Hinge 2012

H HINGE A JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY STUDIES 2012 ONLINE EDITION

contributions by

andrea benson patrick blenkarn meghan borthwick shane bryson nathan burley davis carr rebecca davies wilson jacob glover natasha hay bethany hindmarsh kieran innocenzi harry sawchuk aaron shenkman nick stark

HINGE

A JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY STUDIES Š 2012 PUBLISHER

Gaeby Abrahams EDITORS-IN-CHIEF

Jacob Morris and Mark Rendell ASSISTANT EDITOR

Aaron Shenkman LAYOUT ARTIST AND BOOK DESIGN

Adrian Lee EDITORS

Cate May Burton Michaela Cavanagh

Sebastian Ennis Jacob Glover

Andrea Benson Rebecca Best Patrick Blenkarn Reed Clements Nevin Cussen Tessa Elliott-Israelson

Sophie Golets Bethany Hindmarsh EsmĂŠ Hogeveen Adrian Lee Paula Libfeld *ULIĂ€Q 0F,QQHV 6LPFKD :DOĂ€VK

Natasha Hay Gabe Hoogers

REVIEWERS

Gabrielle Rekai Aaron Shenkman Erik TarBush Alex Tesar Brandon Tolliver Jacqueline Vincent

Volume xviii, 2012 Online Edition Hinge: A Journal of Contemporary Studies is an undergraduate academic journal published annually by the Contemporary Studies Society of the King’s Students’ Union at the University of King’s College in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Please address submissions and inquiries to: +,1*( (',7256 F R &RQWHPSRUDU\ 6WXGLHV 2IÀFH University of King’s College 6350 Coburg Rd. Halifax, NS B3H 2A1 Copyright, in all cases, remains with the author.

Table of Contents I. On the Potentiality of Theatrical Pleasure: Re-mapping Theatre Masochistically II. On Black Pens: A Poem III. The Bad Touch: Masculinity, Man Hands, and Care Work IV. The Parable of the Demon: Fiction V. Monogamy is a Social Construction VI. Trollkraft: A Poem VII. Untitled: A Poem VIII. Saying: Meaning(’s) Impossibility IX. Reading Benjamin in Translation X. Ad-Hoc/Post-hawk: A Poem XI. Heidegger and a Rat: A Poem XII. French-Kissing Heidegger: Jean-Luc Nancy’s Existential Analytic of Love XIII. Just a Part of ‘Growing Up’?

XIV. Lost in Trans-nation: A Poem XV. Parting Shots: Photography HINGE VOLUME XVIII ONLINE EDITION

PATRICK BLENKARN PG 4 TO 16.

BETHANY HINDMARSH PG 17.

SHANE BRYSON PG 18 TO 28.

KIERAN INNOCENZI PG 29 TO 31.

DAVIS CARR PG 32 TO 43.

ANDREA BENSON PG 44.

NATHAN BURLEY PG 45.

AARON SHENKMAN PG 46 TO 52.

NICK STARK PG 53 TO 63.

HARRY SAWCHUK PG 64.

JACOB GLOVER PG 65.

NATASHA HAY PG 66 TO 77.

REBECCA DAVIES WILSON PG 78 TO 87.

ANDREA BENSON PG 88.

MEGHAN BORTHWICK PG 89 TO 90.

Editors’ Note “All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.”

– Walter Benjamin Why a hinge? The hinge metaphor evokes a door, an opening. To see the importance of interpretation, to understand that disciplines are porous and interconnected, is to grasp that our contemporary academic landscape is a collection of open doors. Ideas are never limited to single discourses or research programmes; they call for different modes of investigation to be understood and better applied to our world. The Contemporary Studies Programme strives to keep doors open, to keep the interaction of ideas moving. Hinge, we hope, is a shining example of CSP’s ability to instill in its students the commitment to the interaction of ideas.

This year we received a record number of submissions covering a wide array of disciplines and topics, from philosophy to sociology, critical theory to poetry. We made our selections with a view WR UHÁHFWLQJ WKLV GLYHUVLW\ ZKLOH DOVR VKRZFDVLQJ WKH KLJKHVW TXDOLW\ work of our peers. The work published in the following pages exHPSOLÀHV Hinge’s aims to keep things open and moving. And in this spirit, 2012 will see the journal’s inaugural online publication. We hope digitization will make Hinge’s intellectual tradition accessible to a wider readership. We would like to note that for this, Hinge’s online publication, we have added some bonus poetry and photography.

It has been a privilege for us to explore the work of our fellow students, and we hope the pieces we have selected will make for an enjoyable and thought-provoking read.

- JACOB MORRIS AND MARK RENDELL

On the Potentiality of Theatrical Pleasure Re-mapping Theatre Masochistically PATRICK BLENKARN

W

e must redraw our dated maps of theatre in order to see more clearly where we can go. In his work on masochism, entitled Coldness and Cruelty, Gilles Deleuze makes the observation that ‘theatre’ is essential to a masochistic situation. “Masochism,â€? as he writes, “is above all formal and dramatic.â€? 1 By inverting this statement, I will argue that theatre is masochistically. I shall begin with a consideration of theatre as a temporal, “rhizomaticâ€? assemblage and then show how it is possible to read this assemEODJH DQG LWV YDULRXV SDUWV VSHFLĂ€FDOO\ WKH DXGLHQFH WKH SHUIRUPHU and the performed play) through the basic formal structure of Deleuzian masochism. My analysis will conclude with an examination of how theatremakers have been pointing towards this particular understanding of the theatre-assemblage in both practical experiPHQWV DQG WKHRU\ IRU RYHU KDOI D FHQWXU\ %XW Ă€UVW P\ PHWDSKRULFDO SDUDOOHOLQJ RI WKHDWUH DQG PDVRFKLVP GHPDQGV WKDW ZH Ă€QG D FRPmon ground as to what the terms ‘theatre’ and ‘masochism’ imply.

7KURXJKRXW WKLV HVVD\ ÂśWKHDWUH¡ ZLOO GHQRWH D VSHFLĂ€F DVVHPEODJH RI VSHFLĂ€F SDUWV 6LPSO\ SXW WKHVH SDUWV LQFOXGH QRQ VSHFLĂ€F IRUPV RI VRXQGV ORFDWLRQ DXGLHQFH SHUIRUPHU DQG the performed. Structurally speaking, exactly what shape the location is, how loud the sound is, or how many people there are Gilles Deleuze, “Coldness and Cruelty,â€? in Masochism, trans. Jean McNeil (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 109.

1

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 25.

2

5

in the audience does not matter. Theatre is simply that which ocFXUV LQ WKH VXVWDLQHG PRPHQW RI V\QWKHVLV EHWZHHQ WKH VSHFLÀF phenomena of bodies, places, and things. Deleuze and Guattari’s metaphor of the rhizome can shed more light on this assemblage.

A rhizome is a spontaneous synthesis of points in which each point connects to all others. They are, as Deleuze and Guattari say, “uniquely alliance.â€?2 As such, a rhizome lacks any centre RU RUJDQL]LQJ SULQFLSOH 7KLV PHWDSKRU LOOXVWUDWHV WZR WKLQJV Ă€UVW D ZHE WKDW GLIIHUV LQ VKDSH DQG QDWXUH GHSHQGLQJ RQ WKH VSHFLĂ€F FRPSRVLWLRQ RI UHODWLRQV DQG VHFRQG WHPSRUDO Ă€QLWXGH ,Q WKLV context, ‘theatre’ will be the term for the temporal event that features the unique ‘alliances’ among audience member(s), performer, the performed, location, and sound. It must be clear, the theatreevent only occurs as these alliances, none of which functions as a centre. I now turn to Deleuze’s interpretation of masochism in order to fully explicate the masochism of the theatre-rhizome.

I. Deleuze’s Interpretation of Masochism Masochism, as Deleuze understands it through the literDU\ WH[WV RI /HRSROG 6DFKHU 0DVRFK LV D ZHE RI VSHFLĂ€F UHODWLRQV and characteristic actions. In Coldness and Cruelty, Deleuze argues against the notion of the Freudian sadomasochistic ‘entity’/relation and argues for a demarcation between masochism and sadism. For Deleuze, Freud and his followers mistake the “perversionsâ€? of masochism and sadism for two sides of the same coin.3 Masochism and sadism, as Deleuze sees them, are “separate dramas, each complete in itself, with different sets of characters.â€?4 The difference, therefore, is structural. In the Freudian theory of sadomasochism, there must be both a fully sadistic WRUWXUHU DQG D IXOO\ PDVRFKLVWLF YLFWLP ,Q D VSHFLĂ€FDOO\ PDVRFKLVtic situation, however, the masochist initiates the alliance with an other. Only once he generates this alliance does the other take RQ WKH UROH RI WKH LQĂ LFWRU RI SDLQ 5 In other words, the ‘torturer’ characteristic of the being with whom the masochist forms an alliance does not precede the masochistic situation: “she is a pure 3 4 5

Ibid., 43.

Ibid., 45.

Ibid., 42.

Ibid. The same generating of character is true of the sadistic situation.

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element of masochism.â€?6 Therefore, the masochist is only ever a “victim in search of a torturer.â€?7 He generates the situation through his very engagement with the other body. That is to say, for a situation to be masochistic, it requires both a fully masochist victim and an other-turned-torturer. One should not assume, however, WKDW WKH VLWXDWLRQ LV DV VLPSOH DV Ă€QGLQJ DQ HOHPHQW IRU WKH SOD\ RI WKH PDVRFKLVW )RU 'HOHX]H D VWUXFWXULQJ ´FRQVWHOODWLRQÂľ RI Ă€YH qualities – contract, fantasy, law, pain-pleasure, and fetishism – facilitates and uniquely characterizes how these two bodies interact.8 Contract For Deleuze, the contract extends beyond the simple written agreement, for it can be tangible or in the mind. He derives this notion from the contracts within Masoch’s work as well as those between Masoch and his wife, Wanda. One such contract reads: You [Masoch] shall carry out everything I ask of you, whether it is good or evil, and if I should demand that you commit a crime, you shall turn criminal to obey my will ‌. You have nothing save me; for you I am everything, your life, your future, your happiness, your unhappiness, your torment and your joy.10 Simply put, the contract establishes a relation, “for a determinate period,â€? in which one “is given every rightâ€? over another.11 As a relational alliance between two bodies, it facilitates the generation of both fantasy and law.

Fantasy

$ VSHFLĂ€F IDQWDV\ RU LGHDO LPDJH GHĂ€QHV WKH WRUWXUHU UROH 'HOHX]H SLHFHV WKLV LGHDO LPDJH IURP WKUHH PRWKHU Ă€JXUHV in Masoch’s work: the uterine mother, the Oedipal mother, and the oral mother. The former two, Deleuze asserts, are opposed:12 the uterine being “sensualâ€? and loving and the Oedipal, severe and harsh.13 7KH WKLUG PRWKHU LV WKH Ă€[HG LPDJH EHWZHHQ WKH WZR Ibid., 20.

Ibid., 72.

9 Ibid., 76.

10 Leopold Sacher-Masoch, “Venus in Furs.� in Masochism, trans. Jean McNeil (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 279.

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12 13 14

Deleuze, “Coldness and Cruelty,� 66.

Ibid., 49.

Ibid., 47.

Ibid., 52.

ON THE POTENTIALITY OF THEATRICAL PLEASURE

extremes. As such, she takes on their properties. She acts as a “freezing point,â€? as Deleuze says, always unchanging and disavowing the sensuality and cruelty of the two.14 7KH VDPH Ă€[HG ideal, however, is not universal to all situations. As Deleuze writes, ´WKHUH LV QR VSHFLĂ€FDOO\ PDVRFKLVWLF IDQWDV\ EXW UDWKHU D PDVRFKistic art of fantasy.â€?15 Each masochistic situation needs to creatively generate its own fantastical ideal and new laws from scratch.

Law “The function of the masochistic contract,� as Deleuze writes, “is to invest the mother-image [torturer] with the symbolic power of the law.�16 This symbolic power is simply the restrictive forces of language in which the law and we all exist, governing our everyday discourse and thought. The contract, therefore, fabricates a new set of laws that govern the situation. Through the details in the contract, the masochist suspends the old law and creates a new one in full awareness of the presence and binding character of the old. This generating of an ‘ideal’ law is fundamental to the masochistic situation because it allows the masochist to rewrite the symbolic rules that pain cannot produce pleasure.

Pain-Pleasure Pain, for Deleuze, is the necessary precondition of pleasure in the masochistic situation. It is primary. Only by suspending the traditional disjunction between pleasure and pain can the masochist gain pleasure. However, this suspension is not mitigation. The creation of a new, ideal law allows the masochist to “emphasize [the law’s] extreme severity,�17 – that is, to fully embrace the chains that hold him.

Fetishism The masochist must be a fetishist. The law permits the fetish to exist and the fetish upholds/represents the masochistic fantasy.18 Deleuze sees an example of this ‘betweenfantasy-and-law’ characteristic of fetishism in one of Masoch’s letters. As Masoch writes, “Whether she is a princess or a 15 16 17

Ibid., 72, emphasis added.

Ibid., 76.

Ibid.

18 19

Ibid., 32.

Sacher-Masoch, “Venus in Furs,� 273.

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peasant girl, whether she is clad in ermine or sheepskin, she is always the same woman: she wears furs, she wields a whip, she treats men as slaves and she is both my creation and the true Sarmatian Woman.�19 The particular fetish object or costume piece shifts as though in a metonymic chain; whether ‘ermine’ or ‘sheepskin,’ the ideal stays the ‘same.’ Simply put, the ideal has no independent signifying power but harnesses meaning from its surrounding situation.

7KHVH Ă€YH FR RULJLQDO TXDOLWLHV Ă€W WRJHWKHU OLNH D SX]]OH $ contract, generating both fantasy and law, brings about the masochistic situation. Through it, the overall ‘ideal’ fantasy world takes place DOORZLQJ WKH ODZ WR GHĂ€QH KRZ WKH VSHFLĂ€F ERGLHV FDQ LQWHUDFW DQG derive pain and pleasure from the situation. Fetishism is the necessary covering component that maintains the suspension of the symbolic law. Mindful of this constellation, I return to the theatre-event.

II. Theatre is Masochistically In order to re-map the theatre-event, I will investigate the particular roles within the ‘theatre situation’ through the lens of rhizomes and masochism. I will enumerate the theatre relationships analogous to contract, fantasy, fetishism, law, and painpleasure. The roles, I suggest, must be cast as follows: in the SODFH RI WKH PDVRFKLVW ZH Ă€QG WKH DXGLHQFH WKH SHUIRUPHU SOD\V the part of the torturer; the play-text plays the part of the whip.

Contract The contract in the theatre has many expressions: your ticket, the foreplay in the foyer of posters, signs and reviews, the pre-production speech telling you to turn off your cell phone or unwrap a ‘delicious candy now,’ and the production’s programme.

Here, we should recall Deleuze’s comment that the contract can be in the mind. The contract of the theatre-situation is intangible.

No one writes it out or gives it out before a show. However, while productions do not make it explicit, it nonetheless exists, dictating, “You [audience member] shall carry out everything I [performer] ask of you, whether it is good or evil, and if I should demand that you commit a crime, you shall turn criminal to obey my will.� What this means is that the contract establishes the spectator’s relationship with the performer; it casts the performer in the part of the torturer.

The audience must be the one to generate the contract simply because it is the only part of the theatre assemblage that

ON THE POTENTIALITY OF THEATRICAL PLEASURE

does not need to be there. That is, the audience is the last addition to a pre-existing assemblage (of performer, text, location, etc. – what one might call a ‘rehearsal-situation’) that transforms the assemblage into ‘theatre.’ To put it another way, we know the theatre contract exists because the audience is there. If there is any reason why theatre is not a sadistic situation, this is it: They do not have to be there. Regardless of the fact that so many theatre companies desperately hunt for audiences, I suggest that it is ultimately DXGLHQFHV YLFWLPV WKDW VHDUFK IRU DQG Ă€QG SHUIRUPHUV WRUWXUers). Therefore, the audience’s physical presence at the theatre is the clearest expression of what we might call a theatre contract.

7KH H[SUHVVLRQV , OLVWHG ÀUVW DUH MXVW SHULSKHUDO FRPIRUWV RQFH LQside the theatre, preparing the audience for the events to come.

Fantasy Fantasy, as the ‘ideal’ in the masochistic situation, means a freezing point in which the torturer can be cruel and sentimental at the same time. I suggest that the ideal coldness belongs to the performed character while the cruelty and sentimentality exist within the person embodying the character. It is the person behind the fantastical mask that is the element, not the character s/he plays on stage.

Bertolt Brecht’s writings on epic acting articulate a similar process. For Brecht, awareness of the separation, or “alienation,â€? between ideal and torturer is fundamental to the constitution of the performer.20 The performer, while maintaining distance from KLV RU KHU FKDUDFWHU VWULYHV WR WRUWXUH WKH DXGLHQFH 7KXV ZH Ă€QG evidence of all three fundamental characteristics of the oral mother, “icy-sentimental-severe,â€? in the performer. After all, when on VWDJH RQH RIWHQ Ă€QGV RQHVHOI ÂśSOD\LQJ¡ WKH DXGLHQFH ZDLWLQJ IRU the perfect moment to deliver the most hilarious of lines in a most torturous way. And more, the breaking of the fantasy in masochism is the same as a character breaking on stage. Any interruption of the relationship – from sentimentality to cruelty –can betray the fantasy. A body that consents to the contract can undermine the situation itself by interrupting the performance of the role.

Bertolt Brecht, “On Chinese Acting,� in Brecht on Theatre, trans. John Willet (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 95.

20

Elinor Fuchs, “EF’s Visit to a Small Planet: Some Questions to Ask a Play,�

Theater, vol. 34 (Summer 2004): 6.

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Law In her essay, “EF’s Visit to a Small Planet: Some Questions to Ask a Play,â€? dramaturge and critic Elinor Fuchs writes of play ÂśZRUOGV ¡ ´$ SOD\ Âľ VKH VD\V ´LV QRW D Ă DW ZRUN RI OLWHUDWXUH QRW D description in poetry of another world, but is in itself another world passing before you in time and space.â€?21 While for Fuchs this is a dramaturgical exercise for bringing a play-text to ‘life,’ it rightly acknowledges the nature of law in theatre. For her, each play operates by its own rules of time and space. In other words, it suspends the ‘real’ rules of the world of the audience and substitutes them for its own. Throughout the duration of the theatre-event, the new law follows upon the contract formed at the beginning by the masochist-audience member. Of course, the obvious critique of this claim is that a play world is made in rehearsal, prior to any audience interaction with it. This is not necessarily true. While chronologically it is a fact that the events of the play world existed before, only once the audience forms the contract do the laws of said world come into force. This is no different from the masochistic situation described above. The theatre contract gives the torturer-performer the power of the symbolic order. Whether made before the encounter or in the moment, it is the audience that grants the torturer’s new laws validity for a determined duration – the length of the production. It is on the basis of the masochist-audience’s acceptance of the new laws that experience of pain and pleasure is possible.

Pain-Pleasure

$W Ă€UVW WKRXJKW WKH TXHVWLRQ ´ZKHUH LV WKH SDLQ RU SXQishment in the theatre-event?â€? is misleading. Pain is the precondition of pleasure; therefore a search for pleasure will propel the VHDUFK IRU SDLQ 3OHDVXUH RI FRXUVH LV HDV\ WR Ă€QG LQ WKH WKHDWUH The audience shrouds a theatre-event with this reductive notion once outside of the actual event. For instance, one always asks, “Was it a good show?â€? or “Did you enjoy it?â€? Since pain precedes pleasure, any reaction to such questions acknowledges that the spectator must have experienced some pain. This pain comes from Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text,â€? in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 22

ed. Vincent B. Leitch (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001), 1471.

ON THE POTENTIALITY OF THEATRICAL PLEASURE

WKH SHUIRUPDQFH RI WKH SOD\ IURP D VSHFLÀF SURGXFWLRQ¡V PDQLIHVtation of a play-text. It is the pain of active participation, or work.

5RODQG %DUWKHV¡ LQVLJKW LQ ´)URP :RUN WR 7H[WÂľ FODULĂ€HV WKLV point. Barthes writes, “the Text Âľ D SLHFH RI ZULWLQJ IUHH RI VSHFLĂ€F enchaining interpretations, “is experienced only in an activity of production.â€?22 I look to Barthes here for the understanding that art commands active participation even in its reception. To engage with a text is to inhabit the text, to place one’s self within it and hold it together. On this inhabiting, Barthes writes, “Every text is eternally written here and now.â€?23 Is this not exactly what the contract permits?

The text, like the contract, demands the unique engagement with the torturer and their strange weapons of choice (verbal, gestural, etc.).

Therefore, this need to inhabit and uphold art occurs in the theatreevent, just as the contract is at play in the masochistic situation.

Ultimately, the victim-audience must attentively observe the play world in front of them. They must accept and follow, if only in their minds, the laws of the play world, and they must acknowledge the frozen ideal that masks the torturer-performer’s ‘true’ identity. We might also think of the play as the whip of the performer-torturer. ,Q D QDUURZ VHQVH WKH VSHFLĂ€F OLQH VDLG RU JHVWXUH SHUIRUPHG LQ RUGHU WR H[HFXWH KLV RU KHU FUXHOW\ LV WKH SHUIRUPHU¡V WRRO IRU LQĂ LFWLQJ pain. However, on a broader scale, it is what Barthes describes when he speaks of texts. The audience interprets everything that occurs within the duration of the theatre-event; they connect scene one to scene two, action to emotion to intention, set to sound to light, etc.

This is the pain of the theatre-event, the holding-together of a world.

The audience member derives pleasure from the work of holding the theatre-event together. As Deleuze writes, “by the closest adherence to [the law], and by zealously embracing it, we may hope to partake of its pleasures.â€?24 Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest is a good example. You must work surprisingly hard if you want to laugh in Earnest QRW EHFDXVH LW LV GXOO EXW EHFDXVH WKH WH[W RYHUĂ RZV with humour, requiring one to be selective. Regardless of how well a director stages and paces the play, a spectator must work to catch a pun.

Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,� in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001), 1468.

23

24

Deleuze, “Coldness and Cruelty,� 88.

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To contrast, we can take a production of 4.48 Psychosis by Sarah Kane. The pain we suffer in this piece is one of how the different text and action fragments relate. 4.48 demands that one ask, “Is it narrative? Is it all one character’s thoughts? How does the entire proGXFWLRQ Ă€W WRJHWKHU"Âľ ,Q WKH VDPH ZD\ WKDW SOHDVXUH LQ PDVRFKLVP LV secondary, the pleasure we derive from the pain of interpretive work in the play world ourselves is also secondary. Ultimately, a spectator’s experience of different forms of pleasure depends on the form of SDLQ ZRUN WKH\ H[SHULHQFH LQ WKH VLWXDWLRQ (YHU\ SOD\ LQĂ LFWV D GLIferent kind of pain and thus permits a different kind of pleasure.

Fetish Fetishism is perhaps the simplest of features to map within the theatre-event; it is the aesthetics. Whether minimalist or naturalist, the aesthetics of costumes, lighting, sound, and set design are all fundamentally fetishistic. They necessarily disavow the fact that the fantasy LV Ă€FWLRQDO. Some might say that any meta-theatricality would disprove WKLV WKDW WKH DXGLHQFH NQRZV WKH SOD\ LV Ă€FWLRQDO UHJDUGOHVV RI WKH DHVthetics. However, this argument does not take into consideration how, no matter what is present on stage, the state of the theatrical ‘place’ is fundamentally in relation to all the other parts. This is a function of the contract and idealization of the torturer. Contemporary dress is not a lack of costume. An empty stage is not a void. The properties and costumes are fundamental pieces of the play world. “Fursâ€? are metonymic here too for they always exist, “ermineâ€? or “sheepskin.â€?

Many audience members might not relish the label of masochist-victims. It is, after all, hard to reconcile this masochistic theatre-event with the experiences of seeing a Broadway show, a newly refurbished Neil Simon or Henrik Ibsen, or maybe a children’s theatre production of Roald Dahl’s The BFG or Cinderella Wore Combat Boots. These productions may not usually appear to have a masochistic form, but they do!

To restate, our analysis is not investigating a VSHFLĂ€F kind of theatre – especially not theatre necessitating leather, straps, or whips. Rather, any audience’s ‘being there’ initiates the assemblage of any theatre, and this assemblage operates with the same ‘rules’ as the masochistic situation. The contrary perspective, however, is worth further consideration. Why do we so often ignore WKLV PDVRFKLVP WKDW PDNHV WKHDWUH Ă RZ" :K\ GR SHRSOH WKLQN they are not participating in a masochistic system when they are?

ON THE POTENTIALITY OF THEATRICAL PLEASURE

:H FDQ ÀQG WKH IXQGDPHQWDO UHDVRQ E\ UHWXUQLQJ WR 'HOHX]H DQG Guattari’s metaphor of the rhizome and its counter-metaphor, the tree.

A “tree,â€? for Deleuze and Guattari, is a way of becoming that is hierarchical and centered on a “root.â€? For example, they call psychoanalysis a tree because it reduces all experiences to manifestations of the Oedipal complex.25 What we can gain from this metaSKRU LV KRZ D WUHH DWWHPSWV WR IUHH]H RU DUERULI\ D IUHH Ă RZLQJ rhizome. Simply put, where a rhizome is a spontaneous temporal play of relations, one that is a multiplicity of possibilities or “outgrowthsâ€? of production,26 the tree collapses all possibilities to one forced outcome. In the theatre-rhizome, trees grow in many different parts. For example, the play-text acts as a ‘constant’ within the situation on which the performers stand. In most Western theatres, there is continual stress upon audience control; a voice from without commands us to sit in our seats in the dark and be silent.

There are also trees of quality control in production and performance. Look at Broadway – a forest! There, many expect theatrical performances on Broadway to be no different than a performance RQ Ă€OP )LQDOO\ WKH ELRPHFKDQLFDO WKHDWUH RI 9VHYRORG 0H\HUKROG strives to create a tree in the technical way of making theatre.27 These trees need not demoralize theatre participants. As Deleuze and Guattari write, “There are knots of arborescence in rhizomes, and rhizomatic offshoots in roots.â€?28 That is, there is no such thing as a pure rhizome or pure tree form of theatre. ,Q IDFW ZKDW DOO RI WKHVH ÂśDUERULĂ€FDWLRQV¡ LOOXVWUDWH LV WKDW RQH FDQ QHYHU IXOO\ Ă€[ WKH WKHDWUH UKL]RPH $W DQ\ SRLQW DQ DFWRU may forget a line or break a key stage property; at any point an audience member might sneeze or have a heart attack. Moreover, the nature of masochism, as co-original with this rhizome, is also never ‘fully’ present nor is it ever completely absent. We FDQ Ă€QG DQ H[DPSOH RI WKLV WHQVLRQ LQ DQ RXWGRRU WKHDWUH HYHQW 7KH WH[W DUERULĂ€HV L H IRUPV WKH ÂśJURXQG¡ RI WKH DFWLRQ ZKLOH WKH natural elements and neighbourhood cats keep the rhizome alive.

Let me therefore assert two notions: 1) the theatre-event DOZD\V H[LVWV PDVRFKLVWLFDOO\ E\ GHĂ€QLWLRQ DQG WKH VSHFLĂ€F Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 17.

26 Ibid., 9.

27 See V. Meyerhold, Meyerhold on Theatre, trans. Edward Braun (London: Eyre Methuen, 1969). Biomechanics is a form 25

of theatre training and theatremaking that ultimately attempts to render theatre reproducible.

28 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 20.

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BLENKARN

masochism of theatre is always in a GHĂ€FLHQW mode. That is to say, MXVW DV 'HOHX]H DQG *XDWWDUL GHĂ€QH WKH UKL]RPH DV ´LQ EHWZHHQ Âľ the masochism of the masochistically theatre-event is also always “in the middleâ€? – always in some ‘degree.’ The notion of pain and pleasure directly corresponds with how many trees are on stage. The fewer the trees, the more work required to hold the events together.

Therefore, the reason as to why the notion of a masochistic theatre LV VR YLROHQW WR RXU HDUV LV WKDW IRUFHV VXFK DV FDSLWDOLVP DQG LQĂ XHQFHV IURP WHOHYLVLRQ DQG Ă€OP DUERULI\ WKH PDMRULW\ RI WKHDWUH WRGD\ The masochistic situation appears centered on the contract, making it arboreal. However, we must see the contract as a “desiringmachine,â€? not a ‘root,’ for it continually connects elements. As above, the contract generates law and fantasy, and these become members of the rhizomatic structure on the condition of the contract’s presence. A “desiring-machine,â€? as Deleuze and Guattari describe it in their work Anti-Oedipus,29 is a product of desire and a hub through which desire produces and connects a multiplicity of other desiring-machines. A horribly banal example might be the desire for some new article of clothing. A new suit will necessarily connect the one possessing it to a multitude of other situations, such as a conversation about the new suit, or events requiring the suit, etc., but each new situation is not rooted in the new suit.

This paper is not meant to be a “tracingâ€? of Deleuzian masochism onto theatre, but a re-mapping of theatre in light of Deleuze’s theory. As he and Guattari say, “The map has to do with performance, whereas the tracing always involves alleged ‘competence.’â€?30 We must try to understand how we relate to the theatre in the moment of the event. This is the reason we began with a consideration of the bits and pieces of masochism. Not to trace it, but to speak as it. Only in this order can a structure as familLDU DV WKHDWUH Ă€QG DUWLFXODWLRQ LQ 'HOHX]H¡V ODQJXDJH DV D GXUDWLRQDO FUHDWLYH Ă X[ RI ERGLHV LQ UHODWLRQ %\ ZD\ RI FRQFOXVLRQ OHW PH say that many theatremakers have sought and still seek to overcome WKH RQVODXJKW RI DUERULĂ€FDWLRQ ERWK WKURXJK WKHRU\ DQG SUDFWLFH The notion of a theatre-event that works its audience Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, AntiOedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans.

Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis; University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 32.

30 Ibid., 12-13.

29

Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, trans. Mary C. Richard (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 82-83.

31

ON THE POTENTIALITY THEATRICAL PLEASURE

is not novel. In the last century, the attempt to make explicit the PDVRFKLVWLF Ă RZ RI WKHDWUH LV HYLGHQW LQ DOPRVW HYHU\ PDMRU WKHDWULcal movement. The obvious example is Antonin Artaud’s attempt to create a theatre free from the tree-chains of speech and text, “in which violent physical images crush and hypnotize the sensibility of the spectator seized by the theatre as by a whirlwind of higher forces.â€?31 Artaud’s style of attack is hardly the only one. Though Brecht’s theory of pleasure differs from Deleuze and Guattari’s, as noted in his essay “Theatre for Pleasure or Theatre for Instruction,â€? he also sought to work his audience. He attempted to do so through dialectical moments on stage in which an audience member, to gain any pleasure (in the masochistic sense) from the moment, needed to think about the contrasts the play presented to them. For example, in Mother Courage and Her Children, Yvette speaks of her newly bought boots on one side of the stage while Mother Courage, the Chaplin, and the Cook discuss the hardships of war and poverty on the other. For Brecht, the presence of the dialectic overcomes ‘pleasure.’ For the masochist, the experience of this dialectic is pleasure as such.

Furthermore, unique approaches to masochistic pleasure emerge in some more recent avant-garde theatremakers. American avant-gardist Richard Foreman’s theory of “total theatreâ€? aims towards overwhelming the audience, pleasure being directly related to your heartbeat’s acceleration in the face of anxiety and chaos.32 The immersive productions by the British theatre company Punchdrunk take a different tact, placing their audiences within large explorable locations. In their performance Sleep No More, Punchdrunk scatters scenes inspired by Shakespeare’s Macbeth throughout a hotel leaving audience members to recreate the story they all know in their own time. Therefore, a list of other theatre-events that were less GHĂ€FLHQW LQ PDVRFKLVP PLJKW LQFOXGH anything from Italian Futurists to the works of Canadian community theatremaker James Reaney to Samuel Beckett’s later short plays.

This short history demonstrates that there is no prescribed form of a masochistic theatre-work. To restate Deleuze, “there is QR VSHFLĂ€FDOO\ PDVRFKLVWLF IDQWDV\ EXW UDWKHU D PDVRFKLVWLF DUW RI fantasy.â€?33 We are clearly still experimenting with our art form and always will be. Exactly how a theatremaker works within her/his medium, navigates the map of relations, is up to her/him. Though Brecht’s didactic purposes differ from the

15

16

gestural violence of Artaud, both are masochistically. Therefore, this paper articulates no masochistic root at the centre of theatrical practices. It opposes such reductionism. Though sharing the constellation of masochism, the multiplicity of theatrical forms and styles from all over the world are not ‘the same.’ They are all their own rhizomes each at varying degrees of masochism.

I write this essay with a notion of theatremaking in mind.

What does a theatremaker do if s/he knows that the audience wants to ‘suffer’? What does s/he do with the knowledge that their role in that particular situation is to wear furs, hold the whip, and torture them? I leave the question to you. Can knowing this interpretation of how theatre is help you artistically explore degrees of ‘masochism’ and thereby move us all toward new ways of experiencing and creating theatre? We cannot think of this as an argument for the return to something, as the tree in one’s brain might attempt to do.

We need to think of this as a radical re-mapping of the assemblage that is ‘theatre’ in the name of pleasure, in the name of exploring and producing new forms of pleasure. I write this because I often wonder if we really know the potentiality of theatrical pleasure.

From a conversation with Jamie Peterson, actor in Foreman’s Astronome (2009) and Wake Up Mr. Sleepy! Your Unconscious Mind is Dead! (2007).

32

33

Deleuze, “Coldness and Cruelty,” 72.

On Black Pens

Often compared to swords, for reasons I’ve never understood—we point to these, our instruments of writing, as if the territory of violence belongs to the ink that maps it out. Yes, we know there are cleavages in language; it argues us away from absence.

But each of us also knows this: HYHU\ ODPHQW ZDV ÀUVW D ORYH VRQJ every love song sings elegy to its own history, and all elegies are sheaths.

- BETHANY HINDMARSH

The Bad Touch Masculinity, Man Hands, and Care Work SHANE BRYSON

I

n this paper I outline ways that masculinity limits the agency of men, and in certain professions leaves them likely to be understood as sexual threats. The professions that I am concerned with here are care professions in which the care receivers are vulnerable demographics. I focus on child care, both teaching and otherwise, and nursing. It should be understood that I use the term ‘touch-focused care work’ to denote these proIHVVLRQDO Ă€HOGV 1 Also, I use the terms ‘care worker’ and ‘care receiver’ in a broad sense throughout to denote those providing WKHLU VHUYLFHV LQ WKH DERYH SURIHVVLRQDO Ă€HOGV DQG WKH UHFLSLHQWV of these services, including children, the elderly, and patients.

In my examination of men in touch-focused care work I ÀUVW LGHQWLI\ DQG H[DPLQH VWHUHRW\SHV WKDW GHHP PHQ LQ WKHVH ÀHOGV sexual threats en masse. The personal accounts of these workers are particularly instructive here. Second, I identify the act of touching DV WKH IDFWRU WKDW SODFHV PDOH ZRUNHUV LQ WRXFK IRFXVHG ÀHOGV LQ D SUHFDULRXV VRFLDO VLWXDWLRQ WKH PDOH WRXFK LV REMHFWLÀHG DQG DOLHQated from these men resulting in the limitation of their autonomy.

Third, I look at the social context in which these stereotypes are IUDPHG QRWLQJ WKDW WKH\ EHQHÀW SDWULDUFK\ EXW DOVR LQIULQJH RQ WKH I do not imply that the professions with which I concern myself are the only professions that would be affected by the stereotypes I discuss, nor do I imply that WKHVH ÀHOGV DUH WKH RQO\ FDUH ZRUN ÀHOGV WKDW involve touching. I do not, however, want 1

to make claims regarding areas I have not studied. This discussion might be useful in a study of some other areas of ‘touch-based care work,’ but will make no stronger claim than that, and henceforth use the term only DV VSHFLĂ€HG DERYH

19

autonomy of men in care professions. Fourth, I offer a brief account of how an analysis such as the one undertaken here could serve to provide incentive for men to change patriarchal strucWXUHV GHVSLWH WKHVH VWUXFWXUHV FDWHJRULFDOO\ EHQHÀWWLQJ PHQ /DVWly, I offer an understanding of how the treatment of men’s issues can positively contribute to the resolution of issues for women.

I will split my examination of stereotypes affecting males in touch-focused care work into two sections. Initially, I will identify stereotypes that affect men in general and then I will combine these with stereotypes that are professionVSHFLĂ€F LQ RUGHU WR JHW D IXOO VHQVH RI WKH VWHUHRW\SHV LQ SOD\ A look at some commonly used words and at the mainstream media reveals the pervasiveness of aggression, the lack of emotional sensitivity, and a sex-focused mindset in characterizations of men. A notable example of a gendered word that constructs males as controlling, and thus aggressive, is ‘paternal.’ Literally, this word means “characteristic of a father’s care;â€?2 however, its connoWDWLRQV DUH PRUH DJJUHVVLYH WKDQ LWV GHĂ€QLWLRQ $V WKH ZRUG LV FRPmonly used, especially in medical literature, ‘a father’s care’ is characterized as the self-assured, perhaps arrogant, hijacking of another’s decisions for the supposed good of that other. Colloquial words like “manhandleâ€? further reveal that aggressiveness is understood as close to manliness. We can see a related lack of emotionality in the pejorative “dick,â€? commonly used to describe someone who acts without regard for others. This pejorative both constructs male sexuality as apathetic opportunism and reduces the man to the penis.

Indeed, the image of the ideal man is “two feet long, hard as steel, and can go all night.�3 In a discussion of pornography, Harry Brod points out that “the necessary corollary to pornography’s myth of female perpetual availability is its myth of male perpetual readiness.�4 Such readiness is commonly seen as a major part of what it is to be male and heterosexual, and it is portrayed beyond the world of pornography through prominent male characters in the mainstream media. This mythology informs the everyday experiences and decisions of most men in the West.5 “Paternal,� from www.dictionary.oed.com, accessed on December 3rd, 2010.

3 Harry Brod, “Pornography and the Alienation of Male Sexuality,� from OWL PHIL 4500 and 5500 and GWST 4500: Topics in Feminist Philosophy, 240.

4 Ibid., 241.

2

Many men run the risk of accusations of homosexuality when refusing advances.

It seems that if they are not sexually en garde, they are “gay� – and, as we shall see, this label itself often comes with accusations of sexual predatorship.

5

20

BRYSON

Stereotypes of the sex-crazed and aggressive ideal man are major contributors to the maintenance of a culture of violence against women; understandably, feminists have reacted by pointing out a need for protection. Such a need to explicitly teach protection is well motivated by Burrow’s observation that “a culture of violence against women and girls creates an environment that entrenches female passivity.â€?6 We might add as a logical corollary to this that such a culture presupposes male aggressivity. Women and others who “are attuned to a heightened threat of personal violence ‌ have an awareness of the frequency with which others’ intimidating or threatening postures, words, or actions may turn into assaults against their bodies.â€?7 This awareness and attention to protection primes people to look for signs of violence in possible aggressors, often men. This constant scrutiny may further entrench the already prevalent stereotypes of men as sexual aggressors, increasing the likelihood that men working in touch-focused care will be accused of sexual assault. Yet, for women who feel such a threat, there may be, and often is, little option but to stay guarded. This problem can only be resolved by widespread and explicit rejection of the above stereotypes by the perceived antagonists themselves.8 Until such rejection is realised, however, men in certain contexts may have to be more careful in their actions than would otherwise be the case.

Until this time, even more dire consequences may continue to play out. Stereotypes of aggression are dangerous in that as they entrench themselves they receive uptake. As the stereotypes of males as sexual predators are promoted, the number of men who feel that in order to be a man they have to mimic these stereotypes increases, creating a feedback loop. Evidence of this uptake is that most of the sadistic murders that take place are perpetrated by men, usually white, middle-class, and intelligent.9 Already conceived as sexual threats, men in touch-focused care work are often further stereotyped. Commonly characterized as D IHPLQLQH Ă€HOG RI HPSOR\PHQW FDUH ZRUN HVSHFLDOO\ WRXFK IRFXVHG care work, is dominated by women. Consequently, male workers in Sylvia Burrow, “Bodily Limits to Autonomy Emotion, Attitude, and Self-Defense,â€? in OWL PHIL 4500 and 5500 and GWST 4500: Topics in Feminist Philosophy, 130.

7 Ibid., 131.

8 This would be reminiscent of slogans 6

that “men rapeâ€? or that “it is men’s responsibility to stop rapeâ€? (Jones). It is inFXPEHQW XSRQ PHQ VSHFLĂ€FDOO\ LI WKH\ FDUH about gender injustices, men must make their intentions good by explicitly disagreeing with the above stereotypes.

THE BAD TOUCH

WKHVH SURIHVVLRQDO Ă€HOGV ´DUH >RIWHQ@ HLWKHU SRVLWLRQHG DV H[FHSWLRQV like doctors ‌ or constructed as homosexual, as in the sexual stereotyping of ‌ nurses.â€?10 We can see this construction in nursing LQ WZR H[DPSOHV ,Q WKH Ă€UVW D UHOLJLRXV IXQGDPHQWDOLVW DGYLVHV D member of his congregation that Peter 5:8 warns of the dangers of “homosexual male ‘nurses’ who might be doing heaven knows what to your grandfather’s ‘property’ during sponge bath time [in hospice care].â€?11 In the second, as reported in Evans’ 2002 interviews of eight employed male nurses, one of them “was accused of molesting a baby boy by the father who discovered him changing the baby’s diaper.â€?12 ,Q WKH Ă€UVW FDVH QR VSHFLĂ€F QXUVH RU HYHQ context, is mentioned. It is a generalized stereotype that links male care givers to homosexuality and homosexuality to perversion. In the second, a father superimposes his homophobic preconceptions on a nurse performing a routine chore in child care. In this latter case such preconceptions result in the further assumption of pedophilia. The associations between homosexuality and perversion can be traced to a historic lack of distinction between the two. PostWorld War II literature, for example, reveals little distinction between the labels “sex criminal, pervert, psychopath, and homosexual.â€?13 Nursing is not the only care work profession in which men are subjected to identity construction. For instance, standard sentiments in the mid and late twentieth century dictated that men should QRW ZRUN ZLWK FKLOGUHQ EHORZ WKH Ă€IWK JUDGH ,Q WKH V RQH PDQ ZDQWHG WR WHDFK Ă€UVW JUDGH EXW ZDV DGYLVHG E\ D SULQFLSDO WKDW ´LQ future interviews it would be best not to mention [that].â€?14 While this principal said he “understood, [he was] sure others would think of it as not quite normal.â€?15 Twenty years later, in California, Proposition 6 was introduced to purportedly “help protect your family from vicious killers and defend your children from homosexual teachers.â€?16 The target demographic of this bill was implicitly male. In the 1980s, as “no touch policies that included cameras and two-way mirrorsâ€? were implemented in the United States, a former daycare worker, after being vindicated of sexual abuse charges, advised men working in Maurice Hammington, “A Father’s Touch: Caring Embodiment and a Moral Revolution,â€? in BSL: Dalhousie University, 271.

10 Carol Wolkowitz, “Body Work as Social Relationship and as Labour,� Bodies at Work (London: Sage Publications, 2006), 153; Joan A. Evans, “Cautious Caregivers: Gen9

der Stereotypes and the Sexualization of Men Nurses’ Touch,� Journal of Advanced Nursing 40, vol. 4 (2002): 445; Julie A. Willett, “’A Father’s Touch:’ Negotiating Masculinity and Sexual Subjectivity in Child Care,� Sexuality and Culture, 12, vol. 4 (2008): 279, 285.

21

22

BRYSON

schools and day care centres “to get out in a hurry.”17 More recently, Paul Sargent’s 2002 study found that males in early education report that if they “touch children, some administrators, parents, or peers will view this as a sign that these teachers are paedophiles or are gay.”18 Many negative effects of the above stereotypes on men in touch-focused care work are closely linked to the touch itself. Touching is simultaneously required for success and made a dangerous act for men in these professions.19 That touching is a required element in care work is perhaps even an understatement, as Nicky James notes in a study of hospice care: “the physical labor of care is not only given emphasis but is the framework under which care labor is organized.”20 This comment is also relevant to child care. One teacher SKUDVHV KLV IHHOLQJV DERXW WKH QHHG IRU WRXFK DQG LWV LQKHUHQW FRQÁLFW with convention as follows: “I really love these kids … you know, I just don’t care anymore.”21 After articulating his desire to defy gender limitations, he goes on to emphasize that “these little folks need care and love and hugs. I even let them sit on my lap. … Unfairly women’s laps are places of love, [while] men’s are places of danger.”22 Because their physical interactions can be easily misconstrued as dangerous, physical interaction itself becomes dangerous for men in touch-focused care work. Put more eloquently, there is a “subtext of touching that … communicates volumes.”23 Just what is communicated in this subtext is not simply a matter of what a communicator intends to communicate. Preconceptions about the integrity of male care workers can tint the experiences of not only care receivers, but also of coworkers and other bystanders. Although there is no mention of who accused the former day care worker in the above example, given the prevalence of two-way mirrors and video cameras it is probable that the accuser ZDV D E\VWDQGHU %\VWDQGHU DFFXVDWLRQV DOVR DSSHDU LQ WKH ÀHOG RI nursing. In Evans’ interviews, one male nurse recounted an instance in which he was reported to his supervisor by a co-worker for attempting to reassure a patient by putting his hand on her shoulder.24

Alex ExGay, “Re: Pray for my Grandfather,” from www.landoverbaptist.net, accessed November 4th, 2010. The passage actually reads as follows: “Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom 11

KH PD\ GHYRXU µ ,W LV GLIÀFXOW WR VHH DQ\ EXW a tenuous connection here, and I take this GLIÀFXOW\ DV HYLGHQFH WKDW VRPH SHRSOH ZLOO go to great lengths to support homophobic norms with authoritative texts.

12 Evans, “Cautious Caregiviers,” 444.

THE BAD TOUCH

7KHVH NLQGV RI DFFXVDWLRQV FDQ KDYH VLJQLÀFDQW QHJDWLYH UDPLÀFDtions, which are manifested differently depending on the context of the work. A care receiver is often physically vulnerable. Conversely, a care worker often has a certain amount of physical control over care receivers, whether in the form of supervisory control, as with teachers, or more direct control of physical abilities, as with nurses. Robert Weinbach points out that in child care this context is only aggravated by “the repeated juxtaposition of child care and sexual abuse[, which gives] the inaccurate impression that these two entities are necessarily linked.”25 As shown above, all of the professions with which I am here concerned face this juxtaposition. For patients, parents, coworkers, and children, the collision of the context of vulnerability and common preconceptions can create situations of extreme anxiety, even situations LQ ZKLFK PDOHV ZRUNLQJ LQ WKHVH ÀHOGV PD\ LQDGYHUWHQWO\ DFW LQ D way perceived as inappropriate. Worse, they may be unable to engage in certain required physical interactions with care receivers without those interactions being perceived in this negative way.26 For these male care givers, with accusations based on these perceptions comes the danger of defamation, job loss, and jail time.27 A widespread consequence of veridical accusations of male care workers is that the immoral and illegal actions of a few individuals categorically defame all males in touch-focused care work.28 Part of the predicament for these care givers is that the VLJQLÀFDQFH RI WKHLU DFWLRQV LV QRW GHWHUPLQHG E\ WKHP DORQH 2QH way of conceiving of this disjunction between what they mean to express and what they do express is to understand the male touch LQ WKHVH SURIHVVLRQV DV REMHFWLÀHG DQG DOLHQDWHG IURP WKH WRXFKer. Young presents a concept of alienation which can be applied KHUH ´>D@OLHQDWLRQ KHUH PHDQV WKH REMHFWLÀFDWLRQ RU DSSURSULDtion by one subject of another subject’s body, action, or product of action.”29 Through stereotypes of men’s intentions, the mere act of touching comes to signify intentions that the man

Willett, “A Father’s Touch,” 278.

Ibid.

15 Ibid.

16 Ibid., 283. Senator Briggs, to whom we owe the above purpose statement, warned the public that “Homosexuals want your 13 14

children … if they don’t recruit children or the very young they’d all die away … that’s why they want to be teachers” (Ibid., 284).

17 Ibid., 283.

18 Ibid.

19 Evans, “Cautious Caregivers,” 443.

23

24

BRYSON

may not have; this signifying touch, in turn, becomes representative of the man’s character, regardless of his self-conception. %HFDXVH RI VXFK D IRFXV RQ WRXFK D PDOH QXUVH ZKR LV ´REMHFWLÀHG may fail to recognize [his] body, action, or experience as fully [his] own� – thus alienating him from his body, action, or experience.30

7ZR SRLQWV DUH UHOHYDQW WR WKLV REMHFWLĂ€FDWLRQ DQG DOLHQDWLRQ First, they further entrench stereotypes of men as less emotionally sensitive, since touching is key to many expressions of empathy. In RUGHU WR DYRLG REMHFWLĂ€FDWLRQ DQG DOLHQDWLRQ PDOH FDUH JLYHUV PD\ intentionally distance themselves from situations and professions in which they will have to touch care receivers.31 As Evans reports, this distancing can leave male care workers with a general lack of SURĂ€FLHQF\ DW WRXFKLQJ 32 “Care,â€? emphasizes Lanoix, “especially in the sense of taking care of, has been assumed to be a natural practice akin to instinct.â€?33 But for men, whose touch is meant to be too sexual and aggressive to be caring, the touching aspect of care is not constructed as a natural practice. For male care givers who consider themselves good at their jobs but are unable to effectively touch, further alienation may result from this disjunction between their aspirations and their abilities. Moreover, this lack of skill and this distancing often result in less intimate treatment of care receivers. In some cases, this may alienate care receivers from their bodies and remove them from control over the process of care itself.34 As we can see, the contribution of stereotypes to the way that men act in care professions results is an embodied manifestation of these stereotypes: too frequently when men choose to stay in care work professions their physical interactions, and the lack of these interactions, are alienating for both parties. Beyond a male care giver’s loss of the ability to self-determine his identity, his own body can become a source of a danger for him since WKH REMHFWLĂ€FDWLRQ DQG DOLHQDWLRQ RI KLV WRXFK PHDQV WKDW KLV DFtions are more open to accusations and their associated harms.

Burrow’s discussion of Meyers’ theory of autonomy can help XV XQGHUVWDQG WKH VLJQLĂ€FDQW FRQVHTXHQFHV RI WKH SUREOHPDWLF PDOH touch. In this discussion ‘autonomy’ and ‘identity’ take on nuanced Monique Lanoix, “A Body No Longer of One’s Own,â€? in OWL PHIL 4500 and 5500 and GWST 4500: Topics in Feminist Philosophy, 170.

21 Willett, “A Father’s Touch,� 286.

22 Ibid.

20

Hammington, “A Father’s Touch,� 270.

Evans, “Cautious Caregivers,� 444.

25 Willet, “A Father’s Touch,� 286.

26 Evans, “Cautious Caregivers,� 444.

23 24

THE BAD TOUCH

meanings. The notion of autonomy is relational; the extent to which one’s identity can be self-determined has to do with what one knows about one’s social situation.35 Here one can become more autonomous by developing autonomy competencies: “skills of introspection, imagination, reasoning, and volition.â€?36 Importantly, this means that one can have greater or lesser degrees of autonomy in different areas of one’s life. The development of these competencies happens through interactions with other people, and autonomy is formed by a negotiation of one’s social situation through physical interactions.37 Along with the notion of autonomy as embodied, Burrow also uses a notion of embodied identity. Again drawing on Meyer’s account, Burrow speaks of a holistic version of identity called “psycho-corporeal identity.â€? The use of this term acknowledges the respective roles that one’s socially situated psychology and physiology play in constructing their identity.38 A way of understanding the interplay of these roles is through the observation that we may “decide beforehand – usually mistakenly – that [a] task is beyond us, and thus give it less than our full effort. At such half-hearted level, of course, we cannot perform the tasks, become frustrated, DQG IXOĂ€OO RXU RZQ SURSKHF\ Âľ39 Thus, a physical failure motivated by a psychological state, ‘I cannot,’ may reinforce the conviction of that VWDWH LQ WXUQ UHDIĂ€UPLQJ WKH UHDOLW\ RI WKH SK\VLFDO IDLOXUH DQG RI one’s identity as someone who is unable to do the task in question.

As Burrow points out, “one way to recognize the embodied nature of autonomy is to acknowledge the body as a site for suffering constraints on autonomy.â€?40 Thus, for instance, the prominence of a male care worker’s fear of touching patients or children may translate into an incompetent touch or the avoidance of physical interaction. Conversely, a physical interaction, say a touch on a patient’s shoulder, or a ‘horsey ride’ on a teacher’s knee, may translate into a care giver’s psychological aversion WR WRXFKLQJ EHFDXVH RI WKH UHVXOWLQJ QHJDWLYH VRFLDO UDPLĂ€FDWLRQV Such limitations of physical interaction undermine the male care giver’s autonomy, diminishing the possibility of certain forms of self-expression: an empathetic, non-sexual, touch, for instance.41 Ibid., 447; Bill Braun, “Ex-Nurse Acquitted of Rape,â€? from www.allbusiness. .com, accessed on November 1st, 2009; Nancy Krause, “RI Nursing Assistant Acquitted of Rape,â€? from www.wpri.com, accessed on November 1st, 2010.

27

Evans, “Cautious Caregivers,� 447.

Lanoix, “A Body No Longer One’s Own,�

168.

30 Ibid., 172.

28 29

25

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BRYSON

An additional way that male care givers have limited autonomy is in their relative inability to establish reliable autonomy competencies, namely skills of introspection and reasoning. I do not here imply that these workers are simply incompetent. Rather the FRQWH[W LQ ZKLFK WKH\ ZRUN PDNHV LW JHQXLQHO\ GLIĂ€FXOW WR UHOLDEO\ assess who is likely to reduce their professional integrity to asexually charged and threatening touch. Care workers’ selective diction in their accounts is instructive here. While often the demographics ZLWK ZKLFK WKHVH ZRUNHUV ZRUU\ DERXW LQWHUDFWLQJ DUH LGHQWLĂ€DEOH descriptions of prospective accusers range from patients and coworkers to the open-ended “someone.â€?42 Even more open-ended, sometimes the accuser is omitted altogether, as in personal accounts like “I won’t be caught in the same room alone with [certain patients].â€?43 Such phrasing invites the interpretation that anyone who catches this care giver is a prospective accuser. The care receivers and the surrounding observers are often in constant rotation, each with their own degrees of prejudice. Assessing situations based on SDVW H[SHULHQFH VXUHO\ UHĂ€QHV FDUH JLYHUV¡ DXWRQRP\ FRPSHWHQFLHV But as the anxiety of possible accusation in male care workers attests, these competencies cannot be developed to the point where WKHVH ZRUNHUV IHHO FRQĂ€GHQW WKDW WKH\ KDYH FRQWURO RYHU WKH PHDQing of their own actions; the threat of alienation is too pervasive.44 The notion of self-trust may be instructive in understandLQJ WKH DXWRQRP\ GHĂ€FLHQFLHV RI PDOH FDUHJLYHUV 7R WKH H[WHQW WKDW one has self-trust, one trusts that one’s behaviour is “not harmful WR RQHVHOI ÂŤ SURFHHGV IURP IDYRXUDEOH PRWLYHV DQG ÂŤ UHĂ HFWV one’s sense of what it means to be a good person.â€?45 Male care JLYHUV VHHP WR ODFN WKH FRQWH[W UHTXLUHG WR VXEVWDQWLDOO\ IXOĂ€OO WKH Ă€UVW DQG WKLUG FULWHULD $V QRWHG DERYH WKH REMHFWLĂ€FDWLRQ DQG VXEsequent alienation of the male touch means that male care givers often do not have control over the harmful effects of their touch.

Given that the meaning of the action may be determined by anothHU D PDOH FDUH JLYHU¡V EHKDYLRXU PD\ QRW UHĂ HFW HYHQ UHPRWHO\ KLV VHQVH RI ZKDW LW LV WR EH D JRRG SHUVRQ 7KXV D GHĂ€FLHQF\ RI VHOI trust may lead one to question one’s competence. As Trudy Govier Evans, “Cautious Caregivers,â€? 444-45; Willett, “A Father’s Touch,â€? 287-88; Lisette Hilton, “A Few Good Men,â€? from www. nurseweek.com, accessed on November 1st, 2010 ; Carol Dunbar, “Man Enough for the Job,â€? from www.news.nurse.com, accessed 31

on November 1st, 2010.

32 Evans, “Cautious Caregivers,� 443.

33 Lanoix, “A Body No Longer One’s Own,� 166.

34 Ibid., 174.

35 Burrow, “Body Limits,� 133.

THE BAD TOUCH

explains, our ability to make good decisions and act on them is impaired if “we are insecure in our sense of our own values, motives, and capacities.�46 For male care givers, self-doubt entails a lack of autonomy because they are never certain that their touch won’t be misconstrued as something at odds with their beliefs and values.

Despite the negative effects of stereotypes on men in touch-focused care work, a more expansive explanation of the problematic preconceptions at the heart of the ‘bad touch’ reveals that such stereotypes are upheld by maintaining gendered norms that actually privilege men. As noted above, constructing males as aggressive and violent is a way of entrenching passivity in women.47 The juxtaposition of these norms creates a social space where the autonomy of men is decisively privileged. Thus, such an aggressive construction begets inequity in men’s favour.

0RUH VSHFLĂ€FDOO\ WKH SURIHVVLRQDO ZRUOG KDV KDG LWV RZQ VHW of patriarchal dogmas to uphold: many men wishing to teach young children were told “hey we don’t want to waste you in the classroom‌ we want you to work with all of the teachers‌ be in management.â€?48 The media hearsay, such as that in “popular magazines,â€? argues that “anyone [read: any men] who would accept such a low paying job is suspect to begin with,â€? and that “these low wages ‘were bringing XQTXDOLĂ€HG DQG SHUKDSV HYHQ GDQJHURXV SHRSOH LQWR WKH Ă€HOG ¡¾49 In health care, a man’s role as a doctor is a proud one, while male nurses have been subjected to deep stigmatization, as noted above. The denial of men’s role as care givers except in administrative positions maintains the wage gap and male authority. Thus the stereotypes themselves maintain patriarchal power while oppressing certain men.

The incentive for men to collectively act against their construction as well-paid sexual aggressors seems diminutive. The above observations about the limitation of the autonomy of male care givers, however, provides them with good incentive to reject the stereotypes of men as sexual aggressors. A revolution in how we conceive of male touch would have effects felt far outside of the professional ZRUOG ,I WKLV LV WUXH HYHU\ PDQ ZKR Ă€QGV KLPVHOI LQH[WULFDEO\ OLQNHG to this ‘bad touch’ has good reason to reject these autonomy-limiting Ibid., 128.

Ibid.

38 Ibid., 130.

39 Iris Marion Young, “Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment, Motility, and Spatiality,�

36 37

On Female Body Experience - “Throwing Like a Girl� and Other Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 144.

40 Ibid., 129 41 Ibid.

27

28

stereotypes. Fathers constitute one tangible example of a very large GHPRJUDSKLF WKDW ZRXOG ERWK EHQHĂ€W IURP WKH GHVWLJPDWL]DWLRQ RI the male touch and could work to prevent this stigmatization by having physically caring and engaged relationships with their children.

*LYHQ WKDW PDVFXOLQH VWHUHRW\SHV XVXDOO\ DIÀUP SDWULDUchal gender norms it may seem that our attention is better directed DW IXUWKHU OLEHUDWLQJ ZRPHQ IURP SDWULDUFK\ WKDQ DW WU\LQJ WR ÀJure out how men’s autonomies may be limited. However, these issues are not so cleanly separated. As seen above, many men are coerced into administrative positions, some subtly, and some aggressively. Personal accounts from many men wishing to enter WKHVH ÀHOGV KRZHYHU LQGLFDWH WKDW WKHLU H[SHULHQFHV DV FDUH JLYHUV LQ QRQ DGPLQLVWUDWLYH SRVLWLRQV DUH LQWHQVHO\ IXOÀOOLQJ 50 It seems that destigmatizing the touch of men in care work is relevant to the feminist agenda of enhancing women’s autonomy. Allowing men to work in positions other than administration opens posiWLRQV WKDW FDQ EH ÀOOHG E\ ZRPHQ 7KLV PD\ EH D VPDOO YLFWRU\ LI other men still have privileged access to these positions, but it is a victory nonetheless. Finally, a common recognition by men of the negative implications of aggressive and sexualised stereotypes could SOD\ D VLJQLÀFDQW UROH LQ WKH SDFLÀFDWLRQ RI D FXOWXUH RI YLROHQFH

Evans, “Cautious Caregivers,� 443.

Ibid., 445. Examples of these certain SDWLHQWV DUH WKH PHQWDOO\ LQĂ€UP DQG WHHQDJH girls (Ibid., 444-45).

44 Ibid., 444; Willett, “A Father’s Touch,�

279, 286.

45 Evans, “Cautious Caregivers,� 134.

46 Burrow, “Body Limits,� 134, emphasis mine. Burrow also points out that levels of self-trust are closely related to levels of 42 43

self-esteem. I have not found enough data on this matter to claim that the self-esteem of male care givers is problematically compromised, but such a study may enrich an DQDO\VLV VXFK DV PLQH E\ IXUWKHU GHĂ€QLQJ WKH limitations of their autonomy.

47 Ibid., 130.

48 Willett, “A Father’s Touch,� 282.

49 Ibid., 286.

50 Ibid., 282; Hilton, “A Few Good Men.�

The Parable of the Demon FICTION BY KIERAN INNOCENZI $ PDQ FDPH KRPH RQH QLJKW WR ÀQG D GHPRQ KDG UHSODFHG KLP LQ his bed. Beneath the sheets, its tiny body looked almost like a child’s.

All was very still, and the man heard only his own shallow breath.

He feared to approach, but neither could he leave, for he saw his wife’s sleeping form, far away on the other side of the bed. Finally the man set himself in motion towards his bed. As he walked forward he raised his eyes to look at the demon’s face. He was taken aback, and for a moment gathered his wits and his courage. When he spoke his voice startled the silence of his familiar room. He said, You are a demon. I do not know why you have come, but you are not welcome here. This is my home, and the home of my family. You are in my bed. I command you to leave now, and do not return.

But the demon did not move. Now it too raised its eyes. Looking at the man it spoke, and its voice was cold. Slowly it said, No. This is my home, and the home of my family. This is my bed. You are an intruder and not welcome here. Leave now, and do not return.

Hearing the demon’s words the man felt estranged. He looked at the bed and the desk and the dresser. He looked at the demon, comfortable and at home lying in the bed beside his wife.

30

INNOCENZI

He felt a distance come between him and all of these things with which he was familiar. But now his eyes fell on the nightstand.

A framed photo of his smiling wife and children was illuminated in the faint light from outside. He stood straight and spoke, This is my family. To my wife I have been a loving husband, and to my children, a caring father. I am more beautiful to them than any stranger could be. They are smart and clever. When they look at you, they will know you for a Demon and reject you from our house. We command you to leave.

But again the demon did not move. Its tiny body lay rooted to the bed. It grinned a crooked grin and spoke from a mouth with ugly teeth. Gesturing to the photo, it said, This is my family. They are smart and they are cunning. They will love me because when they look at me they will see a caring father and a loving husband. I will not be a stranger.

And now the demon’s smile seemed straighter. And when the man looked up from the mouth that spoke the cold words, he saw not a tiny demon, but his own likeness lying in the bed.

Now the man trembled and shrank back from the voice that echoed, icy in his ear. But this repulsive voice also renewed his courage.

The man summoned his strength for a third time, and spoke in a voice loud and clear: You are a demon. And because you speak with a demon’s tongue no soul can be found in the timbre of your voice. With my voice I have soothed my children to sleep, and whispered secrets into the ear of my wife. I am smart, demon, and I know your game. What you do not know, you cannot have. These secret things I will never divulge to you. Leave my home now, and do not return. %XW WKH PDQ KDG KDUGO\ ÀQLVKHG ZKHQ KH KHDUG KLV RZQ IDtherly tone emerge from the demon’s mouth. It said,

THE PARABLE OF THE DEMON

My family will hear soul in the timbre of my voice, and my children will continue to sleep soundly.

And my wife, whose bed I now share, longs not for the secrets she already knows, but for those she has yet to hear.

And for a moment the man doubted the demon. But he could tell that these were no idle threats, for the demon’s eyes glinted. In them was the look of a man who believes in the intimacies between husband and wife.

And seeing this, a violence and an anger welled in the man. A hatred for this thing in his bed. A hatred for this image of himself.

But as he advanced, he saw that the demon was poised to engage him. Looking up from the bed, and looking down, their dark faces met. The man stood for a moment. It was with great effort that he ÀQDOO\ ZLWKGUHZ +H HDVHG KLV MDZ +H UHOD[HG KLV QHFN DQG EDFN He opened his heart to defeat. Now the man was scared and lost and alone. He was betrayed. He felt as if he were nothing at all.

3HUKDSV KH KLPVHOI ZDV D GHPRQ +H ZRXOG QRW ÀJKW WKLV WKLQJ but neither would he let it see his fear and embarrassment. He SDXVHG IRU D ORQJ WLPH EHIRUH VSHDNLQJ KLV ÀQDO ZRUGV +H VDLG You are a demon, and this will always be true.

You have my voice and my face. You are lying in my bed. My wife and children may come to love you, perhaps, more than they love me, for you are at least my equal. But where you match me in virtues, may you also share my fear and vulnerability.

For in replacing me, you have exposed yourself as replaceable. May this always haunt you.

And with this the man left his room. He left his home and his family.

He left that body, dreamless and malign, in the bed beside his wife.

He tore himself from what he had thought would always be his own.

When morning came, the demon spoke to his children. They smiled and laughed, for they loved their father’s voice. And when the demon kissed his wife, she kissed him back. She loved her husband’s lips and his smile. These and other things the man saw from outside. What the man could never know, however, was if the demon, now a man himself, would be haunted by a demon of his own.

31

Monogamy is a Social Construction DAVIS CARR Introduction According to religious leaders and conservative sex education teachers, monogamy is the natural state of human reproduction.

Monogamy is natural and any urges for someone who is not one’s husband or wife is unnatural, perhaps even sinful. I call this perspective the “Standard Narrative of Human Sexuality.” In this paper I will propose an alternative vision of human sexuality. Modern research into the lives of hunter-gatherer, pre-agricultural humans indicates that monogamy is simply not the norm. From an evolutionary perspective, monogamy would have been detrimental to our species’ survival. ,Q RUGHU WR H[SRVH PRQRJDP\ DV D VRFLDO FRQVWUXFWLRQ , ZLOO ÀUVW examine what I call the Standard Narrative, going over all of its major premises. I will then explain why monogamy is a social construction, drawing on Ian Hacking for support. Next, I will systematically discredit the Standard Narrative by drawing on scienWLÀF GDWD , ZLOO DUJXH WKDW WKH QDUUDWLYH LV PHUHO\ D SURMHFWLRQ RI modern values onto the past. I will then propose an alternative narrative, one that focuses on the egalitarianism and institutionalL]HG VKDULQJ WKDW GHÀQHG WKH KXQWHU JDWKHUHU SRSXODWLRQV RI RXU past. Finally, I will discuss why the turn to agriculture reduced the health and happiness of the Homo sapiens sapiens species. I will conclude by arguing that the Standard Narrative is dangerous because of the emotional and sexual dysfunction that it imposes on

33

society. Knowledge of our promiscuous past explains why modern humans have such a hard time remaining faithful to their spouses.

The Standard Narrative of Human Sexuality In the West, the story goes something like this: men and women, when choosing reproductive partners, “assess one another’s mate value from perspectives based upon their differing reproductive agendas/capacities.”1 The major premise of the Standard Narrative is that when the Homo sapiens sapiens species split off from its ancestors, its members formed life-long pair bonds that included exclusive sexual reproduction. According to this narrative, men look for signs of youth, fertility, health, DQG RI VH[XDO LQH[SHULHQFH DQG WKH WHQGHQF\ IRU ÀGHOLW\ :RPHQ look for signs of wealth and resources (or prospects for wealth and resources), social status, health, and likelihood of commitment.2 Women carry the heavier burden of reproduction, as they must expend more energy – through gestation period and lactation, for example – in order to successfully reproduce. Thus, women are more selective about who they reproduce with.3 Women can only have one child at a time. Men, on the other hand, carry no such reproductive burden. Their sperm “are easily produced and plentiful”4 so one man can easily impregnate many women in a short period. According to the Standard Narrative, this means it is natural for men to be promiscuous.

Females are far more careful than males about choosing mates because of their high level of parental involvement. The female is thus almost always the one who is “courted” by males. Females are seen as a valuable “resource,”5 and are the object of male competition. Because natural selection favours males that succeed in competition they tend to be larger and more aggressive than females. 6 According to this logic, the man’s top priority is his wife’s VH[XDO ÀGHOLW\ VR DV WR HQVXUH KLV SDWHUQLW\ RI WKHLU FKLOGUHQ ZKLOH having short-term sexual relations with other women in order to improve his chances of reproductive success. The female will be concerned with maintaining access to the male’s resources and his protection of her children. She will be especially sensitive to any signs of emotional C. Ryan & C. Jethá, Sex at Dawn: the Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality (New York: Harper Collins, 2010), 7.

2 Ibid.

3 David P. Barash and Judith E. Lipton, The Myth of Monogamy, (New York: W.H. Free1

man and Company, 2001), 17.

4 Ryan & Jethá, Sex at Dawn, 8.

5 Barash and Lipton, The Myth of Monogamy, 17.

6 Ibid.

CARR

34

intimacy with other females, as they could be indications that she will lose his resources. Around ovulation she will be especially inclined to KDYH D ´TXLFN à LQJ ZLWK D PDQ JHQHWLFDOO\ VXSHULRU WR KHU KXVEDQG ¾7 Problematic Assumptions of the Standard Narrative

7KH 6WDQGDUG 1DUUDWLYH UHĂ HFWV WKH XQFRQVFLRXV ELDVHV RI WKH Western world. It expresses a proprietary version of history, one that reduces human sexuality to an exchange of goods and services. This economic approach dictates that humans are naturally monogamous.

Furthermore, the social organization dictated by religion for the past millennia is founded on a supposedly natural basis: “The glue holding the standard narrative together is the assumption that to marry and to mate have universally applicable meanings.�8 However, some modern research indicates that humans are not naturally monogamous.

When we discuss what is “natural� for humans, we are referring to the ways that our ancestors behaved and the ways that evolution has shaped us to behave. If we look deeper into the behaviour of prehistoric humans, monogamy appears less natural and more constructed.

Hacking provides insight into understanding monogamy as a social construct. In The Social Construction of What, he outlines some basic premises for determining if something is a social construct.

The fundamental condition of a social construct is: “(0) In the present state of affairs, X is taken for granted; X appears to be inevitable.�9 Furthermore, social constructionists tend to hold that: (1) X need not had existed, or need not be at all as it is. X, or X as it is at present, is not determined by the nature of things; it is not inevitable.

Very often they go further, and urge that: (2) X is quite bad as it is.

(3) We would be much better off if X were done away with, or at least radically transformed.10 0RQRJDP\ ÀWV DOO RI WKHVH SUHPLVHV EXW PRVW LPSRUWDQWO\ LW ÀWV SUHPLVH )XUWKHUPRUH LW DOVR ÀWV SUHPLVH HVSHFLDOO\ ZKHQ RQH

7 8

Ryan & JethĂĄ, Sex at Dawn, 8.

Ibid., 137.

Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What (New York: Harvard University Press, 2000), 12.

10 Ibid., 6.

9

MONOGAMY IS A SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION

considers the effect agriculture has had on human health and society, discussed below.

Based on these terms I will argue that monogamy is a social construction, and that the arguments of the Standard Narrative are simply a projection of modern human reproductive values.

In the following pages, I will systematically go through and refute the arguments made by those who believe monogamy to be the natural state of our species.

Chimps vs Bonobos Chimpanzees have long been touted as our “closest living relative.”11 They are our dangerous and aggressive cousins, organized into strict hierarchies, which are most evident during times of meat sharing. They are the only primates apart from humans known to go to war with one another. However, we have another cousin: bonobos. Bonobo DNA differs from humans by about 1.6%.12 Both chimps and bonobos are highly intelligent, highly social creatures, with one major difference: bonobos have a “turbocharged sexuality utterly divorced from reproduction.”13 This hypersexuality creates cooperation both between males and females and amongst males. It also creates a higher level of reproductive success.

Despite being just as closely related to humans as chimps, bonobos are almost always ignored when we look to primates for explanations of human behaviour. Bonobos are especially ignored when humans search for clues for our sexual habits. As Ryan and Jethá note, when looking at “the origins of human behavior, we look to chimps and bonobos for important clues: language, tool use, political alliances, war, reconciliation, altruism …. But when it comes to sex, we prudishly turn away from these models to the distinctly related, antisocial, low I.Q. but monogamous gibbons.”14 This exclusion of the bonobo problematizes the Standard Narrative, which explains why it has primarily been ignored. Bonobos are peaceful, egalitarian, and promiscuous – bad news for those trying to prove humans are naturally peaceful, egalitarian, and monogamous.

Matt Ridley, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature (Toronto: Maxwell MacMillan Canada, 1993), 16.

11

Ryan & Jethá, Sex at Dawn, 62.

Ibid., 63.

14 Ibid., 246.

12 13

35

CARR

36

Sperm Competition Natural selection is the process by which certain traits are eliminated from the gene pool. It “targets the relevant organs and systems for adaptation.â€?15 Competition between animals occurs ZKHQ WKH\ Ă€JKW RYHU UHVRXUFHV LQ RUGHU WR UHSURGXFH 6SHUP FRPSHtition is the theory that natural selection occurs on the cellular level – the sperm from one male literally competes with that of other males.

The most straightforward indication of this competition is the amount of sperm any animal expels in its ejaculate. Apes who have steady access to sex (such as male gorillas, who have harems of females) have smaller, sometimes internal testicles and produce lower concentrations of sperm. Male apes living in multi-male societal organization (such as chimps, bonobos, and humans) have larger external testes.16 The small testicles of gorillas can be attributed to the fact that they only mate once per reproductive cycle. Male gorillas FRPSHWH ZLWK RWKHU PDOHV RQ D QRQ VH[XDO SK\VLFDO OHYHO WKH\ ÀJKW one another for dominance over females. Apes living in multi-male groups, however, need to compete at a cellular level, because they all have equal access to females. As a result, aggression between males is much lower, because they are not overtly competing for females. This allows for higher rates of cooperation and a non-stressful social dynamic. Gorillas develop muscles, while bonobos develop friendship.

Variation in penis size and shape is another expression of genetic monogamy. The average gorilla penis, for example, is one inch long because of his one-mate-per-reproductive-cycle style of mating. Other more promiscuous species have developed intriguing methods of male competition for mating rights.

One of these methods is forming a copulatory plug, blocking the entrance of any subsequent sperm into the female’s cervical cavity.17 Within species with such a capability, males have penises with elaborate hooks on the end to pull out any previous male’s plug.18 Sperm Competition in Human Males Modern man is unique among apes: “Adult male humans KDYH WKH ORQJHVW WKLFNHVW DQG PRVW Ă H[LEOH SHQLVHVÂľ FRPSDUHG 15 16

Ibid., 223.

Ibid., 220.

17 18

Ibid, 234.

Ibid.

MONOGAMY IS A SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION

to any other primate.19 Human adult males also have some of the largest testicles compared to their body size.20 They ejaculate in any from three to nine bursts.21 These split ejaculates have a very imporWDQW HYROXWLRQDU\ IXQFWLRQ WKH Ă€UVW VSXUW ´FRQWDLQV FKHPLFDOV WKDW protect against various kinds of chemical attack.â€?22 What kind of chemical attack? The kind that comes from the later spurts, which “contain a spermicidal substance that slows the advance of any latecomers.â€?23 7KXV HMDFXODWH IXOĂ€OOV D GXDO SXUSRVH WR LPSUHJQDWH the woman and also to destroy any sperm from competing males.

The shape of the human penis seems to greatly increase the likelihood of fertilization. The human penis is a rarity, as it is the only SULPDWH SHQLV WR EH HTXLSSHG ZLWK Ă DUHG JODQGV DW WKH FRURQDO ULGJH The repeated thrusting motion characteristic of human intercourse “creates a vacuum in the female’s reproductive tract. This vacuum pulls any previously deposited semen away from the ovum, thus aiding the sperm about to be sent into action.â€?24 Human males, unlike human females, need a period of rest after their orgasm. This incongruity contributes to competition among males because it means that the female is still available for mating after having mated with one partner.

Women are polyorgasmic: able to continue mating long after orgasm.

It is not only males who participate in sperm competition. For females, sperm competition takes place at a preconscious level. The female body has been expertly designed to fend off unwanted pregnancy: “Only one in 14 million ejaculated human sperm even reach the oviduct.â€?25 The construction of the reproductive organs facilitates WKH Ă€OWHULQJ RI SRWHQWLDOO\ XQZDQWHG VSHUP 26 The cervical opening tends to be highly acidic and thus harmful to sperm. The alkaline pH of semen protects the spermatozoa, but the protection is shortlived.27 Female orgasm has been known to change the acidity level in ways that favour the sperm that arrive along with the orgasm.28 It appears that the female reproductive system is “capable of making subtle judgements based upon chemical signature of different men’s sperm cell.â€?29 Female bodies therefore selectively choose which sperm to accept and which to eliminate. The body literally chooses the best-suited mate. This debunks the 19 20 21 22 23

Ibid.

Ridley, The Red Queen, 160.

Ibid., 157.

Ryan & JethĂĄ, Sex at Dawn, 228.

Ibid.

24 25 26 27 28

Ibid., 235.

Ibid., 264.

Ibid., 265-6.

Ibid., 266.

Ibid., 267.

37

CARR

38

Standard Narrative myth that “high status males� are the best pick for females across the board – while a female may consciously seek a high status male, her body might choose the sperm of another.

Sperm Competition and Sexual Promiscuity If the human body had been designed by evolution to promote monogamy then we would look incredibly different. For one, the male:female size ratio would be almost equal, as it is in gibbons.30 Instead, men are roughly 10 to 20% larger than women.31 As well, the sizes of testicles and penises would be dramatically smaller, like the gorilla. Finally, if human beings were designed to only have sex with one other member of the species, why is it that female and male sexuality are so dramatically opposed to one another? When it comes to sex, men are sprinters: they race WR WKH ÀQLVK OLQH DQG WKHQ ORVH LQWHUHVW LQ WKH JDPH :RPHQ RQ the other hand, are marathon runners: they remain sexually available long after orgasm. Clearly monogamy does not meet the needs of our evolutionary design. Casual promiscuity, however, does.

I have shown that the Standard Narrative is based on IDXOW\ VFLHQWLĂ€F GDWD ,Q WKH IROORZLQJ VHFWLRQ , ZLOO DUJXH WKDW OLIH for hunter-gatherers, far from being “nasty, brutish, and shortâ€? was actually far healthier than agricultural life. Hunter-gatherer lives revolved around the community, sharing food, child-rearing, and – most importantly – sex. Monogamy would have been detrimental WR RXU VSHFLHV¡ VXUYLYDO EHFDXVH LW ZRXOG KDYH SURPRWHG VHOĂ€VK DQG exclusionary behaviour in a social environment centered on sharing.

Life, Prehistory: Hunter-Gathers Modern research has yielded much information on the lives of hunter-gatherer populations. Fossil remnants are particularly interesting, but recently scientists have turned to modern hunter-gatherer societies in order to make educated guesses about prehistoric life.

The Hadza are a group of hunter-gatherers living in Tanzania. While these modern foragers are not exactly representative of prehistoric humans they nonetheless provide models for the lives of our ancestors.

29 30

Ibid., 264.

Ridley, The Red Queen, 159.

31

Ibid., 160.

MONOGAMY IS A SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION

Humans lived in hunter-gatherer populations for many thousands of years before the advent of agriculture. The vast majority of time since the genus Homo arose two million years ago has been spent in nomadic hunter-gatherer societies.32 The KXQWHU JDWKHUHU¡V DELOLW\ WR VLPSO\ ZDON DZD\ IURP FRQà LFW H[SODLQV WKH ORZ OHYHOV RI LQWHU JURXS FRQà LFW DQG YLUWXDO ODFN RI warfare. There were endless amounts of space that hunter-gatherers could use in the days before civilizations. Their nomadic inclination is seen in the present day in societies across the world.

Prehistoric human populations doubled every 250 000 years.33 Basic human biology made rapid population growth in a foraging context extremely unlikely, if not impossible.34 After all, women rarely conceive while breastfeeding, and without animal milk to substitute for their own, hunter-gatherer women would have breastIHG IRU ÀYH RU VL[ \HDUV ,Q DGGLWLRQ WKH QRPDGLF QDWXUH RI KXQWer-gatherer life would have made carrying more than one child an unreasonable burden. Thus, large populations of hunter-gatherers were simply impossible. Hunter-gatherers did not deplete natural resources to the same extent that their agricultural brothers did, allowing their ecosystems to remain abundant and rich. In addition, low population density would have limited the risk of infectious disease.

Health and Quality of Life This rich and abundant environment allowed for huntergatherers to have a healthy and high quality life. Although huntergatherers did not preserve food, it appears that they did not suffer from starvation: “studies of prehistoric human bones and teeth show ancient human life was marked by episodic fasts and feasts, but prolonged periods of starvation were rare.�35 Hunter-gatherers were incredibly healthy compared to agricultural humans because they had an institutionalized system for the sharing of food. Food sharing was the key to the hunter-gatherer’s success as a species.

When the tribe worked together to get food it meant that nobody went hungry. It promoted pragmatic altruism, since when a member had a successful hunt he was inclined to share his food, Michael Finkel, The Hadza, from ngm. nationalgeographic.com (2009), 4.

33 Ryan & JethĂĄ, Sex at Dawn, 156.

32

34 35

Ibid., 159.

Ibid., 173.

39

CARR

40

knowing that when he was less successful, somebody else would feed him. Hunter-gatherers did not share food because they were somehow “nobler” than modern humans. Sharing just made sense: “Universal, culturally imposed sharing was simply the most effective way for our highly social species to minimize risk.”36 Food sharing meant that all members of the tribe were fed and also led to a more communal type of living. Chores and childrearing were other types of shared duties. Sharing the chores meant more leisure time, but also meant innovation: two heads are better than one, and this type of social organization could be the reason why humans have such a high level of intelligence. Brain scans of individuals participating in the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma show that “the brain responded most energetically to acts of cooperation.”37 The area of the brain that responds to desserts, pretty faces, money, and cocaine reacted in response to acts of cooperation. This proves that cooperation and egalitarianism is natural and healthy for our species.

The best way to ensure survival of offspring was communal childcare. If a group shares cooking and cleaning duties, why not share childcare? Hunter-gatherer childcare is echoed in the behaviour of the Hadza today: “There was a bevy of children in the camp, with the resident grandmother, a tiny, cheerful lady named Nsalu, running a sort of day care while the adults were in the bush.

Except for breast-feeding infants it was hard to determine which kids belonged to which parents.”38 Hunter-gatherers are invested in the survival of all the children in the group, not just their own.

The Standard Narrative insists that men are very concerned with knowing which child is theirs so that they do not have to waste resources on a child that is not related to them. However, uncertain paternity would have guaranteed that all men be equally invested in the survival of every child of the group, therefore dramatically increasing the likelihood of each child’s survival to reproductive age.

Casually Promiscuous Sexuality Uncertain paternity arises out of women having sex with different men. After men orgasm they need a recovery period, but 36 37 38

Ibid., 9.

Ibid., 168.

Finkel, The Hadza, 5.

Jared Diamond, “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race,” in Discover Magazine (1987) 39

MONOGAMY IS A SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION

women can go on to have multiple orgasms and stay at a potentially orgasmic level of sensation for hours after intercourse. Why shouldn’t prehistoric woman have had more sex after she was done with one man, especially if there were others, ready and willing nearby?

Casual promiscuity had a very important evolutionary basis: communalism and egalitarianism. As mentioned earlier, in a hunter-gatherer society, everything is shared: food, children, and yes, even sex. Bonobos are far more peaceful and sociable than chimpanzees. What is the difference? Bonobos engage in casual promiscuous sexuality, which enhances group cooperation. In comPXQDO VRFLHWLHV VKDULQJ LV HYHU\WKLQJ +RDUGLQJ DQG VHOÀVKQHVV DUH ORRNHG GRZQ XSRQ DV VKDPHIXO -HDORXV\ DQG LQ ÀJKWLQJ FDQ OHDG to the destruction of the group, who depend on cooperation for survival. Sexual jealousy, as shown by soap operas and high-school dramas, is particularly destructive. However, a good way to avoid such destructive jealousy is to share everything including – sex.

Casual promiscuity would have created a deep bond of cooperation between members of a tribe, a bond that was vital for survival.

What Went Wrong: Why Agriculture Ruined Everything It appears that hunter-gatherers were relatively happy and healthy, existing in nomadic, sparsely populated groups that engaged in casual sexual relations with other members of the group. So how did we arrive at where we are today, living in mega-cities with billions of other individuals, trying desperately to save marriages broken by adultery and sexual dissatisfaction?

About 10 000 years ago, people began to domesticate plants and animals, exchanging a nomadic lifestyle for a more sedentary one. This turn to agriculture is what Jared Diamond calls “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race.�39 This is because, after the turn to agriculture, humans had less nutrition, were more susceptible to disease, lived in higher populations, and were more prone to interpersonal violence.

Bone analyses of eight hundred skeletons from the Dickson Mounds in the lower Illinois Valley reveal the change in health status that accompanied the shift from foraging to farming around 1200 AD:40 the farmers’ remains show a 50% increase in chronic malnutrition, three times the incidence of infectious disease as

41

CARR

42

indicated by bone lesions, evidence of increased infant mortality, delayed skeletal growth in adults, a fourfold increase in ironGHÀFLHQF\ DQHPLD DQG ´DQ LQFUHDVH LQ GHJHQHUDWLYH FRQGLWLRQV RI WKH VSLQH SUREDEO\ UHà HFWLQJ D ORW RI KDUG SK\VLFDO ODERU ¾ 41 The difference in nutrition levels can be explained by a variety of causes. Hunter-gatherers, being nomadic and therefore XQFRQÀQHG DQG DEOH WR WUDYHO WR ÀQG QXWULWLRXV IRRG KDG D PRUH varied diet. On the other hand, farmers ate what they grew: mainly carbohydrates and starches such as wheat, rice, and corn.42 Farmers were also more likely to suffer from periods of starvation if a crop failed. Hunter-gatherers could carry the burden of an unsuccessful hunt because they had other members of the tribe to feed them. Farmers, who lived in highly individualized communities, did not receive the same generosity from their neighbours.

Agriculture brought with it something humanity had never encountered before: personal wealth. It also, however, allowed the DPDVVLQJ RI JUHDW DPRXQWV RI SHUVRQDO UHVRXUFHV DQG SURÀW FUHDWLQJ IRU WKH ÀUVW WLPH HYHU FODVV GLYLVLRQV DPRQJ KXPDQV $QG DSDUW IURP class divisions, there were also gender inequalities: the role of women in agricultural society became one that was intensely focused on the home and hearth. Rather than being an equally reliable source of sustenance, women were relegated to childrearing while men plowed WKH ÀHOGV 7KH SK\VLFDO VWUHQJWK HQMR\HG E\ PHQ JDYH WKHP WKH PHDQV WR SURGXFH IRRG ZKLOH ZRPHQ ZHUH FRQÀQHG ZLWKLQ D VSHFLÀF GRmestic role. Men also became more and more interested in paternity: they would not want to waste resources on a child that was not their own. This assignment of women to the home and intense focus on paternity sets the grounds for the gender inequality we see today.

Conclusion Monogamy is a social construction and the result of a turn to agriculture 10 000 years ago. Humans have lived in hunter-gatherer societies for most of their time on earth. The history of agricultural civilization is a mere fraction of the history of our species.

While humans have proved highly adaptable, our instinctual and 40 41

Ibid.

Ibid.

42

Ibid.

MONOGAMY IS A SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION

biological behaviour is still rooted in a past where the communal and systematic sharing of everything ensured the survival of our species.

It is likely that hunter-gatherer populations were not monogamous.

Instead, they practiced a kind of communal, casually promiscuous sexual behaviour that promoted group bonding and sharing of resources. Hoarding of food and exclusive or jealous sexual relations with another individual would have been shameful in such a society.

The Standard Narrative of human sexuality is systemDWLFDOO\ XQGRQH E\ PRGHUQ VFLHQWLÀF UHVHDUFK DQG DQWKURSRORJLFDO investigations of non-agricultural societies. These societies offer a glimpse into the past, as well as some illuminating information on our own behaviour. Humans have the fantastic ability to adapt to whatever social conditions they are born into. In a society where one is raised by one mother and one father, it is natural for one WR DVVXPH WKDW WKLV LV WKH VWDQGDUG VRFLDO FRQÀJXUDWLRQ ,Q WRGD\¡V society, monogamy is often universally accepted as being natural.

2QFH RQH LQYHVWLJDWHV WKH VFLHQWLĂ€F GDWD DYDLODEOH LW DSSHDUV WKDW this is far from the case. Thus, monogamy is a social construction.

43

Trollkraft Moss roofs and unused telephone booths This is the land where I live.

The plush trees are pruned To grow like goblins Trolls in the trunks Growing up Creatures in the wood Faces in ice And the fabled rule of thrice.

This is the land of mythical inhabitation Where the hills come alive Not with the sound of music, But with folk creation.

A German girl on the train Shows me a letter from her copain, A newspaper clipping which states: Der Wald lebt ‘Tis magic, magic that hath ravish’d All of us; Not only Doctor Faustus This is the land where I live.

But just for now And not for ever.

- ANDREA BENSON

Untitled It was the sound of things – the shrill creak of an opening door rusting at the hinge, the hollow clang of a loner making breakfast and far down the road the slowing rhythmic clop of the winning race horse coming gradually to stop – that’s what attracted me, all these years, GDUOLQJ ZKDW¡V EHHQ UHSOD\LQJ LQ RXU ÀFNOH HDUV And now you will leave me? immobile, gumming mush, what I’ve done to get here? not much. Still, you stood by me until this moment, listening with me, HDUV WR WKH à RRU IRU ² JORU\¡V WUXPSHWLQJ FDGHQFH the last clap of roaring applause, the smack of parting lips from a celebratory kiss that never came, never came. And I’m sorry, I know you wanted a baby and I said it was coming – only because, like from the other end of a distant hallway, I could practically hear it crawling towards us – from your horrid labour pains and moans, the baby’s birthed cries and sobs out from in you and at last our own laughs of glee at the sight of our new born baby – as if it was real. I could feel it happening at the stroke of day’s end but it never came, never came.

- NATHAN BURLEY

Saying: Meaning(’s) Impossiblity The Place of the Unspeakable in Hegel’s Account of Consciousness AARON SHENKMAN

I

Q WKH RSHQLQJ SDUDJUDSKV RI WKH ÀUVW FKDSWHU LQ WKH Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel investigates how it is we relate to the sensible world. As he examines the possibility of an immediate relationship with the objects that surround us, he discovers that any experience of a particular moment is always caught up in time, and thus in relation to the rest of the world. It is impossible to speak of the particular ‘this’ without referring to it in universal terms. This structure is necessarily tied to language, since it has everything to do with the ability to say what one means. At this moment in Hegel’s thought, I would like to argue that Sense-Certainty’s1 sublation into universality carries with it a certain traumatic residue. At every moment, whenever one tries to articulate a given moment, one’s inability to do justice to the particularity is apparent not only through the philosophical structure laid out in the chapter, but also in one’s voice.

+HJHO EHJLQV WKH ÀUVW FKDSWHU RI WKH Phenomenology by examining how it is that we relate to the world around us. His starting point is what he claims to be the most straightforward and reasonable: that our knowledge of the world is “a knowledge of the

47

immediate or of what simply is.�2 Indeed, what could be more comprehensible than saying that a tree is that tree, distinct from others, and that I know this because it is there, plain for all to see? When I say ‘tree,’ inferring that tree there, there is an immediate correlation between what I am saying and that particular tree. While Hegel admits that this “appears to be the truest knowledge; for it has not yet omitted anything from the object, but has the object in its perfect entirety,� it in fact “proves itself to be the most abstract and poorest truth.�3 But how can this be the case? How is it that in knowing that particular tree, I actually do not know it? Hegel responds by considering the actual experience of encountering a tree.

In experiencing a tree, Hegel points out that there are two factors at play: a “Hereâ€? and a “Now.â€?4 That is to say, that tree is only that WUHH LQVRIDU DV LW H[LVWV LQ D VSHFLĂ€F SODFH DQG GXULQJ D VSHFLĂ€F WLPH +RZHYHU WKLV VWUXFWXUH RI VSDFH DQG WLPH ODFNV WKH VROLGity required to maintain an immediate relationship with the world.

For example, if we were to assert that “Now is Night,â€? but were to reconsider such a statement the next day, it is no longer true: “if now, this noon, we look again at the ‌ truth we shall have to say that it has become stale.â€?5 To understand things through the temporal category of the Now is to be subject to relation and change. The Now was night, but now, the next day, it is noon. But even this statement, that now the Now is noon, is equally subject to change, for in a few hours it will once again become night.

A similar process holds true for the Here: “’Here’ is, e.g., the tree. If I turn around, this truth has vanished and is converted into its opposite: ‘No tree is here, but a house instead.’�6 The Here that contained the tree no longer has the same content, since it has a house. Thus, when one attempts to understand the world immediately through the categories of Here (space) and Now (time), one’s experience of the world falls short of immediacy, since as soon as one gestures towards this tree here, he actually points towards the capacity for a tree to be experienced at all. These structures, which were presumed to be particular and instant, are in fact the opposite.

6HQVH &HUWDLQW\ UHIHUV WR WKH ÀUVW FKDSWHU of the Phenomenology. It represents the argument that my experience of the world is immediate to me.

2 G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller 1

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 58.

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid., 60.

5 Ibid.

6 Ibid., 60-61.

SHENKMAN

48

The Here and Now are universal categories that allow the world to make sense, but how are they themselves to be understood?

Hegel notes that “the Now that is Night is preserved, i.e. it is treated as what it professes to be, as something that is; but it proves itself to be, on the contrary, something that is not.”7 When the Now changes from day to night and back again, the Now maintains itself, despite the change in content; it is the common factor in both instances. However, it does not maintain itself as a positive, identiÀDEOH PRPHQW 2QH FDQQRW VD\ ¶that is the Now.’ Rather, it is, as we saw above, ‘something that is not,’ it is a place of negation. It is “neither This nor That, a not-This, and is with equal indifference.

This as well as That – such a thing we call a universal.”8 Two things are made apparent here. First of all, the universal is the negation of particularity, and as such is not anything in particular. However, and this is the second point, it is what allows us to experience anything at all. The tree is not a tree unless it exists Here and Now. In other words, the particular cannot be the particular without the universal, but at the same time through the universal it cannot be expressed as D SDUWLFXODU +HUH LV WKH ÀUVW KLQW RI D OLQJHULQJ WUDXma in Hegel’s early chapters (we will return to this in a moment).

Not even the self, that which one would presumably hold to be the most immediate and personal, escapes this mediating structure. To say that ‘this is me’ assumes the same conception of knowledge that we saw earlier. But certainly we could assert that our own selves are what are most obvious and immediate to ourselves! In Hegel’s words “consciousness, for its part, is in this certainty only as a pure ‘I’; or I am in it only as a pure ‘This.’”9 We are immediately transparent to ourselves, insofar as we are a graspable and understandable ‘This.’10 However, this falls into the same problem that we saw before. In any attempt to pick out and sustain a particular moment, one necessarily refers to it through universal terms, and what was thought to be the most immediate and simple of structures has thus turned out to be constantly mediated. The belief that “the

Ibid., 60.

Ibid.

9 Ibid., 58.

10 Such a moment can be found in Descartes. As he says ‘I think, therefore I 7 8

am’ the thinking substance is immediately available to itself. As soon as it thinks itself, it is able to grasp itself without any form of mediation.

11 Ibid.

SAYING: MEANING(’S) IMPOSSIBILITY

thing is, and it is, merely because it is,â€?11 LV LQVXIĂ€FLHQW IRU WUHDWLQJ each moment, since it overlooks the universal structures of which each moment is a part. For example, the ‘I’ is not this particular ‘I’, but an ‘I’ “whose seeing is neither a seeing of the tree nor of this house, but is a simple seeing which, though mediated by the negation of this house, etc., is all the same simple and indifferent to whatever happens in it ‌. The ‘I’ is merely universal like ‘Now,’ ‘Here,’ or ‘This’ in general.â€?12 The ‘I’ is therefore something that mediates reality through experience so that it can be understood.

Therefore, the truth of Sense-Certainty, which claimed to have an immediate relationship to the world, turns out to be the opposite.

All of this, while sublating each particular moment into the universal, is not able to speak to each moment’s particularity.13 The structure of reality is both spatial and temporal, and this is UHĂ HFWHG LQ ODQJXDJH ,Q RUGHU WR VD\ DQ\WKLQJ RQH WDNHV UHFRXUVH in universal terms, such as Here and Now, but remains unable to say what one means.14 The experience that one attempts to express is only expressible due to these universal terms. In the enunciation of ‘tree,’ the particular tree that was meant goes unsaid. This is not limited to vocal language, and even gestures are caught up in this sublation. If one points to a tree and in that gesture says that ‘this, Here and Now, is the tree I am talking about,’ they will refer to it in equally universal terms as in vocal language: “The Now is pointed to, this Now. ‘Now’ – it has already ceased to be in the act of pointing to it.â€?15 The Now that one indicates has always already become a ‘Then,’ it is in the past as soon as it is enunciated or gestured toward. Hegel concludes, therefore, that “the Now is just this: to be no more just when it is.â€?16 At each moment, the Now is not. It has already become ‘not now but earlier.’ Consider this in relation to the tree. Whenever one tries to indicate this tree it is no longer this tree, but a tree that was in that position thirty seconds ago. The particular moments that are necessarily contained in language are, just like the Now that we try to pin down by pointing at

Ibid., 62.

Indeed, Hegel admits that “it is reasonDEOH WKDW WKH >VFLHQWLĂ€F@ GHPDQG VKRXOG VD\ which ‘this thing,’ or which ‘this particular man’ is meant,â€? but concludes that “it is 12 13

impossible to say this� (Ibid.).

14 Ibid., §103.

15 Ibid., 63.

16 Ibid.

49

SHENKMAN

50

it, ‘no more just when they are.’ Every act of language, therefore, is an enunciation of the sheer impossibility of meaning, since the impossibility of the particular is contained in every universal utterance.

It is here that we can understand the traumatic structure of language.17 As we have seen, just because one can only speak using universal categories, this does not mean that the particular which is meant is completely ignored or overcome by language, but remains a part of its very utterance. The particular lingers in language as precisely that which one attempts to capture in speech, but eludes expression at every moment.18 What is meant exceeds language in that it is always a part of it but is what cannot be expressed. Consequently, language in its very utterance exceeds itself, and thus exists in a traumatic structure that lurks in its impossibility in every moment. We can then see Hegel’s claim that “it is just not possible for us ever to say, or express in words, a sensuous being that we mean�19 does not exclude the meant from language but actually includes it in its negativity.

The inclusion of particularity in its impossibility plays an important role in Hegel’s understanding of the nature of the self and how he is going to solve this issue in language. Giorgio Agamben notes that the meant does not simply lurk in language as an unwanted moment, but rather that “language guards the unspeakable by speaking it, that is, by grasping it in its negativity.â€?20 While language may be unable to say what it means, this very structure contains the possibility of reconciliation within it from the beginning. Take, for example, Hegel’s discussion of the Unhappy Consciousness.21 Here we have an instance where the particularity and XQLYHUVDOLW\ RI WKH ZRUOG DUH LQ FRQĂ LFW +RZHYHU WKLV FRQĂ LFW does not abandon one in favour of the other, but through a dialectic involving both WKH VHOI LV DEOH WR ´H[SHULHQFH WKH MR\ RI Ă€QGLQJ itself ‌ and becomes aware of the reconciliation of its individuality with the universal.â€?22 In its moment of reconciliation, Unhappy Consciousness is able to recognize the relationship the particular has to the universal and vice versa, and from this recognition

It is important to point out here that the use of language in this paper insists on the act of language (i.e. communication) as opposed to a linguistic system.

18 The German word for moment – Augenblick – is helpful in unpacking what happens here. Literally translated as ‘in 17

the blink of an eye,’ Augenblick is only experienced in one’s inability to experience it, since in blinking one has already missed it. This is the very structure at play in the relation between the particular and the universal. Universal speech experiences the particular in its impossibility, but does

SAYING: MEANING(’S) IMPOSSIBILITY

becomes ‘Joyful Consciousness,’ insofar as it has found itself in itself. Hegel’s dialectic, therefore, is capable of doing justice to both the particular and the universal and the fact that language maintains both in its structure is crucial for any future reconciliation.

Agamben has more to say about this issue in regards to the self and to time. As we saw, the self is just as universal as the Here and Now. Therefore, whenever we attempt to assert ourselves, we are unable to do so in language without referring to our impossibility instead of our particular self in the world. Agamben refers to this as ‘taking the This,’ as attempting at every moment to say that this is a tree, but constantly falling short. However, he does hint at the possibility of overcoming this problem. He writes that “it is possible to ‘take the This· RQO\ LI RQH FRPHV WR UHDOL]H WKDW WKH VLJQLÀFDQFH RI the This is, in reality, a Not-this that it contains; that is, an essential negativity.”23 By recognizing the traumatic structure of language as traumatic, one is able to ‘take the This’ in its negativity. Furthermore, consider Agamben’s discussion of ‘taking the This’ in relation to time: “precisely inasmuch as it is generated in the act of utterance [that is to say, language], the present … is necessarily also marked by negativity,” and therefore “[it] is not something simple, but instead, it guards within itself the secret power of the negative.”24 That is, even insofar as the particular is negated it does not disappear, but is maintained in its negativity.25 This allows it to still be present in WKH ÀQDO VWDJH RI WKH Phenomenology and therefore a part of Hegel’s ÀQDO XQGHUVWDQGLQJ RI WKH VWUXFWXUH RI SKLORVRSK\ 1HLWKHU VLGH RI the dialectic (here understood as the particular and the universal) has any more importance than the other, but it is in their interplay that the truth of Hegel’s position can be properly understood.

Indeed, as we have seen, to say ‘this is Now’ is to actually say the impossibility of any particular now. However, Agamben addresses that this negative structure contains within it the possibility for reconciliation, since time (the Now) contains within it what it is trying to say, but always falls short of

nevertheless experience it (in its exceeding).

19 Ibid., 60.

20 Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death, trans. Karen E. Pinkus with Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1991), 13.

Unhappy Consciousness is a chapter of the Phenomenology that examines a philoVRSKLF VWDJH ZKHUH WKH SDUWLFXODU ÀQGV LWVHOI incapable of living up to the universal, and is thus unhappy.

22 Hegel, Phenomenology, 128.

21

51

52

expression. This reconciliation is not the ability to say what one means, but rather the ability to recognize the structure of language and the world, and therefore move the lingering residue of particularity from the backdrop into the foreground and make it an explicit part of the dialectic. With this in mind, any future attempts to enter into the Phenomenology’s later chapters can now attend to the interplay between particularity and universality without eclipsing either and therefore rendering Hegel’s system inert.

As such, it is only through proper attention to both sides of the GLDOHFWLF WKDW WKH ÀQDO FKDSWHU RI $EVROXWH .QRZLQJ FDQ EHJLQ to be understood and brought into a contemporary philosophical dialogue and that any conception of freedom is truly possible.

23 24 25

Agamben, Language and Death, 14.

Ibid., 36.

This points directly toward the German

verb aufheben, that is found throughout all of Hegel’s texts. The verb has a threefold meaning – to lift up, to hold close, and to cancel.

Reading Benjamin in Translation NICK STARK

H

ow does one read a translated essay about the impossibility of translation? Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator” poses this question, and my own task here is to struggle with it. Since Benjamin originally composed his essay in German, while I am reading its English translation, I intend to apply Benjamin’s own theory of translation to Harry Zohn’s translation of “The Task of the Translator.” My investigation will be guided by one of philosopher Paul de Man’s public lectures and an academic article by Betsy Flèche, since these scholars are also engaging with the impossibility of translation in their interpretations of Benjamin’s text. ‘Reading’ Benjamin is not as simple as that word might suggest; rather, it requires an attentiveness that matches Benjamin’s complexity of thought.

Giving this attention, I am confronted with this truth: in order to begin my project, I must already have read Benjamin in translation. That is to say, the problems that concern translation only come to light in my reading of the translation. To what extent can I ‘trust’ a translation? Though I shall soon come to answer that question about this particular text, the question shall remain as I read in the future: how can I be sure that what I read in translation is intended by the author? Or is the translation of intention even what I seek? I hope to learn this too from Benjamin’s essay.

But is this task just as impossible as the task of the translator? *

*

*

STARK

54

My reading of Benjamin’s essay begins with a stalemate as seemingly impassable as my original methodological problem. At the outset of his text, Benjamin declares that I, the reader, am of no import to him: “consideration of the receiver never proves fruitful.”1 The premise that “the translation is not intended for the reader who cannot read the original” is the foundation of Benjamin’s essay: he is arguing that translation of an original work should not occur for the sake of an audience.2 Benjamin’s assertion places the reader at a far remove from the translation. Why should the reader be so divorced from the translation? In asking this, I am by implication asking what translation is. Benjamin has an enigmatically simple answer: “translation is a mode.”3 Flèche notes that Zohn has translated the German Form as mode, but in her opinion, ‘form’ is perhaps more clear.4 To say that translation is a form of language is to show that it is a way of expressing meaning in its own terms.

In order to understand this form as such, Benjamin urges the reader “to go back to the original, for that contains the law governing the translation: its translatability.”5 Clearly, translation does not take place in spite of the original, but for and because of it.

What is translatability? Benjamin declares that it is “an esVHQWLDO TXDOLW\ RI FHUWDLQ ZRUNV « >LQ ZKLFK@ D VSHFLÀF VLJQLÀFDQFH inherent in the original manifests itself.”6 Unfortunately, this formuODWLRQ LV WRR LQGHÀQLWH WR TXDOLI\ DV DQ\ NLQG RI PHDQLQJIXO DQVZHU Rather than identifying what disposes the original for translation, Benjamin is concerned with drawing out the relationship between the translation and the original text. Yet might his obscure formulation nonetheless provide an answer as to what translatability entails? As my answer regarding the nature of translatability comes to light only at the end of my essay, I shall postpone this question for the moment. * * * To come to a conclusion with respect to translatability, I must inquire initially about a key aspect of Benjamin’s text that Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 69.

2 Betsy Flèche, “The Art of Survival: The Translation of Walter Benjamin,” SubStance vol. 28 (1999): 102.

1

3 4 5 6

Benjamin, “Task,” 70.

Flèche, “The Art of Survival,” 100.

Benjamin, “Task,” 70.

Ibid., 71.

READING BENJAMIN IN TRANSLATION

details the so-called ‘afterlife’ of a literary work. Writing that “a translation issues from the original – not so much from its life as from its afterlife,â€? Benjamin posits that the translation both perpetuates and outlives the original text.7 What are the qualities of this afterlife of the original text in its translation? Benjamin wishes the reader to recognize that “a translation comes later than the original, and since the important works of world literature never Ă€QG WKHLU FKRVHQ WUDQVODWRUV DW WKH WLPH RI WKHLU RULJLQ WKHLU WUDQVlation marks their stage of continued life.â€?8 In this sense, the afterlife of the original is that continued existence, but in another form, another language: the form and language of its translation.

The mode of continuation of the original is of particular LQWHUHVW WR )OqFKH DQG VKH Ă€QGV WKLV PRPHQW RI WH[WXDO WUDQVODtion of Benjamin’s piece itself instructive. She notes that the word which Zohn translates as ‘afterlife’ is the German term Ăœberleben, “which in its ordinary usage means to outlive.â€?9 The translation is a ‘survival’ of the original text: it “does not repeat the original RU UHĂ HFW LW LQ DQRWKHU ODQJXDJH EXW ÂŤ HYHQ GLPLQLVKHV LWV LPportance.â€?10 Zohn’s rendering in which “a translation issues from WKH RULJLQDOÂľ GRHV QRW DFFXUDWHO\ UHĂ HFW WKH RULJLQDO *HUPDQ geht die Original hervor, which is better rendered as “wins out over the original.â€?11 The translation, “quite apart from the depleted original,â€? is living in its own right.12 Zohn’s version, which has the original “continuedâ€? in the afterlife, does not adequately address the distinctiveness of the translation’s life. The original is survived by its translation, but in the translation the original is no more.

In order to fully draw out how translation outlives the origiQDO , PXVW WXUQ EULHĂ \ WR %HQMDPLQ¡V WKHRU\ RI ODQJXDJH %HQMDPLQ writes that translation “ultimately serves the purpose of expressing the central reciprocal relationship between languages.â€?13 In translation, “the original undergoes a change,â€? and so does its language; “[t]he life of the original attains in [translation] to its ever-renewed ODWHVW DQG PRVW DEXQGDQW Ă RZHULQJ Âľ14 At the same time, the translaWLRQ JLYHV ULVH WR D Ă RZHULQJ RI WKH WUDQVODWRU¡V ODQJXDJH ´HYHQ WKH Ibid., 71.

Ibid.

9 Flèche, “The Art of Survival,â€? 96.

10 Ibid., 97.

7

11

8

12 13 14

Ibid.

Ibid.

Benjamin, “Task,� 72.

Ibid., 73.

55

STARK

56

greatest translation is destined to become part of the growth of its own language and eventually to be absorbed by its renewal.â€?15 For Benjamin, this absorption demonstrates an interrelatedness that arises from the kinship of languages: such a kinship between languages “rests in the intention underlying each language,â€? or in other words, what the languages “want to expressâ€? in their diverse articulations.16 Yet languages are dependent on each other, and their mutual intention is “realized only by the totality of their intentions supplementing each other: pure language.â€?17 It is imperative to be able to distinguish “the intended object from the mode of intention:â€?18 the IRUPHU WHUP GHQRWHV WKH REMHFW VLJQLĂ€HG E\ D SDUWLFXODU ZRUG DQG WKH latter term denotes the way of meaning inherent in that word. In order to closely examine the way in which the original text has its own intention toward language, Benjamin turns from the object intended by the word to the word’s mode of intention. Benjamin writes, “in the individual, unsupplemented languages, meaning is never found LQ UHODWLYH LQGHSHQGHQFH ÂŤ UDWKHU LW LV LQ D FRQVWDQW VWDWH RI Ă X[ ² until it is able to emerge as pure language from the harmony of all the various modes of intention.â€?19 These various modes of intention belong to different languages, but together they give some sense of the pure language, which holds together what is intended as a whole.

Paul de Man’s lecture insightfully reveals further inadequacies of Zohn’s translation of Benjamin’s text, and so forces the attentive reader to re-evaluate Benjamin’s theory as well as Zohn’s translation. Insofar as all “interlinguistic� activities “read the original from the perspective of a pure language, a language that would be entirely freed of the illusion of meaning,� they “bring to light� the inability to adequately address meaning in the original language, according to de Man.20 The form of pure language reveals the inadequacies of words to express meaning, which de Man terms the ‘disarticulations’ of the original text. These disarticulations, which “impose upon us a particular alienation� from our own language,21 indicate that meaning in its totality cannot be fully expressed by the original text. Benjamin attempts to express this gap in the original by speaking of the 15 16 17 18 19

Ibid.

Ibid., 72, 74.

Ibid., 74.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Paul de Man, “‘Conclusions’ on Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator’: Messenger Lecture, Cornell University, March 4 1983,� Yale French Studies, vol. 97 (2000), 24.

21 Ibid.

20

READING BENJAMIN IN TRANSLATION

“maturing processâ€? that stems from translation in the “afterlifeâ€? of the work.22 But de Man is adamant that “maturing processâ€? is an inadequate translation of the original German word Nachreife, which conveys a sense of “melancholy, the feeling of slight exhaustion, of life to which you are not entitled.â€?23 These affective states are associated with a word I have already encountered, Ăźberleben, which is to outlive, “to live beyond your own death.â€?24 Similarly, Nachreife “is a ORRNLQJ EDFN RQ D SURFHVV RI PDWXULW\ WKDW LV Ă€QLVKHG Âľ QRW D NLQG of growth. In Benjamin’s text, Nachreife occurs in close proximity to the word Wehen, which describes the changes in the translator’s language: Zohn translates Wehen as “birth pangs,â€? but the German word could also convey “any kind of suffering, without necessarily the connotation of birth and rebirth, of resurrection.â€?25 This reassessment leads de Man to conclude that an equally adequate, and perhaps necessary translation, is “death pangs,â€? since it is not the renewal but the death of the original that translation oversees.

What are the origins of this suffering evoked by de Man? I return to what Zohn calls “the intended objectâ€? and the “mode of intention.â€? In German, these terms are das Gemeinte and Art des Meinens, or in other words, “what is meantâ€? and “the way in which language means.â€?26 De Man rightly points out that a certain “phenomenological assumptionâ€? is at play in Zohn’s translation insofar as the language of intentionality assumes that “the meaning and the way in which meaning is produced are intentional acts.â€?27 What else could be suggested by ‘intended’ and ‘intention’? Yet, de Man observes, “it is not a priori certain at all that the mode of meaning, the way in which I mean, is intentional in any way.â€?28 , Ă€QG LPSOLFLW HYLGHQFH WKDW WKH ZD\ RI PHDQLQJ PD\ not be intentional within Benjamin’s own text. Using the German word Brot and the French word pain as an example, Benjamin illustrates the discrepancy inherent in ‘meaning’ between the ‘way of meaning’ and ‘what is meant.’ The word Brot is the way in which a German speaker means, and what is meant is ‘bread’ in French, the word pain is used to mean the same object, with “very different Benjamin, “Task,â€? 73.

De Man, “Conclusions,� 25.

24 Ibid.

25 Ibid.

Ibid., 27.

Ibid.

28 Ibid.

22

26

23

27

57

STARK

58

connotations.â€?29 Whereas Brot und Wein (‘bread and wine’) has a sacred connotation for de Man – although he does not name the holy sacrament, the HĂślderlin elegy to which his lecture refers deals implicitly with this Christian ritual – the French pain et vin “is what you get for free in a restaurant.â€?30 The experience of these divergent connotations of the French and German words “upsets the stability of the quotidian ‌. What I mean is upset by the way in which I mean.â€?31 Since it shows the disjunction between the way in which we mean and what is meant by our words, the activity of translation upsets the stability of our quotidian use of language for our “daily breadâ€?32 and can be said to traumatize the original text. Furthermore, translations force the original text to surrender to another language into which its meaning cannot be transferred without violation. The “maturingâ€? of the original language stems from a disconnect between “what is meantâ€? and “the way in which language means.â€?33 * *

*

7KH Ă€QDO DVSHFW RI =RKQ¡V WUDQVODWLRQ FULWLFL]HG E\ )OqFKH and de Man is the passage about language as a fragmented vessel.34 The discrepancy between das Gemeinte and the Art des Meinens points to an equally jarring disjunction “between the symbol and what is EHLQJ V\PEROL]HG D GLVMXQFWLRQ RQ WKH OHYHO RI WURSHV >WKH Ă€JXUDWLYH use of a word] between the trope as such and meaning as a totalizing power of tropological substitutions.â€?35 In other words, while in the original the symbol seems to be able to “convey a picture of WRWDO PHDQLQJ Âľ WKH XVH RI Ă€JXUDWLYH FRPSDULVRQ LQ WKH WUDQVODWLRQ reveals the disjunction between the intended meaning and the mode of intention.36 Indeed, de Man understands Benjamin’s focus on WKH V\PEROLF GLPHQVLRQ RI ODQJXDJH LQ WUDQVODWLRQ WR EH D UHĂ HFWLRQ upon the use of tropes in language as a whole. Translations show that meaning can only pretend to exercise a totalizing power: there will always be a disjunction between the trope as such in the original text and the tropological substitutions imposed by the translation.

Ibid., 28.

Ibid.

31 Ibid.

32 Ibid.

29

33

30

34 35 36

Ibid., 27, emphasis added.

Benjamin, “Task,� 78.

De Man, “Conclusions,� 30.

Ibid., 30.

READING BENJAMIN IN TRANSLATION

'H 0DQ VHHV WKH GLIĂ€FXOW\ RI ´7KH 7DVN RI WKH Translatorâ€? in this very diminution of the power of the symbol, since “the text is full of tropes, and it selects tropes which convey the illusion of totality,â€? even as Benjamin criticizes the phenomenon of tropological substitution.37 The repeated “images of seed, of ripening, of harmonyâ€? seemingly allude to Benjamin’s meaning without explicitly stating it.38 The inability of the symbol to convey meaning in its fullness seems to be the intention of one such symbolic instance in Benjamin’s text. He writes that the “unity [of content and language] in the originalâ€? resembles “a fruit and its skin,â€? while WKH IRUP RI WKH WUDQVODWLRQ LV Ă€JXUHG DV D ´UR\DO UREH ZLWK DPSOH foldsâ€? that “envelops its content.â€?39 It appears to Flèche that “the content of the translation ‌ seems in danger of being lost, since the language is apparently more than surrounding it:â€?40 in the light of pure language, symbols envelop meaning rather than expose it.

Likewise, de Man understands that the text acts out what it conveys, as though it were a mise en abĂŽme structure.

De Man declares the following: Whenever Benjamin uses a trope which seems to convey a picture of total meaning, of complete adHTXDF\ EHWZHHQ Ă€JXUH DQG PHDQLQJ D Ă€JXUH RI SHUfect synecdoche in which the partial trope expresses the totality of a meaning, he manipulates the allusive context within his work in such a way that the traditional symbol is displaced in a manner that acts out the discrepancy between symbol and meaning, rather than the acquiescence between both.41 In other words, Benjamin’s use of symbols and tropes “becomes DQ H[DPSOH RI ZKDW LW H[HPSOLĂ€HV Âľ42 it enacts the divergence EHWZHHQ Ă€JXUH DQG PHDQLQJ DW WKH KHDUW RI WKH FRQFHSW RI ODQguage in “The Task of the Translator.â€? De Man sees this mise en abĂŽme structure put particularly into play when Benjamin speaks Ibid.

Ibid.

39 Benjamin, “Task,� 78.

37

40

38

41 42

Flèche, “Art of Survival,â€? 102.

De Man, “Conclusions,� 30.

Ibid., 26.

59

STARK

60

of language as a fragmented vessel. In Zohn’s translation, Benjamin states “fragments of a vessel which are to be glued together must match one another in the smallest details.â€?43 De Man recognizes that this statement seems to disagree with Benjamin’s position that “the trope and what it seems to represent ‌ do not correspondâ€? and cannot be wholly equated with one another.44 According to de Man, a reconstructed translation of Benjamin’s original, which does not attempt to simplify the image, would read “fragments of a vessel, in order to be articulated together ‌ must follow one another in the smallest detail.â€?45 In this translation, the fragments “are already metonyms and not metaphors [and] as such they are certainly [not] working toward a tropological totalization.â€?46 :KLOH D PHWDSKRU LV PHUHO\ WKH Ă€JXUDWLYH DSSOLFDWLRQ RI RQH FRQFHSW or word to another which posits an imaginative identity between them, a metonym substitutes the name of a property or attribute RI D WKLQJ IRU WKH WKLQJ LWVHOI 7KHUHIRUH PHWRQ\PV DOORZ WKH Ă XLGity and alterability of language to come to light rather than falsely imposing sameness upon inherently disparate terms. In his portrait of the fragmentation of language, Benjamin is tracing out a “successive patternâ€? of meaning that assumes disjunction between words, rather than a “unifying patternâ€? which assumes that the whole of language is homogeneous and continuous.47 The very “tropological totalizationâ€? which Zohn’s translation produces in its engagement with the passage about the fragmentation of language is an exemplary instance of the disjunction between the original and its translation which Benjamin theorizes in “The Task of the Translator.â€?

Zohn’s translation proves to be equally inadequate in bringing to light Benjamin’s interpretation of the image of the fragmented vessel. Zohn writes that the translation must “incorporate WKH RULJLQDO¡V PRGH RI VLJQLĂ€FDWLRQ Âľ 7KH PHDQLQJ RI WKLV SKUDVH is altogether unclear and it only becomes comprehensible with de Man’s preferred translation: “the translation must ‌ in its own language, form itself according to the manner of meaning of the original.â€?48 Although the meaning of the original text might be Benjamin, “Task,â€? 78.

De Man, “Conclusions,� 31.

45 Ibid., 32.

43

46

44

47 48

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

READING BENJAMIN IN TRANSLATION

enveloped by its translation, the shape of the translation points towards the original while making it clear that they are distinct. Insofar DV WKH LPDJH RI ´LQFRUSRUDWLRQ¾ VLJQLÀHV XQLÀFDWLRQ rather than disjunction, it is demonstrably inadequate to Benjamin’s original text.

Zohn’s translation further papers over the disjunction of language when he continues, “a translation, instead of resembling the meaning of the original, must lovingly and in detail incorporate the RULJLQDO¡V PRGH RI VLJQLĂ€FDWLRQ WKXV PDNLQJ ERWK WKH RULJLQDO DQG the translation recognizable as fragments of a greater language, just as fragments are part of a vessel.â€?49 De Man correctly notes that this statement is a synecdoche, which means that it emphasizes the unity of language as the ‘togetherness’ of its fragments.

De Man’s translation, which reads “[making] both recognizable as the broken parts of the greater language, just as fragments are the broken parts of a vessel,â€?50 does not set forth a synecdochic strucWXUH +HUH , Ă€QG WKDW WKH RULJLQDO DQG WKH WUDQVODWLRQ DUH XQHTXLYocally disjoined. In de Man’s words, Benjamin “is not saying that the fragments constitute a totality, he says the fragments are fragments, and that they remain essentially fragmentary ‌. Any work is totally fragmented in relation to [pure language], with which it has nothing in common, and every translation is a fragment, is breaking the fragment.â€?51 Benjamin wishes to establish the disjunction of language, but Zohn’s translation conceals Benjamin’s intention, HYHQ DV LW H[HPSOLĂ€HV WKH YHU\ SKHQRPHQRQ RI LQWHUOLQJXLVWLF GLVjunction that comes to light in Benjamin’s account of translation. * * * With the guidance of De Man and Flèche, I have illustrated a little more precisely what Benjamin has written in “The Task of the Translatorâ€? – a disjunction always exists within language as well as between an original and its translation. And so I return to my original dilemma: what is the best way to read a translation? I have just shown that a translation can play tricks on me, hiding what 49 50

Ibid.

Ibid, emphasis added.

51

Ibid., 32-33.

61

STARK

62

Benjamin intends, if the word “intendâ€? is even adequate – am I destined to always be so stymied? Indeed, even the title of Benjamin’s essay points to the problem I have confronted. What is translated as “The Task of the Translatorâ€? is in German Die Aufgabe des Ăœbersetzers. Flèche notes that Die Aufgabe “means surrender, abandon, and signals defeatâ€? as well as meaning “task.â€?52 De Man makes the same SRLQW ´WKH WUDQVODWRU KDV WR JLYH XS LQ UHODWLRQ WR WKH WDVN RI UHĂ€QGing what was there in the original.â€?53 'R , QRW Ă€QG P\VHOI LQ WKH same position? Insofar as I wish to understand the original, I am continually defeated. Translation, after all, does not take place for the sake of the reader, but is caused by the translatability of the original text. Let me return to that question: what is translatability?

A potential answer lies near the end of Benjamin’s text.

Benjamin writes, “the lower the quality and distinction of [the original’s] language, the larger the extent to which it is information, WKH OHVV IHUWLOH D Ă€HOG LW LV IRU WUDQVODWLRQ ÂŤ 7KH KLJKHU WKH OHYHO of a work, the more does it remain translatable.â€?54 Those works whose language carries a profundity of and care for meaning rather than merely transcribing information offer themselves for translaWLRQ WKRXJK WKDW ´PHDQLQJ LV WRXFKHG XSRQ RQO\ Ă HHWLQJO\ Âľ55 This is the irony of translation: the more meaning is contained within the original, the less that particular meaning comes through in its translation– it becomes “lost in the bottomless depths of language.â€?56 Any attempt to ‘translate’ the translation while retaining the original – into understanding, into another language – is destined to fall short. Something does arise from the depths of language, but it is something other than the meaning of the original text.

Is this to say that translation is fruitless? By no means. Only if one equates loss of meaning with loss of value would that conclusion be possible. While what makes the original translatable may now be clear, I have yet to ask why D WUDQVODWLRQ PLJKW RFFXU , Ă€QG RQH DQswer in another of Benjamin’s texts, the “Theses on the Philosophy of History.â€? Here, Benjamin writes, “the past can be seized only as an LPDJH ZKLFK Ă DVKHV XS DW WKH LQVWDQW ZKHQ LW FDQ EH UHFRJQL]HG DQG Flèche, “The Art of Survival,â€? 98.

De Man, “Conclusions,� 20.

54 Benjamin, “Task,� 81.

52

55

53

56

Ibid.

Ibid., 82.

READING BENJAMIN IN TRANSLATION

is never seen again.”57 That instant is the “now” in which the present is recognized as being part of a “constellation” with the past.58 The same momentary appearance of an image in which the constellation between the past and the present becomes recognizable is true of translation. Translation occurs when the original work is seized in a moment of revelation and of recognition of its place in the present.

Here I have reached the limits of my argument in the context of this paper. The image of a ‘revelation’ is no accident. There is clearly a great deal to say about the sacredness of history and language in “The Task of the Translator” as well as its Messianic undertones. Benjamin writes that the loss of meaning in translation comes to stop “vouchsafed by Holy Writ alone.”59 The form of the Biblical text is able to halt the loss of meaning since language and revelation are united in it: “just as, in the original, language and revelation are one without any tension, so the translation must be one with the original in the form of the interlinear version, in which literalness and freedom are united.”60 The disjunction of language that comes to light in translation is repaired only by virtue of a power higher than that of the translator. It is beyond the scope of this paper to address the ways in which this reparation may come to pass. Nonetheless, I have demonstrated that Zohn’s translation of the “The Task of the Translator” is as disjoined from the original text as predicted by Benjamin’s work. Perhaps knowledge of the fact of such disjunctions can be used to safeguard the reading of translations in the future.

The reader must remember that the translation that he or she reads can never be wholly true to the original text. We can read constantly alert to this danger: my alertness may alienate me from the text, but this disjunction is only a recognition of the disjunctive effect of translation. At least the original shall be safe, left to rest in peace.

Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, trans.

Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 255.

57

58 59 60

Ibid., 261, 263.

Benjamin, “Task,” 82.

Ibid.

63

Ad-hoc/post-hawk

Post-hoc? Or post-hawk?

7KH ÀHOG PRXVH SRVW KDZN Can’t redact post-hoc What happened, Where the hawk struck from.

So far outside the mouse’s grassy world No expectation or ad-hoc explanation Of an additional hawk.

When your paradigm never looks up And on the level of pebbles you’re stuck, An ad-hoc surmise can’t deal With a post-hawk surprise $QG \RXU ÀHOG PRXVH VFLHQFH LV IXFNHG

- HARRY SAWCHUK

Heidegger and a Rat

Being is not naught But will be.

I saw it in a rat, a few days into fall A rat, what had been a rat, but Now was not naught, but Something not being.

The rat had had being but now it had cold and stiff darkness.

On a driveway a few days into fall, Surrounded by Being, in Being, That which was rat, was no longer being.

Time was, being was in that Rat. Time was, Being was that rat, as that rat Was being.

But now, Being is not naught, it is gone, From this rat, anyway, so it might as well be.

- JACOB GLOVER

French-Kissing Heidegger Jean-Luc Nancy’s Existential Analytic of Love NATASHA HAY

S

ome Heidegger scholars might hesitate to portray the object of their research as a philosopher of joyous and passionate love.

Nonetheless, Heidegger’s inaugural lecture to the Freiburg University faculties grants that the revelation of beings as a whole is not restricted to the moods of anxiety and boredom that are frequently privileged in Being and Time. In a beautiful passage, Heidegger claims that “another possibility of such revelation is concealed in our joy in the presence of the Dasein – and not simply of the person – of a human being whom we love.”1 Drawing on such aspects of Heidegger’s work, the post-Heideggerian philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy proposes that a new thinking of love may be “indispensable to the possibility of thinking in general – that is to say, to the possibility of the life of a community,” whereas such possibilities would not open to the thought of any other matter.2 In opening itself to the possibility of love, Dasein is not only granted access to joyous, futural, creative modes of being, but also to suffering, mourning and destruction.

Martin Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?” in Basic Writings (San Francisco: HarperCollins Publishers, 1993), 99.

2 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney (Minneapo1

lis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 83.

3 Heidegger distinguishes between particular beings and Being as such. Fundamental ontology investigates the question of Being as such, or in other words, it explores the

67

By examining the ‘existential analytic of love’ that comes WR OLJKW LQ 1DQF\¡V ZRUN , ZLOO Ă€UVW H[SODLQ KLV FODLP WKDW EHLQJ LQ love is an ontological structure for Dasein with reference to modes of being-with and being-in elucidated in Being and Time.3 Secondly, I will interpret a poem by Paul Celan as an example of the writing of love understood as ‘literary communism.’ Thirdly, I will show the pertinence of love to a thinking of ‘the political’ in terms of the novelty, contingency, and singularity which are crucial aspects of being-in-the-world. I will argue throughout my paper that the experience and articulation of love presents the ‘community without essence’ and that being-in-love is the promise of a politics understood as a passion for relation rather than as the will to realize an essence.4 Although Nancy notes that “love is never namedâ€? in Being and Time, he argues that it is “an ontological determination of that existent that Heidegger names the Dasein.â€?5 Nancy reworks the motifs of touching and solicitude, which Heidegger focuses on throughout Being and Time in the form of being-in and beingwith, to show that being-in-love is constitutive of Dasein. Beingin-love is formulated as a special case of being-in-the-world, insofar as the ‘world’ of lovers differs from the average everydayness of the community at work. One’s mode of being-with another Dasein in love is the unworking of one’s mode of being-withthe-‘they’ (das Man) whom one encounters at work. For Nancy, being-in-love solicits the ontological structure of ‘care’ which lies at the core of Dasein’s Being, since love is the passionate exposure of Dasein’s heart to an encounter with the other Dasein.

Heidegger suggests that the existential mode of Dasein’s being-in is not a compound unity of spirituality and corporeality.

In other words, Dasein’s “existential spatiality� does not simply hold open possible ways for Dasein to be.6 This spatiotemporal site is called ‘the heart’ by Nancy. It is “the being of being, that by virtue of which it is being� as the capacity for love.7 This heart comes to be only insofar as it is received by another Dasein. The way in which “the heart exposes the subject� cannot be reduced to modes of conditions of possibility for the very existence of particular beings in the world.

4 Nancy, The Inoperative Community, xl.

5 Ibid., 103-04. My use of ‘ontological structure’ simply refers to the existential conditions which allow Dasein to come to be. By situating love on the level of

ontology, Nancy is arguing that the possibility of loving belongs to Dasein in its very opening onto the world.

6 Martin Heidegger, “Selections from Being and Time,� in CTMP 4000 Course (Halifax: University of King’s College, 2011), 82-83.

7 Nancy, The Inoperative Community, 88.

HAY

68

propriety, identity, or contradiction that permit Dasein to “appropriate its own becoming in order to be.â€?8 Rather, the exposure of Dasein’s heart destines it to “being presented: given over, offered to the outside, to others, and even to the self.â€?9 Musing that “the heart of the singular being is that which is not totally his, but it is thus that it is his heart,â€? Nancy indicates that the fact that “the heart does not belong WR LWVHOI Âľ FRUUHVSRQGV WR WKH OLPLW RI 'DVHLQ¡V Ă€QLWXGH 10 Being-inlove reveals that one’s heart is always and only the heart of the other. “Being towardsâ€? the other is bound up with Dasein’s “Being towards the world of its concern, and likewise with its authentic Being towards itself.â€?11 The interdependence of these modes of relation alORZV D Ă€HOG RI SRVVLELOLWLHV WR EHFRPH DYDLODEOH WR 'DVHLQ $FFRUGLQJ to Heidegger, Dasein can relate to others in a mode he calls ‘genuine solicitude.’ Being-with-the-Other in this mode means that one “leaps ahead of â€? the Other and “liberatesâ€? him. In genuine solicitude, one relates “to the existence of the Otherâ€? rather than to the particular matter “with which he is concerned,â€? so that one “helps the Other to become transparent to himself in his care and to become free for it.â€?12 Love is exactly this “relation to the other as otherâ€? in ZKLFK 'DVHLQ ´ÀQGV LWVHOI LQ ORYH beyond itself.â€?13 As Nancy writes, it is not the singular being that puts itself outside itself: it is the other, and in the other it is not the subject’s identity that operates this movement or this touch. But in the other it is this movement that makes it other and which is always other than ‘itself ’ in its identity; that is what transcends in me.14 Foregrounding the fact that the movement of solicitation shared between Daseins alters both of them, this quotation claims that Dasein does not touch itself. In an exemplary case of the transformative encounters which occur in solicitation, the surprise of a declaration of love which had not been expected, anticipated, or known in advance “will reveal to the other person the possibility that he or she is capable of loving and being loved,â€? or in other words, it will disclose the disposition of his or her heart.15 Ibid., 89.

Ibid.

10 Ibid., 99.

11 Heidegger, Being and Time, 159.

12 Ibid., 158-59.

13 Christopher Fynsk, “Foreword: 8 9

Experience of Finitude,� in Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), xvii-xviii.

14 Nancy, The Inoperative Community, 97.

FRENCH-KISSING HEIDEGGER

To distinguish our relation to other Dasein from the relation we have to other objects that we encounter in the world, Heidegger writes that an entity can only be touched if it “has Being-in as its own kind of Being,�16 meaning that it is another Dasein. Nancy reiterates this distinction in a more colloquial and amusing manner when he claims that “lovers touch each other, unlike fellow citizens.�17 This observation posits that the gesture of love addresses the being and the presence of the other in a caress.18 In “moments of the greatest intimacy,�19 which touch what is “innermost�20 in each lover, the caress “seizes� and “draws out� the Being of the other Dasein.

Since the secret of one’s Being can only be touched by another Dasein, such interiority is inexplicable and unknowable for Dasein on its own.21 As Christopher Fynsk writes, this ‘secret heart’ is simply RXU Ă€QLWXGH ´ZH NQRZ RXU Ă€QLWXGH E\ ZD\ RI WKH RWKHU DQG E\ ZD\ RI WKH RWKHU¡V Ă€QLWXGHÂľ LQ KLV RU KHU ´RSHQLQJ WR XV RXW RI >KLV or her] own relation to alterityâ€? in a shared exposure to freedom.22 Nancy argues that Heideggerian solicitude determines the essence of Dasein “in a being-exposed or in a being-offered to othersâ€? even as it allows Dasein to have “a sphere of autonomic ‌ allure.â€?23 For Nancy, however, one’s fundamental mode of solicitude-towards-the-Other is less stodgy than “a lively mutual acquaintanceship on the basis of Being-withâ€?24 as characterized by “forebearanceâ€? and “considerateness.â€?25 Solicitude exceeds “the very movement of FĂźrsorge [care]‌still thought starting from an ‘I’ or from an ‘identity’ that goes toward the other.â€?26 Nancy particularly stresses this passionate aspect of solicitude when he alludes to an exposure and opening which “cuts across and alters I going to the other while the other comes to it.â€?27 The passion of love disrupts the self-possession of Dasein by exposing its capacity for “passivity, suffering and excessâ€?28 in which it receives and submits to a passion that comes from the other Dasein.29 Love opens one up to the relationality of Being that is “beyond the relation to oneself and beyond the other’s self-relation.â€?30 Being-in-love allows one’s “constitution of Being in its singularityâ€? to be “alteredâ€? by the touch of WKH RWKHU LQ D JHVWXUH 1DQF\ FDOOV WKH Ă€QLWH WUDQVFHQGHQFH RI ORYH 31 Jean-Luc Nancy, “Love,â€? in God, Justice, Love, Beauty: Four Little Dialogues, trans. Sarah Clift (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011), 82.

16 Heidegger, Being and Time, 81.

17 Nancy, The Inoperative Community, 38.

15

18 19 20 21 22 23

Nancy, Four Little Dialogues, 72.

Fynsk, “Foreword,� xvii.

Nancy, Four Little Dialogues, 67.

Ibid.

Fynsk, “Foreword,� xvii.

Nancy, The Inoperative Community, 104.

69

HAY

70

Having explored the idea that being-in-love is an existential determination of Dasein, I will now turn to what Nancy calls ‘literary communism,’ one mode of Dasein which arises from the structure of love. For Nancy, the practice of ‘literary communism’ is a mode of comportment toward language that allows the experience of love to become communicable to those who are not ‘in’ the world constituted by love. Nancy argues that “there is an inscription of the communitarian exposition, and that this exposition, as such, can only be inscribed, or can be offered only by way of an inscription.”32 The practice of literary communism shares community “not, perhaps, [as] an experience that we have, but [as] an experience that makes us be.”33 Ian James argues that this mode of writing is “the presentation of presentation.”34 In using this phrase, James seems to suggest that the comportment towards language central to literary communism creates a unique space which discloses the lovers’ world.35 To the extent that the writing of love is a playful negotiation between the image of the loved one and his or her reality as a being-in-the-world, the hermeneutic activity of literary communism is not a closed system of discourse.36 When Nancy says that anyone who reads and writes “by exposing himself – not by imposing himself ” belongs to the practice of “unimpeachable and irrepressible literary communism,”37 he seems to be alluding to the poet Paul Celan’s dictum that “la poésie ne s’impose plus, elle s’expose [poetry no longer imposes herself, she exposes herself].” Indeed, Celan’s poem “The Poles (Die Pole)” can be read as a gesture which interrupts the foundational mythology of ‘Jerusalem’ by using poetic language to reveal that being-in-love is the promise of being-in-common. John Felstiner translates “The Poles” as follows: The poles are within us insurmountable while we’re awake, we sleep across, up to the Gate of Mercy, 24 25 26 27 28 29

Heidegger, Being and Time, 162.

Ibid., 159.

Nancy, The Inoperative Community, 104.

Ibid.

Ibid., 32.

Nancy, Four Little Dialogues, 72.

Ibid.

Nancy, The Inoperative Community, 104.

32 Ibid., 39.

33 Ibid., 26.

34 Ian James, The Fragmentary Demand (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 213.

30 31

FRENCH-KISSING HEIDEGGER

I lose you to you, that is my snow-comfort, say, that Jerusalem is, say it, as if I were this your whiteness, as if you were mine, as if without us we could be we, I leaf you open, for ever, you pray, you lay us free.38 2QH PLJKW VHH D QRYHO LQĂ HFWLRQ RI VROLFLWRXV FRQFHUQ IRU WKH RWKHU Dasein in the “generous reticenceâ€?39 of Celan’s erotic verse. His use of subjunctive and imperative moods recalls the speaker and his addressee to the ontico-ontological difference which conditions the facticity of their being-in-the-world. Whereas the declarative mood generally denotes the subject’s description of a predetermined ZRUOG WKH VXEMXQFWLYH LV WKH Ă€JXUDWLRQ RI DQ DOWHUQDWLYH ZRUOG DQG the imperative is a demand upon the world as it is. The command addressed to a listener – ‘say it’ – shows the necessity of a language that opens onto what is for the sake of the world’s articulation. If one were to respond to the poet’s request by naming a place of community that cannot exist outside the word, one would speak as though the world were otherwise. These moods mark a “double exigencyâ€? that cannot be answered by “literary artâ€? or “communication.â€?40 Only “literary communismâ€? is able to “defy at the same time the speechless immanence and the transcendence of a Word.â€?41 “Say it, as if I were this / your whiteness, / as if you were / PLQH Âľ WKH ÂśDV LI ¡ RU ÂśDV WKRXJK¡ Ă€JXUHV WKH LPSRVVLELOLW\ RI H[FKDQJIbid., 217.

Nancy, Four Little Dialogues, 88.

37 Nancy, The Inoperative Community, 68.

38 Paul Celan, “The Poles,� in Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, trans. John Felstiner 35 36

(New York: W.W. Norton, 2001), 362-63.

39 Nancy, The Inoperative Community, 83.

40 Ibid., 80.

41 Ibid.

71

HAY

72

ing one’s own ‘skin’ for that of the lover whom one touches. The territory of love comes to be in the tension between the magnetic poles within each lover since the whiteness of each lover – the singularity or ‘mineness’ that opens in the spatiotemporal differentiation of each Dasein – both resists and desires communion. Nonetheless, passionate ecstasy carries the lovers to the edges of their beLQJ DQG UHYHDOV WKH OLPLW RI WKHLU Ă€QLWXGH /RYH LV D GRXEOH ELQG the contradictory desire for separation and union – for the beloved to be free with respect to yet wholly devoted to the lover42 – cannot be collapsed or effaced. Recognizing that both the impossibility of possession and the structural possibility of loss are inscribed in the relation between mortal creatures, the poet consoles himself by saying that “I lose you to youâ€? as he envisages the relinquishing of his lover for the sake of her freedom to become herself.

,Q D VWULNLQJ LPDJH &HODQ Ă€JXUHV KLV EHORYHG DV D ERRN ZKR calls forth her reading lover. Nancy writes, “myth is interrupted by literature precisely to the extent that literature does not come to an end,â€?43 which means that the reading, writing and interpretation of literary communism inscribes the resistance of being-in-common to the end of love. Such a communal hermeneutic refuses to complete the work and hence it never consigns the community to immanence. “Being-in-common is nowhere, and does not subsist in a mythic space that could be revealed to usâ€? because it is given only in the “singular ontological qualityâ€? of writing or literature which reveals a space in which ‘without us we could be we.’44 Literature presents community “not in the form of a common being that would preexist works and would still have to be set to work in them, but as a being in common of the singular being:â€?45 as Celan writes, “I leaf you open, for ever.â€?

In the poem’s concluding lines, the lovers ‘pray’ and ‘lay’ each other free in a poetic space set apart from yet bound to the Holy Land to which they have returned from exile. Singing the Lord’s song in a strange land, Celan draws out the lovers’ relation such that the community “traverses [the lovers], in a tremor of ‘writing’ wherein the literary work mingles with the most simple public exchange of speech [whose] trait travers[es] the kiss, 42 43

Nancy, Four Little Dialogues, 78.

Nancy, The Inoperative Community, 64.

44 45

Ibid., 63-64.

Ibid., 75.

FRENCH-KISSING HEIDEGGER

sharing it.â€?46 Naming the sacred carnality or ecstatic relation of love, the poem’s ending resembles Christopher Fynsk’s evocation of “the opening, in thought [or writing] ‌ to the possibility of a world: thought’s [or the word’s] deliverance or abandonment to ‌ the drawing out or articulation of this opening ‌ whereby it is possible to remark the fact of being as such:â€?47 ‘you pray, you lay / us free.’ The phrase “as if without us we could be weâ€? reveals community in its very unworking: the separation of lovers from the work of the community also constitutes its being-in-common. As Nancy writes, “passion carries to the limit of singularity: logically, this limit is the place of communityâ€? insofar as the community’s relation to the writing of love occurs at this threshold or limit.48 Since “there LV QR PDVWHU Ă€JXUH WKHUH LV QR PDMRU UHSUHVHQWDWLRQ RI ORYH QRU is there any common assumption of its scattered and inextricable shatters,â€?49 it cannot become a narrative which founds community conceived on the model of a work of art. Celan offers “what belongs to no one and returns to everyone: the community of writing, the writing of communityâ€? in which the absolutely unique relation between lovers becomes communicable to a plurality of others.50 In fact, Heidegger asserts that the “positive existential conditionâ€? of “the possibility of understanding the strangerâ€? is a hermeneutic interpretation of “the existential constituentâ€? he names “Being-with.â€?51 The thinking of the political understood as such a hermeneutic must show that the ethos of care is essentially different from “empathyâ€? with the other and from “leaping inâ€? to resolve matters which concern the other.52 Indeed, Heidegger chose to use terminology derived from sorgen (to care) “not because Dasein happens to be proximally and to a large extent ‘practical’ and economic, but because the Being of Dasein itself is to be made visible as care.â€?53 Similarly, Nancy’s thinking of community begins with the perception that “if there has been an event in Marxist thought, one which is not yet over for us, it takes place in what is opened up by [Marx’s] thoughtâ€? of a “socially exposed particularityâ€? at stake in being-in-common.54 7KH SROLWLFDO PXVW EH ´WKH SODFH RI D VSHFLĂ€F existence, the existence of being-in-common, which gives rise to 46 47 48 49 50 51

Ibid., 40.

Fynsk, “Foreword,� xiii.

Nancy, The Inoperative Community, 59.

Ibid., 102.

Ibid., 42.

Heidegger, Being and Time, 163.

52 53

Ibid., 158, 161-62.

Ibid., 83-84.

73

HAY

74

the existence of being-self,� as Nancy phrases it.55 The thinking of the political in The Inoperative Community elucidates the ontological structure of community for the sake of an ethos that comports itself responsibly towards such a ‘socially exposed particularity’ in the world. This ethos will expose or open a space for encounters between singular beings caring for one another in their freedom.

The promise of love, which is the minimal condition of the Ă€GHOLW\ UHTXLUHG E\ PDUULDJH DV D VRFLDO OHJDO DQG HFRQRPLF LQVWLWXtion, happens prior to and exceeds the contractual bond enforced by ontic determinations. According to Nancy, “all of love resides in the fact of saying ‘I love you’ to someone,â€?56 or in other words, “love’s name is not ‘love,’ which would be a substance or a faculty, but it is this sentenceâ€? spoken between lovers.57 The phrase ‘I love you’ is a promise “unlike all other promisesâ€? because “one must keep only the promise itself: not its ‘contents’ (‘love’), but its ‘utterance’ (‘I love you’)â€? which simply allows “the fact that love must arriveâ€? to appear as “the law of the given word.â€?58 Perhaps the reason that the thinking of love is “clearly in confrontation with and opposition to the collapse of the politico-religiousâ€? throughout the Western tradition can be found here.59 The ‘promise’ of love shows that the singularity of the person, the contingency of relations, and the novelty of events are crucial aspects of ‘the political’ and of beingin-common. After all, “a perpetually renewed, perpetually deferred (or perpetually relayed) promiseâ€? is exactly community’s address.60 As Nancy writes, saying ‘I love you’ is a “declaration where ‘I’ is posed only by being exposed to youâ€? and is “given overâ€? to “the risk that the other does not love me, or the risk that I do not keep the promise of my love.â€?61 This “momentâ€? of exposition or opening cannot be characterized as an operation in which the KHDUW UHSRUWV LWV RZQ MXGJPHQW WR LWVHOI DV WKH UHĂ HFWLRQ RU VSHFulation of an ego, or as a propositional statement which can be contradicted.62 7KH DIĂ€UPDWLRQ RI WKH KHDUW H[FHHGV WKHVH VXEMHFtive categories because it bespeaks a delighted gratitude “that his person existsâ€?63 and “that this must beâ€?64 whatever may befall the fact of relation. The declaration that ‘I love you’ presents the 54 55 56 57 58

Nancy, The Inoperative Community, 74.

Ibid., xxxvii.

Nancy, Four Little Dialogues, 66.

Nancy, The Inoperative Community, 100.

Ibid.

59 60 61 62

Ibid., 37.

Fynsk, “Foreword,� xxvii.

Nancy, The Inoperative Community, 89-90.

Ibid., 100.

FRENCH-KISSING HEIDEGGER

facticity of being which is prior to and exceeds the actions which determine it. That is to say, the promise is a ‘nothing’ in which the relationality of being comes to light as absolutely unknowable and absolutely risked. The touching of lovers presents the fact that there is a world which is the ‘with’ or ‘between’ in which entities are related to one another rather than being present in discrete isolation. Community is this ‘with’ of being-with or this ‘in’ of beingin-common that can be constituted to the extent that loving allows “the appearance of the between as such: you and I (between us).â€?65 “In love, we are two:â€? “from the moment we are two, everything changesâ€? because we “have entered into a unique relation that cannot be compared with anything else.â€?66 In this relation, each lover allows the other “to come to me as a person, for what he or she is and independently of everything that he or she has.â€?67 Passion emerges from “my capacity to receive ‌ whoever has been chosen by my heartâ€? without reference to any “qualities proper to the personâ€? because the “absolute uniquenessâ€? of the person touches our hearts.68 For Nancy, this apparition is the absolute singularity of each Dasein: “a singular being appears ‌ with the contact of the skin (or the heart) RI DQRWKHU VLQJXODU EHLQJ DW WKH FRQĂ€QHV RI WKH VDPH VLQJXODULW\ WKDW is, as such, always other, always shared, always exposed [in] the at once JORULRXV DQG GHVWLWXWH DSSHDULQJ RI EHLQJ Ă€QLWH LWVHOI Âľ69 Freeing the person whom one loves to appear in a world is the very gesture of greeting a stranger at the threshold of one’s home. Welcoming the refugee, the infant, the newcomer in his or her absolute nudity and vulnerability as an exposed heart begins with this loving encounter.

James contrasts the foundational politics of the metaphysiFDO WUDGLWLRQ ZLWK D SROLWLFV RI SUDFWLFDO ÀQLWXGH 'UDZLQJ RQ UHPDUNV from Fynsk, he explains that the moment of failure in philosophy’s HQFRXQWHU ZLWK WKH SUDFWLFDO ÀQLWXGH RI KXPDQ SURGXFWLRQ RSHQV onto a freedom and a decision in which the existence of others and a shared relation to being is at stake.70 The metaphysical gesture is to establish a foundation which overcomes this abyss, but a genuine thinking of the political simply marks a moment in which community is unworked at its limits. In love, one is always already Nancy, Four Little Dialogues, 73.

Nancy, The Inoperative Community, 100.

65 Ibid., 29.

66 Nancy, Four Little Dialogues, 70-71.

67 Ibid., 73.

68 Ibid., 72-73.

63

69

64

70

Nancy, The Inoperative Community, 28.

James, 156-57.

75

HAY

76

exposed to the heartbreak of absence, loss, and even death to the extent that “if love were guaranteed, it would not be love.â€?71 In the experience of heartbreak, the lover is also exposed to the SUDFWLFDO Ă€QLWXGH LQ ZKLFK KH RU VKH GLVFRYHUV WKDW ´LW LV WKH EUHDN itself that makes the heart.â€?72 When my immanence has been ruptured “by the other where its presence is most intimate and its life most open,â€?73 “I can no longer ‌ pro-pose myself to myself (nor im-pose myself on another) without ‌ something of me remaining, outside of me.â€?74 Indeed, the heartbroken lover returns to the community from which he was sundered by his love, but since “the return in fact takes place only across the break itself, keeping it open,â€?75 he still carries the relation to the beloved within him.

The experience of heartbreak exacts a passionate questioning from the ‘I’ exposed to “an outside in the very intimacy of an inside:â€?76 As soon as there is love, the slightest act of love, WKH VOLJKWHVW VSDUN WKHUH LV WKLV RQWRORJLFDO Ă€VVXUH that cuts across and that disconnects the elements RI WKH VXEMHFW SURSHU ² WKH Ă€EHUV RI LWV KHDUW 2QH hour of love is enough, one kiss alone, provided that it is out of love – and can there, in truth, be any other kind? Can one do it without love, without being broken into, even if only slightly? 77 If self-possession is rendered impossible in the intimate relations of the heart – for “I is constituted brokenâ€?78 – how can one continue to protect that which is proper to oneself in public speech and action?

Must one not begin with the fact of being-in-common that has given each person the heart he or she can no longer call his or her own?

For Nancy, the question of community is a question of ecstasy, so his study of being-in-love develops Heidegger’s sense of facticity as an ecstatic relation to ourselves, others, and the world.

The modern politics of techno-economic administration is a GHĂ€FLHQW PRGH RI WKH RQWRORJLFDO VWUXFWXUH RI WKH SROLWLFDO LQVRIDU as it keeps the possibilities of such modes of being-in-the-world to 71 72 73 74

Nancy, Four Little Dialogues, 78.

Nancy, The Inoperative Community, 99.

Ibid.

Ibid., 97.

75 76 77 78

Ibid., 96.

Ibid., xxxvii.

Ibid., 96.

Ibid., 106.

FRENCH-KISSING HEIDEGGER

D EDUH PLQLPXP +RZHYHU WKH ÀQLWH WUDQVFHQGHQFH RI ORYHUV ZKR come to a shared freedom is a site of resistance to the fatality of imPDQHQFH LQ WKH FXUUHQW SROLWLFDO RUGHU 6XFK UHVLVWDQFH LV WKH ÀJXUH of community even though fragmentary, momentary, and localized.

That is to say, the facets of being-in which come to light in love as a mode of being-with remain bound to the historical, situated, and material dimensions of the facticity of Dasein. The ontological structure of love and of the political is such that they can never be founded or completed: “One makes love, because love is never made,�79 as Nancy writes, and we speak and act in political life because politics does not belong to the order of production and fabrication. “We have to talk about [love] because we all have something at stake in the word love and in the images that go with it,�

Nancy claims.80 What we talk about when we talk about love, or in other words, what calls for our thinking of love, is the sharing RI WKH H[SHULHQFH RI Ă€QLWXGH EHLQJ LQ ORYH ZULWLQJ RQ ORYH DFWing out of love. Rather than restricting himself to expounding the existential analytic of death to his colleagues and disciples in the universities, Nancy lets himself be questioned by children on the “hauntingâ€? yet “imperativeâ€? themes of justice, beauty, love and God.81 Four Little Dialogues no longer pretends to be a grand rĂŠcit: rather than presenting an edifying or didactic monologue on ‘how to love,’ Nancy reveals that the children have already begun to experience and understand love in their everyday lives. Whereas Heidegger informed his students that the biography of Aristotle could EH FRQĂ€QHG WR ÂśKH ZDV ERUQ KH ZRUNHG DQG KH GLHG ¡ 1DQF\ PLJKW say to these children that ‘we are born, we love, and we die.’ Such a phrase would change the stakes of community because it alters our sense of the historicity of being-in-common. Rather than espouse the piety of thinking, Nancy calls forth the passionate expoVXUH RI ORYH WR WKH Ă€QLWXGH WKDW LW VKDUHV ZLWK RWKHUV DQG WKH ZRUOG

79 80

Ibid., 102.

Nancy, Four Little Dialogues, 65.

81

Fynsk, “Foreword,� viii-ix.

77

Just a Part of ‘Growing Up’?

How the increasingly individual experience of adulthood is contributing to the rise in social drinking among university students

REBECCA DAVIES WILSON Introduction This paper examines the increase seen over the last few decades in the practice of social drinking among university students in the Western world. The prevalence of alcohol in human society is an extraordinarily complex issue not only because alcohol has been a feature of human life for thousands of years, but also because it has been used historically for a plethora of purposes.1 In 2002, M. Lee Upcraft noticed a “44% increase in alcohol-related problems” in young adults over the last forty years.2 Yet the search for a cause of social drinking always elicits responses that might be summarized by the statement, “Because it feels good; it’s fun.” Evidently there is a biological basis for this claim, though the inadequacies of the biological H[SODQDWLRQ IRU DOFRKRO FRQVXPSWLRQ ZLOO EH LGHQWLÀHG LQ WKLV SDSHU I argue that young people have increased their alcohol consumption since the 1960s not because of the physiological response alcohol

79

induces, but rather as a direct consequence of the change in the experience of growing up. The question of youth social drinking is LPSRUWDQW EHFDXVH DOFRKRO VLJQLÀFDQWO\ VKDSHV WKH VRFLDO ZRUOG LQ which university students and young adults live. Alcohol is not the only (or in any way the primary) stimulator of the reward circuit in the brain, yet today it is a principal facilitator of pleasurable social encounters. In addition to biological factors, the media’s portrayal of alcohol consumption as an extremely positive and pleasurable experience enables the view of it as a potential pleasure stimulus.

Today, alcohol is so culturally engrained in the social realm that it is almost synonymous with fun and relaxation. I use ‘social’ here in the context of “relating to or designed for activities in which people meet each other for pleasure.â€?3 While these biological and societal factors lay the framework for social drinking as a new and VLJQLĂ€FDQW DVSHFW RI \RXQJ DGXOWKRRG WKH\ GR QRW H[SODLQ ZK\ VRcial drinking is on the rise. As the transition to adulthood becomes increasingly diverse and individualized, young adults are experiencing a new social vulnerability that is unique to their generation.

Pleasure as a Neurological Phenomenon While there is a biological answer to the question of why social drinking takes place, biology cannot adequately resolve the issue at hand because it fails both in its explanation of the physical sensation of pleasure derived from alcohol and in its ability to explain the increase in social drinking seen in youth over the last several decades. Neurologically speaking, the experience of pleasure and pain is an evolutionary mechanism that has been preserved in order WR UHLQIRUFH EHKDYLRXU WKDW EHQHĂ€WV WKH LQGLYLGXDO DQG WR GLVFRXUDJH self-destructive behaviour.4 The motivation-reward system, which is the pleasure mechanism in human beings, is activated by various neurotransmitters. When activated, the ventral tegmental area (VTA) and the nucleus accumbens (NAc) “release ‌ neuromodulators such as endorphins and endocannabinoidsâ€? which result in the sensation of pleasure.5 This experience is then recorded in memory systems, D. Mandelbaum, “Alcohol and Culture,â€?

Current Anthropology, vol. 6, 3 (1965): 281.

2 M. Lee Upcraft, “Today’s First Year Students and Alcohol,� College Drinking: Changing the Culture (2002).

3 “Social,� from www.oxforddictionaries.com, 1

accessed November 17th, 2011.

4 Diaz, Contreras, Gomez, Romano, Caynas, Garcia, “Brain, Drugs, its Neurobiological Mechanisms,� Salud Mental Volume, vol.

33, 5 (2010).

5 Ibid.

DAVIES WILSON

80

HQVXULQJ WKDW VDLG SOHDVXUDEOH DQG E\ H[WHQVLRQ EHQHĂ€FLDO DFWLYLW\ ZLOO be repeated. Stimuli of this circuit include sex, exercise, and eating, all fundamental to the propagation, health, and survival of humankind.6 Certain mind-altering drugs, such as nicotine and alcohol, impact the motivation-reward system directly. In the case of alcohol, the GABA and glutamate receptors are interfered with, resulting in an “intense [though comparatively brief] sensation of pleasureâ€? despite the harmful character of said substance.7 This key difference ODFN RI EHQHĂ€W WR WKH VXEMHFW LV UHFRJQL]HG E\ WKH EUDLQ ZKLFK DWtempts to protect against another activation of the pleasure circuit by “reducing the availability of receptorsâ€? and by activating the punishment circuit, which is crucial in discouraging harmful and dangerous behaviour. Thus alcohol, when next consumed, incites less of a pleasure sensation. Humans experience this as “toleranceâ€? to alcohol – every time one drinks alcohol, one must increase the quantity one imbibes in order to achieve the same physiological effect.8 The neurological impact of alcohol on the brain is not limited to the inducement of pleasure. Gilman et al found that not only does alcohol incite an acute sense of pleasure, it further alters one’s mental state by inhibiting anxiety and fear,9 which are features of the punishment circuit.10 This is to the detriment of the organism, as it is the punishment system that “helps us to avoid dangerous stimulus and behaviours.â€?11 Thus alcohol’s biological role in pleasure seeking is evident.

However, this does not explain the discrepancy between the effectiveness of alcohol as a pleasure stimulator and the pervasiveness of alcohol in social settings, nor does it address the increase in alcohol consumption that has been documented over the last several decades.12 7KH SUREOHP LV WKDW DOFRKRO LV QRW DQ HIĂ€FLHQW PHDQV RI acquiring pleasure. Though it distorts, and thus elicits, a response from the motivation-reward system, one must consume more and more alcohol in order to continue to evade the pleasure-reducing effects of alcohol tolerance. Physical exertion, in contrast, not only invokes the pleasure sensation for a more extended period than Ibid.

Ibid.

8 Ibid.

9 Gilman, Ramchandani, Davis, Bjork, Hommer. “Why We Like to Drink: A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study 6 7

of the Rewarding and Anxiolytic Effects of Alcohol.� The Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 28, 18 (2008): 4583.

10 Diaz et al., “Brain, Drugs, its Neurobiological Mechanisms.�

11 Ibid.

JUST A PART OF ‘GROWING UP’?

alcohol, but one never becomes “tolerant� to exercise – it will always produce the sensation of pleasure. The question then arises: in the search for pleasure, why choose alcohol at all, given not only its detrimental character, but also its ineffectiveness as a pleasure stimulus? Furthermore, why increase the consumption of such an ineffective pleasure stimulator from one generation to the next?

Alcohol in the Social Environment A study conducted by Gronkjaer et al found that the soFLDO FRQWH[W LQ ZKLFK DOFRKRO LV XVHG LV H[WUHPHO\ VLJQLĂ€FDQW 6SHFLĂ€FDOO\ WKH\ IRXQG WKDW \RXQJ SHRSOH WRGD\ WKLQN DOFRKRO LV QHHGHG LQ RUGHU WR Ă€W LQ ZLWK WKH VRFLDO JURXS KDYH IXQ LQ VRFLDO VLWXDWLRQV DQG ´UHDIĂ€UP IULHQGVKLSV Âľ13 Young people are “[devoted] to intense social drinkingâ€? as a means of having a pleasurable social encounter.14 $OFRKRO SHUPLWV D YHU\ VSHFLĂ€F NLQG RI atmosphere in social situations characterized by drinking. Young people feel they are expected to contribute to the atmosphere of drunkenness by drinking in these situations. This study found all participants identifying the desirable atmosphere as “cosy.â€?15

$OO SDUWLFLSDQWV LQ *URQMNDHU¡V 'DQLVK VWXG\ LGHQWLĂ€HG the “cosyâ€? social atmosphere, the supposed goal of social drinking, as unattainable without alcohol consumption.16 Non-drinking social situations actually suffer, participants reported, because they lack this atmosphere. Furthermore, the positive atmosphere drinking induces is harmed by individuals choosing not to drink.

Thomas, a nineteen-year-old participant in the study, said that “it is non-normal not to drink� in such settings.17 Non-drinkers are “annoying� to drinkers when socializing because they are not conforming, and drinkers are “annoying� to non-drinkers because they are drinking.18 When pressed further, participants “reported that they would feel uncomfortable if they refused a drink because it could be viewed by others as their rejection.�19

7KH 'DQLVK VWXG\ LGHQWLĂ€HV DQ LQWHUHVWLQJ WKHPH RI ´DFceptance and expectanceâ€? in the practice of social drinking Upcraft, “Today’s First Year Students and Alcohol,â€? College Drinking: Changing the Culture (2002).

13 Gronkjaer, Curtis, De Crespigny, Delmar. “Acceptance and expectance: Cultural norms for alcohol use in Denmark.� Interna12

tional Journal of Qualitative Study on Health and Well-being, vol. 6, 4 (2011): 2.

14 Ibid., 2.

15 Ibid., 6.

16 Ibid., 5.

17 Ibid., 7.

81

DAVIES WILSON

82

today.20 There is an expectation of alcohol as being a facilitator of positive social encounters. Furthermore, when all participants drink, alcohol allows the individual to feel accepted by the peer group because their behaviour is being directly validated by the similar behaviour of others. Not drinking in social situations is perceived as a negative judgement on the behaviour of drinking peers.21 Because non-drinkers don’t participate in the mutual validation of their drinking peers, they miss out on the component of acceptance and inclusion in social scenarios characterized by drinking. While this social explanation is compelling, it as ineffective as the biological explanation in accounting for the increase in social drinking. I seek to uncover what a movement towards the use of drinking in order to mediate social situations reveals about the way in which young adults choose to build their social frameworks today.

Social Norms as Predictors of Drinking Behaviour Social norms are the standard behaviours expected by and RI D VSHFLÀF JURXS RI LQGLYLGXDOV 22 Both Neighbors et al and LaBrie HW DO LGHQWLÀHG VRFLDO QRUPV DV KDYLQJ DQ HQRUPRXV LQÁXHQFH XSRQ the social drinking behaviour of young adults attending university.

There exist two types of social norms: descriptive and injunctive.

Descriptive norms in this context amount to how much one thinks other people drink alcohol, while injunctive norms describe the approval one anticipates receiving from others as a result of one’s own drinking behaviour.23 Neighbors et al, upon surveying young adults attending a West Coast college in the United States, found that social norms “were among the best predictors of college student drinking.”24 They found that “students who overestimate the drinking of their peers and who perceive their friends as more approving of alcohol have more problems because they drink more.”25 This reinforces the theme of acceptance and expectance introduced by Gronkjaer et al: students expect that other students are drinking alcohol, and, because they want their close friends to accept them, students therefore engage in what they perceive as approved alcohol behaviours.26 Ibid.

Ibid., 6.

20 Ibid., 10.

21 Gronkjaer et al., “Acceptance and expectance,” 6.

22 LaBrie, Hummer, Neighbors, Larimer, 18 19

“Whose Opinion Matters? The Relationship Between Injunctive Norms and Alcohol Consequences in College Students,” Addictive Behaviours, vol. 35, 4 (2010): 344.

23 Ibid.

JUST A PART OF ‘GROWING UP’?

A study conducted by LaBrie et al indicates that “injunctive norms for close friends or self â€? predict alcohol-related problems.27 They concluded that “close friends appear to be among the most impactful reference groups in predicting alcohol-related problems.â€?28 7KH LQĂ XHQFH RI LQMXQFWLYH DV RSSRVHG WR GHVFULStive norms places particular emphasis on the “acceptanceâ€? side of the acceptance/expectance trend.29 Students are so aware of their friends’ attitudes towards drinking to the extent that they appear to be acting based on the perceived approval of their friends. This makes sense because it is presumably one’s friends ZLWK ZKRP RQH LQWHUDFWV LQ ´FRV\Âľ VRFLDO VLWXDWLRQV GHĂ€QHG E\ DOcohol use. Thus young adults place a high value on the validation their friends offer regarding their own alcohol-related behaviours.

Alcohol in the Media

6WXGLHV WKDW GHPRQVWUDWH WKH SURIRXQG LQĂ XHQFH VRFLDO norms have upon the behaviour of young adults (and university VWXGHQWV VSHFLĂ€FDOO\ EHJ WKH IROORZLQJ TXHVWLRQV ZKHUH GR WKHVH social norms come from and what is perpetuating their existence today? One hypothesis worth investigating is the effect of advertising upon alcohol consumption. In the review done by HastLQJV HW DO LQ LW ZDV IRXQG WKDW DOFRKRO PDUNHWLQJ LQĂ XHQFHV drinking behaviour.30 They remark that a “[study by Saffer] suggests that countries with advertising bans have lower levels of alcohol consumption and lower levels of motor vehicle fatalities.â€?31 7KH GLIĂ€FXOW\ ZLWK UHVHDUFK WKDW ´>H[DPLQHV@ DOO WKHVH >PDUNHWLQJ@ variables in isolationâ€? is that it cannot assess the strength of alcohol marketing, which relies on the complex interaction of advertising strategies and other factors to sell alcohol.32 Despite this shortcoming, Hastings et al state that “the advertising is rewarding and reinforcing [the] drinkingâ€? of young social drinkers.33 While marketing strategies can sell alcohol to young adults, it appears these same strategies struggle to sell new social norms to the same demographic. In 2003, Wechsler et al studied the impact in Neighbors, Lee, Lewis, Fossos, Larimer. “Are Social Norms the Best Predictor of Outcomes Among Heavy-Drinking College Students?â€? Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, vol. 68, 4 (2007): 556.

25 Ibid., 564.

24

Gronkjaer et al., “Acceptance and expectance,� 10.

27 LaBrie, Hummer, Neighbors, Larimer, “Whose Opinion Matters? The Relationship Between Injunctive Norms and Alcohol Consequences in College Students,� 349.

26

83

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American universities of social norms marketing on students’ heavy social drinking practices.34 Social norms marketing seeks to diminish the instances of alcohol-related problems on university campuses in order to reduce the frequency of “adverse health, educational and social consequences – including physical injury, high-risk sexual behaviour, alcohol overdose, alcohol-impaired driving” and others.35 The aim of social norms marketing in this context is to promote the actual drinking behaviours of students so that they do not drink based on overestimations of their peers’ drinking. Thus social norms marketing targets descriptive norms by attempting to publicize the facts about student drinking, which indicate that students drink less than other students think. This is meant to encourage lower instances of heavy social drinking among university students. However, as Wechsler et al discovered, social norms marketing on college campuses does not reduce the occurrence of heavy social drinking.36 The discrepancy between the effectiveness of alcohol marketing and the ineffectiveness of social norms marketing suggests that marketing cannot create social norms, but rather is only capable of reinforcing existing norms. Thus advertising makes drinking more socially acceptable because alcohol is marketed as being positive, which in turn makes alcohol accepted and expected in positive social encounters. However, marketing alone appears to be unable to change what it is young people accept and expect from social scenarios and cannot explain an increase in social drinking by university students.

Also worth investigating is the impact of indirect alcohol advertising shown through movies, television, and music. The prevalence of alcohol references in the media cannot be denied, with PriPDFN HW DO ÀQGLQJ RI WKH ´ PRVW SRSXODU VRQJV RI according to Billboard magazine” contain references to alcohol use, with over half of these references “associated with partying.”37 In addition, Engels & Koordeman remark that while individuals often pay little attention to a television commercial, in a movie “people are transported into a storyline and identify with the actors and characters,” which in turn makes one more likely to internalize perceived Ibid., 350.

Gronkjaer et al., “Acceptance and expectance,” 10.

30 Hastings, Anderson, Cooke, Gordon, “Alcohol Marketing and Young People’s Drinking: A Review of the Research,” 28 29

Journal of Public Health Policy, vol. 26, 3 (2005): 300.

31 Ibid., 297.

32 Ibid., 306.

33 Ibid., 301.

34 Wechsler, Nelson, Lee, Seibring, Lewis,

JUST A PART OF ‘GROWING UP’?

messages concerning alcohol use.38 In a report authored by Atkinson et al, “alcohol was the most prominent substance and beverage portrayed in media consumed by young people.â€?39 This report found that not only does the media portray alcohol as a standard feature of everyday life, it reinforces the belief that alcohol is a necessary component of positive social experiences.40 In consulting media professionals, Atkinson et al found that most considered it a possibility that the media could affect the alcohol usage of young adults.41 It remains unclear, however, whether the portrayal of alcohol in the media is causing increased alcohol consumption by XQLYHUVLW\ VWXGHQWV RU ZKHWKHU LW LV PHUHO\ UHĂ HFWLQJ WKLV LQFUHDVH The Increasingly Unstable Transition into Adulthood Drinking among university and college students indicates a sincere need held by this demographic to participate in a social system of acceptance and mutual validation.42 University students are turning to social situations characterized by drinking more than their 1960s counterparts in order to seek close interpersonal relationships and attain personal validation. I suggest that present-day drinking behaviour has changed as a result of the dramatic shifts in the transition to adulthood over the last few decades. In 2000, Shanahan, summarizing Buchmann, recognized that “the highly standardized trajectories of school, work, and family have been ‘shattered’ by several structural and cultural developments since the 1960s.â€?43 In the 1960s and 1970s, the process of growing up had PRUH FOHDUO\ GHĂ€QHG DQG VWDQGDUGL]HG VWDJHV RQH DWWHQGHG VFKRRO secured a job, got married, and had children, in that order. Deviation from this order is occurring today partly because the job market has changed – more and more education is required for “goodâ€? jobs while the number of secure, low-education jobs has decreased. 44 To compensate for this, young adults en masse are pursuing higher HGXFDWLRQ DQG PDQ\ DUH WXUQLQJ WR WKHLU SDUHQWV IRU Ă€QDQFLDO VXSport during this new, semi-autonomous phase in their transition to adulthood.45 Such an intermediate phase lengthens the transition to Keeling, “Perception and Reality: A National Evaluation of Social Norms Marketing Interventions to Reduce College Students’ Heavy Alcohol Use,â€? Journal of Studies on Alcohol, vol. 64, 4 (2003): 484.

35 Ibid., 484.

Ibid., 491.

Primack, Dalton, Carroll, Agarwal, Fine, “Content Analysis of Tobacco, Alcohol, and Other Drugs in Popular Music,� Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, vol.

162, 2 (2008): 169.

36 37

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DGXOWKRRG DQG SRVWSRQHV WKH GD\ RI Ă€QDQFLDO LQGHSHQGHQFH ZKLFK 95% of Americans regard as a key indicator of attaining adulthood.46 Other observed changes include shifts in the “institution of the family.â€?47 This is expressed in several ways. Firstly, Western parents are, on average, choosing to bear fewer children and are, in turn, bestowing upon each child more attention, support, and energy than ever before. An implication of this is the increasingly prevalent trend of young adults pursuing higher education with the support of their SDUHQWV 3DUHQWDO VXSSRUW KHUH LQFOXGHV EXW LV QRW OLPLWHG WR WKH Ă€QDQcial; young adults, whether living at home or away, are also maintaining close emotional ties to their parents.48 Thus the semi-autonomy that FKDUDFWHUL]HV WKLV OLIH VWDJH UHĂ HFWV ERWK Ă€QDQFLDO DV ZHOO DV LQ PDQ\ cases, emotional dependence that was not as evident in decades past.

The way we think of the “familyâ€? is changing in other ways too. Marriage is no longer considered a prerequisite for becoming an adult, as it is increasingly seen as a personal choice.49 Cohabitation and childbearing are no longer strictly tied to marriage and are now rising trends among unmarried young adults.50 These changes in the structure of the family contribute to the loss of the adulthood “scriptâ€? which existed decades ago and VHUYH WR GUDPDWLFDOO\ UHFRQĂ€JXUH WKH IRXQGDWLRQV RI \RXQJ adulthood and the young adult’s core social support structure.

This is not an entirely negative development, of course.

In the new family structure each child receives more parental support, which can serve to not only aid the child but also to foster, nurture, and preserve the valuable parent-child relationship. Furthermore, while this extended period of semi-autonomy places a Ă€QDQFLDO EXUGHQ XSRQ SDUHQWV LW DOVR SURYLGHV D \RXQJ DGXOW GHSHQGLQJ RQ KHU Ă€QDQFLDO FLUFXPVWDQFHV ZLWK LQFUHDVHG IUHHGRP WR pursue various interests and opportunities for the simple purposes of personal growth and enjoyment. Thus the view is emerging that there can be more to one’s career and education than merely attaining and maintaining an adequate salary. As the “school/work/ retirementâ€? model is replaced by a less linear and more open and Engels & Koordeman, “Do Alcohol Portrayals in Movies and Commercials Directly Affect Consumption?â€? Addiction, vol. 106, 3 (2010): 472.

39 Atkinson, Elliott, Bellis, Sumnall, “Young People, Alcohol and the Media,� Joseph 38

Rowntree Foundation (2011): 6.

40 Ibid.

41 Ibid., 9.

42 Gronkjaer et al., “Acceptance and expectance� 10.

43 Shanahan, “Pathways to Adulthood in

JUST A PART OF ‘GROWING UP’?

à XLG OLIH FRXUVH \RXQJ DGXOWV DUH EHQHÀWLQJ LQ P\ULDG ZD\V 0RUHover, education is more attainable for young adults today than ever before. And while marriage is being postponed in order to pursue educational and career opportunities, it has been shown that the marriages of individuals who marry later in life, in comparison with marriages that occur earlier, are less likely to result in divorce.51 The changed landscape of growing up thus has many positive attributes. However, it also means that in the midst of transitioning to adulthood, the ways in which individuals form the inWHUSHUVRQDO FRQQHFWLRQV WKDW ZLOO VKDSH DQG GHÀQH WKHLU DGXOW OLYHV are no longer standard and clear-cut. The increasingly non-linear transition to adulthood is lengthening. As the old social construction of adulthood is shattered to make way for a more individuDOL]HG H[SHULHQFH \RXQJ DGXOWV ÀQG WKHPVHOYHV OLEHUDWHG EXW DOVR very alone. Growing up has lost some of its basic formula, rendering the avenues through which individuals form and maintain supportive and close relationships more unclear, diverse, and individual WRGD\ WKDQ WKH\ KDYH HYHU EHHQ 7KLV LQWHQVLÀHV WKH QHHG \RXQJ adults have for social acceptance and, consequently, for alcohol.

In the midst of an individualized adulthood, young people are drinking more in order to participate in a practice of mutual connection in which validation and approval are sought by and received from their peers. This makes sense because drinking is a shared social experience able to bypass the barriers of an individualized life course.

Today, in the search for commonality, the “cosy� social atmosphere is more important than ever before: it is an accepted and expected method of exploring and solidifying connections between individuals in social settings. The new vulnerability felt by young adults today propels them towards drinking as a way to connect with each other.

Conclusions In examining the social and biological causes of the drinking behaviours of university students, this paper raises many quesWLRQV 7KH ÀQGLQJV VXJJHVW D QHHG WR H[DPLQH LQ JUHDWHU GHWDLO WKH Changing Societies: Variability and Mechanisms in Life Course Perspective,� Annual Review of Sociology, vol. 26 (2000): 671.

44 R. Settersten Jr., and B. Ray, “What’s Going On With Young People Today? The

Long and Twisting Path to Adulthood,� The Future of Children, vol. 20, 1 (2010): 22.

45 Ibid., 26.

46 Ibid., 22.

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social and societal differences between the Western world of the 1960s and that of the present day. To understand this issue in its full complexity one would need to take into account ethnic, economic, gender, and possibly other differences within the population of university students then and now. Such an effort does not fall within the scope of this paper. Furthermore, a more discriminating look at the demographic “university students” in contrast with “young adults” is needed to better understand the microenvironments in which today’s young adults live. Further research might include examining how the increasingly individualized experience of growing up is manifesting itself in other aspects of the lives of young adults.

This paper indicates, if nothing else, a pressing need to study alcohol usage among young adults more closely in the larger context of the individual’s transition to adulthood as this manifests itself today.

F. Furstenberg Jr., “On a New Schedule: Transitions to Adulthood and Family Change,” The Future of Children, vol. 20, 1 (2010): 68.

48 Settersten Jr. and Ray, “What’s Going On With Young People Today?” 32.

49 Furstenberg Jr., “On a New Schedule: 47

Transitions to Adulthood and Family Change,” 67; Settersten Jr., and Ray, “What’s Going On With Young People Today? The Long and Twisting Path to Adulthood,” 30.

50 Settersten Jr., and Ray, “What’s Going On With Young People Today?” 31.

51 Ibid.

Lost in Trans-nation written in the Frankfurt airport

A German professor Taught me the transience of trains Those tracked transport automobiles Locomotives with only one motive: To go back and forth on wheels.

People appear and disappear Like ghosts Enter and exit, exit and enter.

There are no characters.

Only Passengers of Empty Seats, Over time leaving marks where heads and bodies should be In winter, like traces of vehicles in abandoned car parks.

- ANDREA BENSON

Parting Shots MEGHAN BORTHWICK

Bird framed in window of building. Berlin, 2011.

Man selling silverware in Camden Town. London, 2011.

Contributors PATRICK BLENKARN is a third year King’s student studying Contemporary Studies, Theatre Studies, and Film Studies. He is an emerging artist, theatremaker, and writer from Ottawa, Ontario. His current academic and artistic interests are in making and WKLQNLQJ DERXW WKHDWUH WKURXJK WKH OHQVHV RI ÀOP ODQJXDJH ÀOP theory, the art of Peter Greenway, and the philosophies of Martin Heidegger, Jacques Lacan, and Gilles Deleuze and FÊlix Guattari.

BETHANY HINDMARSH studied Contemporary Studies and Creative Writing at the University of King’s College. Her primary academic interest is in the relation of aesthetics to politics, particularly the intersections of the two in the context of contemporary classicism or medievalism. Bethany enjoys writing poetry and making theatre.

She presently lives in her hometown of Vancouver, British Columbia.

SHANE BRYSON is from central and rural Ontario, raised in a village called Sundridge. April 2012 will see the end of his studies DW 'DOKRXVLH ZKHQ KH ZLOO ÀQLVK KLV GHJUHH ZLWK FRPELQHG KRQRXUV in Philosophy and English (he hopes). He intends to do a little living before making a decision about further academic pursuits. His interests include creative writing, feminist philosophy, and contemporary poetry.

KIERAN INNOCENZI studies English and Sociology at Dalhousie. He fears being replaced and, but not simultaneously, being subjected to Victorian normalizing power. When he is not writing, coordinating school arts projects, or leaving his bike helmet in soon to be locked rooms around campus, these fears haunt KLP 1LJKW DQG GD\ +H WKHUHIRUH ÀQGV JUHDW FRPIRUW LQ WKH QRtion that his musings will be read and, perhaps, commiserated with.

DAVIS CARR, fourth year student, is pursuing a combined honours degree in English and Contemporary Studies. Davis has been an active member of the King’s community, from serving on the executive of the King’s Theatrical Society to Production Manager for The Watch to editor-in-chief of The Record, King’s yearbook. She is extremely excited to be involved in the academic side of things, and is honoured to have her paper published in Hinge.

CONTRIBUTORS

NATHAN BURLEY (b. 1990) was raised in Toronto by two professional photographers, leading to a multitude of baby pictures. As an adolescent, Nathan played basketball for the rep team Toronto “Five-O,” averaging 9.2 points and 7.8 rebounds a game throughout his career. In the summer of 2008 Nathan appeared in the CBC comedy “Being Erica.” In 2012 while studying English at Dalhousie, Nathan won second place in the Valentine’s Day sonnet contest, receiving $150.00 in cheque form. After graduating, Nathan plans to win thousands of sonnet contests as a career.

Currently attending the University of King’s College for combined honours Contemporary Studies and German, AARON SHENKMAN realized that he is Da-sein in 2009 and hasn’t looked back since. A little too fascinated by the traumatic nature of Heidegger and post-Heideggerian thought, he seems to have gotten in too far over his head and is slightly concerned about the psychological consequences. The paper he submitted, entitled “Saying: Meaning(’s) Impossibility,” is part of a larger work (Language and Trauma in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit) and acts as the spring board from which the reader can begin to understand forgiveness, as opposed to totality, as the sign under which Absolute Knowing should be understood. Despite these philosophical considerations, Aaron still hasn’t entirely given up on his dream of becoming an astronaut.

NICK STARK is from Guelph, Ontario. He is currently earning a degree in Classics and CSP from King’s. He enjoys cooking.

HARRY SAWCHUK is a gifted latté-drinker, but only a moderately talented poet. He does, however, look very good holding a moleskine, which is enough to be getting on with.

JACOB GLOVER grew up in Saratoga Springs, New York.

He is studying contemporary philosophy and classics. And he plans to continue on in philosophy for a graduate degree.

NATASHA HAY LV LQ KHU ÀQDO \HDU RI D FRPELQHG KRQours degree in Contemporary Studies and German. Her essay, “French-Kissing Heidegger: Jean-Luc Nancy’s Existential Analytic of Love,” was composed for Professor Glowacka’s course on The Deconstruction of the Tradition. Its publication is

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CONTRIBUTORS

dedicated to the former, current and prospective law students with whom she has (or has not) been romantically involved. She will continue to engage with the questions of community, language and art in her graduate work at the University of Toronto.

REBECCA DAVIES WILSON is a History of Science and Technology and Italian Studies student who attempts to understand the world around her by writing essays about it. She is always pursuing new forms of creative expression, whether by cooking, sewing, or playing the violin. Her goal-of-the-moment is to accumulate a glass jar for every item in her pantry, because nothing is lovelier than quinoa in a jar.

ANDREA BENSON is a third year undergraduate student of European Studies. She was on exchange in Bergen, Norway last semester and found inspiration to write poetry there, against any of her expectations. She is sincerely appreciative of the support she has received from Hinge, hopes that the UHDGHU ÀQGV VRPHWKLQJ WR UHODWH WR LQ KHU SRHP V DQG ZLWK enough courage would like to contribute again in the future.

MEGHAN BORTHWICK is in her fourth year at King’s and Dal. Between her English and CSP classes she can be found disturbing the peace on the upper level of the library by whispering loudly and not controlling her laughter. Most of her evenings this year have been occupied with rehearsals for the KTS production of Noises Off. When she is not thus engaged, she dabbles in photography, ukulele, writing stories, and learning recipes from her new cookbook.

ADRIAN LEE LV D IUHHODQFH MRXUQDOLVW ÀOPPDNHU DQG OD\RXW DUWist. He graduated in 2011 from the University of King’s College with a combined honours degree in Journalism, Contemporary Studies, and Being Utterly Unemployable. Unlike the brilliant folks who are published in this collection – the second that he has designed – his interests are almost comically simple: straight whiskies, professional sports, medium-rare meats, situational comedies, and their ontological relationship to Hegel’s Aristotelian-style meta-thinking (Nacbdenken).

HINGE A JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY STUDIES

Volume xviii, online edition, 2012

© 2012