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?