The Boudoir Bible

Betony Vernon's The Coudoir Bible is set for release this coming month, and this was a wonderful interview with her. Remnants of Foucault line the beginning, as she delves into the taboo of power. Under the rule of monotheism and medicalization, Foucault (1978) points out that sex becomes (ab)normal, treated, watched, and even silenced as a mechanism of control; as hegemonic oppression through the mechanism of repression formed by socio-historical processes. Through our fear of engaging it wholeheartedly, we reify the stigma associated with sex and pleasure. Our treatment of sex as taboo legitimates our interactions and power relations (Berger and Luckmann 1966). Have a listen while she grapples with some of these issues in a lovely accent.

The cuckoo clock

"In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love: they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."
                                                                -Harry Lime, “The Third Man” (Orson Welles)

The Demise of “Instinct” and Mana-tized Truths

            I'll start out by saying that this was written for a Contemporary Theory class that I am currently taking. It was bound to get out of hand with James, Freud, Adorno Horkheimer, and Said on the list, but it should have kernels of interest and contempt for all! I hope you enjoy! Of course, if you have any comments or critiques (including spiteful ones), I'll take 'em in the comments section or by email at bkramer.ru@gmail.com.

            Lacking a coherent place to start, I will dive into this entry with the help of an author that was not on the required reading list. Gaston Bachelard connects quite well with this week’s readings. He was mentioned overtly by Bourdieu last week, was a contemporary critic of both Freud and James, and was an influence on the Frankfurt School (i.e. Horkheimer and Adorno), Foucault (who Said draws from quite heavily), Derrida and Althusser. His concept of the “epistemological break” is explicit in each of these entries, apart from Freud. He states that “scientific progress always reveals a break, or better perceptual breaks, between ordinary knowledge and scientific knowledge” (Bachelard 1949: 270).  Affectively, he is challenging us to see through the doxa, and understand that we are approaching our own inquiries with a pre-established frame of reference, that in some cases, muddles our interpretations beyond repair. He is careful, like Bourdieu, not to take a nihilistic jump, but says rather that science is indeed useful for our understanding of the social and natural world.

            William James approached this in a new way around the turn of the century. I can sympathize with James’ notion of pragmatism, which is built on the implications of practice in any epistemological realm. He does well in turning away “from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins” (Kivisto 2008: 169). With this method, we are then free to use various theoretical tools to aid our understanding of the world. Like Nietzsche, he mentions the Almighty and his control over Euclidean space. Yet, as Nietzsche says “God is dead” (Kivisto 2008: 160), and thus so too is an a priori Euclidean understanding of space if we implement a pragmatic approach. Bachelard also took this prospect up with great diligence in his work on time-consciousness. Both show that by undermining some of these assumptions we can make progress in scientific understanding, among other things. Our new opinions proffer these epistemological breaks in thought, and from there we can construct a new concept of the world; with innovation and the openness of scientific experimentation.

Yet, where James lost me is when he asserts that “to a certain degree… everything here is plastic” (Kivisto 2008: 171). Our construction of a knowledge base becomes slippery and specious. Bachelard called this the “easy tolerance of the Pragmatists” (Jones 1991: 49), and is unfortunately a rather pervasive way of thinking; whether it be in the Thomas Theorem’s famous princess example or the apparent belief system of the Tea Party to ignore events that “actually” happened. In the right hands, this method can benefit us greatly, but it can also be a crux for the lazy scientist. But who does this right? Where do we start? Nietzsche forbade us from starting on theistic grounds, Said undermines the West-centric perspective, and Horkheimer and Adorno deem the tenets of the Enlightenment “totalitarian” as well. It seems we need to go back to the hegemonic forces that shape those frameworks and assumptions that we have in the first place, and as Bourdieu said, take up a barrage of arms to better conceive of our social milieu.

Freud offers some intriguing tools to help us interpret both psychological and macro-social phenomena.[1] Freud’s conception of drives is exemplar as an observation of closed systems (more on this later), as are the heuristic applications of the id, ego, and superego in clinical settings. I found his work on dreams intriguing, and, according to this clinical psychologist, is an applicable tool used toward understanding anxieties that are displaced in obsessive-compulsive tendencies (e.g. like checking fire alarms). This attests to the section about the repressed being manifested through the displacement of fear/anxiety in other real world objects (e.g. in hoarders). I would even agree with Freud’s approach to the oedipal complex, though only to a degree. I have my own reservations about the libidinal aspect of his theory, preferring to conceive of Eros and Thanatos more broadly, as propulsionary factors of closed systems in the physical world. It’s tough to say how much of this was implemented after Freud’s theory became popular, but the application of the oedipal complex is ubiquitous (see TLC’s Strange Sex Season 1, Episode 1 for an example of young men pursuing “cougars” in New York City). The “O.C,” more generally taken to examine conflict between cross-sex relationships with parents, has also been useful in dealing with friends and family in the past. Unfortunately, the defense mechanisms he lays out are all too real, especially when trying to suggest the prospect of change to those unwilling to listen. Interestingly, Willer (in press) uncovered some of these defense mechanisms experimentally in the case of the hyper-masculine.

However, my main discontent with Freud’s theory is his treatment of “instincts,” which is ultimately a lack of foresight in human ontogeny and of neural systems in particular.[2] This may not be pertinent to others (a necessary prerequisite to a tangent if you’ve ever read one), but I feel the application of his theory is a principle reason for the “nature vs. nurture” dichotomy and, consequently, the misconceptions that much of the public has regarding biology, sex/gender, and sexuality (Blumberg 2009; Foucault 1974). In other words, this, to me, demonstrates his hegemony over biological and genetic knowledge, even to the careful scientist without a background in those fields. In the article, he confounds “instincts,” “at birth,” and “innate.” To say these three things with the same intention is erroneous and has left scientists bickering for over a hundred years. We as “social scientists” don’t seem to care that cells exist prior to birth, because there is no behavior to observe and, thus, no “socialization.” For instance, Bergesen (2004) is perpetually sighted in cultural sociology texts, attesting to the pervasive imperialism that nativist-based evolutionary psychology, and best-selling authors like Elizabeth Spelke and Steven Pinker have over our field and the public at large. This happens even with suggestive evidence that they are the same sloppy scientists we condemn for wearing disciplinary blinders (see Spencer et al. 2009). Freud’s, and now our own, lack of understanding of how biological processes unfold in any environment (which is the social, provided there is a source of action (Latour 1997)), perpetuates the idea that we become objects that are overly-determined by miniscule genetic puppeteers. With this said, I fail to see how Freud’s conception of “innate drives” turns into anything different than a shadowy determinism based on the same mana, which he seemed so profoundly opposed to. We can circumvent these problems if we pick from a larger, denser “tree of knowledge” in order to better understand ontogeny and phylogeny (Maturana and Varela 1981). I believe this is what Bourdieu meant by arming ourselves with the weapons of a cross-disciplinary discourse to chat with our colleagues in the natural sciences. This is assuming again that the fruit we pick fills us with self-reflexivity, rather than vacuous presuppositions.  Of course, I am likely preaching to the choir here, since, for instance, biology is absolutely imperative in helping us strengthen our understanding of sex/gender. This is one example of an ongoing struggle that has been pervasive in science.

I was captivated by Said’s piece on Orientalism, and how he spoke of the Occidental framing the Orient. Sticking with science, I was brought back to the History of Science and Technology of Islam in Istanbul. Having visited a couple years ago, I remember how suspect I felt regarding many of the exhibits. I was brainwashed by my own education in the American empire of science, and I didn’t realize at the time how much innovation was stolen. This was especially pertinent since I was living in Córdoba, Spain; one of the most permeable centers of exchange between the “Occidental” and “Orient” up to la Reconquista. The heteronomy of the Roman-Catholic church is still strong there today, as I remember reading that three Muslims were arrested on charges of public disorder for praying in the now-dubbed “Catedral” in the city’s center. To a degree, I wonder if I know anything about the city now that its history seems so clearly Occidentalized to me. In the end, I suppose this suggests caution on all of our parts. Just as Freud’s “mana-tized” theory of instincts eventually monetized the American fetishism of consumption (i.e. Century of the Self) and Nietzsche’s “will to power” was strategically used to ignite the rise of struggling dictator in the Weimar Republic (Shirer 1959), we must all be reminded that our work will someday be seen as the hegemonic dogma of a generation pushing forth toward “progress,” “truth,” and “enlightenment.”

Bachelard, G. 1949. Le Rationalisme Appliqué. Presses Universitaires de France: Paris.

Bergesen, A. J. 2004. “Durkheim’s Theory of Mental Categories: A Review of the Evidence.” Annual Review of Sociology. 30: 395-408.

Blumberg, M. 2009. Freaks of Nature. Oxford University Press.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1991. “On the Possibility of a Field of World Sociology.” Pp. 373-386 in Social Theory for a Changing Society, edited by Pierre Bourdieu and James Coleman.

Foucault, P. 1978. The History of Sexuality. Volume 1: An Introduction. Random House: New York, NY.

Horkheimer, Max & Theodor Adorno. 1944.  Dialectic of Enlightenment. Stanford University Press.

Jones, M. 1991. Gaston Bachelard, Subversive Humanist. University of Wisconsin Press. 

Kivisto, Peter (ed.) 2008. Social Theory: Roots and Branches, Third Edition: Oxford.

Maturana, H.R. & Varela, F.J. 1987. The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding. Shambhala: Boston, MA.

Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. Vintage Books.

Shirer, W.L. 1959. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, A History of Nazi Germany. Touchstone Publishing.

Spencer, John P., Mark S. Blumberg, Bob McMurray, Scott R. Robinson, Larissa K.

Samuelson, and J. Bruce Tomblin. 2009. “Short arms and talking eggs: Why we should no longer abide the nativist-empiricist debate.” Child Dev Perspect. August 1; 3 (2): 79–87.

Willer, Robb, Christabel Rogalin, Bridget Conlon, and Michael T. Wojnowicz. 2013. "Overdoing Gender: A Test of the Masculine Overcompensation Thesis." American Journal of Sociology. In press.

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[1] My inclinations toward Freud have always been negative, though this bias has recently been alleviated by an ongoing discourse with a clinical psychologist.

[2] Of course, he did better than Bergson or Mead as psycho-physiologists, or their attempts thereof.

On Bachelard, Bourdieu, and a Sociology of Knowledge

Over the holiday break I was fortunate to stumble across a book that had been lying dormant on my shelf for some time. I had attempted to pick it up last summer when a good friend gifted it to me, yet found it buried amid the transition to my new career. This book, McAllestar Jones' Gaston Bachelard, Subversive Humanist, explicates the scholar's view on epistemology, poetry and time consciousness. The former and latter have been great interests of mine, especially since reading Berger and Luckmann's The Construction of Social Reality and G.H. Mead's Philosophy of the Present when I was an undergraduate. Bachelard's conception of time in particular was something that I had hoped to delve further in, as he undermines Henri Bergson's conception of la durée, a canonical idea in the study of temporal consciousness. Although the matter of time will inevitably fill later blog entries, I will centralize on how his conception of epistemology has influenced the discourse of "discipline" in academia. 

Jones does a fine job of summarizing Bachelard, and points out that his epistemology has influenced some of the great social theorists of the past three-quarters century such as Foucault, Deleuze, Althusser, and Bourdieu. It was the latter of these theorists that penned the required reading for this week's theory course. Bourdieu's entry "On the Possibility of a Field of World Sociology" comes as an epilogue of a synthetic conference of sociologists in 1991. At the time, and as remains the case today, sociology is a fragmented discipline. We are broken into critical theorists, race scholars, social psychologists, network methodologists, medical sociologists, and the list goes on without any of the above being mutually exclusive entities per se. The problem with sociology, as many see it, is that the "polycentric" conception of knowledge that sociology proffers (Becker 1986) "cannot be controlled completely because of its very fragmentation and diversification" (Bourdieu 1991). In other words, sociology as a discipline seems to suffer from the multivalent streams of research being produced in its academic confines. 

If we focus strictly on the power relations and ever-embedded nature of political influence that sociology seems to have in the social world, it is clear why many find this problematic. The monetary resources that almost any academic field depends on are controlled by the hegemonic forces of the political realm. For instance, the NSF and NIH are both reportedly reducing their budgets toward social science and humanities-based research. Perhaps, this is due to the "identity crisis." Maybe it is our anti-scientistic tendencies. Regardless of the true reason, Bourdieu prompts the reader to question herself: which logic do we pursue as sociologists and scientists more generally? The first logic he proposes is that we function on basis of the power groups associated and controlling the field (i.e. funding agencies, academic journals) or if we pursue the logic of the scientific field, impelled by Spinoza's "intrinsic force of the true idea" (Bourdieu 1991). He points out that many sociologists, among countless other academics, tend to see the latter through the lens set into focus by the former. Essentially, we are ruled by the dominating social forces of our historical landscape. As a result, we become hypnotized by dissident monologues that attempt only to subvert the opposing perspectives in our field as well as the other disciplines that threaten our own. The critical theorists scoff at the social psychologists, the quantitativists spit in the hair of the qualitative crowd, and so on. We are all seemingly guilty of a prolongated inferiority complex. Yet, Bourdieu argues that this will get us nowhere if our real objective is to engage in the latter of the two proposed logics.  

Bourdieu points out that in order to move forward an advantageous practice of science we must understand the "working dissensus" of the field and arm ourselves, not with disciplinary strongholds, but with the weapons of discourse. We must engage in a metasociology of omega means, rather than an alpha end. This entails a "epistemological vigilance" that, like Bachelard, is based on the process of a dialectic. The ultimate goal of a scientific discipline is not to be scientistic, objective, or to locate the a priori truths that we have all seen undermined since Berger and Luckmann's (among others) treatise on the sociology of knowledge. The intersubjective perspective that both theorists propound is careful not to fall into the rabbit hole of a nihilistic escapism, but believes instead that science can help us better understand the world; to aid us in overcoming the power relations that negatively shape the social world. However, we must be willing to learn the language of our counterparts and to engage openly about the strengths and tribulations of our (inter-) disciplinary discourse in the creation of knowledge.

This is the most challenging aspect of my academic career thus far. Most sociologists are not open to the idea of interdisciplinary work, especially with that of the "natural sciences." These specious and, at times, unnecessarily dichotomous categories thwart the nature of a true scientific discourse. Though I have witnessed this proclivity from scholars at both of the institutions I have attended, it is by no means limited to sociology. I have recently spoken with clinical psychologists, English literature students, and even philosophers who stymie through their studies bewildered by the shackles of "discipline" as a social force. Just as Bachelard and Bourdieu propose, I hope to delve into many fields; to melt physics into poetry. I hope this objective will someday come to fruition, but it will undoubtedly need the motivated pursuit of understanding on the part of my colleagues as well. The good news is that some of the disciplinary confines are beginning to crumble; largely from the propulsion to understand the world in truly scientific terms. My frail edge of science bridges sociology and biology: social neuroscience and neurosociology. The contradistinction is necessary in an inappropriate and largely superficial sense, but when I -we- look back on this years later we will either understand the line drawn in the sand as the residue of a merciless power dynamic or snicker at the gaffe of such divides in a theory of knowledge. 

Becker, H. 1986. Writing for Social Scientists. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Berger, P. L. & T. Luckmann. 1966. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, Garden City, NY: Anchor Books.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1991. “On the Possibility of a Field of World Sociology.” Pp. 373-386 in Social Theory for a Changing Society, edited by Pierre Bourdieu and James Coleman.

Jones, M. 1991. Gaston Bachelard, Subversive Humanist. University of Wisconsin Press. 

Mead, G.H. 1932. The Philosophy of the Present. Prometheus Books.