apologies all around

I'm sorry I have not added to this thread, but my work load at the moment is too killing. But I will be returning to this soon.

the place of women II: A digression

In the Philosophy of Money, Georg Simmel speaks of money as the “absolute tool”. Simmel begins with one of those foundation stories with which philosophy is littered - the baby who sees his mother point, the man on the deserted island, the two men handing each other tools and instructions. In this story, the stress falls upon the disparity between what an individual wants of another individual and what he has to trade for it. What this situation is supposed to show us is that, in the encounter of the two individuals, everything is too personal. They are too much themselves, they are persons whose qualities require some intermediary to make them collaborate, to make them less personal one with the other. In this encounter, the peculiarities and situations of both individuals are highly pertinent – they are, so to speak, rooted in their situations. They are, one could say, the prisoners of their own authenticity. Simmel postulates that what is required, here, is some third, some intermediary, some absolute means that will enable these situations to interrelate. And in so doing, that means will uproot them. This might not seem to be the obvious result of money, the absolute means. It turns out, however, that money does change the situation of the men not only in regards to their relation to each other, but in regards to their identity with their situations. Their places. Which have been constructed so far on the premise of opposition, and which now encounter the social symbol of absolute indifferent. It is this indifference to what it is a means to, this openendedness to ends, that makes money such an absolute and finally subversive means.

As we fall into the habit, then, of thinking not of the ends, but in terms of this means, money begins to penetrate other social niches. It is the “nature of the instrument to persist through its individual applications or to be called into service in a generally not foreseeable number of occasions.” And this, Simmel thinks, is the secret of the dominance of money: “Out of this particular value of money, its complete lack of connection to all things and moments of time, its complete renunciation of any proper end on its own behalf, the abstraction that derives from it mediate character, flows the superior weight of that which money offers over that which the commodity offers.”

Now, it is under the sign of its penetration into all spheres, as a pure instrument, and its domination of commodities, as being disconnected ideally from all situations – from production itself – that Simmel introduces the effect of money on the style of modern life. Of the style of life, Simmel gives an account that emphasizes the ‘circle’ as the essential community form:

"One of the most common images under which the organization of the substance of life is made clear is its assimilation into a circle, in the center of which stands the actual ‘I’. There is a mode of relationship between this I and the things, people, ideas and interests that we can only designate as the distance between both. An as far as we deal with an object it can, remaining substantially unchanged, come near to the center or be pushed back to the periphery of our range of vision and circle of interest; but this doesn’t effect, for instance, the fact that our inner relationship to this object is changed, but just the inverse, we can designate certain relations of the I to its contents only through the intuitive symbol of a specific or changing distance between both.” These distances are not separated for the I from the object, in other words, but “according to its distance from our organs - differences not only of clearness, but of quality and of the whole character of the felt image – it is easy to extend this symbolization therein that the differences even of inner relations to the things are interpreted as differences of distance to it. (My translation)

”

To get near a thing, in other words, symbolizes a stage in the understanding of a thing. To be “near” a person is to be in a particular relationship with a person. In the world picture given to us by science, Simmel says, this relation of near and far is displaced from its instinctive, or at least traditional, coordinates: our instruments for getting near – like the microscope or the telescope – at the same time tell us how far we are from the objects we are pointing at. How far I am from the piece of skin that, under the microscope, I see is a much different looking thing than the skin that I thought I was as near to as… my own skin. Accordingly, “the anthropomorphizing of nature leaves us, in the subjective perspective, after the side of the feelings and of the, as always, misleading beliefs, a littler distance between men and things that we have at present.” And in this double process, Simmel says, money plays a role.

I’ll return to what that role is after I interpose some excerpts from Rousseau that continue the theme we began to see take shape under Morgenstern’s suggestion about the place of women, or rather, a woman, Julie, in the autarky of Clarens. Though Morgenstern doesn’t mention Simmel, I think the Philosophy of Money gives us an appropriate framework within which to see more clearly why Rousseau’s heroines end unhappily – and more generally, why women, in the moment that they are set in their place, collapse a whole ideology of places.

A woman's place

Let’s take up where we left off: with Madame de Stael’s remark that, in our current social arrangements, women are “neither in the order of nature nor in the order of society.”

D’Agoult cites de Stael not to refer to Rousseau’s time, but to the new, post revolutionary society. However, since the very staging of that opposition is, in a sense, signed by Rousseau, it is natural to think that Rousseau would have something to say to women and about women. In fact, when d’Agoult writes that Rousseau “spoke” to women, she could well be referring to the introduction of Emile, in which Rousseau literally says that he is speaking to mothers. Less literally, the Nouvelle Heloise was an event in the third life of women all over Europe, and surely the letters of Julie speak to women, in d’Agoult’s sense.

Certainly, d’Agoult is onto something when she contrasts Condorcet, with his eagerness to end the system of submission that shackles women in the civil sphere, and Rousseau, for whom it would seem that a woman’s place is in the private sphere. By the social logic that opposes independence and dependence, women, then, should be dependent. And yet, this can’t be all the story. Rousseau could see, and even advocate for, the transformation of the order of dependence, the traditional order; by committing himself to this change, he deprives himself of the traditional reasons that women should be dependent. He deprives himself of the social sanction of that hierarchy. Moreover, how can women have a place at all if all places are to be rearranged? If the old order’s corruption calls for revolutionary action? In fact, as Helena Rosenblatt has pointed out in an article defending Rousseau from the charge of misogyny, even in the Letter to D’Alembert, which has often been seen as the most misogynistic of Rousseau’s writings about women, a closer reading will find that Rousseau is not writing against all women, but pleading the case for women of civic virtue. For Rosenblatt, one should never forget that Rousseau wrote: “Every revolution began with the women. Through a woman Rome gained her liberty, through a woman the plebians obtained the consulate, through a woman the tyranny of the decemvirs was ended; it was the women who saved Rome [when besiged by Coriolanus].”

In all of these examples, Rosenblatt claims, we see women in a different light than in the usual Enlightenment discourse about the ‘softening’ power of women. Rather, Rousseau aimed at the opposite.

And yet, those examples of women outside the house are also examples of states of emergency. If the revolution begins with women, doesn’t it end by putting women back in their place?

The theme I’d like to follow, the effect I’d like to investigate in Rousseau, is, in a sense, a detour around the question of whether D’Agoult is right, or whether Rosenblatt is right. It is the question of the place of these beings who are not in nature or society. I am inspired here by the starting point of Mira Morgenstern’s book on Rousseau. Why, Morgenstern asks, is it that the model of a woman’s place in Emile and the Nouvelle Heloise is in such discord with the arc of the narrative in both books? For surely if the author of Emile is right about women, then the education of Sophie should be crowned with success, rather than tragedy. And Julie’s ultimate failure to be happy in her marriage to Wolmar in the Nouvelle Heloise – Wolmar, the man who her father chose, and who does his best to get her to love him – condemns absolutely that marriage and all the arrangement of the idyll of Clarens, their utopian estate?

Why is it that Rousseau does not gild his theme of women’s place with happy endings, in other words? Why does the narrative force seem to perversely turn upon the conceptual advice? Where is a woman’s ‘place’ in all of this?

I am not taking that as a starting place for an examination of the narratives so much as an allowance for seeking the source of the tension created in Rousseau’s work by women. Ultimately, I want to focus on a suggestion of Morgenstern’s in her brilliant chapter on the household set up by Wolmar and Julie in la Nouvelle Heloise. In a subsection about women and power entitled The Benevolent Patriarchy, she shows that the utopian arrangement of the household set up by Wolmar at Clarens, she writes:

“On the face of it, then, Clarens would appear to be the perfect example of benevolent paternalism. However, here the paradox reappears: using the familial metaphor based on love to operate an estate that must be run on the principles of order, although perhaps in a different guise than expected. Wolmar does use love to run the entire estate, servants and family alike. But this love is not a true emotion. Rather, it is a disguise for absolute control. This use of love as a cover for authoritarian domination emphasizes Wolmar’s cynical realization that while different principles ostensibly underlie the organization of family, citizens, and servants, any relationship involving people can be translated into a matter of politics and power, albeit in different strengths and forms.” (208)

The problem of dependence for Rousseau is the problem of attachment. As St. Preux himself remarks about the Wolmar’s schema, the whole thing is based on attachment.

‘They [the servants] well know that their surest fortune is attached to that of the master, and that they will never lack anything so long as the house is seen to prosper. In serving it, therefore, they serve their patrimony, and augment it in rendering their services agreeable. This is their greatest interest. But this word is hardly in its place on this occasion; for I have never seen a place where the rules [police] or the interests are so wisely managed, and where, however, they have less influence than here. Everything is done by attachment: one might say that venal souls are purified in entering into this abode of wisdom and union.” [1873:430]

Rousseau’s utopian solution to the problem of interest has not drawn enough attention, Morgenstern thinks. Underneath Wolmar’s benevolence is a very manipulative economic structure:

The second obstacle to the servants’ developing any independent notions of their own good as distinct from the well-being of their masters lies in the economic structure of Clarens. Wolmar’s aim is to make the small estate of Clarens as self-sufficient as possible. To this end, outside trade is discouraged unless it is strictly necessary. Further enforcing the autarky of Clarens is the internal exchange system fostered among the inhabitants and workers of Clarens. Thus, for example, the grocer is paid with grain for his supplies, while the rents are used to furnish the houses owned by Wolmar. This economic system, dispensing as much as possible with the circulation of money, finds its philosophical justification in the avoidance of any intermediaries that can render human exchange potentially inauthentic. A most important side effect of this self sufficiency, however, is that this exchange system effectively prevents the servants and workers of Clarens from ever leaving.” [212]

Here, indeed, is place – place closed upon itself. It is here that the problem of the place of women finds a solution – a solutin which, on another scale, is the solution for society as a whole. But the problem with this solution is two-fold: it fosters desperate attachments, rather than love; and it prevents and minimizes the chance of a stranger appearing. The latter is, I think, crucial to Rousseau’s unresolvable problem of reconciling love and place.

Jean-Jacques and the women

They only want you when you’re seventeen
When you’re twenty one, you’re no fun…

Marie d’Agoult, in her summation of the struggle for equal rights for women in France, felt she had to dispell a myth about where Rousseau stood in this history:

“It is to Condorcet and not to Jean-Jacques, as is generally believed, who deserves credit for the initiative of reforms proposed in the education and condition of women. The first man posed the principle of the entire equality of the sexes. Jean-Jacques, who had spoken to women with an incomparable eloquence and tenderness, showed himself, however, less liberal and less serious to them than Fenelon. In his plan of education, which was applicable neither to the women of the people, who did not occupy him, a man sprung from the people, nor even to the women of the middle class, but only to wealthy girls, he established as a principle that women ought to be exercised in constraint; that dependence is their natural state. He wanted to see developed in them not reason, which would render still more painful this blind submission to the will of others, but the talents of agreeableness, on the condition, however, that this be in the frivolous and subaltern manner. M. de Stael, more rational and firmer in her judgments, removed the prejudices of Jean Jacques. Her strong but proud soul was open to all the grand presentiments of modern times. She declared that, in the actually existing state of affairs, women are neither in the order of nature nor in the order of society.”

I’m going to be doing a series of posts on Rousseau, women, money, strangers and the lateral. I thought d’Agoult’s text is a good place to start, both as a statement of the prosecutor’s case against Rousseau and because of the strange intimacy of the denunciation – one made about a man she calls “Jean-Jacques” throughout. A man who spoke to women, and thereby gained a deceptive reputation among them – for though he strirred them up, he meant, all the time, to bring them down. This is, of course, a voice that is very familiar – it is the serpent’s voice; it is the voice of the seducer.

There is something brilliant and momentous about the conjunction, at the end of this passage, between a Rousseau who addresses the daughters of the rich and the more historically informed de Stael. Indeed, it is impossible to talk of Jean Jacques and women without running into the ambivalence of the place of women, played out against a background in which the old order of dependence was dissolving.

Amie's Excellent News - and the ten song countdown!

Amie, long the friend of LI, told me some excellent news yesterday, and I persuaded her to let me celebrate it with a list of ten songs. What the news is can probably be gathered from my not so subtle subtitles.


The brain - Soave il vento


The beating heart Santigold – Creator.


Eyelids – Talking Heads Naïve Melody

Oh expressive Mouth - Yet nature is made better by no mean/But nature makes that mean
Sezen Aksu – Rakkas

Hair - Sweets with sweets war not, joy delights in joy
Dhoom machale

Skin that blocks the light of the sun - the birth of our shadows
Dandy Warhols –Good Morning

Hearing voice makes space from which we dare not turn
Metric Help I’m Alive

And the red blood cells then came then
Dionysos et Kaolin C’est la vie

And the world was the best thing sense had ever sensed
Stravinksy Sacre de Printempts, part 1

Kick out the jams Sexy Sushi – Hibernatus
J'ai tout visité en 2 secondes,
Pékin, Tokyo, la Joconde.

J'ai fait tous les jobs possibles,
Plombier, pute et belle fille.

J'ai sodomisé un louveteau
Avec le manche d'un marteau.

the politics of being born

- Martine Francke
As I perhaps clumsily indicated in my last post, one risks falling under the spell of a parergonal logic in trying to “frame” a text, to give it a frame, to approach it from a frame. For from the start, the frame has a fatal tendency to bilocate within the frame. In this particular case, the frame is a woman – who provides the frame for the actual content of the phrase from Rousseau, “all men are born to be free…”, about which the Consolatio dialogue turns. The woman is both the support, the constitution and condition of that birth, and what is marginalized by that particular freedom. Marie d’Agoult in her Histoire provides a very good (and neglected) overview of feminist history from the French revolution to 1848 –giving due credit to figures who were supposedly re-discovered by the feminists of the 1970s, like Olympe des Gouges.

“The Revolution, after having provoked them [women] to appear on the political scene, threw them back into the shadows, on 9 thermidor, without having provided essential changes in their social condition. However the constitutional assembly, not content to render them a striking homage in entrusting the “reserve of the Constitution to the vigilance of wives and mothers” had sensibly ameliorated their fate in the family in establishing the equal sharing of goods and abolishing the perpetuity of monastic vows. The legislative assembly thought they were doing even more by legalizing divorce. But in this as well the legislators were occupied solely with women of the wealthy class. The questions of equal division of goods, of perpetual vows and of indissoluble ties did not touch the daughter of the people, for she did not expect inheritances, her family had no interest in pushing her into a convent, and the uniformity of the habits of her industrious life retained her naturally, without causing her to suffer, in the one matrimonial tie. The ideas which interested the generality of women and their rights in all social situations were not treated again after the long silence of the Empire and the Restoration than by the schools of Saint Simon and of Fourier.” (II, 33)

This is a beautiful passage, both for what it recognizes and its rather destabilizing ultra gesture. The latter became more common in leftist discourse in the 20th century, when, due to the reactionary family policy of Stalinism, the cry went forward that, as d’Agoult puts it here, the women of the people were wholly uninterested in the bourgeois topics of feminism. The game, by that time, was all about suspending indefinitely the cultural revolution (which was frivolous) while pursuing the economic and political revolution (which was serious). Seriousness is a politically charged social thematic – and alas, an all too little investigated one. However, at the time d’Agoult was writing, the sinister career of this theme was well in the future. Instead, one has to credit d’Agoult with the perception that the unity of “women” could easily disguise the social disunity of “women”. That the “long silence” is broken by the ‘utopians” – oh, this is such a rich topic, and one with such bearing on the liberal-radical alienation from the happiness culture, that I can hardly do it justice here. I’ll just point to it.

And so let us leap, following the method of the grasshopper rather than that of the scholarly ant, back to our Herzen text and end this post with a quote from the doctor:

“Did you ever think what the words, ‘man is born to be free’ mean? I shall interpret them for you. They mean, ‘man is born to be a beast’ – no more. Take a drove of wild horses – complete freedom and equal rights, the most complete communism; but development is impossible. Salvery is the first step to civilization. For development it is incumbent that some shall be far better off and others far worse. It is then that the former can advance at the expense of the latter. Nature spares nothing for development. To her man is an animal with an extraordinarily well developed brain: herein lies his power. Man did not feel in himself the agility of the tiger or the strength of the lion. He was remarkable neither for his muscles nor for especially keen senses; but he evinced a world of cunning, a host of humble qualities which, coupled with his natural tendency to live in communities, brought him to the initial step of social life. Bear in mind that man is fond of obeying; he always seeks something to lean upon, or to hid behind. He lacks the proud self-sufficiency of the beast of prey. He grows up subjugated by the family and the tribe. The more involved and tight the knot of social life became, the deeper people sank into slavery. They were oppressed by religion, which played on their fears, and by the tribal chiefs who played on tradition. There is not an animal, but one from the ‘kind corrupted by man,’ as Byron called domestic animals, that would be able to stand the strain of human relations. The wolf devours the lamb because it is hungry and became the lamb is weaker; but the wolf does not demand slavery from the lamb, nor does the lamb submit to him. It protests by bleating and running away. Into the wildly independent and self-sufficient world of the animals man has introduced an element of personal loyalty, the element of Caliban, and it is owing to this that a Prospero could appear.” (426)

more thoughts on women and doctors

Another story, another tale of substitutions.

Amie’s citing of Sylvia Plath’s Lady Lazarus in the comments of my last post made me think about the difficulty of trying to “frame” my description of Herzen’s Consolatio when the frame is bigger than the picture. But this is not an unusual situation – indeed, though we speak of frames with the image in our mind of those ornamental strips of wood which form a square in which a picture is placed, the analogy rarely works like that when dealing with concepts and themes. For the frame is the world itself, and we must take ‘frame’ in a different, older sense: as the OED puts it, rather diffusely, “The manner or method of framing; construction, structure; constitution, nature…” Etymologically, the word is related to “from” – a root meaning advancement. The unstoppable growth of frames is, indeed, a kind of demented advancement – what begins as a boundary becomes an endless frontier.

If, as I am going to imagine it, there is a vibe in Herzen that comes from therapeutic nihilism, and a likeness of his doctor to one of France’s most prominent radicals, Raspail, there is also a vibe in that struggling dyad, the woman and the doctor. A very nineteenth century vibe, indeed. Modern historians – Angus McLaren and Thomas Laquer, for instance – in telling the story of the medicalization of the female body in the nineteenth century re-use a substitution trope that comes from the nineteenth century: the doctor replaces the priest. McLaren writes:

“when nineteenth-century observers declared “the doctor is replacing the priest” they were almost always referring to the new role assumed by medicine on the terrain previously dominated by the dictates of religion – the area of sex and the family.” (McLaren 1975:39) Now how exactly a replacement like that works – what the area is that is replaced, this hole inside the frame – is relevant not just to the politics of projection which we have been following, but to the interior of the human limit – the defining traits of the Other – that has served as one of our parameter for defining the rise of the material culture. The other within, the patient within, the invalid within the house, the bed, the nation, was becoming, archetypally, the Woman. Michelet, with whom Herzen was friendly, proclaimed, famously, in L’amour that “la femme est une malade.” “She seems destined to pain; thus suffering to be formed, suffering every month, suffering to be a woman…” Thomas Laqueur noted that it was in the 1840s that obstetricians developed a better sense of the menstrual cycle (there had been a medical theory that menses was caused by lasciviousness), building on von Baer’s demonstration of an egg in the fallopian tube of a dog:

“In the novelistic style that characterizes so much early nineteenth-century scientific reporting, Theodor L.W. Bischoff tells his reader that on 18 and 19 December 1843 he noted tat a large bitch in his possession had begun to go into heat. On the 19th he allowed her contact with a male dog, but she refused its attentions. He kept her securely imprisoned for two more days and then brought on the male dog again; this time she was interested but the animals were separated before coition could take place. At ten o’clock two days later, i.e., on the morning of the 23rd, he cut out her left ovary and fallopian tubes and carefully closed the wood. The Graafian follicles in the excised ovary were swollen but not yet burst. Five days later he killed the dog and found in the remaining ovary four developing corpus lutei.

Laquer points out that F.A. Pouchet, a famous doctor (and friend of Michelet) considered the discover that ovulation occurs independently of coition so important that “he formulated it as his “fifth and critical law of reproductive biology.” (Laqueur 1987: 26) As Laqueur points out, this shifted the medical identity of women from the vagina to the ovaries. And Emily Martin has pointed to the persistence of feminine and masculine cultural archetypes in the representation of the egg and the sperm up to the present day.

The thematic of alienation in the liberal and radical marginals begins with a turn in the interpretation of the structure of the relationship between the governors and the governed. The enlightenment notion that the bond between the people and the state consists in some relationship to collective happiness was not a direct hit on the old order – rather, a conservative view of this notion is that happiness is the equivalent of the stability given by a fixed order of dependence. Georg Foster had compared this to an order that kept the people in the stage of larvae – arrested in their development. This metaphoric of development is, of course, a biologic metaphoric. It is taken, ultimately, from embryology. Just as the embryo develops into a human in the womb, the people would develop into perfected humans in the womb of the revolutionary state – or, in the liberal version, in a state that allowed for a culture of the liberated imagination. The oddity of this metaphoric is that, although it is taken from the woman’s body, the woman in the story seems to be backed further and further away from the center. In this, she becomes a frame, a bracket, a support.

I'll return to this in another post