Pornologies: Sex/Violence/Power/Knowledge
Shawn P. Wilbur
Andrea Dworkin: Possessing Sade
Sade's importance, finally, is not as dissident or deviant: it is as Everyman, a designation the power-crazed aristocrat would have found repugnant but one that women, on examination, will find true. In Sade, the authentic equation is revealed: the power of the pornographer is the power of the rapist/batterer is the power of the man.
-Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women
It would be comforting if we could simply dismiss this sort of angry, sweeping indictments of "men" and patriarchal culture as merely the outbursts of a (too-) "radical feminist." It is tempting to respond to the "violence" of Dworkin's rhetoric--the ways in which it will acknowledge no dissenting view--with an equal, opposite violence. The image of Sade as "Everyman" falls somewhere between the crassest sort of sexual essentialism--unabashed "man-bashing"--and pure provocation. The rage that fuels such statements leaves the reader little room to negotiate a place in relation to the text. The roles are simple: male oppressor/rapist/pornographer or female victim. It is no wonder that Dworkin, and her sometimes-collaborator Katherine MacKinnon, elicit such strong reactions.
However, reading snippets of the work of radical feminists--or hearing the catch phrases: "rape culture," "penetration is rape," "pornography is rape"--doesn't give one the sense of the power of those texts. In particular, Dworkin's work is alternately riveting and unreadable. There is a manifesto-like quality to her writing which may be traceable back to the influences of "freak" politics and the Movement on her generation of feminists. Her spelling of "Amerika" throughout most of her work seems to point in those directions. Indeed, her earliest writings, such as Woman Hating, seem intimately tied to the Movement doctrines of sexual freedom as revolutionary force. Although she rejects the retooled patriarchal structures of Leftist "free love"--in much the same way that Valerie Solanis did in the SCUM Manifesto--she posits an even more radical alternative: an androgynous, non-hierarchical society in which all blocks to desire could, and should, be abolished. There would be no need for taboos against bestiality and incest in such a society, since the issues of power, consent and coercion would be swept away by the freeing of "natural" human sexuality. Dworkin was not alone in her vision. Raoul Vaniegem's The Book of Pleasures suggested as similar "revolutionary program," finding precedents among groups such as the Movement of the Free Spirit, a Christian heresy. And we might consider the thread of "queer" liberation that stretches back in American intellectual history to at least Whitman, and may share more than a few similarities with early American antinomian and gnostic heresies.
It is useful to position the early writings of Dworkin in a tradition of relative openness to desire. There is rage in Woman Hating, directed against the power of the patriarchy--strongly connected to some category, presumably neither entirely biological or social, that Dworkin calls "man." But there is an affirmative energy which holds out the possibility of the "androgynous." Biology is not, it would seem, precisely destiny in this early work. But as the polemic becomes increasingly negative in later works, the status of "man" and "woman" seems increasingly reified, socially constructed relationships are increasingly conflated with biological differences.
Dworkin assumes a very uncertain position in the midst of the essentialist-constructivist debate that has been central to the discourse between various feminisms at least since Simone de Bouvoir asserted that "one is not born a woman." The more her work is driven by an anti-pornography polemic, the more essentialist she seems to become. However, even in works such as Pornography: Men Possessing Women and Intercourse it is not clear exactly what Dworkin means by "men" and "women." That is, it is unclear what she assumes to be the origins of these states. This ambiguity--made doubly ambiguous by her apparent shift away from the celebration of desire to its almost complete demonization--is what renders the reading of Dworkin's work so difficult. One is alternately seduced by the strength of her storytelling and brought up short by what seem to be rash over-generalizations.
The central problem in Dworkin's world is a rough equation of sex and violence--at least under patriarchy. This is further complicated by her willingness, like MacKinnon, to slide from violence to its representation as if the two were not separate categories. The strength of Dworkin's narrative is that she personalizes the real problems of women's oppression. She may be without peer as a writer of deeply, personally moving social commentary. She has an eye for the horrible and heart-rending. But if we are to attempt to use this sort of "analysis" as a basis for a feminist social science, or as the basis for law, we have to be concerned about the ways in which that very personal narrative may be manipulative.
There are a large number of ways in which so subjective an approach might undercut the work's value for legal or social scientific purposes. Some of the objections usually raised, including the call to "objectivity," have been challenged by feminist critiques of the formation of "objective" and "subjective" categories within cultures. These critiques show how the Western philosophical tradition, the medical establishments, and psychoanalysis have denied women--along with non-Europeans, children, and frequently the lowest social classes--full participation in the categories of "reason" and "objectivity." These marginalized groups have served as "others" to the dominant groups--largely white, male economic elites--excluded by both actual exclusion from institutions, such as colleges, and through symbolic exclusions, such as the use of a generic, but not fully-inclusive "man" to designate human beings. The existence of others, according to these critiques, is necessary for the establishment of the privileged, core identities. "Men" cannot represent full humanity if "women" do not assume the place of "lack."
This is particularly true within the discourse of psychoanalysis, and that of sexuality in general. The feminist critique of the male/female, active/passive dichotomy is well known. Briefly, the argument is that such divisions work to uphold a certain division of power which allows the patriarchy to perpetuate itself. Women are effectively "silenced" through the enforcement of roles, or are encouraged to be culturally "silent" through their socialization. Both the carrot and the stick work to maintain the hegemony of the patriarchy. In a sense, Dworkin's argument is merely an extreme dramatization of that dynamic, and as such it is hard to dismiss. It would be hard to argue, against MacKinnon for example, that pornography was "only words." Certainly, we must be aware that in a mass-mediated culture like our own representations have some very real effects in shaping individuals and interactions. However, to base any sort of further analysis on that dramatization, without sounding the depths of its foundations, is to invite any number of difficulties.
The problem with the rhetoric of Dworkin--if I may be so bold--is that it finally becomes the thing it hates. In attempting to talk about sexuality and violence, and finding the two inextricably linked, Dworkin becomes increasing violent in her writing. In forcing most readers to assume the role of either rapist or victim, she effectively silences those "other voices" which other feminisms attempt to allow voice. In appropriating the (frequently isolated) work of novelists, and the life experiences of individuals, and working them all into her own narrative of oppression, she reduces the individual differences between them, even as she "personalizes" her narrative. It is hard to imagine a more violent, unforgiving, phallic, masculinist form of writing. In her displays of mastery over the culture she opposes, Dworkin engages in the "possession" of her sources, frequently through suspicious retellings of existing narratives. Perhaps this is the wily avant garde technique of plagiarism and provocation, a sort of feminist scandal in the mold of surrealism, but if so Dworkin is once again taking on the characteristics of that which she despises. Her scorn for those sources is second only to her hatred of Sade.
Still, I want to resist dismissing entirely the problem that Dworkin presents: the pervasiveness of a kind of sex-violence matrix within patriarchal culture. But, if we are to deal with Dworkin's problem in ways which do not replicate what I have suggested is her mistake, we need to find some approach which does not involve either consenting to the silences imposed by her texts or complete rejection--the basic psychoanalytic options of introjection or abjection. One means might be to free her problem from her particular polemic. If we delve into the footnotes of Dworkin's work, we may find other scholars who have wrestled with the same conflicts. In particular, we might want to look at the work of Georges Bataille--a writer present only in a few passages in Dworkin's work and universally scorned there as an apologist for erotic violence. We need not, however, take Dworkin's word for it alone.
Georges Bataille: Sex, Death and the Sacred
Eroticism, it may be said, is assenting to life up to the point of death.
-Georges Bataille, Death and Sensuality
It is not hard to understand, given her particular prejudices, how Dworkin could disapprove of Georges Bataille. Bataille's own fascination with the "transgressive," his "pornographic" writings, and his analysis of the "use value" of Sade place him firmly, it would seem, in the realm of Dworkin's rapist-patriarch. However, there are surprising number of continuities between the works of Dworkin and Bataille. Bataille's world, like Dworkin's, has at its core a relation of sex-violence-death, and he acknowledges the way in which the roles of sacrificer and victim have been consistently mapped down onto men and women respectively. Where his analysis differs is in the ways that it associates the biological world with this relation, and in his unwillingness to finally abject the transgressive elements that he finds. Bataille's writing is not without its own sort of violence, but it is a violence which seeks to engage with an otherwise unknowable world. It is the violence of one possessed, rather than one possessing.
Bataille has been extremely influencial on recent continental philosophy, and the various strands of cultural study that have grown out of the "poststructuralist" and "postmodernist" tendencies, but he has been present in America almost entirely through footnotes. Writers like Baudrillard and Foucault owe a significant debt to Bataille's work, and through them some of his ideas have gained wide circulation. However, his own work seems to have been read infrequently. Only his novels have been available with any regularity in this country, and most editions have been released by either avant garde presses or pornographic publishers. As far as I have been able to ascertain, Bataille is nearly unknown among North American sociologists, despite the fact that his work grows out of the early sociological/anthropological tradition of Mauss and Durkheim. Yet a "sociology of the sacred" is probably as close to a classification Bataille's project as we could hope to come. It is not, however, a "sociology" that lends itself to easy instrumentalization, and this has undoubtedly blunted its potential impact in America.
Bataille's wrote numerous works, on a broad range of topics, but nearly all of them deal in some way with the central problems of eroticism and transgression. It is hard, therefore, to speak about Bataille's thought without mentioning works of fiction together with works of philosophy, together with works on art history and "general economy." And it is hard to separate these works from the life of the writer, since Bataille repeatedly foregrounded the importance of personal "inner experience" in his work. In general, Bataille's life/work is not only focused on an analysis of transgression, but it is itself transgressive. "Excess" is the unifying element here. Bataille is as concerned with conjuring up "the other" in his analyses--with giving speech to that which we ordinarily silence--as Dworkin seems to be to reifying that silencing.
The overall argument of Bataille's work is spread somewhat unevenly through various texts, with each partial explanation filling out the whole from some new direction. However, his basic arguments can be found in Death and Sensuality: A Study of Eroticism and the Taboo and The Accursed Share, a three-volume work on "general economy." The first text delves into the potential origins of eroticism, both historically and organically. In it, Bataille develops the theory of the natural world that drives the rest of his work, and explores its implications through a series of case studies--among them one of several analyses of Sade. In the second work, Bataille focuses on more macro-scale analyses, suggesting how various systems of exchange--from potlatch to the Marshal Plan--are manifestations of certain warring tendencies within civilizations based on work and consumption.
Death and Sensuality takes as its central problem eroticism, "assenting to life up to the point of death." For Bataille, life, specifically as it is tied to reproductive sexuality, and death are promiscuously interconnected. That is, death is present--and particularly so--at those moments we most closely associate with the giving of life, and death is disturbed by the irruption of new life. The problem, which taboos seek to address, is one of boundaries. That which threatens to cross a boundary, particularly to symbolically obscure the line between life and death, threatens the individual and society which build indentities on the basis of those boundaries. Significantly, for Bataille, those boundaries are more social than natural, and they are maintained through signifying practices. It is probably not a coincidence that Bataille gives credit to Jacques Lacan in the acknowledgements for Death and Sensuality. There is ample indication that Lacan's notion of unstable, "decentered" ego/subjects was at least compatible with Bataille's dynamic of taboo and transgression.
The biologistic basis for Bataille's whole system is fascinating. He begins by noting that the natural world is excessive. He points to the fact of reproduction as an indication that, rather than being ruled by some absolute scarcity of resources, life is driven toward a consumptive production of more life. But this drive toward life is not unconnected with an intimacy with death. In support of his assertion, he moves to an analysis of reproduction at the cellular level. Pointing to the two primary modes of reproduction--sexual and asexual--he describes the central role of an annihilating violence to each. The terms of this argument are "continuity" and "discontinuity."
In asexual reproduction, the creation of the two identical causes a rupture in the "identity" of the "parent." While both "children" as in some sense continuous with the (no longer existent) "parent," they are no longer continuous with each other. Since the biological material, the "identity," of the parent is now split between the children, the parent is no longer continuous with itself--to the extent that we can even talk about the existence of the parent after reproduction. The potential paradoxes of "identity" in this exceeding and rending of the original self present Bataille with one instance of the "death" that naturally accompanies new life.
Sexual reproduction presents a similar set of problems of continuity. In the fusion of sperm and egg, the death of the parents is foreshadowed in the obliteration of separateness. Rather than a violence of rending, there is a violence of merging. The combination of egg and sperm is a sort of decomposition of the individual parts--foreshadowing, if only symbolically, the decomposition of the parents' bodies. This particular, human, form of reproduction has the closest association with death, with decomposition being the linking factor. Bataille points to taboos which show that the period during which dead bodies are considered abject is the period during which they are rotting. This period marks something like the opposite of sexual reproduction, since the biological processes which mark decomposition involve the proliferation of new life out of the matter of the corpse, at a time when the individual is thought to have passed into non-life. Dry bones can mark the place of a deceased individual, but the irruption of life from a "dead" body threatens the notion of the individual by calling into question the line between life and death and the relationship of the individual to the continuity of life.
The space of mixture, excess and possibility that is left open by death and sensuality is what Bataille calls the "plethora." It marks the always-excessive nature of things, which human civilizations have attempted to cover up through careful systems of management and classification. In Death and Sensuality, Bataille subsumes most of these systems under the category of "work." It is important to understand that, according to Bataille's scheme, the uncertainty of the life-death, and therefore the sex-death, boundary need not be a problem under all social conditions. It is specifically the attempt to organize the natural plethora of the world through work that is incompatible with the sorts of uncertainty that are Bataille's focus. In this way, he is not so different from the Dworkin of Woman Hating, who can imagine an entirely different sexual economy freed from patriarchal hierarchy and oppression.
Having established the basic conflict between work and the plethora, and having identified eroticism as the privileged site for this conflict, Bataille spends the rest of Death and Sensuality exploring the means by which various cultures have managed to survive the contradictions. Taboo and transgression are the major terms of this analysis. Taboos are the structures which protect society from inherent contradiction. They establish the core identity of the culture by establishing precisely what must be abjected. Transgression is then the means by which the desires and frustrations masked, or set up, by taboo are released in socially-sanctioned ways. Bataille makes clear that the rules of transgression are frequently as rigid as the taboos they break. Trangression does not involve absolute freedom. In fact, transgression and taboo work together to make certain expressions, which might more seriously threaten a society, nearly unthinkable.
Bataille sets up an opposition between cultures within which ritualized transgression--that is, sanctioned violence against taboo--is able to diffuse the various threats to the realm of work, and those, like our own, in which the spaces of trangression are no longer widely recognized, and where the conflicts must be worked out in other ways. Bataille's own "pornographic" writing, his championing of Sade, his early associations with the Surrealists and later ones with the Acephale ("headless") group, might all be seen as attempts to create spaces for the "irrational"--that is, that which can not be contained within the Enlightenment, work-driven mode of "rationality." Significantly, Bataille and his closest associates were as concerned with the "sacred," and with religious experience, as with any other form of social experience. The sublime, excessive, conflicted space of the sacred bears at least symbolic, metaphoric resemblances to the spaces of passion, or orgasm (the "jouissance" or bliss of much French philosophy). For Bataille, the need for these spaces is great, since the ritual structures by which cultural tensions were managed have been largely lost in the desacralization of our cultures.
The Accursed Share is Bataille's macro-level analysis of various approaches to managing the problem of the plethora. Not surprisingly, he finds that cultures with a sharper sense of the sacred nature of taboo have been more able to create spaces in which tensions could be released. Following the incorporation of work into the structures that had previously supported religion--a la Weber--societies have been less able to create spaces of transgression, and have instead been forced to create modern forms of warfare and a whole range of oppressions. The plethora, denied by economies of scarcity, resurfaces as "woman," the "primitive," "nature," "the masses," the "reds." It is a classic example of the return of the repressed, or of the "normal" function of deviance. And transgression takes the form of sexual abuse, class war, imperialism, overheated consumption. Or sex is stripped of its sacred character without anything being added in its place to deal with the potential irruption of violence form the symbolic world into the physical world.
The distance between the worlds of Bataille and Dworkin is not, I think, as great as Dworkin would have us believe. Both see the connections between sex, violence and death as central to the conflicts in contemporary culture. Both acknowledge the ways in with sex, and the sex-gender matrix have become important sites for cultural conflict management, as well as the violence which comes with unresolved conflict. However, it may be Bataille who provides the explanation that is most useful for a feminist polemic--at least for feminists whose goal is finally to reduce sex-gender inequalities. The sacred character of Bataille's eroticism--its "radical otherness" in contemporary philosophical jargon--suggests the possibility of re-thinking erotic relationships in ways which begin to deal with the conflict and violence that the world of work assigns them. Sex becomes radical in a way that Dworkin understood in the 1970s, before 'fucking' became for her only a word for the possession of women by penetrative force through intercourse.
This "hopeful" reading of Bataille, however, should not be mistaken for some sort of call for innocence, or a return to some "primitivism" regarding the erotic. The sort of sacred space that Bataille calls for must be an explicitly transgressive one, and transgression always carries with it certain dangers. To transgress is to enter the realm of the gods, or at least to leave the human realm. For individuals constituted by the discourses of work, progress, psychoanalysis, and capital, the sacred may well be best designated by the label "psychotic" or "schizophrenic." The darkness of Bataille's work is certainly a reflection of the gulf between the contemporary world and the "primitive" societies that Bataille drew inspiration form. The potlatch of the Tlingit is almost unthinkable for contemporary Americans, given the radically different meanings of plenty and consumption in our society. However, Bataille does provide us with a less personalized narrative, despite his emphasis on "inner experience," and also a variety of essays (attempts) at drawing out the significance of his rethinking of nature and the erotic. Through him, we may be able to return to the important questions raised by feminists like Andrea Dworkin. The sacred may be no less difficult to instrumentalize than rage, but at least Bataille has some more explicit grounding in familiar disciplines, despite his interdisciplinarity. Certainly, both Bataille and Dworkin ask very interesting questions about what can be considered "sexual deviance." Bataille does not finally refute the notion that "Sade is Everyman." Instead, he examines more fully what that might mean. But if sexuality is traditionally a sacred space, is it more "deviant" to find it played out in a pornographic film or strip joint, or diffused through glamour magazines and automobile advertisements? Why, if this is a "Rape culture," does pornography occupy such a privileged--one might say fetishized--place in radical feminist critiques?
Michel Foucault: Subjection and the Limit
I would be remiss in ending an examination of writing on sex and transgression without at least mentioning Michel Foucault. Foucault's work follows Bataille's, both in terms of intellectual history and in terms of influence, although there are significant differences in the way the two writers deal with "sexuality." Foucault's overall project was to show the ways in which power was diffused in modern societies, so that its force did not come as much from centralized authority, which could impose its will, as from systems of discourse in which individuals participate, and through which they partake of some fraction of power and autonomy. For Foucault, the human "subject"--used here in the psychoanalytic sense--is not an autonomous thing apart from culture. Instead, individuals are subjected--indeed, are required to participate in their own subjection--in order to participate in society as individuals. Discourse, which for Foucault is the key term for systems of linked power/knowledge, is the tool through which we fix our individual boundaries, but it is not an innocent tool. It has a specific history, and represents the product of certain conflicts of interest.
Foucault examined the ways in which legal and medical discourse "created" certain kinds of subjects, such as criminals and the insane. However, his most focused work on the work of discourse is probably his three-volume History of Sexuality. In particular, the first volume presents a clear overview of Foucault's understanding of power. What is most important to the examination of sexuality in relation to Dworkin and Bataille is that Foucault insists that "sexuality" as such is an invention, and a fairly recent one. It represents only one modern discourse by which the articulations of bodies, and human subjects, may be understood. Although this may be implicit in Bataille's discussion of the role of work in creating erotic tensions--making the life-death boundary a particularly important site for cultural stress--Foucault's analysis deals more directly with the questions of agency that haunt Dworkin's work.
Reading Dworkin, I find myself constantly looking for some position in relation to the text which does not finally recapitulate the rapist-victim model. The choice is finally one of either "inside" or "outside" the text--as disciple/victim/possessed or as (frustrated?) opponent/aggressor/possessor. This forced choice is what constitutes the violence of the text, as well as the violence of the philosophy behind it. And in Bataille's terms it is a philosophy of rending. The reader must assume one of two predetermined roles. Foucault denies the inside/outside distinction, and the simple oppressor/oppressed model which goes with it. Without "blaming the victim," Foucault looks for the ways in which individuals are driven to participate in their own oppression, and to uphold the values that oppress them. And, through the notion of limits and "limit experiences," Foucault provides a rationale for the impulse which draws individuals back to the spaces of the sacred and of flux, of which sexuality has been a privileged example. If power is more fluid and distributed than Dworkin or Bataille believe, then it is likely that it is even less able to completely still the conflicts which it engenders, leaving individuals to confront these conflicts in personal ways. We know now how Foucault addressed the sex-violence-death matrix in his later years, engaging in S/M practices despite his possible knowledge that he was HIV-positive. This seems to be "assenting to life up to the point of death," and may represent for us the final denial of the inside/outside, theory/practice splits in Foucault's life-work. The irruption of AIDS into the foucauldian narrative certainly encourages us to look beyond innocence or simple oppositions for our grounding in examining matters of eroticism.
A foucauldian analysis of Dworkin's work might well be one way to approach the problem of how she becomes, at least in her relationship to her readers, that which she hates. Foucault presents a model of power that is both more disturbing, in its suggestion that we take part somehow in our own oppressions, and less so, in that it at least suggests that we are always already in possession of some access to power, if only as some node in a network of discourse. But Foucault also gives us a more recognizable standard on which to base social scientific research. He requires that we historicize our notions of deviance carefully, and make clear our grounding assumptions, but he still provides the possibility of normative assumptions around which studies might be based.
None of the approaches to the question of violent eroticism provide anything like neat answers, or trustworthy methodologies upon which we might build follow-up studies. However, they do prod us toward acknowledging and dealing with the more "radical" claims of feminist critics, if not precisely on their own terms. Social scientists and cultural studies scholars alike have been unfortunately slow to critically engage with the ideas of writers like Andrea Dworkin, except in fairly simple introject/accept or abject/reject ways. Perhaps by putting the polemics of Dworkin and other into play with the anthropological and philosophical critiques of writers like Bataille and Foucault, we can build a more sympathetic, if also more conflict-ridden, base from which to explore the difficult issues of sex, violence, power and knowledge.
Bibliography
Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share (3 volumes). (New York: Zone Books, 1988 & 1991).
---. Blue of Noon. (New York: Urizen, 1978). [fiction]
---. Death and Sensuality. (New York: Ballentine, 1969).
---. Guilty. (Venice, CA: Lapis Press, 1988).
---. Impossible. (San Francisco: City Lights, 1991). [fiction]
---. Inner Experience. (Albany: SUNY, 1988).
---. L'Abbe C. (London: Marion Boyars, 1983). [fiction]
---. Literature and Evil. (London: Calder and Boyars, 1973).
---. My Mother/Madame Edwarda/The Dead Man. (London: Marion Boyars, 1992). [fiction]
---. On Nietzsche. (New York: Paragon House, 1992).
---. Story of the Eye. (San Francisco: City Lights, 1987). [fiction]
---. The Tears of Eros. (San Francisco: City Lights, 1989).
---. Trial of Gilles de Rais. (Los Angeles: Amok Books, 1991).
Dworkin, Andrea. Intercourse. (New York: Free Press, 1987).
---. Pornography: Men Possessing Women. (New York: Dutton, 1989).
---. Woman Hating. (New York: Dutton, 1974).
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: Volume 1: An Introduction. (New York: Random House, 1978).
---. The History of Sexuality: Volume 2: The Use of Pleasure. (New York: Random House, 1985).
Hollier, Denis, ed. The College of Sociology, 1937-1939. (Minneapolis: Universtity of Minnesota, 1988).
Klossowski, Pierre. Sade My Neighbor. (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University, 1991).