent to which norms do not always function this way in practice, nor is he an essentialist about what the proper norms for a group of persons are—such norms have to be arrived at through public debate and democratic political processes. But he would insist that norms can be rational, and so in the face of a situation in which we find that existing norms are functioning unjustly, as in the exclusion of gay people from certain civil rights or the unequal compensation of women for their work, then what we need are better norms.

A Foucauldian argument might insist that the search for “better norms” is naïve and dangerous to the extent that it imagines that norms can ever be divested of coercive power. That ideal of truth without power is bound to collapse into ideology, a truth whose false universality will function for the benefit of some and to the detriment of others. We should give up on the idea of norms altogether. 

Amanda Anderson, "Debatable Performances"

Amanda Anderson

Both Wendy Brown and Amanda Anderson take up this debate about norms as it unfolded in the context of ‘90s feminism between Judith Butler (aligned with Foucault) and Seyla Benhabib (aligned with Habermas).

Brown elaborates the Foucauldian (also Nietzschean) critique of truth as a form of power in her essay, but she’s not merely concerned to critique this relationship: rather, she’s urging feminists to embrace the inseparability of truth and power. Why, and how?

Anderson, whose essay is a virtuoso example of exposition and critique, will make a case against Butler for the political usefulness of what she calls “evaluative norms,” as distinct from the “normalizing norms” focused on in the Foucauldian tradition. What does Anderson mean by these terms, and why does she believe that evaluative norms are politically valuable and not just coercive?

Anderson will also, of course, argue that Butler’s theory is more useful for the formation of evaluative norms than either Butler or Benhabib admit. Anderson advances this part of her argument through a critique of Benhabib’s discussion of S/M, and a discussion of the “disidentification” valued—rightly, says Anderson—by Butler. Here, we see a continuation of last week’s discussion of identity politics. Why is disidentification politically valuable, on Anderson’s account?

Berlant and Warner, "Sex in Public"

Lauren Berlant

Michael Warner

 We might think of Warner and Berlant, in this essay, as engaged in their own ambitious version of Anderson’s project of  fusing Butler and Habermas, performativity and politically significant publicness.

Gay marriage as example: Michael Warner and Andrew Sullivan

In many ways, Warner and Berlant are aligned with Butler’s critique of normalization. In "The Politics of Homosexuality" (1993), which Warner has called “the most influential gay essay of the ’90s” (TwN 52), the conservative British (now American) gay journalist Andrew Sullivan argued that gay people did and should aspire to normality, understood broadly as integration into mainstream politics and culture, and that a more just extension of political freedoms and rights, including marriage, would enable them to achieve this. Sullivan expanded the article into a book, Virtually Normal (1995).

Andrew Sullivan

Warner responded to these arguments in a non-academic book called The Trouble with Normal (1999), which includes a chapter called “Beyond Gay Marriage” that argues against gay marriage as an ultimate political goal for the queer community. His reasons for this argument can help us to understand the thinking that informs “Sex in Public.”

Why would a gay man argue against gay marriage? 

Warner notes, first, that this question wouldn't have felt rhetorical before the '90s; from the point of view of earlier decades, in fact, it's strange that marriage has become a kind of holy grail in the quest for gay rights. Queer politics in the post-Stonewall decades, the '70s and '80s, had been more broadly critical of norms--we've seen examples of this tradition in Foucault, Butler, and Rubin among others. This tradition was formed in response to discrimination against queer persons, and not just (more narrowly) against monogamous queer couples. Warner sees political value in the less restricted, more fluid formation of intimacies, sexual and other, that was characteristic especially of gay male culture during these decades and into the present. This aspect of queer culture has been devalued as merely "promiscuous"; Warner often calls it "world-making," in recognition of how essential sexually oriented subcultures have been to queer socialization and politics. 

Earlier queer politics had been critical of marriage as a heterosexual institution that gave married straight people privileged access to social goods not obviously tied to sex or sexuality: tax breaks, health insurance, joint checking accounts and so forth (the list is fairly long).  One way to overcome these inequalities is, of course, to grant queer people the right to marry. Yet Warner sees this as a provisional solution at best, and one that still problematically links sexuality to aspects of citizenship that should have nothing to do with it. Marriage, he writes, “sanctifies some couples [whether gay or straight] at the expense of others. It is selective legitimacy. … Marriage, in short, discriminates” (TwN, 82). He believes that a conscientious argument for gay marriage has to see the attainment of marriage rights not as a final goal, but rather as one step of a broader program of divorcing the state from any differential treatment of persons according to (non-coercive) sexual behavior. This program, writes Warner, 

would have to say that marriage is a desirable goal only insofar as we can also extend health care, tax reform, rights of intimate association extending to immigration, recognition for joint parenting, and other entitlements currently yoked to marital status. It would have to say that marriage is desirable only insofar as we can eliminate adultery laws and other status-discriminatory regulations for sexuality. It might well also involve making available other statuses, such as expanded domestic partnership, concubinage, or something like PACS for property-sharing households, all available both to straight and gay people alike. (TwN 146)

It's important to see here that while Warner wants the state to have no involvement with sexuality, this is not at all the same as saying that sexuality should not be political--in fact, sexuality must have political and public effects if the state's relation to it is to be changed. Of course, probably only a straight male could be oblivious to the public effects that gender and sexuality already do have. (The "closet," as described by Eve Sedgwick, is a potent figure of how tacit heterosexual privilege shapes the public lives of queer people in ways often invisible to straight people). There's no choice about whether sex will be public; the choices concern how it will be so.

"Many of those who hang out on Christopher Street--typically
young, queer, and African-American--couldn't possibly
afford to live there" (N 2613). This photo is from a 2006
New York Times article about black and Latino youths
who come to Christopher Street from outlying areas.

Foucault knows this, and so in a different way does Habermas. Here, it's important to understand the very particular meaning of "public" as Habermas uses it in his study of the modern formation of a "public sphere" (Öffentlichkeit, publicness). 

Civil society: publicness without the state

Habermas's public sphere is formed in the 17th and 18th centuries, culminating in the American and French Revolutions, by the middle classes in opposition to the aristocratically-controlled state. It includes the journals, newspapers, learned societies and universities that became during these centuries, for the first time, forums for cultural and, increasingly, for political argument. Yet it also includes, crucially, the family, important in the first instance as the entity through which "private" property was transmitted independently of the state. The collectivity of economically defined families was the locus of privacy from which persons could come into a public sphere not synonymous with the state: this was civil rather than political society. And so Habermas defines the public sphere as "the sphere of private people come together as a public." Warner gives the thought more pith: "The public in this new sense...was no longer opposed to the private. It was private" (Publics and Counterpublics, 47; cf. N 2609).

Of course, it didn't stay that way. Think of the role played in the American Revolution by, for example, Thomas Paine's pamphlet Common Sense. It's significant that in that pamphlet, Paine imagines the British government as an abusive father, violating its natural relationship to its colonial family in America. Here, the family is not the opposite of the state, but the standard by which it is judged. As the public sphere came to have political power, so too did the bourgeois family acquire greater normative force.

"Naked, smiling, and just off-white, Time's
divine Frankenstein aims to organize
hegemonic optimism about citizenship and
the national future" (N 2601).

With Marx, Habermas acknowledges that in the liberal democracies of the 19th century, the common sense or standard of reason was never common enough; that is, the public sphere was not sufficiently extended by the bourgeois men who had used it to seize political power to other groups--women, non-whites, sexual minorities, workers--who should have been equally entitled to participate in it. The common sense of the public sphere, if used as an instrument of domination, was merely ideology, not reason. And, Habermas will acknowledge, as liberal democratic states have become more inseparable from their economies, this problem has in some ways become worse: a public sphere in which Rupert Murdoch makes huge donations to conservative politicians with the money he's earned from Fox News is not, to say the least, a great foundation for the transformation of rational debate into political justice. 

But for Habermas, this is a betrayal of the public sphere's potential, not a sign that the public sphere was a tainted or interested or falsely universal idea from the start.

Speaking, Moving, Acting in Public: Bodies in the Public Sphere

It is no accident that ACT UP was founded by a playwright, since its politics was essentially theatrical: a fantastic display of rhetorical pique and visual brilliance. It became a national media hit, but eventually its lines became familiar and the audience's attention wavered, New shows have taken its place and will continue to do so - but they will always be constrained by their essential nature, which is performance, not persuasion.

     —Andrew Sullivan, "The Politics of Homosexuality" (1993)

I'm tempted to say, reductively but in the hope that it will be useful, that Warner and Berlant take up and critique Habermas's concept of the public sphere by insisting that we imagine it more fully than does Habermas himself--not merely as an arena for reasoned speech, but as an arena for speaking bodies. Here's Warner's version of this idea:

In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas speaks of “people’s public use of their reason.” But what counts as a use of reason? In later works, he has put forward a highly idealized account of argumentative dialogue. But movements around gender sexuality seek to transform fundamental styles of embodiment, identity, and social relations—including their unconscious manifestations, the vision of the good life embedded in them, and tha habitus by which people continue to understand their selves or bodies as public or private. … The ability to bracket one’s embodiment and status is not simply what Habermas calls making public use of one’s reason; it is a strategy of distinction, profoundly linked to education and to dominant forms of masculinity. (Warner, "Public and Private," in Publics and Counterpublics, p. 51)

Protestors at the office of House Speaker John Boehner,
Tuesday, November 27, 2012

To Warner here, the idea that the situation of public speech is independent of the body is profoundly counter-intuitive; more than that, it discounts the extent to which restrictions upon movement and appearance, sometimes legislated but just as often enforced via unspoken customs and learned habits, have functioned as instruments of political oppression. Yet instead of dismissing reason out of hand here, Warner asks about what counts as reason: if we need to transform ingrained assumptions, visceral responses, unwritten rules, than it's at least worth asking whether performative responses--a 'take back the night march,' public cross-dressing, passive resistance--might sometimes count as rational discourse.

Sullivan, in the epigraph above, is suggesting that theater and politics make strange bedfellows, and he wishes they'd just get a room. That is, keep the "performances" of queer sexuality private, so that "persuasion" can do its respectable, unsexy work in the public sphere--perhaps in a three-piece grey suit and a tastefully unobtrusive tie.

Berlant and Warner seek to contest this segregation of performance and persuasion; they see all the world, bedrooms and closets included, as a stage. But this means for them not, as in the hermeneutics of suspicion, that politics is always just irrational power masquerading as truth and justice. It is rather, perhaps, a stage we can get beyond only by thoughtfully acting out our intimacies in different ways, until the political regulation of those intimacies becomes more equitable. And this even, perhaps especially, when it requires changing rationally, viscerally our sense of how what's inside us should come out--changing each other's sense of what makes us sick.

Erotic vomiting, anyone?