Introduction to the Concept of Chastity

1 Introduction to the Concept of Chastity Alan El Haj Department of Integrated Studies in Education McGill University Montreal, Canada A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts February 2004 © Alan El Haj, 2004 2 ABSTRACT The concept of chastity has not figured prominently in the discourse on sex education or philosophy in general. If and when it does arise, it is treated cursorily at best and is almost always misrepresented. This thesis undertakes to re-present the concept of chastity by situating it against the context of four contemporary philosophical concerns: the problem of technology; the search for authenticity; the experience of beauty; and the anthropology of violence. Within this context chastity emerges as the anthropological hermeneutic which reveals human sexuality and identity in a manner consistent with the ideal of authenticity and the horizon of beauty. In the absence of this hermeneutic, identity and sexuality are revealed against a horizon of technology and violence, and confined and distorted accordingly. This has implications for sex education: the authentic education of sexuality is an education in chastity. RÉSUMÉ Le concept de chasteté n’a jamais occupé une place de premier plan dans le discours sur l’éducation sexuelle ou dans la philosophie en général. Les rares fois où il est en question, ce concept est traité au mieux de façon superficielle et est presque toujours déformé. La présente thèse a pour but de le ré-actualiser en le replaçant dans le contexte de quatre thèmes philosophiques contemporains, à savoir la place de la technologie, la quête d’authenticité, l’expérience de la beauté et l’anthropologie de la violence. Dans ce contexte, la chasteté apparaît comme une herméneutique anthropologique de la sexualité et de l’identité humaines dans une perspective d’idéal d’authenticité et de quête de beauté. En l’absence de cette herméneutique, l’identité et la sexualité apparaissent déterminées par des critères de technologie et de violence, avec toutes les limitations et les distorsions que cela implique. Ce que cela signifie pour l’éducation sexuelle est qu’une véritable et authentique éducation sexuelle est une éducation dans la chasteté. 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract …………………………………………………………………...…..…… p. 2 Résumé ………………………………………..………………………….…...…… p. 2 Table of Contents ……………..........................................................................…… p. 3 Introduction …………….................................................................................…… p. 5 Instrumentalism in Sex Education……………………………………….… p. 7 Attempts at Meaning…………………………………………………..…… p. 9 Intentionality………………………………………………………......…… p. 10 Structure of the Thesis..………………………………..………..….....…… p. 13 Chapter I: Technology………………………………………………….…....…… p. 15 Technique……………………………………………………………...…… p. 16 Techne………..……………………………………………………….......… p. 17 Poiesis………………………………………………………………..............p. 18 Technology………………………………………………………………… . p. 23 Technological Sexual Desire: Lust……………............................................ p. 28 Destining……………………………………………………………....…… p. 34 Mythology…………………………………………………………......…… p. 35 Chapter II: Beauty…………………………………………………………...…… p. 40 Part I: Beauty…………………………………………..…………….…… p. 40 Questions Arising from Technology……………...…………...……...…… p. 40 Recognition and Authenticity………………………………………....…… p. 41 Poetry……………...……………………………………………………..… p. 44 Beauty……………………………………………………….....……...…… p. 46 The Temporality of Beauty………………………………………………… p. 54 Play…………………………………………………………………....…… p. 57 Festival………………………………………………………………...…… p. 58 Theoria………………………………………………………………...…… p. 59 Granting and Freedom………………………………………....……...…… p. 61 The Moment of Beauty: Two Movements…………….........................…… p. 62 4 Part II: Violence…………………………………………..………….….… p. 63 ‘Free Play’ and Transgression.................................................................…… p. 64 Axiological Identity…………………………………………….……..…… p. 67 Axiological Sexuality…………………………………………….. ……..… p. 69 The Archaic Axiological Axis …………..............................................….… p. 71 Desire, Violence, and Sacrifice………………………………………..…… p. 72 Sacrificial Victims of Archaic Axiology…………………………….…...… p. 75 Sex as Festival……………………………………………………...…….… p. 77 The ‘Deep’ Intentionality of Lust..........................................................…… p. 78 The Anthropological Image of Lust……………………………………...… p. 80 The Myth of Myth……………………………………………………………p. 82 Chapter III: Chastity………………………………………………………...…… p. 87 The Method (of Beauty): Chastity………………………….................…… p. 88 The Meaning of the word ‘Chastity’…………………………...……...…… p. 90 Incarnate Signs: Shame and Continence……………………………....…… p. 94 Shame………………………………………………………………….…… p. 95 Continence…………….........................................................................…… p. 96 The ‘Moment’ of Chastity………………………………………….....…… p. 99 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………..p. 103 References………………………………………………………….......……...…… p. 106 5 INTRODUCTION Sitting around a table in a crowded restaurant, Marshall McLuhan and a group of acquaintances were surprised to find themselves being served by a nude waitress – obviously, one of the draws of the restaurant. A friend of McLuhan’s turned to him, and remarked incredulously, “She’s completely nude!” McLuhan, not missing a beat, is said to have replied coolly, “She’s not nude. She’s wearing us…”1 Indicative of the instrumentalization of sexuality that is not an uncommon facet of modern culture2, the ideational import of this scenario, crowned by McLuhan’s cryptic yet incisive exegesis, strikes at the core of the issue facing us today concerning our understanding of the human being and the transmission of this understanding in both education and culture. This issue concerns the recognition or misrecognition of a person, particularly as the person is manifested through their sexual being, i.e., in sexual relationships, or whenever their sexual value enters the consciousness of another, as in the scenario above. The question of recognition and the consequences of its withholding has been well formulated by Charles Taylor, 1 Story recounted by Tom Wolfe in: Wolfe, Tom (1995). Marshall McLuhan: The Man and His Message [Video]. Written by Tom Wolfe. Directed by Stephanie McLuhan. Produced by McLuhan Productions in association with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Published Oakville, Ontario: Magic Lantern Communications Ltd. 2 Lionel Trilling defines culture as “a unitary complex of interacting assumptions, modes of thought, habits, and styles, which are connected in secret as well as overt ways with the practical arrangements of a society and which, because they are not brought to consciousness, are unopposed in their influence over men’s minds.” [Trilling, Lionel (1971). Sincerity and Authenticity. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. p.125.] 6 albeit in a different context, as follows: “Our identity is partly shaped by recognition or its absence, often by the misrecognition of others, and so a person or group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves. Non-recognition or misrecognition can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being.”3 This lucid formulation suggests a question: How does one ‘recognize’ another? And more specifically with our scenario in mind: ‘How does one recognize another where their sexuality is concerned?’ The answer to this question, I argue, is chastity. This much-maligned concept is little understood, even by many of its advocates. Its obscuration in the collective consciousness of the philosophic and academic elite4 is mirrored by its irrelevance in the contemporary cultural project and flanked by its misleading conflation with the notion of abstinence in the ranks of sex educators.5 While abstinence is at times constitutive of chastity, it is not the end of chastity. It does not exhaust the meaning of chastity, and has nothing to do with the essence of chastity. Abstinence, as understood by most advocates, ends when a couple gets married. Chastity obtains even within marriage and even within the sexual act, so that there is chaste sexual intercourse and unchaste sexual intercourse. Chastity is far more than just a prohibition. My aim in this thesis is to re-present the concept of chastity in the context of the problematic of instrumentalism and the question of recognition as formulated by Taylor insofar as they concern sexuality in sex education and in culture in general. By so doing, I want to attain to, and uncover, the essence of the concept of chastity. In order to uncover its essence and ‘rehabilitate’ the meaning of chastity, we must uncover its own dynamics and the structure of its comportment in the world of human existence; we must describe the dynamics that it sets in motion. This means primarily, that we must undertake to Taylor, Charles (1994). “Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition.” Ed. Amy Gutmann. Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press. p.25 4 The concept is not mentioned, for example, in: Nussbaum, Martha (1997). “The Study of Human Sexuality.” In Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (pp.222-256). Cambridge: Harvard University Press; Soble, Alan (1998). The Philosophy of Sex and Love. St. Paul: Paragon House; Morris, R.W. (1994). Values in Sexuality Education. 5 Thomas Lickona for instance identifies chastity as a synonym for abstinence. [Cf. Lickona, Thomas (1993). “Where Sex Education Went Wrong.” Educational Leadership, November. pp.84-89; Lickona, Thomas (1993). “Directive Sex Education Is Our Best Hope.” Educational Leadership, November. pp.76-77.] 3 7 describe the dynamics of our world, the deep currents of human culture. Once we have set the stage we can demonstrate the impact of chastity once it makes it’s entrance into the world. With this in mind, I want to return to the scenario recounted at the outset. McLuhan’s comment – “She’s not nude. She’s wearing us” – is obviously intended eidetically 6 , and speaks of the inability of culture to recognize someone adequately when they are seen solely through the lens of their sexual value. But the metaphor he uses suggests that there are underlying dynamics in seeing or not seeing the waitress that we don’t usually consider. This raises a few questions: What are the structural dynamics that underlie the situation of not seeing the ‘nudity’ (understood as the person, or self, or being, or meaning) of the waitress? Do these dynamics obtain elsewhere; are they in any way universal? Do they emerge from a more general, pervasive, cultural mode of being of which this particular situation is but one instantiation? If these dynamics are uncovered, can we conjecture, from that basis, an alternate method, one that allows us to ‘see’ (recognize) her? It is relatively uncontroversial to argue that the scenario above represents a distorted picture of the waitress. A more controversial claim would suggest that the underlying structure of this scenario, and its consequent representation of sexuality, is, at its core, archetypal of mainstream approximations to sexuality, in both theory and in practice – that is, in thought and education, and in the lived expression of sexuality. Yet, I don’t think it can be avoided. To reiterate, the issue is a conflict between essentially two types of modes of seeing: on the one hand, those which provide a reductive context in which the human being is interpreted in a distorted or false way, and on the other hand, those in which the human being is interpreted in a way which recognizes her as a person. Instrumentalism in Sex Education Whether or not this issue of seeing is an issue, is itself part of the issue. There is no reason to believe, as Ronald Morris has demonstrated,7 that the 6 Eidos, in Plato’s conception, is that which is unseen but is the ideal form of the thing which we do see. Heidegger points out the magnitude of Plato’s innovation here in that he uses the language of precisely what is most visible to describe that which isn’t. [Heidegger, Martin (1977). The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Trans. William Lovitt. New York: Harper & Row. p.20.] 7 Morris, Ronald William (1994). Values in Sexuality Education: A Philosophical Study. Lanham: University Press of America. 8 question of the meaning of human sexuality is perceived to be an issue in mainstream academic and cultural debate, concerning the aims and methods of sex education in North America. The underlying assumption of approaches to sex education – regardless of the explicit position advocated – is instrumental in its inception, methodology, and ultimately, its rendering of human sexuality.8 As Morris has shown, the almost exclusive concern of the advocates of comprehensive sex education and advocates of abstinence education is the reduction of the possible consequences of adolescent sexual behavior (sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies).9 Morris has termed this approach “the crisis-instrumental paradigm” of sex education.10 In its solely technical emphasis, this approach to sex education does nothing to address the problem posed by the scenario recounted above: what is the adequate method of seeing that will allow us to recognize the person meaningfully? It therefore shares, by default, in the same fundamental structuring of reality as the scenario in the restaurant above, whether abstinence education11 or comprehensive sex education is the explicit scheme. By not asking this question, this approach accepts the answer, which is already given by the dominant cultural modes. The difference is a matter of the immediacy and intensity of the consequences as far as the instrumentalization of sexuality is concerned. 8 Ibid. On this point Michael Reiss states, [Reiss, M. (1995). “Conflicting philosophies of school sex education.” Journal of Moral Education, 24, pp.371-382. Cited in: Morris, R.W. (1997). “Myths of Sexuality Education.” Journal of Moral Education, vol.26, no.3, pp. 353-361.] “Most educators would hold that sex education should reduce teenage pregnancy and help prevent transmission of HIV and other causes of sexually transmitted diseases.” On the idea of sex education as solely a health concern, an interesting study of high school textbooks and curricula that are used to teach adolescents about sexuality and relationships, which Paul Vitz has carried out. [Cf. Vitz, P. (1998). The Course of True Love: Marriage in High School Textbooks. New York: Institute for American Values. p.19.] Vitz shows that the consistent message conveyed by these books is that sexuality is a concern that falls simply into the wider concern of health and is treated that way. The same answer that is given to a student who asks ‘Why not do drugs?’ is given to a student who asks ‘Why not have sexual intercourse?’: “Because it would be unhealthy.”(p.19) A question, which is at the heart of human – especially adolescent – concerns and interests “becomes akin to an act of hygiene, like, say, flossing one’s teeth.”(p.19) Nothing from other fields of study in this area are brought to bear – art, philosophy, cultural anthropology, and religion. How then can questions of meaning and significance of sexuality be nurtured in such an environment? 10 Elsewhere, he has termed it “the Utilitarian-Missionary myth” of sex education. [Morris, R.W. (1997). “Myths of Sexuality Education.” Jr. Moral Education. pp.353-361.] 11 Chastity education is usually assumed to be the same as abstinence education but this conflation of the two terms is misguided. 9 9 Attempts at Meaning Morris has pointed to narrative centered motifs as an alternative to the ‘crisis-instrumental’ approach to sex education, noting that this approach is too confining to inspire students. 12 Story is a powerful way to engage questions of meaning and identity, and can reach areas of concern that an education focused narrowly on the regulation of behavior cannot. Though a story about the meaning of sexuality may not necessarily change measurable outcomes of behavior, “it can make a qualitative difference in a person’s life since it addresses concerns relating to one’s very identity.”13 However, even the more meaning-centered programs of sex education do not necessarily engage the issue at the core of the question. What is usually understood in a vague sense is that there is a conflict between instrumentality and meaning. The consequences are pointed out; for example, following MacIntyre’s lead in After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory 14, educators have begun to voice the need for a narrative dimension to education.15 The answer put forward therefore, is to put more meaning into sex-education classes, or to frame them with a meaningful approach, usually a variation of a narrative pedagogical approach, as suggested by Morris. But what is rarely, if ever, delineated is the constitutional structure of instrumentalism and the constitutional structure of meaning in the world generally and in sexuality particularly. The problem with this is that one may consciously attempt to construct a semantic approach, but without having an adequate grasp of the way instrumentalism is structured – the particular dynamics it sets in motion – one may not realize that the structure of what he has termed ‘meaning’, may in fact mirror an instrumental structuring. It may, at its core, be based on an instrumental dynamism. This is not to say that the educator has an instrumentalist agenda or instrumentalist intentions, but rather that unless the instrumentalizing dynamics at work in the culture are not 12 Morris, R.W. (1997). “Myths of Sexuality Education.” Jr. Moral Education, pp. 353-361. Cf. Morris, R.W. (1994). Values in Sexuality Education. pp.77-83. 13 Morris, R.W. (1997). “Myths of Sexuality Education.” Jr. Moral Education. p.358. 14 MacIntyre, Alasdair C. (1981). After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame, Indiana:University of Notre Dame Press. 15 Cf Witherell, C.S. (1995). “Narrative Landscapes and the Moral Imagination.” In H. McEwan and K. Egan (Ed.), Narrative in Teaching, Learning and Research (pp.39-49). New York: Teachers College Press; Kilpatrick, William (1992), Why Johnny Can’t Tell Right from Wrong. New York: Touchstone; Tappan, M. & Brown, L. (1996). “Envisioning a postmodern moral pedagogy.” Journal of Moral Education, vol.25, No.1, pp.101-107. 10 identified and directly worked against, they will always pervade any approach to sex education. So the structural dynamic, or intentionality, of instrumentalism must be delineated. Only then can we have a more or less sketchy picture as to how the method of attaining to meaning must be structured in order to not be ultimately subsumed by instrumentalism, in theory and in practice. To reformulate, the problem is with the way the question of instrumentalism vs. meaning is asked. It is not that the question is wrong, but that the question is not fully asked. In order to ask, ‘what is the problem?’ we must ask ‘how is the problem?’ and in order to ask ‘what is the solution?’ we must ask ‘how must the solution be in order to undo the way the problem is?’ Intentionality I have been speaking of underlying ‘structures’ and ‘dynamisms’ (hows) and the project of delineating them. Such a project suggests a particular approach, one that can be found in phenomenology. Phenomenology can be defined as a description of the ways in which we are conscious of objects in the world, “giving an account of the way that things appear.”16 The central doctrine of phenomenology is ‘intentionality.’ Intentionality, Sokolowski points out, should not be confused with the common use of the word ‘intention’. When we use the word ‘intention’ we usually refer to one’s purpose in doing something: ‘I am going to the store because I intend to buy apples,’ or ‘I had only good intentions, I didn’t mean to hurt you.’ Rather, when used in the phenomenological sense, to ‘intend’ something is to have “consciousness of” or “experience of” that thing. Whenever I visualize an object, I am ‘intending’ it, I am conscious of it, whether the object is in front of me, in my imagination, in my remembering, or whether, the ‘object’ of my intention is actually an object, or a state of affairs, or a concept, or something I am anticipating.17 There are a couple of basic concepts in phenomenology which can clarify some of what we have been talking about, in particular, the question of recognition, if we see recognition as demanding a particular way of seeing. The first concerns the identity of an object, its aspects, and its profiles. 16 17 Sokolowski, Robert (2000). Introduction to Phenomenology. New York: Cambridge University Press. p.13. Ibid., pp. 8-10. 11 Sokolowski uses the example of a cube. When we look at a cube, what we see are its sides. “Each side can be given to us under different perspectives.”18 For example, if I look directly at the side, it is presented to me as a square. If I tilt it, it is presented to me as a line, or as a trapezoid. What is presented to us of the cube, say at an angle, is called an ‘aspect.’ The aspect can be viewed at any given moment. At any point in time, my view of the aspect is given to me as an identity. Each of these momentary views is called a ‘profile of the aspect’. “A profile is a temporally individuated presentation of an object … Ultimately then the cube is given to me in a manifold of profiles.”19 In other words, I perceive the identity of the object – in this case a cube – through the combination of the many profiles I have ‘intended’ of it. Another way of putting it is that the context in which the cube is revealed is what determines the profile in which it is seen. Thus, if the context is always similar, the profiles will all be similar, and the identity of the cube will be experienced, through any particular aspect, as what is consistently revealed through these profiles – the amalgamation of these moments of perception. Sokolowski’s elucidation of identity, aspects and profiles applies in relation to the identity of persons. The profiles that are effected by the interaction of an object with one’s intentionality have much to do with our structures of ‘intention.’ In other words, the field of interpretation through which I gaze at the object before me. In a very simple sense, my own interiorized definition and expectations of what and who a person is, of what they are comprised, is the hermeneutic through which I look at them, and thus, receive them. It is the prism through which they are revealed to me. Thus, the moment of their revealing of themselves in this field is what comprises the profile. A person’s aspects all have a unity in that they all emerge from and are of the one identity. But it is also through aspects via profiles that we reach identity. Identity as a whole can be dealt with through the manifold aspects, and it is through aspects, which encounter various activities, that identity can be reached and transformed in the image of the aspect. And that image of the aspect that is most influential in the shaping of identity is that which is most often and most consistently called into profile. So the ‘profile’ in which my ‘aspect’ is called into most often is going to be the most predominant image I have of my aspect, and it will be through this aspect – as well as the accumulation of all aspects – that I will (use to) 18 19 Ibid., p.19. Ibid. 12 interpret my identity. Self-image is this: the cumulative ‘profiles’, through which I perceive the cumulative ‘aspects’, which comprise my identity. Identity, is however, something more than this. This is why self-image is never able to be a fully adequate grasp of identity; because the whole is greater than the parts. My identity transcends the sum of all my aspects and profiles. Sexuality is an ‘aspect’ of a person’s identity. And we understand and interpret sexuality as it is presented to us through the profiles, which it is invited into. Whether this be in sexual relationships with others, or in the media, or through literature or in sex-education classes. It is culture, in general, which calls forth aspects into its particular profile – which is its particular view of that aspect. It is through these cultural profiles of our sexuality that we come to see it according to the profiles or gazes in which it is looked at and talked about or through the hermeneutics in which it is dealt. For example, we may see it in a bioligistic, spiritualistic, consumerist, instrumentalist, or fragmented light. Or we may see it as a relational, integrated and integral aspect of our identity. But we come to interpret our sexuality not only through the direct profile, i.e., not only through talking about sex or learning about it in school, or engaging in it in sexual relationships. We also interpret our sexuality through association. The ‘profiles’ of those other ‘aspects’ of our ‘identity’, which transform identity, are in turn transformed by identity as a whole. Thus, if our predominant ‘profiles’ of our other aspects are utilitarian, then we are most likely to interpret sexuality in such a way and it will become our default ‘profile’ of our sexual aspect, unless it is directly contradicted. So, the hermeneutic of our life world, of the world comprised of our relationships with others, with culture is always an affective one. We are always in dialogue, as Taylor says,20 and our identity is constantly being generated through that dialogue, most significantly in the dialogue, which takes place in intimate relationships. As Taylor puts it: “Relationships are seen as the key loci of self-discovery and self-affirmation … Love relationships are … crucial because they are the crucibles of inwardly generated identity.”21 Speaking of sexuality as an aspect, which is subject to profiling, i.e., subject to interpretation and reinterpretation through intentional structures, leads us inevitably to the consideration that profiling is effected by the intentionality of desire itself, and by the action of the body in response to this 20 21 Taylor, C. (1991). The Malaise of Modernity. Toronto: Anansi. Taylor, C. (1994). Politics of Recognition. p. 36 13 desire. Intentionality, in this existential consideration we are taking, is not simply a cognitive act, but to a certain extent precognitive as well. According to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “sexual life is one more form of original intentionality”22, a directedness towards the world. That the directedness of desire is culturally shaped is a theme expounded on by René Girard23, for whom desire is mimetic: desire is never an unmediated phenomenon constituting a desiring subject and a desiring object, but is always mediated by a model.24 One learns to desire by imitation. One’s method of desire, so to speak, is modeled after another. Culture and significant others are the models which mediate our desire for us. Whether it is advertising, which trains us to desire something we don’t originally want or need, or the rivalry we experience with our neighbor or friend which makes us want to outdo them in their possession of things or career success. But mimetic desire is also a positive thing; for example, if we model someone who gives themselves to an ideal, or loves unconditionally. Sexual desire, while in itself an intentionality, is also an intentionality which is dialogically shaped, and, it in turn, effects a profiling into which the person projects himself, and through which others are seen in their sexual being. If intention is not simply a cognitive inquiry, but is constituted by desire, by sexuality, by our way of acting and comporting ourselves, we can surmise that our being in the world is an intentionality. Existence itself is an intentional gaze. The way I use the word ‘intentionality’ in the succeeding pages will be consistent with the preceding discussion Structure of the Thesis The first part of this thesis will be an exposition of some of the less visible but fundamental dynamisms at work in the constitution of the horizon in which sexuality finds itself in both sex education and contemporary culture. I will rely on Martin Heidegger to articulate some of these underlying 22 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1962). Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. London: Routeledge and Kegan Paul. p.157. 23 Cf. Girard, René (1977). Violence and the Sacred. Trans. Patrick Gregory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 24 Cf. Girard, René (1996). “Triangular desire.” In James G. Williams (Ed.), The Girard Reader. New York: Cross Roads. 14 dynamics of instrumentalism. If I have accomplished my task, the need for an alternate horizon will be evident. In our times, any dicussion of instrumentalism cannot avoid the question of technology, and there is no more influential and original thinker in this field than Heidegger. The second part of my thesis will show that this need for an alternate horizon – that is, the need to be seen in a non-reductive way – is not an abstract metaphysical speculation, or a passive wish, but a need that expresses itself concretely in various ways. I will articulate one of the contemporary signs of this need, a sign which indicates the character of a would-be alternate horizon. I will rely mainly on the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer for this task. I will show why all methods usually taken to attain this horizon are in the final analysis unsuccessful, and that the consequences spoken of in the first chapter still obtain. My discussion here will rely on Rene Girard’s theory of mimetic desire and violence. The final part will be an exposition of the constitution of chastity and will show, by describing its impact upon the world and the dynamisms it effects, how it is the method that attains this alternate horizon. 15 CHAPTER I: TECHNOLOGY My aim in this chapter is to achieve a deeper understanding of the problematic of instrumentalism when it is applied to sexuality. In order to do that, I am going to undertake an analysis of the dynamics of instrumentalism as they are currently manifested. This will lead inevitably to a discussion of the dynamics of technology, since technology, by most accounts, is the form of instrumentalism in modern life.25 It colors the character of modern life26 and the way we even perceive reality. As Heidegger says, “Technology is a way of revealing.”27 To understand the method by which technology reveals reality, I will delve into its genealogy and discuss the way in which the ancient Greek notion of techne-poiesis – ‘craft of making’ – was a way of revealing, and, analogously, the way sexuality would be revealed according to this method. With this understanding in hand, we can return to the current situation to delineate the character of technology and examine the way in which it reveals sexuality and consequently identity. This will help us better understand the 25 See for example, the discussions in: Taylor, C. (1991). Malaise.; or Borgmann, Albert (1984).Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.; or Ellul, Jacques (1964). The Technological Society. Trans. John Wilkinson, New York: Knopf. 26 27 Borgmann, A. (1984). Contemporary Life. Heidegger, M. (1977). Question Concerning Technology. p.12. 16 dynamics at play in instrumental forms of sex education and in our cultural understanding of sexuality. I will then go on to show how the structure, delineated by Heidegger’s analysis of technology, when applied to sexuality, mirrors the structure and dynamisms of the primordial human problematic of lust. The chapter will conclude with a brief look at the trajectory set in motion by technology and lust and how it is mirrored by the structure of archaic cosmology, as delineated by Mircea Eliade, in order to indicate some of its deepest philosophical and anthropological implications. Technique When questions about sexuality and sex education are predominantly instrumental, and questions of meaning are relegated to the periphery or altogether excluded, we are left with an essentially meaning-less discourse about an issue of profound anthropological significance. All that remains is a discussion of techniques. For example, the literary genre of ‘sexology’, whose emergence is contemporary with that of modern technology, is a symptom of the reduction of sexuality into a series of procedures to manage the raw resource of sexual desire in order to maximize the yield of sexual pleasure (whether it appears in the form of a treatise by a certified expert or as an article or column in a popular tabloid, the discussion is the same). The sexological approach is dominant in modern culture, and questions of meaning are not asked. But meaningless discourse is not merely a benign suspension of meaning. Humans are “self-interpreting animals” 28 , says Taylor, and our identities are continuously being generated in dialogue with others and with the horizon against which we find ourselves. (I use the term ‘horizon’ in the sense of a matrix of meaning in and through which we interpret our identities, relationships, experiences and the world.) The human dynamism of selfinterpretation cannot be suspended; we cannot cease – ontologically – to be human. It is because of this that technique, in the absence of meaning, becomes by default the horizon of self-interpretation. As Neil Postman has argued, when the ‘ends’ (ultimate meanings) are taken out of education, the role they leave vacant is taken over by the ‘means’ 28 Taylor, C. (1985). “Self-Interpreting Animals”, in Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 45-76. 17 (techniques) of education, and the horizon of learning is constructed out of these means.29 The means, in a sense, become the ‘meaning.’ In the absence of a meaningful understanding, sexuality is interpreted sexologically: the ‘meaning’ of sex, becomes the acquisition of pleasure. Since sexuality is a significant aspect of human identity through which one’s identity is expressed and communicated, the contribution of an instrumental understanding of sexuality – one’s own and that of others – to the formation of identity and of relationships, is a contribution to the construction of a meaningless horizon of self-interpretation. The idea of technique as a horizon brings us to the threshold of the question of technology; it brings us into the realm of techne. Techne The word techne referred to the craft of making. According to Martin Heidegger, although the word techne belonged to the craft of making, its decisive meaning lies elsewhere – in “bringing-forth.” 30 “Techne is a mode of aletheuein. It reveals whatever does not bring itself forth and does not yet lie here before us, whatever can look and turn out now one way and now another.”31 An example of this would be the carving of a statue from a block of stone – the way in which the stone becomes the statue depends upon the way in which the craftsman makes it. Aletheia means ‘revealing’ but it also means ‘truth’, not as the correspondence of a proposition to reality, but as it is revealed to man in the moment of its passing from a state of veiledness or concealment, into a state of unveiledness. To make an analogy, it is in the way that we unveil another, bring them forth, that speaks the truth of what they are, that reveals them one way and not another. In other words, techne was a process of disclosure, and it was in this that the craft achieved its importance. Therefore, as much as techne was a way a making, it was also way of a revealing.32 (We will see later how the notion of recognition mirrors techne.) Techne was not performed in a void but within the cosmologicalmythological horizon of the Greeks, and was understood as effecting a mimesis, a re-presentation, of this horizon. Everything made was always 29 Postman, Neil (1995). The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Heidegger, M. (1977). Question Concerning Technology. p.13. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 30 18 symbolic of the cosmological order in a more (a temple or statue of a goddess) or less (a boat or sword) direct sense.33 In other words, techne as making and revealing was the bringing forth of the cosmological horizon in and through the thing made. The context in which a things was made was the meaning the thing contained, and the made object expressed, or was a sign of this context. A question arises here: if techne is a way revealing, and technology is also a way of revealing, what is it, then, that makes techne different from technology? The answer is in the method: poiesis. We are going to see how the poietic method of making differs from the technological, and why this makes all the difference. Poiesis But what is poiesis, which we translate as ‘making’? Plato answers: “Every occasion for whatever passes over and goes forward into presencing from that which is not presencing is poiesis, is bringing-forth.”34 In fact, there are two terms in Greek used to denote the process of bringing-forth: physis and poiesis. Physis refers to the bringing-forth that takes place when a thing is brought about into unconcealing in and of itself. Nature is thus, a physis; for example, the blooming of a flower. Poiesis is reserved for those essences that must be brought out by an artist or craftsman.35 (Let’s keep in mind at this point that the formation of human identity, as it is dialogically generated in and through relationships, corresponds structurally to poiesis rather than to physis.) Thus, the bringing about of a work of art, a statue or temple, is a poiesis – it is the way in which these things are brought into unconcealing or disclosure. It is, as Plato calls it, an ‘occasioning’, an event. Since the craftsman is the one who effects the ‘occasioning’ that is a poiesis, he does so with a method (from Greek Met-hodon, i.e., a way of proceeding). Using the example of a chalice, Heidegger points out that there are four elements, or causes, that gather to ‘occasion’ a thing. They include: (1) the material from which a thing is made (causa materialis), e.g., silver; (2) the form or shape into which it is being made (causa formalis), e.g., chalice form; 33 McEwan, I.K. (1993). Socrates’ Ancestor: An Essay on Architectural Beginnings. Cambridge: MIT Press. Plato, “Symposium (205b),” cited in: Heidegger, M. (1977). Question Concerning Technology. p.10. 35 Ibid. 34 19 (3) the purpose 36 for which it is being made (causa finalis), e.g., for a sacrificial rite (this cause determines the two previous ones); and (4) that which brings about the making of the thing (causa efficiens), e.g., the craftsman.37 Heidegger brings out what he calls the ‘co-responsibility’ of the four causes of occasioning, the way in which the product is ‘indebted’ to them, and the way in which they are ‘indebted’ to each other.38 “The four causes are the ways, all belonging at once to each other, of being responsible for something else.”39 Briefly then, using Heidegger’s example, the chalice is indebted to the metal because it is the material out of which it came to be, and the chalice is indebted to the image of chaliceness, which is what the material comes to appear as. The chalice is indebted to the purpose for which it is made – i.e., the sacrificial rites it is to perform – which are the bounds that confine it. But ‘confining’ in this sense does not primarily mean limiting. It is out of this a priori confining and bounding that the chalice ‘begins to be what, after production, it will be.”40 Thus, the chalice is indebted to its purpose, material, and form, and they are all responsible for the chalice. The one responsible for gathering and ordering these three causes is the fourth cause, to which the chalice is indebted – the craftsman. But he is not a cause in the same way as the others. He is the one who brings the whole process into being, who brings the truth of the chalice into revealing or disclosure. The disclosure of the chalice as a meaningful object is contingent upon the craftsman’s capacity for deliberation as he gathers and orders the causes together. His contribution is the infusion of reflection into the process of making. The chalice, made with the reflective deliberation of a craftsman, is elementally different from the chalice that is made without the contribution of this ‘cause.’ For example, a chalice that hypothetically was created by accident – by landslide or earthquake – would not be a chalice in the same sense (nor would a technologically manufactured chalice, but more on this later). It would not be brought forth in the context of the reflective horizon, which the craftsman 36 Heidegger criticizes the translation of the Greek telos into ‘aim’ or ‘purpose’ as a misinterpretation. Rather he says. “The telos is responsible for what as matter and for what as aspect are together co-responsible.” [Heidegger, M. (1977). Question Concerning Technology. p.8.] 37 Ibid., p.6. 38 “What we call cause, and the Romans call causa is called aition by the Greeks, that to which something else is indebted.” [Heidegger, M. (1977). Question Concerning Technology. p.7.] 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid., p.8. 20 brings to the process of its making. This works the other way around as well: the craftsman himself would not be brought into this horizon of reflection, which the other causes call him into, if his making was not a reflective one. He is ‘indebted’ to the other causes in this way, even as they are indebted to him. Therefore, ‘indebtedness’ obtains among the causes themselves in that they relate to and are dependent upon one another in order to ‘bring forth’ the chalice, and in so doing are brought forth themselves. This opens up an important point about the dynamics of responsivity: these causes are not just pieced together at the whim of the craftsman, but he bears a responsibility to relate and reconcile them with each other. There is a dialectic of responses to take into account and be responsible for in the gathering and ordering of these causes, a certain ‘rightness-of-fit’41 in which each of the causes are harmoniously brought out and related together. They have, so to speak, a legitimate say in the process of their coming together. It can only be realized, however, if the craftsman is responsible or responsive to what they are and how they comport themselves.42 Thus, the causes have their significance, and are contextualized in a horizon of meaning, only insofar as they are reconciled to one another in their particular ways of being. This is how they become themselves, so to speak: in their right relationship with one another. The analogy can be applied to human relationships. In other words, in order to become ourselves and to help others become themselves, we must relate to each other in a deliberative manner, responsive to each other’s particularities while at the same time drawing ourselves together. So the task of the craftsman is to gather and order the causes and relate them to each other, in a ‘responsible’ way, in order to effect poiesis. The method he uses determines the gathering, ordering and relating. The method is the way in which the thing comes to be, and the method is effected by and effects a horizon. At this point, let us bring out yet another dimension of the term techne: “From earliest times until Plato, the word techne is linked with the word episteme. Both words are names for knowing in the widest sense.”43 As we have seen, the method of techne is poiesis, making. Now it is emphasized that 41 To use Goodman’s phrase. [Goodman, Nelson (1985). Ways of World-Making. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co. p.132] 42 “The silversmith is co-responsible as that from whence the sacrificial vessel’s bringing forth and resting-in -self take and retain their first departure.” [Heidegger, M. (1977). Question Concerning Technology. p.8.] 43 Ibid. 21 this making, whose essence is revealing, is the way in which something comes to be known. The parallels between the issue of recognition and the discussion of techne-poiesis should now be more apparent. We can surmise that the recognition of persons is a matter of revealing, and if so, that it might be linked with poiesis, and therefore to techne. Techne is a way of knowing, which means that it is a way of understanding, and recognizing (re-cognize: to learn anew). The artist or artisan is the one who, necessarily operating from within and towards his horizons of meaning, effects and watches over the method of knowing. What is brought forth by poiesis, says Heidegger, “has the bursting open belonging to bringing forth…in another, in the craftsman or artist.”44 Therefore, we can also speak of ‘seeing’ a person in terms of technepoiesis. The crafted object is now the person, and the craftsman is now the one seeing her. She (her identity) is brought forth by the looking (as craft) of the looker (craftsman), who deliberates how to gather and order the four causes of this bringing forth. In this case, the causes are: the object who stands before him as a human female (materialis); the form or aspect into which he wishes to bring her, that is, in what ‘image’ she will be represented or categorized, and the way she will be rendered (formalis); the purpose or end for which he brings her forth by looking at her, which bounds and confines her (finalis). In other words, her ‘mode of being’ is effected from the way she is revealed in him. His method of bringing her forth can affirm and bring out the ‘indebtedness’ of these causes by being responsible/responsive. Or he can also negate the indebtedness of the causes by being unresponsive or irresponsible.45 He is responsible to her in that she is brought forth in him, and at the same time indebted to her because in ‘making’ her he is being brought forth in his aspect of craftsman, that is, in his role as an interlocutor in the generation of her identity. She is known by him, and comes to know herself in part through his knowing of her. Poiesis, bringing forth, is effected by the craft at work in the looker’s act of looking. In that act, all the method of his craft, the degree of his ‘responsibility’, brings itself to bear on the revealing of the person. Embedded 44 Ibid., p.10. On the ethical implications of being ‘responsible’ to the particularities of the other see: Nussbaum, Martha (1990). “Finely Aware and Richly Responsible: Literature and the Moral Imagination”, and “The Discernment of Perception: An Aristotelian Conception of Private and Public Rationality.” In Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 45 22 in the craft of making is the horizon of the craftsman, the “mytho-poetic nucleus”46 of his culture, as Paul Ricoeur has put it. Therefore the act of looking, as craft, carries with it the horizon embedded within the eye of the looker. Through this intentionality, the other comes to be known, and thus recognized. In the realm of human interaction, Taylor says, recognition impacts upon the generation of the identity of the other, mirroring back to them a picture of themselves.47 That is, she learns to understand her identity in large part through how others reveal her to herself. Misrecognition in this light of techne, means that the method of recognizing is inadequate to the object48, in this case the person. The ethical achievement of responsiveness has perhaps been most succinctly put forward by Aristotle: to respond “at the right times with reference to the right objects, toward the right people, with the right aim, and in the right way, is what is appropriate and best, and this is characteristic of excellence.”49 Taylor’s thesis that misrecognition “can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted and reduced mode of being”50 is a reverse angle commentary on this Aristotelian theme. I want to turn back to our original scenario of the waitress with which I launched the issue of recognition. McLuhan’s claim was that “she is wearing us.” The way in which sexuality was revealed in that scenario – both the desire of the customers and the revealing of the waitress – do not mirror the dynamics of techne as poiesis, consisting of deliberation, responsiveness, recognition and bringing-forth. Clearly, there is a different method of making and other dynamics at play. Insofar as her sexuality was intended as a resource of sexual use, we can say that the horizon of the customers’ gaze was an instrumental, and thus technological, one. Instrumentalism is a way of seeing reality. It mirrors the way in which instruments interact with reality. Instruments educate us in their method, and when we adopt an instrumental stance, we enact a mimesis of the method of the instruments in our surroundings, the ones we predominantly use. In 46 Ricoeur, Paul (1991). “Myth as the Bearer of Possible Worlds.” In Mario J. Valdes (Ed.), The Ricoeur Reader. New York: Harvester and Whitesheaf. 47 Taylor, C. (1994). Politics of Recognition. pp.25, 32-36. 48 As Martin Heidegger puts it, “Every inquiry is a seeking. Every seeking gets guided beforehand by what is sought.” [Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and Time.Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper.] 49 Aristotle, “Nicomachean Ethics, (EN 1106b21-3)”, cited in: Nussbaum, M. (1990). “The Discernment of Perception.” In Love’s Knowledge. p.79. 50 Taylor, C. (1994). Politics of Recognition. p.25. 23 modernity, instruments have a technological character. Techne, or making, is primarily carried out by technological instruments and therefore technological making is a different process from techne-poiesis. This is why Heidegger says, “Technology…is no mere means. Technology is a way of revealing.”51 An analysis of the process of making in technology will help us to understand the particular way in which technology is a way of revealing. We will then see this way of revealing applied to sexuality. Technology Heidegger argues that the way of revealing which had in antiquity belonged to the craft of making, or techne-poiesis, now manifests itself as technology. It is now technology that watches over the realm where truth takes place, where aletheia, or unconcealing, happens.52 But the way in which technology reveals, says Heidegger, is in fact not poiesis – “bringing-forth” – but rather it is what he calls “challenging-forth,”53 which he describes as “an unreasonable demand [put to nature] for energy that can be extracted and stored.”54 Its method essentially differs from that of poiesis: “The challenging happens in that the energy concealed in nature is unlocked, what is unlocked is transformed, what is transformed is stored up, what is stored up is, in turn, distributed, and what is distributed is switched about ever anew. Unlocking, transforming, storing, distributing, and switching about are ways of revealing.”55 What is meant here by unlocking, etc. becomes clearer when we see how something comports itself when gathered and ordered in this five-fold manner: “Everywhere, everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately at hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering.”56 51 Heidegger, M. (1977). Question Concerning Technology. p.12. Ibid., p.13. 53 Ibid., p. 14. The German word that Heidegger uses is herausfordern which means literally ‘to provoke out’, or ‘to demand out hither.’ The German for bringing-forth is hervorbringen, which literally means ‘to bring forth hither’ or to ‘bring out here’. William Lovitt, the translator of this volume, points out that the structure of the two verbs is similar enough to point out the relation that subsists between the two modes of revealing. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid., p.16. 56 Ibid., p.17. 52 24 Heidegger gives whatever is revealed in this way the term “standingreserve.” 57 ‘Reserve’ because it is revealed as the energy that has been unlocked, transformed and stored up. ‘Standing’ because it is called to be on hold, on standby, so that it may, on demand, be distributed and switched about, for use in any matter that is demanded of it. “Standing-reserve”, therefore is the manner of the comportment of that which is “challenged forth”. In other words, this is the way we see objects through this technological challenging-forth. For example, a tract of land is now ‘challenged’ to yield minerals; air is ‘challenged’ to yield nitrogen. A windmill, however, also uses energy inherent in nature, in the wind. But the difference is that it does not set upon it as a challenging. It does not demand that its energy be unlocked and stored up, but it uses it naturally, in a way that acknowledges its indebtedness, and does not circumvent the physis of the wind, its natural manifesting. It does not unlock its energy, store it up, etc. In the case of challenging nature to yield energy, it is a different case. The natural physis is disregarded; the natural way of emergence that is of the essence of the land in a natural sense, is eliminated. What orders the use of the field is the demands of technology, in a monological, hence, non-reciprocal sense.58 An example Heidegger gives of this is that of the scenic Rhine River in Germany.59 It is set up to supply power to a hydroelectric plant, which sets upon it and challenges it forth to yield electrical energy. The river’s comportment (what Heidegger means by essence) is now ordered by the hydroelectric plant, and is revealed only in relation to the power station. Even when it is not used for electrical energy but regarded and approached as a source of natural beauty it is still revealed technologically. But surely it is not here being approached with an eye to its instrumentalization? The intention may not be to do so, but the intentionality effected is nonetheless so; it exists as a source of natural beauty precisely only when one approaches it that way, on his day off, or as part of a package tour. But that very same Rhine is also the supplier of hydroelectric power. Its essence, therefore, can be switched back and forth, distributed between natural beauty and hydroelectric power, according to when man decides. And his decision has nothing to do with being responsible or responsive to the particularities of the river’s natural way of 57 Ibid. Ibid., p.14. 59 Ibid., pp.15-16. 58 25 revealing. It has to do with when he feels like it. The dynamic set forth by the “challenging-forth” of technology is still at play and underlies every consideration to the river, whether it be in a strictly ‘instrumental’ sense, or (taking the contemplation of beauty as a non-instrumental activity) in a more ‘meaningful’ sense. (Is our issue concerning sex education reflected in the ripples of a German river?) Heidegger calls the mode of revealing, which sets upon and challenges nature to yield energy, “enframing.” In enframing, he says, “lies the essence of technology.”60 The word he chooses is deliberately strange and suggestive. He does not mean simply that a framework is set up, in the sense of a system, although this does actually take place. The prefix ‘en-’ is meant to signify its active dynamism.61 Enframing is not a passive framework of thought but a constant claiming, which sets upon things interminably, like a virus or a predator. Taylor’s phrase, “runaway instrumental reason” goes some way to conveying this active dynamic. Enframing, as the term suggests, is the rendering of a picture of the world within the bounds and rules of a frame. In this conception, everything that is revealed within this frame is revealed as picture. This means that all objects revealed within the frame are not revealed as objects but as simulacra. Their way of being as objects is not revealed, and they exist for man not as objects but as picture. The world enframed by technology is “the world conceived and grasped as picture.”62 But it is not only that the world is picture. If the world is revealed as standing-reserve and the world is revealed as picture, then the pictures of the objects themselves are standing-reserves, which means they too are reducible to a basic uniform element: the picture element or pixel. All differences are superfluous because all plurality is reducible to a single undifferentiated substance. All apparent difference is merely the difference in the quantity and configuration of the same substance. At its core then, this precludes the ground upon which an essential diversity can exist. So what happens to the four causes that combine to bring out poiesis when the method of ordering is no longer the “bringing-forth” of poiesis but the “setting-upon” and “challenging-forth” of enframing? 60 Ibid., p.25. Ibid., p.19. 62 Heidegger, M. (1977). “The Age of the World Picture.” In Question Concerning Technology. p.129. 61 26 Heidegger looks to the intentionality of modern physics upon which technology is built63, which demands “that nature reports itself in some way or other that is identifiable through calculation and that it remains orderable as a system of information.”64 The causes in question, which obtained one way in poiesis, display “neither the character of the occasioning that brings forth nor the nature of the causa efficiens, let alone that of the causa formalis. It seems as though causality is shrinking into a reporting – a reporting challenged forth – of standing-reserves that must be guaranteed either simultaneously or in sequence.”65 So the intentionality of modern physics is taken up by technology and becomes the intentionality of making. The four traditional causes of poiesis are rendered irrelevant and obsolete because material, reducible to quantitative uniform units of energy, can be measured and transformed into anything, which is demanded of it. The only causality, which here obtains, is that between the demand set forth by enframing, and the material called forth to provide energy. The formal cause, even when called forth in the production of art or beauty, serves to generate immediate aesthetic pleasure. How it does so is irrelevant. Thus, its dimension of responsibility and indebtedness are framed out of the frame. The causa finalis is conflated with the demand of the frame and does not reveal itself as indebted to the material and the form. Even the causa efficiens – the craftsman – is not revealed in any capacity other than simply as the function, as the one who presses the button. In this way, he carries out enframing. His realization of himself through responsibility and indebtedness, the deliberation owing to ordering and gathering the other causes is banished out of the frame, and he becomes a mere extension of enframing, a cause in the most mechanical sense.66 Man, who carries out the challenging-forth, is himself challenged forth. He, like the other causes, is revealed as standing-reserve. The radical conclusion of this state of affairs is this: objects made through this causal method are in no way objects in either their conception or construction, or in their final state. The deliberation exercised by the 63 Cf. Heidegger, M. (1977). Question Concerning Technology. p.22. He does not see the relationship as a matter of so simple a causality; Modern technology is made possible by modern physics, but modern physics is preceded by technology, in the sense that the intentionality of technology existed prior to it’s concrete development as machines and computers. 64 Heidegger, M. (1977). Question Concerning Technology. p.22 65 Ibid., p.23. 66 “Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever newer forms.” [Gallagher, E.J. (1979). A Thousand Thoughts on Technology and Human Values. Lehigh: Humanities Perspectives on Technology Program, Leigh University. p.14] 27 craftsman in ordering and gathering the elements to bring forth the thing into itself is totally bypassed in this case. It has its existence in the dialectic between systematic procedure on the one hand, and material that stands by ready to be systematically unlocked, stored, transformed, distributed and switched about, on the other. The systematic procedure is set forth by the fact that there is a demand for these things. The horizon of technology is the frame that reveals all objects as objectless. More radically, the craftsman himself, when employing the method of challenging-forth rather than poiesis, inserts himself into the process of enframing, and is thus, in this act, comporting himself as a mere transference mechanism of the challenging-forth. He ceases to be craftsman in an existential sense; his deliberation and responsibility are framed out of the frame, and he exists as one more undifferentiated factor in the process. In no way does he transcend the frame when he inserts himself this way into the process. Therefore, the importance of poietic seeing and making lies not only in the revealing of the object itself but also in the revealing of the one who effects the bringing forth of the object. His existence as himself is at stake in the same process. Within the intentionality of enframing, there is no causal reason why a thing should appear one way and not another way. The causality of poiesis, which used to take into account indebtedness and responsibility, now has no valence. The thing appears, configured, the way it does within the configurable and reconfigurable dimensions of the picture. The material is called into that particular configuration because that is the configuration demanded, but it could just as well be any other configuration, as long as it satisfies the demand of the one who demands. What is demanded is demanded because it is desired. The only causal connection between what a thing is and how it is revealed is the desire that calls for this thing now and here in this way and not that. Within this type of revealing, it is not what we desire that is accorded any ontological reality, but that we desire – that is to say, desire itself. Moreover, since it is technology that has ordered and revealed the world to us in this way, even our desire is revealed and ordered by technology, so that our way of desiring is mimesis of the technological. Desire, as René Girard has pointed out, is mimetic.67 It is mediated by a model and is never a direct relationship with the object desired. A case in point is the advertising industry. What we desire and the way in which we 67 Cf. Girard, René (1996). “Triangular Desire.” In The Girard Reader. pp. 33-44. 28 desire it is modeled upon the structure of the commercial itself and our identification with the characters in it. We unlock, store, transform, distribute and switch about ever anew, according to the desire we want satisfied. Desire, as I pointed out earlier, is an intentional structure. Therefore, when our desire is ordered technologically it has the intentionality of enframing and the object desired is thus revealed according to the method of challenging-forth and not according to poiesis. Now, we can turn to our waitress scenario and articulate the dynamics at work in the technological revealing of sexuality. Technological Sexual Desire: Lust If we take as a given that sexual desire is inherently directed at another, is aroused by the sexual value of the body of another – whether the body intended is actually present, or whether it is remembered, or imagined, or only intended in a tangential sense, as in a fetish – then we can say that there are two ways in which this desire can be directed using the terms in which we have understood seeing and making in this chapter as intentionalities. The intentionality of this desire can be for poiesis or can be for enframing/challenging-forth. (A third way imaginable would be a stance of indifference, but this, where the person is concerned, ultimately amounts to the negation of poiesis and, therefore, has the same effect, albeit it in a less direct manner, of challenging-forth.) That is to say, that we can either intend the person poietically, in that the method with which we see them can be ordered in response to the demands of the object, in this case a person, or, our intentionality can be structured to yield only the sexual value we desire of that person in a way which does not take into account the entirety of the person and the process necessary for their poietic emergence. We can approach them as solely a resource of sexual pleasure and consequently render them a standing reserve. The intentionality of the waitress/McLuhan scenario mirrors the intentionality of technology. It is an instantiation of enframing. All the characters in the scenario are enframed – the waitress and the men looking at her. We can show this by describing the scenario in terms of intentionalities of seeing. The aspect by which the men are intending the waitress is the sexual value of her body. In intending her, they are calling her into a particular 29 profile. The method of this intending can be described in terms of a deployment of the causes that come together to make/reveal something. The way in which these causes are gathered and ordered together determines whether the seeing and making of the object is an instantiation of poiesis, or whether it is an instantiation of enframing. In the scenario, it is clear that the purpose for their being there is to appropriate the pleasure offered by the sexual value of the waitress’s body. So in terms of the method of revealing, she is challenged forth. The material (her body) is set upon to fulfill a purpose (an instance of sexual pleasure). The particular form doesn’t matter as long as pleasure is yielded. However, this method of intending has a bilateral impact: the craftsmen (the customers looking at the waitress), as causa efficiens, are not revealed as craftsmen, but as functional parts of the process. In not deliberating the best way to order and gather the causes in order that the waitress is revealed poietically, they have framed themselves out of existence as craftsmen and revealed themselves as an extension of technology. So even though the intentionality is effected unilaterally, it obtains, in the process of its effecting, in a bilateral manner. In the act of misrecognizing the waitress, they have misrecognized themselves. The intentionality of their desire, in being the intentionality of technology, has claimed them. Therefore, the dialectic at play here is one between desire and resource of desire, where desire, as the causa finalis takes no account of the men looking, nor the particular waitress, but only intends that the material processed yield a degree of pleasure. Thus, the waitress is revealed as the product of the dialectic between her body as carrier of sexual value and the purpose set forward by the desire of the men that she yields sexual pleasure. The object revealed by challenging-forth, the waitress in this case, is set upon for the energy she carries as sexual value, which is unlocked, stored up, transformed, distributed and switched about ever anew. That is, it is intended apart from the totality of her being; it is available whenever someone wants to look, whether at her or another, pornographically, or by any other medium. It can be seen by anyone who wants, and there are ways of seeing variations and deploying this value to fulfill various novel configurations of sexual desires. She is revealed as ‘standing-reserve’, which is to say that she is on stand-by, ready to yield pleasure stored up when and how it is desired. The implication of this method of revealing, we have seen, is ‘objectlessness.’ Her existence as an object – i.e. as having reality in the world 30 of objects, is concealed by the frame.68 She is revealed as picture. Nothing else but her image, unlocked from the totality of her being, enters this field of vision. She is experienced by the ones looking at her as a reconfigurable configuration that is ultimately reducible to basic units of pleasure, which can be embodied in all kinds of configurations providing they yield the required pleasure. There is a phenomenon whose structure suggests itself as a synonym for technology in the sexual sphere: lust. The Greek word for lust, harpagmos, already has the etymological seeds that would indicate a technological intentionality. It comes from the root word harpon. Much like the English word ‘harpoon’, the harpon is “a tool that allows one to cling, to grasp, to seize for oneself, by tearing off if need be, the object of one’s desire.”69 When used in the sense of harpagmos, lust, it expresses the action of tearing off something from its authentic context, like the challenging-forth of enframing. In so doing, it conceals the objectness of the body. “Lust has the internal effect …on the interior horizon of man and woman, of obscuring the significance of the body, of the person itself.”70 Lust is the mimesis of technology.71 It must be noted at this point however, that to intend with an intentionality of lust is not the same as taking cognition of the sexual value of another. Let us take the analogy of the craftsman who intends a material. That he perceives the material’s value does not immediately insert him into a technological intentionality. He would not be able to undertake poiesis if he could not perceive the value. Rather, the moment of intentional decision takes effect when, conscious that he is perceiving value, he begins to order and gather the causes together in order to bring forth the object into its revealed state. With the perception of sensual value, it is at the moment of intentional decision when the deliberation takes place to challenge forth as in lust, or, to gather and order poietically, therefore revealing the object (the person) of sensual value in such a way as to simultaneously retain and realize the object value of that person, that is, her self-realization as a person. The act of intending, when one is conscious, is the realm in which 68 Marcel’s remark: “…the moment I treat my body as an object of scientific knowledge, I banish myself to infinity,” displays an intuitive grasp of the disembodying dynamic of technological, or more specifically, modern scientific, intentionality. [Marcel, Gabriel (1949). Being and Having. Trans. Katherine Farrer. London: Westminister [London] Dacre Press. p.12] 69 Batut, Jean-Pierre (1997). “The Chastity of Jesus and the Refusal to Grasp.” Communio 24, 4-13. 70 Pope John Paul II (1980). The Depersonalizing Effect of Lust. General audience of September 24, 1980. 71 Lust however, is more primordial than technology – at least in its modern form. A question arises: Is lust a mimesis of technology or is technology a mimesis of lust? Or are both a mimesis of a more primordial dynamic? We will understand this more in the second part of the second chapter. 31 poiesis or challenging forth comes to bear. In other words, it is the horizon effected by the intender that is decisive and not the entry of the object into the passive field of vision of the potential intender. In the waitress scenario we have been dealing with, the intentional decision has gone the way of challenging-forth, lust.72 Having described the situation of the waitress as a technological intentionality, whose structural dynamics mirror that of lust, we are left with the conclusion that the method of revealing has revealed the waitress as a standing-reserve. A standing-reserve has the comportment of something which is objectless – a picture or simulacrum. Therefore, in the intentionality of the lookers, she exists as an objectless unreality, or configuration of pixels. If, as Merleau-Ponty says, “the body expresses total existence, not because it is an external accompaniment to that existence, but because existence comes into its own in the body,”73 then we can only conclude that wherever a technological intentionality reigns, of which lust is an especially cogent one, this basic dimension of our existential being is never brought forth into revealing. The danger, then, is that we are enframed out of existence – at least in the sense that within this technological frame of revealing, we do not exist in our incarnate totality. We are accustomed to terming any intending of persons in an instrumental manner ‘objectification’. But we should by now realize how misleading this term is. To intend someone in the manner which we call objectifying is actually nothing to do with objectifying and everything to do with framing them into objectlessness, into ‘standing-reserve’. In actuality, someone enters our intentionality as an object only when we intend them according to the demands of the object that they are, only when they are brought forward into our field of vision in a responsive – poietic – manner. We can begin now to answer the question put forth by McLuhan’s comment, “She is wearing us.” Technological intentionality – enframing – can be said to have a ‘monological’ dynamic. It does not have the responsiveness to the particularities of the causes that is central to poiesis. Therefore, it does not ‘dialogue’ with them, in the sense that their 72 It is useful to note that intentionality can be directed as remembering and imagination, in the absence of the intended and anticipated object. The men who decided to go to this restaurant had obviously intended the value ‘nude waitress’ in its absence, and thus their intentional decision had been made before the actual present time entry of the waitress into their field of vision. However, at some point or other, the entry of the sexual value made it’s way into the field of vision of the customers, at which point the decision was made to intend in the challenging-forth/lustful manner. For a good introductory discussion of the various intentionalities see: Sokolowski, R. (2000). Introduction to Phenomenology. 73 Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of Perception. p.166 32 particularities have no bearing on the final product because they are all reducible to a homogenous substance, and from there they can be molded into whatever is desired by the demand that sets forth enframing. Therefore, when the waitress is revealed monologically, according to the method of enframing, her particularities, her way of being so to speak, are never revealed; they never come forth into the intentional field of the lookers. Rather, their seeing mirrors technology. They have inserted themselves into the process, have become not the deliberator and participator in the existential sense proper to a human subject, but the conductor (in the electrical sense) of the setting-upon of enframing. This process of enframing, of which they are now a component, and which reveals the waitress technologically, is precisely what conceals the revealing of the waitress in the poietic or ontological sense. In this way, we can understand the statement, “she is wearing us.” We have become the method not of her self-revelation, which requires poiesis, but of her obscuration, her concealment. The bilateral enframing dynamic of this intentionality is brought lucidly to the light of social relations by Merleau-Ponty, who characterizes this “alien gaze which runs over [her] body”74 as an instantiation of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic: “Insofar as I have a body, I may be reduced to the status of an object beneath the gaze of another person, and no longer count as a person for him, or else I may become his master and, in my turn, look at him. But this mastery is self-defeating, since, precisely when my value is recognized through the other’s desire, he is no longer the person by whom I wished to be recognized, but a being, fascinated, deprived of his freedom, and who therefore no longer counts in my eyes.”75 Heidegger makes a similar point: “As soon as what is unconcealed no longer concerns man even as object, but does so, rather, exclusively as standing-reserve, and man in the midst of objectlessness is nothing but the orderer of the standing-reserve, then he comes to the very brink of a precipitous fall; that is, he comes to the point where he himself will have to be taken as standing-reserve.”76 In pornography, we have one of the most vivid examples of the enframing of the human body, whose image is unlocked and redistributed on the screen for the consumption of those who are themselves challenged-forth by its bilateral dynamic. But when people are reduced to simulacra in the 74 Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of Perception. p.166. Ibid., p.167. 76 Heidegger, M. (1977). Question Concerning Technology. pp.26-27. 75 33 intentionality of others the differences between the pornographic and the everyday get whittled away. Our gaze becomes a mimesis of the pornographic camera. According to Heidegger, the whittling is immanent; enframing has so effectively claimed the essence of man that “it drives out every other possibility of revealing.”77 More controversially, the intentionality of sex education programs that only provide a context for the instrumental, that is, technical approximation of sexuality (regardless of the intentions of the educators), engender a mode of revealing which mirrors the techne of technology, and thus contain all the dynamisms present therein. In an intentional sense, the methods of lust, of pornography, and of instrumental modes of sex education are ordered by and towards the same horizon, which is technology. The sexual act itself is a way of revealing containing structural dynamics that mirror the act of making understood as techne-poiesis.78 The intentionality of lust, and the revealing it effects, obtains in like manner when the sexual act is one in which one party intends solely the use-value of the other in the manner of a challenging-forth of their sexual value, that is, lustfully. But these dynamics also apply when the two parties have agreed to ‘use’ each other, as in instances of ‘casual sex,’ for example. In sex, like techne-poiesis or challenging-forth, the intentions and the verbal arrangements do nothing to undo the revealing dynamics of the situation itself. With what we have seen concerning the underlying horizonal dynamics embedded in the intentionality of an act – which will, in the final analysis, be poietic or technological – the notion that ‘mutual consent’79 nullifies the dynamisms of an action, which in the absence of consent would amount to sexual use, is the most flagrant stupidity.80 However, even attempts 77 Ibid. An exhaustive and detailed account of the way in which each and every human activity is coming to be thought of in terms of technique, is given by, Ellul, J. (1964). The Technological Society., which shows in a concrete manner, the driving out of all other ways of relating to the world that technology effects. 78 Perhaps there are untold philosophic depths to the colloquialism, “making-out.” We can relate this to techne: what is revealed in “making out,” “comes to presence in the realm where revealing and unconcealment take place, where aletheia, truth, happens.” [Heidegger, M. (1977). Question Concerning Technology. p.13]. That is to say, the person is revealed – made out - one way or another in the process of ‘making-out’ The phrase even expresses the dynamic preserved in the German ‘Hervorbringen’, which means to bring-out-hither. Heidegger uses this word in connection with techne to emphasize the dynamics of unconcealment. 79 Con-sent, to ‘send –with’ is to join another in sending oneself into one trajectory of revealing or another. Mutually consenting to ‘casual sex’ is to send oneself, with another, into the technological revealing grounded in cyclical temporality and all the dynamics pertaining. 80 ‘Stupid,’ from the Latin stupiditas, means ‘numbness, incapacity for sensation, emotion; a state of apathy or indifference; blamable absence of resentment under injury or insult; dullness or slowness of apprehension.’ To be stupid is ‘to be in a state of stupor, stupefied, stunned.’ This type of naming which obscures the actual 34 to place meaning at the center of sexual activity will also fall short in the final analysis if the method employed does not undo the dynamisms inherent in technological intentionality. Intentions mean nothing; it is the method that matters. Destining To conclude this chapter’s analysis, I want to delve into some of the deepest implications of technology and the claim it has on us. Let us return again to the process of techne-poiesis to draw out another dynamic: the causa finalis, the purpose for which a thing is made, that has the role of ‘binding and confining’ a thing. A thing is sent forward to be what it will become from out of the bounds it was brought into by the purpose it was accorded at production.81 Heidegger uses another term for this dynamic of binding and confining as it obtains in technology. He calls it ‘destining.’ Destining is “that sending-that-gathers which first starts man upon a way of revealing. It is from out of this destining that the essence of all history is determined.”82 Remembering Taylor’s formulation of recognition once again will shed more light. When one is misrecognized, it is not just that the picture presented to them of themselves is harmful in that moment. Rather, it gets ‘interiorized’83, and the person, duly misrecognized, is confined and bound and thus sent forth on an historical trajectory “in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being.”84 A destining, according to Heidegger, can be a intentional dynamics of the situation – in the sense of euphemism, or, in this case even worse, blatant falsification (even if this falsification is not meant by the one’s naming it) pertains, as we shall see later, to mythology. The temporality of the mythological, like technology, conceives of being and time as both cyclical, and therefore static. To be static, is to be in state of stupor, stupefied. It is the intentional dynamism of stupidity, which has nothing to do with mental capacity, but rather, an orientation of being away from freedom. This shall become clearer as we progress. 81 Heidegger, M. (1977). Question Concerning Technology. p.8. 82 Ibid., p.24. 83 Taylor, C. (1994). Politics of Recognition. This interiorization is a feature of the ‘inner dialogicality’ that identity is generated through. Interestingly we can speak, then, of destining as a conversation, or relationship with something or other that sends one along one trajectory or another. The dialogue, or relationship, sends one into one mode of being or another. “History” as effected by destining – as Heidegger puts it – can be said to be effected by relationships. The nature of the relationship, and all the dynamisms, intentionalities and horizons it effects, send one along a historical trajectory. 84 Ibid. 35 destining effected by poiesis, so it is not necessarily reductive. But when it is effected technologically it is a reductive mode of revealing. Everything we have seen so far of the type of revealing that technology brings forth is a manifestation of this destining. The reduction of man to standing-reserve, the loss of being, the re-presentation of the world as picture, the loss of poiesis; all these things are symptoms of what Heidegger refers to as ‘the danger’85. Moving along this trajectory of revealing, which amounts to enframing, “man everywhere and always encounters only himself.”86 Having lost the capacity to communicate himself to another and communicate with another, the world appears to him as an extension of himself (‘she’s wearing us’). He has so lost touch with the world that even though he seems to see himself everywhere, he has indeed lost touch with himself and no longer sees his ‘essence.’ 87 He is totally framed and claimed by the system that is technology, which means that in his existential comportment he is nothing more than a component to the technological process, a process whose logical conclusion is the obliteration of man himself. Most fundamentally, technology negates freedom, because “it drives out every other possibility of revealing” 88 and man therefore is imprisoned. Essential freedom does not exist in the frame, and the simulacrum of freedom has taken its place. All that is left is an amorphous desire and an infinite number of choices but they all are reducible to the same essential thing. Desire, here, however amorphously or polymorphously it may be expressed, is uniform in its ultimate trajectory: the obliteration of being – technology.89 This is the trajectory of lust. Mythology Latent within the destining dynamic of technology, hidden in the structures of its deep intentionality, is the realm in which everything that is, comes to be – that is, time.90 The temporal horizon embedded in the nucleus of 85 Heidegger, M. (1977). Question Concerning Technology. p. 26-35. Ibid., p. 26-27. 87 Ibid., p.27. 88 Ibid. 89 Charles Taylor has shown in Malaise of Modernity (Chapter 5, “The Slide to Subjectivism”) the insignificance of choice once we have lost sight of a horizon beyond technology.[ Cf. Taylor, C. (1991). Malaise.] 90 Heidegger’s thesis in Being and Time, and accepted as a ‘doctrine’ in phenomenology. [Cf. Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and Time, and Sokolowski, R. (2000). Introduction to Phenomenology.] 86 36 an intentional structure, is the source from which and to which any destining of a revealed thing leads. In order to get at the heart of the temporal structure of technology, we can describe the intentional dynamisms set in motion by looking at its effects and working inwards from these effects towards an identification of the temporal horizon from which these dynamisms are set in motion. I have undertaken a necessarily sketchy description of these effects with the aid of Heidegger’s descriptive analysis of technology as a particular instantiation of techne – a way of revealing. We have seen that the horizonrevealing potentialities of techne inhered through its historical metamorphosis into technique and ultimately to technology. Perhaps a clue to the temporal structure of technology’s horizon might be found in the original temporal horizon of techne – that is, in the cosmological horizon of Ancient Greece, which, following Eliade91, I take to be essentially archetypical of all archaic cosmology. The description of the way in which ‘being’ is revealed in archaic temporality will shed light on what is essentially an axial symmetry between its intentionality and that of technology. Eliade has pointed out that the temporality that reigned in archaic society is cyclical as opposed to the linear model of time we have in modern western society.92 All things, therefore, come back around to the state in which they are in at the moment. “The eternal return reveals an ontology uncontaminated by time and becoming … everything begins over again at its commencement, every instant. The past is but a prefiguration of the future.”93 Time is both static and cyclical because in every instant the cycle is regenerating itself and all being. The conception of time as cyclical has its source in metonymical reasoning. The cycles of nature are taken as a metaphor for everything, and time, rather than being conceived as dynamic, takes on a spatial characteristic because of its genesis in spatial objects.94 (We will see the deepest anthropological implications of this conception of time in the next chapter.) There is no foundation on which history can be built within this cyclicality. “Nothing new happens in the world, for everything is but the 91 Cf. Eliade, Mircea (1959). Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return. Trans. Willard R. Trask. New York: Harper & Row. 92 Ibid. 93 Ibid., p.89. 94 “The interdependence between the cosmos and cosmic Time (“circular” Time) was so strongly felt that in several languages the term for “World” is also used to mean “Year.” For example, certain California tribes say, “The world is past,” or “The earth is past,” to mean that “a year has passed.” [Eliade, M. (1963). Myth and Reality. Trans. Willard R. Trask. New York: Harper and Row. p.46] 37 repetition of the same primordial archetypes.” 95 The notion of historical progress is dependent upon the possibility and reality of ‘newness.’96 Where there is no possibility of change – which is actualized by an essential alternative – there is no possibility of freedom. 97 Mythical-technological symmetry abounds here when we remember that enframing “drives out every other possibility of revealing.”98 The cosmos in this cyclical conception is a closed entity with no beginning and no end. It is its own source of transcendence, which is to say, that there is no real transcendence, because all is contained within the cycle. A cosmology with no genuine transcendence is, like technology, one where there is no genuine alternate horizon in which freedom can be a reality because the possibility of newness, necessary for change, and thus freedom, cannot be present. These dynamics of myth throw an interesting light upon the notion of ‘casual sex.’ The word ‘casual’ means ‘subject to chance or accident.’99 It is related to the word ‘circumstantial’, which, as Margaret Visser has pointed out, means literally ‘standing around in a circle.’100 Paradoxically, therefore, the notion of casuality has the same dynamics as the notion of determinism. ‘Casualism’ is the doctrine that all things exist or happen by chance; a state of things in which chance reigns. In both determinism and casualism, the temporal dynamics are cyclical. In both, meaning has no conceptual grounding; being has no ontological grounding, and therefore the ultimate fragmentability and dissolution of the person are the logical consequence. It is not by accident, therefore, that the word ‘casualty,’ which means ‘a chance occurrence,’ is also used to refer to a fatal or serious accident or victims of an outbreak of violence or war. This connection is intrinsic to the casual and must not be ignored. This is the logical outcome of an existential trajectory in which the temporal experience that reigns is the cyclical time of 95 Eliade, M. (1959). Cosmos. p.90. Cf. Eliade, M. (1959). Cosmos. (Refer to Chapters 3 and 4 for discussion on history and progress). 97 Margaret Visser has shown that the sense of determinism that seems to have taken sway in modern political society – a lack of meaningful participation in political life – can be well elucidated by drawing parallels to the sense of fate that reigned in archaic society. The sense that life is pursuing it’s course and whether I participate in it or not will make no difference is nothing new, in fact, but is characteristic of archaic culture. [Cf. Visser, Margaret (2002). Beyond Fate. Toronto: Anansi]. Charles Taylor also discusses this sense of a loss of freedom in Malaise (1991) Chapter 9, “An Iron Cage,” whose title is borrowed from Max Weber’s characterization of the fate of man in capitalist society. 98 Heidegger, M. (1977). Question Concerning Technology. p.27. 99 Little, William (1933). The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles. Prepared by William Little, H.W. Fowler and J. Coulson. Ed. C.T. Onions. Oxford: The Clarendon Press. 100 Visser, M. (2002). Beyond Fate. 96 38 technology and myth. It is the horizon effected when sex is engaged in ‘casually,’ the ultimate intentional consequence being the obliteration of being. Technological revealing of ‘being’ as ‘standing-reserve’ and all that it implies obtain primordially in a cyclical cosmology. Because of the cyclical regeneration and destruction of things in every instant, nothing is irreducible, because nothing ultimately transcends this cyclical dynamism. Nietzsche, on this point says, “[it is] like a drink composed of mixed ingredients that disintegrates into its constituent elements unless it is from time to time stirred up.”101 And in this he touches on the monistic nature of the mythological world. Ultimately, all differences are reducible to the one undifferentiated cosmic substance out of which they are all pieced together. Alexandre Leupin has shown that the body in archaic society was regarded as a ‘thing’ and not an ‘object.’102 The term ‘object’ designates a concrete substance that has the character of a sign – that is, it is real and presents itself as well as something else. The term ‘thing’ designates that which has only symbolic value. The body as ‘thing’ was hence revealed to archaic consciousness as a simulacrum – a mere image, or picture. The symmetry with Heidegger’s notion of ‘objectlessness’ is clear. So we have gone from the effects of technology, with the help of an analysis of archaic cosmology – exemplified by myth – to the discovery of the symmetry of intentionality that inheres between the two. The temporal horizon of technology is that of myth; it engenders a cyclical temporality by its way of revealing. The consequences of a mythic-cyclical temporal dynamism are effected by technology in the form designated by Heidegger as enframing. Foremost among these is the negation of a horizon, which makes historical progression, and hence freedom, possible, which makes ontology ontological, and which makes differences differentiated. The destining, which technology sends man towards, is a destining into a temporal horizon that negates the possibility of his freedom and his essence. As we have seen, this horizon is effected in action by man as the one who carries out destining. The act incarnates the horizon contained within its intentional dynamism in the same way a craftsman imbues the made object with the horizon that determines his method. Lust, as the act which intends sexuality technologically, incarnates a dynamic in the person intended, which 101 Friedrich Nietszche (1903). “Das Philosophenbuch I: ‘Die Philosophie im tragischen Zeitalter der Griechen.’ (Fragment Fruhjar 1873),No.6, pp. 37ff., Leipzig. [Quoted in: Rahner, Hugo (1967). Man at Play. New York: Herder and Herder. p.14.] 102 Cf. Leupin, Alexandre (2000). Phallophanies : La Chair et Le Sacre. Paris : Regard. p.5-13 39 destines them and the intender along a way of revealing that is embedded in a cyclical temporality with all the consequences that obtain therein. Moreover, the power of technological revealing has so ‘claimed the essence of man,’103 that he no longer realizes that it is only a way of revealing and not the only way of being. This intentionality has become so pervasive that we relate to all things technologically, even our relationships with people. “The only thing we have left “, as Heidegger ominously claims, “are technological relationships.”104 But I have also shown that there is another method of making – one that deliberates and is responsible to the particular ways of being of particular things. This method is poiesis. The next chapter will take a closer look at the manner in which poiesis survives in contemporary culture and what this implies in terms of revealing, particularly the revealing of sexuality and identity. 103 Heidegger, M. (1977). Question Concerning Technology. Heidegger, Martin (1976) “Only a God Can Save Us Now’: An Interview with Martin Heidegger.” Trans. Sr. Maria P. Alter and John D. Caputo. In Philosophy Today, vol. 20, no.4, pp.267-284. p.274. 104 40 CHAPTER II: BEAUTY In this chapter I discuss the possibility of a resistance to technology, and the manner in which this resistance is being staged. I argue that the ideal of authenticity is a form of resistance to the dynamisms of technology and the way in which it reveals human identity. This is because the horizon that this ideal intends is the horizon of beauty. A discussion of the reasons why beauty is perceived to be an alternate way of revealing comprises the bulk of the first part of this chapter. The dynamisms of beauty, as far as sexuality is concerned, indicate an alternative way of revealing to lust. The second part of the chapter is devoted to a discussion of the ideal of authenticity when it is pursued in a manner which does not contradict the dynamisms of technology, and the consequences this entails. Part I: Beauty Questions Arising from Technology If, as I have been suggesting in my previous chapter, technology is the intentionality of modern life,105 and its intentionality mirrors the intentionality of archaic cosmology, the question emerges as to whether or not we are trapped, fated to be revealed in different variations of ultimately the same 105 Cf. Borgmann, A. (1984). Contemporary Life. 41 reductive horizon. This would suggest as well that technological sexual desire, lust, is really the only form of desire and that all sexual relationships are also only variations of the "purely technological relationship." The natural question at this point is: Is there a way out, an alternate horizon? Can technology’s hold over us be “unraveled”106? Rather than impose an answer here, let's see if we can't deliberate a little by listening to the rumblings of actual human desires that signal, as it were, a subtext of resistance to technology, and thereby get an intimation of a possible way out that already seems to be suggesting itself in our everyday existence. Therefore, the way to an answer to the question above – is there a way out? – requires us to answer two more questions: (i) Do we want an alternative horizon? In other words, do we want to be recognized in an other-thantechnological manner? (ii) If so, what is the way in which we are trying to attain this alternate horizon of revealing? Is there a way in which people respond to technology's hold over us that reveals both an aspiration for an alternative and an indication of what that alternative might be? Recognition and Authenticity The answer to question (i) is relatively straightforward: yes, we want an alternative horizon. Taylor’s formulation of the notion of recognition helps us understand why. In The Malaise of Modernity and The Politics of Recognition, he argues that people have come to demand recognition. The abiding sense is that their identities are worked out in large part against a cultural horizon and in dialogue with others.107 This sense has accorded (or recognized) a weight to the way in which they are perceived in the eyes of others, and this has, in turn, given urgency to the demand to be recognized by others in a way which is not reductive but builds up identity. Misrecognition reveals people in a 'distorted' manner destining them along a 'reduced mode of being.' (In the previous chapter, I argued that seeing people with a technological intentionality, as in the case of lust, is a mode of misrecognition.) To answer question (ii), I want to focus on one particular, subtle, but as Taylor argues, pervasive form in which the demand for recognition plays itself out, the characteristics of which, as we will see, indicate a desire for a non106 This is the word used by Heidegger in the famous posthumously published interview, “Only a God Can Save Us” (1976). It is taken from the phrase, “I do not see the situation of man in the world of global technology as a fate which cannot be escaped or unraveled (my emphasis).” 107 Taylor, C. (1991). Malaise. 42 technologically revealed existence. This discussion will lead us into the discussion of beauty as an alternate horizon to the technological. According to Taylor, one of the most powerful moral ideals of modernity – one that is new in that it has arisen only since the late 18th century108 – is the ideal of ‘authenticity’. This ideal, simply put, is ‘being true to myself.’ This being true to oneself is the attentiveness to, and articulation of, the inner voice within that is original and thus distinct from the voices of anyone else, often in opposition to the pressures of outward conformity. The power of this ideal lies in its being a call to realize one’s life in a manner which is entirely and authentically one’s own, in accordance with one’s own inner voice, which is unique and unrepeatable. It places a moral significance on the differences between human beings.109 Metaphorically, my life is a painting, which I, the artist, must paint or live in a way that it shows itself to be a true reflection and realization of my inner self; it must be me. “There is a certain way of being human that is my way. I am called upon to live my life in this way and not in imitation of anyone else’s.”110 To fail to live up to this ideal – to fail to be true to oneself – is to have failed in life, to have painted a picture in which one’s inner self cannot recognize its own face. As Taylor succinctly puts it, “I miss the point of my life, I miss what being human is for me.”111 The language used to articulate the ideal of authenticity emerges from the language of artistic creation.112 The idea is that the artist is the exemplar of the authentically lived human life. His creativity in forging an expression of an original work is the “paradigm mode in which people can come to selfdefinition.” 113 “Self-discovery requires poiesis, making” 114 and must be understood as the making of something “original and new.”115 Because it 108 Taylor, C. (1991). Malaise. p.25. According to Walter Benjamin [Benjamin, Walter (1936). “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations. London: Fontana], the practice of appraising a work of art to determine it’s authenticity only could have arisen with the advent of technical methods of appraisal. “To be sure, at the time of its origin a medieval picture of the Madonna could not yet be said to be “authentic.” It became “authentic” only during the succeeding centuries and perhaps most strikingly so during the last one.” 109 Taylor, C. (1991). Malaise. p.28. 110 Taylor, C. (1991). Malaise. pp. 28-29. 111 Ibid., p.29. 112 Ibid., p.62. 113 Ibid. 114 Ibid. 115 Ibid. 43 requires originality, authenticity is pitted against any kind of conformism.116 It requires that ones life be unique and unrepeatable. This unique and unrepeatable self-discovery understood as poiesis must take place within the realm of relationships. This is not only because one’s work of art must be communicated to and recognized by others, but, because of the dialogical way in which identity is generated – others are contributors to the very creation of this work of art we call our lives. “On the intimate level, we can see how much an original identity needs and is vulnerable to the recognition given or withheld by significant others. It is not surprising that in the culture of authenticity, love relationships are seen as the key loci of selfdiscovery and self-affirmation.... they are the crucibles of inwardly generated identity.”117 The importance of both recognition and authenticity as they play out in the 'crucible' of a sexual relationship is of course central to our discussion. It is not difficult to see why the ideal of authenticity can be seen as a longing for a horizon that lies outside the frame of technology, and its pursuit as an attempt to unravel and transcend this frame. The characteristics of authenticity suggest a mode of being – original, unique, unrepeatable – that stands in sharp contrast to the undifferentiated and enframed mode of being revealed by technology. As Walter Benjamin puts it: “The whole sphere of authenticity lies outside technical reproducibility.”118 Authenticity needs to be communicated, and communication requires language. Language, however, is not merely the communication of thought; it is an intentionality. It is the medium through which we understand and form our identities in dialogue with others. As Gadamer says: “Language is not only the house of being, it is the house of the human being, a house where one lives, which one furnishes, and where one encounters oneself, or oneself in others…”119 (“Language, by the way, is not only the language of words. There is the language of the eyes, the language of the hands, pointing and naming, all this is language and confirms that language is constantly present in our transactions with one another.")120 116 Ibid., p.65. Taylor, C. (1994). Politics of Recognition. p.36. 118 Benjamin, W. (1936). “Work of Art.” In Illuminations. p.573. 119 Heidegger, Martin (1977). Basic Writings from Being and Time (1927) to The Task of Thinking (1964). Ed. David Farrell Krell. New York: Harper & Row. p.239. 120 In Hans-Georg Gadamer, cited in Palmer, Richard E. (2000). "Gadamer's recent work on language and philosophy: On "Zur Phanomenologie von Ritual und Sprache." Continental Philosophy Review. Vol. 33, pp. 381-393 117 44 An authentic identity, therefore, must find its dwelling in language. But what kind of language is adequate to the realm of authenticity? Poetry The ideal of authenticity requires a language of articulation that somehow contains within its grammar an intentionality, which is other than technological, which is to say, a poietic language. This language is poetry. As Paul Ricoeur puts it, poetry preserves the “width, the breadth of language”121 because in our present culture “the first danger is a kind of reduction of language to communication at the lowest level or to manipulate things and people.”122 Language has been confined and reduced to the instrumental. “We have only one model of language – the language of science and technology.”123 Scientific or technological language, which is essentially a constructed language, differs from ‘natural’ language (i.e., language that is used by communities). It has a tendency towards univocity. The natural polysemy inherent in language is an inefficient characteristic of natural language that doesn’t well serve the technological project.124 Technology speaks only in projective metaphors, projecting its own way of being onto everything it sees; through its lens everything becomes a metaphor for itself. It never speaks being. It doesn’t speak in a way which discloses the being of the object it intends, doesn’t respond to it, but instead it speaks only its own name, by revealing everything technologically (“she’s wearing us”). It reveals everything as a reducible configuration of a basic element – the standingreserve. According to Ricoeur, poetry attempts to restore to language its inherent plurivocity. By so doing, it has a subversive function with regards to instrumental-technological culture. It breaks the frame of the univocal reduction of language, and opens the field up to diversity – a diversity which is there lurking, but which is concealed by the univocal dynamic of instrumental language.125 Poetry has the capacity to “enlarge, to increase, to 121 Ricoeur, P. (1991). “Poetry and Possibility.” In The Ricoeur Reader. p.448. Ibid. 123 Ibid. 124 Ibid. 125 Ibid., p.449. 122 45 augment the capacity of meaning of our language.”126 Thus poetry, as an intentionality, intends meaning and reintroduces it to the centrality, which it had lost to technology. Poetry reveals poietically. All these dynamics in the language of poetry show why it is the language of authenticity. Technological language cannot express the diversity and originality, the uniqueness of things, nor can it express, and therefore reveal, the unity of things, their wholeness. Under the technological, “language has lost its original unity”127 and has become fragmented into the different disciplines.128 However, it is through these different fragments of language that we attempt to express the totality of existence. An existence revealed through an intentionality that takes its departure from a fragment can only be revealed as fragmented. This, I suspect, is the intention behind the suggestion of educators like Morris who propose ‘story’ as a way of couching sexuality education within a meaningful context, one that is not reduced to the merely instrumental.129 The language of poetry is here understood, not narrowly in the sense of a poem, but as language which ‘responds and corresponds’ to being, drawing out aspects and significances of an object that technological language can only conceal. Poetry, expressed as story, invokes the “capacity of language to open up to new worlds,”130 worlds that “transcend the limits of our actual world.”131 When this ‘actual world’ is enveloped technologically, the need for language to articulate things poetically is all the more urgent. At the end of his essay on technology, Heidegger articulates an idea that illuminates the stirrings of the desire for authenticity when he points to poiesis, to art and poetry, as the way to the ‘saving power’ that saves us from the danger technology poses. “Because the essence of technology is nothing technological, essential reflection upon technology and decisive confrontation with it must happen in a realm that is, on the one hand, akin to the essence of technology and, on the other, fundamentally different from it…Such a realm is art.”132 Art, like technology, is a way of revealing, of bringing a horizon to bear in the concrete presence of a created thing. But it is also fundamentally a 126 Ibid., p.450. Ricoeur, P. (1991). “Myth as Bearer of Possible Worlds.” In The Ricoeur Reader. p.489. 128 Ibid. “Today [language] is fragmented not only into different communities but functionally into different disciplines – mathematical, historical, scientific, legal, psychoanalytic, etc.” 129 Morris, R.W. (1997). “Myths of Sexuality Education.” Jr. Moral Education. pp. 353-361. 130 Ricoeur, P. (1991). “Myth as Bearer of Possible Worlds.” In The Ricoeur Reader. 131 Ibid. 132 Heidegger, M. (1977). Question Concerning Technology. p.35. 127 46 different way of revealing than technology. The horizon that art ‘opens up’ to us is beauty. The destination sought by the ideal of authenticity is the horizon of beauty. As Gadamer puts it: “Beauty defines art as art: namely as something that stands out from everything that is purposively established and utilized.”133 If technology is the way of revealing that intends us as a standing-reserve, as pure use-on-demand, then a poetic articulation of our identities is an attempt to attain to a realm which reveals us as the opposite, as something that is intended for itself, and that is beauty. “The poetical pervades every art, every revealing of coming to presence into the beautiful.”134 In spite of the formidable sway that technology holds in modern culture, the ideal of authenticity and its poetic articulation are indications that we have the desire and perhaps capacity to resist it. And it seems that our method of resistance has something to do with the beautiful. An authentically lived life is a poietic life – one that opens up to and makes present the horizon of beauty. But why does beauty have anything to do with the resistance to technology? The answer requires a deeper look at the dynamics of beauty to understand how it plays its hand in the unraveling of technology. Beauty “Beauty will save the world.”135 These oft-quoted words, spoken by Dostoevsky’s ‘Idiot’ are thrown into relief when seen in the light of authenticity and against the background of technology. The word ‘save’136 intimates an immediate, concrete, flesh-and-blood dynamic, as when one’s life is saved from the jaws of death. This is a little different from what one usually associates with the beautiful. I want to draw this intimation out a little bit in order to flesh out the meaning of beauty as it is revealed in its confrontation with technology. 133 Gadamer, Hans-Georg (1986). “Intuition and Vividness.” In The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays (p. 161). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 134 Heidegger, M. (1977). Question Concerning Technology. p.34. 135 Dostoevsky, Fyodor (1942). The Idiot. Trans. Constance Garnett. New York: Random House. 136 Heidegger on the verb ‘to save’: “What does “to save” mean? It means to loose, to emancipate, to free, to spare and husband, to harbor protectingly, to take under one’s care, to keep safe. Lessing still uses the word “saving” emphatically, in the sense of vindication, i.e., to put something back into what is proper and right, into the essential, and keep it safe therein. That which genuinely saves is that which keeps safe, safekeeping.” [Heidegger, M. (1977). “The Turning. ” In Question Concerning Technology. p.42.] 47 Perhaps the most fecund insight into the ‘saving’ dynamic of beauty can be found in Augustine’s description of beauty as “a plank amidst the waves of the sea.”137 In order to understand the meaning of this analogy in the light of what we are trying to unravel, I’m going to offer an interpretation of the dynamics at play in the analogy, followed by a theoretical commentary of the dynamics of beauty. Before we begin analyzing role of the plank, let us remind ourselves of the dynamics of the ‘sea’ which I take to be representative of technology: in the frame of technology, what is ‘challenged-forth’ is ‘unlocked, stored up, transformed, distributed and switched about ever anew’. It is revealed as ‘standing-reserve,’ as value cut off from its particular context and standing by and ready for use in whatever it is that is demanded of it by the frame of technology, with no heed paid to its own particular way of being an object. This technological intentionality is symmetrical in its effects and temporality to the cyclical dissolution and regeneration of the world in mythic cosmology. Both kinds of revealing reveal being as chance configurations and forms, which are all reducible to a single, undifferentiated, cosmic substance – a sea of pure energy. Objects are revealed as objectless. Identity is revealed as replaceable, reducible, fragmented, subject to reconfiguration – a chance configuration of variables having no ontological valence. Such a thing as authenticity cannot emerge from within this frame because nothing is new, all is repetition of some archetype or another, no one is unique, and no one is spared from the possibility of being reconfigured to satisfy technological demand.138 (We have seen how this technological reconfiguring-on-demand 137 Augustine, Saint, Bishop of Hippo (1976). “De Musica, 6.13.” In Albert Hofstadter and Richard Kuhns (Eds.), Philosophies of Art and Beauty (p.196). Trans. W.F. Jackson Knight. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 138 However, the notion of authenticity, according to Benjamin [Benjamin, W. (1936). “Work of Art.” In Illuminations] can only have emerged because of the existence of this frame. Heidegger quotes Holderlin’s phrase, “Where the danger is, there grows the saving power also.” [Heidegger, M. (1977). Question Concerning Technology. p.34]. While Benjamin’s analysis remains associative – he points out the near simultaneity of the advent of modern technology and the notion of authenticity, without making causal claims – Heidegger seems to be saying that there is a causal relation. Whether he means that the saving power is the other side of technology, or whether he means that it is shed increasing light upon by technology, given a greater ‘clearing’ to manifest itself by technological enframing, is unclear. However we can probably surmise, given the use of the word ‘grows’, with its biological connotations, that there is an emanationist tinge to Heidegger’s soteriology, which effectively, in the final analysis, renders it as a kind of technological pantheism. It does not, therefore, offer a genuine alternative, but only points to the inherent regenerative dynamism of the cyclical temporality of technological/mythological intentionality. If this is the case, then even the causal relation Heidegger points to is ultimately ungrounded, as the temporal horizon necessary for an ontological grounding of the notion of causality itself does not obtain in a framework of eternal recurrence. [Cf. Eliade, M. (1959) Cosmos.] 48 obtains in the case of lust, which we can virtually identify with pornographic intentionality.) There is an immediacy to the image of a shipwrecked, drowning man, frantically struggling to stay afloat, arms flailing, gasping for breath, swallowing water and choking, nothing to grasp but the very sea that’s drawing his life inexorably into its own grasp, all but subsumed, when suddenly, atop the waves, serenely and surely, a plank floats by. He now experiences the conviction that this, here, will save his life, because this, here, will not dissolve, and this, here, is here now and was not here before, and will not be here again. The plank offers him an alternative to death: life. Whether he conceptualizes it this way doesn’t matter. He experiences the conviction of encountering the real, persisting, distinct, floating, particular, object, that will save his life. This is no shape made by the waves, no configuration of water molecules dissolvable into the rest of the sea itself, but something distinct from it and irreducible to it, behaving differently and bearing a different message. It promises him the persisting integrity of his body. It speaks to him: “Hold onto me and you will persist. Let go of me and you will be consumed, dissolved.” The sight of it quickens his heart, adrenalizes his body, and compels him towards action; he reaches out and grasps the plank with his hands, and his entire intentional field – his total bodily comportment – is wrapped (integrated) around the plank, for that is what is required in order to hold onto his life. If he is not wrapped around the plank, existentially integrated around it, he is wrapped, integrated around the sea. Integration around the plank sends him along the way (‘destining’) to the persisting integrity of his body while integration around the sea sends him to the disintegration of his body, its ultimate dissolution. In the nearness of the absolute closure of the technological frame, the total consummation of being by the technologically engendered sea, the plank (beauty), piercing the frame, enters the intentional field and quickens the capacity to resist dissolution – to resist technology. In terms of intentionality, we can see that one either intends the sea or the plank. Technological intentionality is to intend the sea, which is either a flinging into, or a remaining in. To intend the plank, however, is to achieve the intentionality of another revealing: beauty. I want now to articulate – with the help of Hans-Georg Gadamer139 and Elaine Scarry140 – the intentional dynamisms of the experience of beauty that 139 Cf. Especially Gadamer, H.G. (1986). “The Relevance of the Beautiful.” In Relevance, and, Gadamer, H.G. (1975). Truth and Method. See also, Grondin, Jean (1998). “Gadamer's Aesthetics: The Overcoming of 49 show why it is the ‘plank amidst the waves of the sea’ that promises a way out of the technological frame. If we keep in mind throughout that the frame of technology is the way of revealing, effected by lust, we will come to understand what dynamics must be effected in the sexual sphere in order for the revealing of lust to be unraveled. How is it that the ‘this-here-now’ experience of the conviction of encountering the real, persisting, distinct, floating, particular, object, that saves life, obtains in the case of the beautiful? Let us begin with the particularity of beauty. When beauty is experienced it is experienced in the particular.141 In the event of encountering a plank amidst the waves of the sea, one does not only encounter the idea of ‘plankness’. One experiences that particular, tangible, plank, which is there floating however many inches or feet away, which speaks immediately to the senses. So it is with the beautiful: “In the apparent particularity of sensuous experience, which we always attempt to relate to the universal, there is something in our experience of the beautiful that arrests us and compels us to dwell upon the individual appearance itself.”142 It is not that there is no universal dimension to beauty, but rather that the universal dimension of beauty can only be experienced in a particular object or thing of beauty, something available to the senses.143 Beauty is made present in a form, yet the form is not just the carrier, but the ‘it’ of beauty. The work of art – the painting or sculpture, or symphony – is ‘it.’ Moreover, “In its irreplaceability, the work of art is no mere bearer of meaning – as if the meaning could be transferred to another bearer. Rather, the meaning of the work of art lies in the fact that it is there.”144 The plank does indeed have a symbolic function, but what it symbolizes is present in this particular plank, at this particular place, in this particular time Aesthetic Consciousness and the Hermeneutical Truth of Art.” In Encyclopedia of Aesthetics. Vol. 2, pp. 267271. Ed. M. Kelly. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press; and Stambaugh, Joan (1997). “Gadamer on the Beautiful.” In Lewis Edwin Hahn (Ed.), The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer. Peru, Illinois: Open Court. 140 Cf. Scarry, Elaine (1999). On Beauty and Being Just. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Scarry’s argument is that the experience of beauty, rather than taking away from the task of justice, actually is an incentive and a contributor to the achievement of this task. 141 Ibid., p.18. “Beauty is always experienced in the particular, and if there are no particulars, the chances of seeing it go down.” 142 Gadamer, H.G. (1986). Relevance. p.16. 143 This ‘thing’ of beauty may of course be something that is only an object in the phenomenological, noematic sense, such as a piece of music or a well-crafted phrase. It need not be a crafted material artifact. For an introductory discussion on this, see, again, Sokolowski, R. (2000). Introduction to Phenomenology. 144 Gadamer, H.G. (1986). Relevance. p.33. 50 (this-here-now). So not only does it symbolize another horizon – an alternative to drowning – but it is that alternative. It symbolizes, and is, life. In being irreplaceable, its value is nontransferable; that is, it cannot be ‘unlocked, stored transformed, distributed and switched about.’ It is not characterized by the ‘objectlessness’ of the ‘standing-reserve.’ “The unique event that characterizes the work of art is not present in the reproduction … what the work of art has to say can only be found within itself.”145 Sexual beauty, to make the link, can only be found within the particular human being in whom we perceive it, not as a value which she carries, but as an incarnate constitutive aspect of her being. She is irreplaceable and nontransferable, or she is not beautiful. The look of lust, which intends only the use-value of her sexual beauty, unlocks, stores up, and switches about, thereby obliterating her particularity, and, thus, her existence insofar as she is beautiful. It does not ‘see’ her. To say that beauty is not characterized as standing-reserve is to say that it is irreducible and distinct. That is, it is not subsumed within the intentionality of the technological frame – it retains its identity, and it persists in that identity. The plank floats, maintaining its separate quality, and it remains that way despite the onslaught of the waves that toss it about; it persists. The separateness manifested by the floating, is symbolic of the alternate horizon represented by this plank. It is the presence of this alternative in the midst of the frame of technology that is the function of beauty. The fact that the plank persists is of immense ontological import. It is nothing less than the symbol and actuality of the endurance of being amidst the throws of the technological pulverization of everything into standingreserve, into the sea. This persistence is the only alternative to the revealing of being as standing-reserve and therefore subject to the total dissolution and regeneration of mythological cosmology and the endless reconfigurability of technology. Aristotle says the beautiful thing is that from which “nothing can be added and nothing can be taken away.”146 The work of art “maintains an organic unity.”147 When a thing is experienced as beautiful, it is experienced and intended as irreducible and unified, as opposed to reducible and fragmented. It is seen as whole, as that which persists and toward which we must respond with care toward its continued persistence. It persists because it 145 Gadamer, H.G. (1986). Relevance. pp. 36-38. Ibid., p.43. 147 Ibid., p.42. 146 51 deserves to persist, because it is beautiful.148 It is irreplaceable, unique, a sign of order and wholeness. This is the confirmation of the reality of the object. Only that which persists has the intentionality of an object (object here understood in opposition to the standing-reserve). To recognize the persistence of the beauty of another is what is required to recognize their beauty at all. “Only what is granted endures,”149 says Heidegger, further bringing out the objective quality of the beautiful. As something granted, something given, it is something which enters our intentional field as something from outside, something other than what has been generated by technology or by our configuring and reconfiguring, constructing and deconstructing, intentionality that obtains when “man always and everywhere encounters only himself.”150 When we encounter beauty we encounter something distinct and separate from us, not an extension of ourselves. Separateness is thus a quality of beauty, because one can only encounter that which is separate from oneself. This contradicts Heidegger’s statement above which seems to suggest that one does, at least, ‘encounter’ oneself. But he follows this by saying that it is the 148 If ‘persisting’ is a feature of beauty, and beauty is the realm that authenticity intends, then we can say that perhaps there is something to the expression “It rocks!” or “That rocks!” If something ‘rocks’ it is because it is cool, or hip or whatever. Coolness, is a feature of a certain ‘rightness of fit’ – an aesthetic category. The expression, ‘that rocks’, intends a persistent quality to the rightness of fit, which, as we have seen, pertains to the beautiful by virtue of it’s diametrical opposition to the reductive intentionality of technology. The intentionality of something that ‘rocks,’ is an intentionality that intends it’s own persistence. It engenders the dynamics of its own persistence in the intentionality of the other who intends the beautiful with care, as something worth preserving. To be a person who ‘rocks’ therefore is to be intended as someone who, like a rock, persists. Could it be that when someone says something ‘rocks’, they are experiencing the conviction of the real? In the era of authenticity this is not such an outlandish idea. In fact it is not outlandish at all but completely inlandish, in that it emerges from the concrete existential situation of the human being in the technological frame. But one might say the expression ‘it rocks’ has nothing to do with stones but emerges from the ‘Rock music’ genre. Rock, descendent from ‘rock n’ roll’, pertains to the movement of rocking back and forth and not to stones. How then does my argument obtain? In two ways: first of all, the play of beauty, as Gadamer characterizes it [(1975). Truth and Method. pp. 121-129] is intrinsically a to-and-fro dynamic, the ‘to-ing and fro-ing’ being the responsive dialogical interaction with the object’s particularity, that which recognizes it as object, therefore as persisting. So if the rock-as-stone argument falls down, this one triangulates to the same dynamic, but in a less direct manner. However, let us see if we can salvage the phrase, ‘it rocks’ as pertaining to the intentionality of a persisting indestructible substance. Thus my second argument: if, as Heidegger [Cf. Heidegger, M. (1971). “Language.” In Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper and Row. pp.187-210] has it, the power of language is not exhausted by the conscious intentions of the speaker of language, but, in it’s own way, speaks prior to the speaker’s speaking, we have an instantiation of language here, making itself present in ways that protect being against technological dissolution but without the speaker knowing the full extent of what he is saying. The etymological depths of the word ‘rock’, even when the synonym is intended, travel with the consciously intended meaning itself. The phrase ‘it rocks’ may then be a responding to the speaking of language as it speaks the rockness of the manifestation of being from the realm in which the ‘decisive confrontation’ with technology takes place. 149 Heidegger, M. (1977). Question Concerning Technology. p.31. 150 Ibid., p.27. 52 delusion effected by technology and it is both true and false – true in that man does not encounter anything outside himself, and false because “precisely nowhere does man today any longer encounter himself, i.e., his essence.”151 The subjectivism engendered by the method of lust and technology is defeated by the method of beauty. So beauty, in its distinct separateness, calls one to communication. One is called to be adjacent, 152 to de-center and look outside oneself at the beautiful object. In the case of the plank, one is forced to stretch out one’s hand and grasp it if one is to survive. In doing so, he is no longer the center, but the center lies in the offering and grasping ‘play’ of the plank and the man. The intentionality of the man in the sea is here altered, one could even say, ‘corrected’, as indeed Elaine Scarry does 153 and Gadamer implies. 154 The object of beauty imposes its own method. It corrects our way of intending. The act of grasping is here an intentionality. It is an intentionality commanded by the plank itself. In contrast, the flailing and drowning is the intentionality commanded by the waves in the sea. It requires a skill and effort to hold onto and balance, the rules of ‘playing’ it are different. This notion of the ‘correction’ dynamic of beauty is allied to the notion of ‘epistemological crisis,’ articulated by MacIntyre. 155 The moment of encounter with beauty, when it ‘corrects’ your intentionality, causes a crisis within the methodical framework from which you see the world. One is asked a question at this moment: Are you able to find a justification, within your framework, that justifies this experience you are now having, without altering the fundaments of your framework completely (which is akin to adopting a new framework altogether)? If not, then you are obliged, by your own standards of rationality, to adopt a new one, one that can organically incorporate this new encounter. And so we are faced with this question every time we encounter the beautiful, the experience of which is unaccounted for in the technological frame and in the gaze of lust. We are invited, therefore, to alter our method. The fact of the particular, irreducible, separate, uniqueness of the experience of encountering the beautiful lends itself to another intentional dynamic: unprecedentedness. As Scarry points out, beauty is experienced as 151 Ibid. Scarry, E. (1999). Beauty. p.116. 153 Ibid. 154 Gadamer, H.G. (1986). Relevance. p.45. 155 MacIntyre, Alasdair C. (1989). Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press. 152 53 unprecedented, as something new, unique, original, occurring for the first time and last time.156 The language of newness and uniqueness is, as we have seen, central to authenticity.157 ‘Newness’, what Hannah Arendt calls ‘natality,’158 represents another dynamic of beauty, which contradicts technology/mythology: it is the antithesis of the archetype, or reconfiguration. 159 It implies a temporal dynamic that cannot emerge from within the cyclical time of technological ‘destining’, or mythological eternal recurrence. As we have seen in the previous chapter, cyclical temporality precludes the possibility of change, thus history, thus freedom.160 The notion of ‘newness’ however, implies not closed – framed – cyclical time, but time that has a beginning, that opens up beyond the confines of the frame. What inheres in the experience and concept of newness is the horizon whose temporality effects freedom. Paradoxically, however, the experience of the beauty, while having the characteristic of ‘unprecedentedness,’ at one and the same time awakens a sense of nostalgia for something past. According to Scarry, this experience of newness causes us to search the recesses of our memory for a similar experience. And yet, when we find one, or more, the unprecedentedness of the present experience is not diminished in any way because we remember that the prior experience was ‘new’ and ‘unprecedented’ in its own particular instance. The likeness that obtains between the experiences is nothing to do with uniformity, but is a likeness owing to the fact that each experience is unique and unprecedented. Moreover, as well as opening us up to the present and the past, the experience of the beautiful instigates in us the anticipation of a further encounter with beauty, either in the sense of the prolongation of the present encounter, and/or the sense of another separate encounter at a future moment, that is, “time future contained in time past.”161 The experience of beauty, engendering the experience of newness, thus weaving together the threads of the past and future with the needle of the present, is nothing but the transfiguration, in that moment and to come, of the spatial-cyclical temporality of technology/mythology into the linear156 Scarry, E. (1999). Beauty. pp.22-24. Cf. Taylor, C. (1991). Malaise. 158 Cf. Arendt, Hannah (1958). The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. p.247 159 New technological gadgets are not ‘new’ in the ontological sense, in that they are simply new configurations of the essentially same standing reserve. There is nothing in them which cannot be found in an earlier instance of technological gadgetry. 160 Cf. Eliade, M. (1959). Cosmos, and, Visser, M. (2002). Beyond Fate. 161 Eliot, T.S. (1959). “Burnt Norton.” In Four Quarters. London: Faber. 157 54 transcendent temporality of natality, history, and freedom. And, in that, it promises us a horizon beyond the cyclical-technological frame. It is in this ‘unprecedented’ manner that beauty ‘destines’ us along a path of revealing, in one temporal horizon and not another. The unified thread of ‘unprecedented’ experiences contextualizes an identity in the temporality of newness, that is, the temporality of freedom. This is the realm that authenticity intends; the authentic identity is generated from experiences of newness or natality in which the temporal horizon, which reveals being as unique, original, unprecedented, free, is made present. In these moments of newness, we participate meaningfully in the world; our actions, because new, have an essential, and historical, significance. In like manner, a sexuality revealed according to the method of beauty, rather than according to technology or lust, is one that is revealed beautifully – into a horizon of freedom and newness, persisting in its particular, distinct, objective, beauty. It is revealed as not subject to instrumental appropriation. Perhaps the greatest significance of the desire to be revealed beautifully, the desire for authenticity, lies in an utterance from the same man who described beauty as a plank amidst the waves of the sea: “Only the beautiful is loved. One cannot help loving what is beautiful.”162 In the preceding commentary – particularly in the discussion of newness – I have touched upon the temporal dynamics of the beautiful. I want to delineate these temporal dynamics in a little more detail in order to show that it is at this fundamental level of time where beauty engages in ‘decisive confrontation’ with technology and duly unravels it. The Temporality of Beauty I am going to begin the delineation of the temporality of beauty by recapping my discussion of the temporality of technology at the end of Chapter One (in which I pointed out its symmetry with mythical cyclical time) and expanding a little on the existential and anthropological implications arising from it. The temporality of beauty, as articulated by Gadamer, and its anthropological importance will be better understood in contrast to this. 162 Augustine (1976). “De Musica.” In Philosophies of Art and Beauty. (The question of human love is the subtext of my thesis but is outside the realm of my analysis. However, my discussion of beauty and its dynamics, and further on, of chastity and its dynamics can be understood as aspects of the dynamics of love.) 55 In both technology and archaic cosmology, time is both static and cyclical because “everything begins over again at its commencement, in every instant.”163 Unlike the newness that characterizes the temporality of beauty, the cyclical time of mythological society forecloses the possibility of change and newness. Everything is merely a reconfiguration of what was before. “Nothing new happens in the world, for everything is but the repetition of the same primordial archetypes.”164 In the same way that mythical time has the shape of a closed cycle, technological time has the shape of a closed frame – time is enframed. Gadamer characterizes this time as the experience of either boredom on the one hand, or frantic busyness on the other. Time is a closed space that is either filled in with activity, or emptied when there is nothing to do – we either have too much time on our hands or no time at all. “Either way time is not experienced as something in its own right but something that has to be spent.”165 That time is understood as something to be acquired and lost is the logical consequence of time conceived in terms of a closed cosmological cycle (in the form of a circle) or revealed through the boundaries of the technological frame.166 But this conception of time also makes an anthropological claim: if time is the fundamental realm of revealing, and time is revealed spatially and subject to acquisition and loss, then being – that is, human being – is revealed spatially and subject to acquisition and loss: being, therefore, is having. This is logically coherent with technology's enframing of everything as standing-reserve. If all being (and thus human being) is ultimately reducible to a single, undifferentiated substance, then more being means more having. The more one has and is able to acquire – and this includes the acquisition of time – the more one is. I will expound on the implications of this idea for the understanding of human identity in greater length in the second part of this chapter (but this brief exposition will suffice for my aims in this section). The technological ‘moment’ is decontextualized from the flow of time itself. Each moment is framed and disjointed from the next, that is, closed in on itself (as the cyclical moment of myth, which regenerates over and over again). This temporal horizon does not extend beyond the present and connect the past and the future. Therefore, time revealed through the frame of technology is not an intrinsically unified flow of time but the succession of 163 Eliade, M. (1959). Cosmos. p.89. Ibid., p.90. 165 Gadamer, H.G. (1986). Relevance. p.42. 166 Visser, M. (2002). Beyond Fate. 164 56 fragmented moments, concatenated together, effecting only the appearance of the unity of time, in the same way that the frames that make up a roll of film – each separated from the other by a gap – produce the illusion of a seamless unified flow. This precludes the possibility of a revelation of the self as unified – neither synchronically (in the present moment) nor diachronically (as it unfolds through time). Identity is not revealed in the context of where it is coming from and where it is going, but in the framed instant of its appearance. It is redefined anew in each and every moment, since each moment is cut off from the next. It is the difference between understanding a self in the context of its entire life and understanding a self according to the way it appears on film. Each moment is a complete cycle of dissolution and regeneration. That is to say, the self, and all being, revealed through technology is trapped in a way of revealing which intends its recurring dissolution to standing-reserve, and subsequent reconfiguration, in every moment. Identity is not revealed as persisting, whole and unified, but as transient, fragmented, and closed in on itself, locked in subjectivism and individualism. (The post-modern notion of the ‘pastiche’ identity, continuously constructed and deconstructed by the accumulation of experiences, is an example of an identity, which dwells in technological moments.) Relationships, therefore, are revealed as a contract between two framed subjectivisms, unencumbered by context, each challenging forth the other for the satisfaction of desire.167 The plank amidst the waves of the sea is duly torpedoed by this temporal intentionality. The technological moment is the temporal structure effected by technological desire – lust. Sexuality revealed in this temporal horizon is revealed as that which is momentarily apparent to the senses, again as a resource of pleasure, completely unencumbered, having no intrinsic connection to any context. I want to show how it is that the temporal structure of beauty unravels these dynamics. Gadamer articulates the temporal structure of the beautiful by calling on two types of activity, both of which effect the temporal horizon of beauty. These are the activities he characterizes as ‘play’ and the ‘festival.’ 168 167 The notion of the ‘pure relationship’ articulated by Anthony Giddens is an example of the ‘purely technological relationship’ that Heidegger spoke of and is another example of the postmodern identity’s mimesis of technology.[Giddens, Anthony (1991). Modernity and Self-Identity. Cambridge: Polity Press.] 168 Cf. Gadamer, H.G. (1975).Truth and Method, and, Gadamer, H.G. (1986).Relevance. 57 Play Gadamer draws on the work of art and points out how the structure of the experience of a work of art mirrors that of human play. When we play, the technological accounting of time falls by the wayside as we engage intently in the game we are playing. We enjoy the game and our focus, if we want to play well, is on the game itself, and not on ourselves or on our watch. We get ‘caught up’ in the playing of the game. Time is no longer something to spend or something that we don’t have enough of. Time is not had. Rather it is experienced as ‘flowing.’ Augustine understands time as a threefold present consisting of memory, attention, and expectation (referring to past, present and future).169 ‘Flowing’ time, or intentio, is effected when we draw together memory, attention and expectation in focusing on an activity. In reading a poem, for example, we remember what we have read, and anticipate what will be read, while we are reading. The discordance between the past, present and future, which he characterizes it in terms of distraction, is reunified through intentio.170 There is a sense of timelessness accruing to the play of contemplating a work of art, of which Gadamer muses, “perhaps it is the only way that is granted to us finite beings to relate to what we call eternity.”171 Nietszche has said of play that it is the way in which man recovers the sense of the world which he had as a child. But playing is not simply a matter of casting off seriousness and doing what one wills. One has to play the game, and in beauty, or the work of art, the rules of the game are set by beauty itself. In order for beauty to come to presence, to reveal itself, one must create the conditions in which it can do so – that is, one must engender, with one’s ‘playing’, the temporal structure in which beauty stands forth. We must adopt the correct relationship to it. Beauty cannot be approached technologically, as a storehouse of pleasurable experience. That the pleasure ensues is no doubt of the nature of the experience, but the way in which it ensues is either as pleasure challengedforth – like technological time – something to be had, in which the one experiencing pleasure stands over and above, dominating the object that yields, or on the other hand, as pleasure that flows from the experience of 169 Ibid. Augustine, Saint (1991). Confessions. Trans. Henry Chadwick. New York: Oxford University Press. 171 Gadamer, H.G. (1986). Relevance. p.45. 170 58 having engaged, played, with beauty on its own terms. 172 Gadamer characterizes this ‘playing’ as a ‘tarrying’173, a ‘to-and-fro’174 movement; it is a matter of responsivity, of dialoguing back and forth, akin to the ‘responsibleness’ of the craftsman as he deliberates the nature of the causes before him and tries to ‘listen’ to them as he brings them forth into presence. The ‘playing’ that beauty demands mirrors the method of poiesis. Festival This leads us to Gadamer’s account of the festival, which for him is the paradigmatic experience of the re-ordering of time from the technological into the beautiful. The festival, like the beautiful, is not engaged in for the sake of something else: “Let us remember that we speak of ‘enacting’ a celebration. Enacting a celebration is obviously a specific form of behavior. … The word ‘enacting’ removes all idea of a goal to be attained. To enact is not to set out in order subsequently to arrive somewhere. For when we enact a festival, then the festival is always there from the beginning. The temporal character of the festive celebration that we enact lies in the fact that it does not dissolve into a series of separate moments.”175 The festival is there in its plenitude the moment we participate in it. It is grasped, like beauty, as an intuition, something which cannot be split up into calculable moments, but something there all at once. 176 This time is “fulfilled” or “autonomous” time. 177 The ‘empty’ time that we ‘have’ retreats178 in the wake of the festival whose time structure is there present whenever it is enacted. It is autonomous in this sense, and as autonomous, it is time that calls us to participation and communication. “A festival unites everyone.” 179 Whereas the activity of everyday, technological-clock time fragments and places ruptures between people, divides them, the celebration of the festival “is clearly distinguished by the fact that here we are not 172 Augustine’s distinction between enjoyment as uti and enjoyment as frui obtains here. Gadamer, H.G. (1986). Relevance. 174 Gadamer, H.G. (1975). Truth and Method. p.105. 175 Ibid., p.41. 176 Cf. Gadamer, H.G. (1986). “Intuition and Vividness.” In Relevance. 177 Gadamer, H.G. (1986). Relevance. p.42. 178 Ibid. “The calculating way in which we normally manage and dispose of our time is, as it were, brought to a standstill.” 179 Ibid., p.49. 173 59 primally separated, but rather are gathered together.”180 But we must engage in its temporal rhythm, we must ‘play’ according to its rules. “It is characteristic of festive celebration that it is meaningful only for those actually taking part.”181 And so it is with the artwork and with the object of beauty. Of course, the festival can be organized – must be organized – at a certain interval of chronological time, but its inner temporal structure remains fundamentally different as, for example, the time that it takes to play a piece of music is different from the time-experience of the music.182 The festival reorders time, not by negating clock or calendar time, but by running parallel to it. A dimension of experience is opened up, which clock time can neither attain nor measure. The dynamism of the inner structure of the festival ‘moment,’ unravels the technologically framed ‘moment.’ Technological time ‘retreats’ to the periphery when the festival is enacted and this opens up the way to the past and the future, precisely because its inner structure – as festival – is essentially a remembering of the past, celebrated in the present, in order to move forward into the future. Within this intentionality, we are being gathered together and united. We are in communion with all the participants of the festival, all those gathered around the same event. The festival brings about the unity of time and thus the community of people. Theoria Thus, the contemplation of beauty requires the adopting of a different relationship to the object, one that meets it in its temporal realm. “Every work of art imposes its own temporality upon us.”183 The word contemplation is here instructive: contemplation, like contemporaneity, is to be with in time. In order to be with beauty, to ‘see’ it, we must adopt its temporality. We must note at this point that ‘seeing’ begins to take on a different meaning. When contemplating the work of art – tarrying, dialoguing, etc. – we are ‘seeing’ beauty. But to define this ‘seeing’ of the beautiful as ‘looking’ is inadequate. Gadamer talks of ‘seeing’ here as theoria, translated as ‘contemplation’ but also as ‘communion’ – being united with. To ‘see’ beauty is to be in 180 Ibid., p.40. Ibid., p.49. 182 Ibid., p.41. “So although it is perfectly possible to organize the forms of the celebration, the temporal structure of the performance is quite different from the time that simply stands at our disposal.” 183 Ibid., p.45. 181 60 communion with it, to meet it where it’s at, to be with it in its temporal realm. Theoria, as Gadamer notes, is “being purely present to what is truly real,”184 and this means not just being there where the event of beauty takes place. Rather, it requires engagement – “to be present means to participate.”185 But participation cannot be conceived in terms of subjective conduct “as a selfdetermination of the subject, but [must be conceived] in terms of what it is contemplating 186… being totally involved and carried away by what one sees.”187 That is, it requires an ek-stasis, a standing outside of oneself, a decentering and focusing on something outside of oneself. 188 McLuhan’s comment, “She’s wearing us,” is understood now from a richer perspective. The revelation of beauty only takes place in communion, when the temporal structures necessary for its emergence are effected by the one waiting to ‘see’ it. The demands of authenticity articulated at the beginning of this chapter come into focus again: the authentic life is the life which is lived originally, articulated beautifully (poetically), must dwell within a horizon of significance, and must be recognized as such; authenticity is realized in significant relationships. To be seen authentically is to be recognized as beautiful, and to be seen (recognized) as beautiful one must be contemplated, and to be contemplated one must be in communion with another. Beauty must be contemplated, and what is contemplated is set apart from everything that can be used – from everything that falls under the realm of the technological, and is therefore subject to dissolution, to cyclical time. Beauty corrects the intentionality of the one gazing at it, demanding that its temporal structure be a mimesis, not of technology, but of poiesis. In this way, beauty transforms and destines – “The work of art has its true being in the fact that it becomes an experience that changes the person who experiences it.”189 As Plotinus says: “We are what we desire and what we look at.”190 Our intentionality has a bilateral effect; we either intend the beautiful and are transformed accordingly, or we intend the technological and are transformed accordingly. To be transformed into the time experience of beauty is to be 184 Gadamer, H.G. (1975). Truth and Method. p.124. Ibid. 186 Ibid. 187 Ibid., p.125. 188 Ibid., p.126. 189 Ibid., p.102. 190 Plotinus, “Enneads, 4.3.8,” cited in: Biernoff, Suzannah (2002). Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages. New York: Palmgrave Macmillan. p.84.. 185 61 ‘destined’ away from the fragmentation, dissolution, and subjectivism191 that technology engenders and toward a persisting integrity of being – authenticity. As the plank is to the sea, so beauty is to technology. It is the bridge to an alternate horizon, and as the bridge, it is already another horizon, its meaning “lies in the fact that it is there.” 192 Granting and Freedom I have tried to show, up to this point in the chapter, that even though the frame of technology holds significant sway in contemporary culture, revealing our identities in distorted and reduced modes of being, the aspiration to a poietic method of revealing, has not been entirely driven out. It persists in the form of the ideal of authenticity, an aspiration of human being that intuits, in the realm of poetry and art, an opening to a horizon beyond the reductive frame of technology – that of beauty. Beauty is the saving power that meets technology in the realm of decisive confrontation – the realm of time – and unravels it. According to the logic of authenticity, the resistance to technology lies in being revealed through, and allied with, this saving power. But we have to be careful here. To aspire to the ideal of authenticity, to long for the horizon of beauty, does not mean that we are attaining it. As George Steiner puts it: “We know now that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his days work at Auschwitz in the morning.”193 We have naively misunderstood beauty if we think that it will change us, make us authentic, by some kind of passive osmosis, just as we would have misunderstood a plank in the sea if we think that it will save us from drowning without our reaching out and grasping it. Beauty is a given, it always appears, always invites us into its horizon – nobody ever poietically effected the appearance of a plank amidst the waves of the sea. But the gathering and ordering of the desire for beauty into its authentic realization and attainment is effected by a poietic method alone. If beauty is always granting itself, always appearing as a plank amidst the waves, and if it holds a powerful attraction for us (especially sexual beauty), then our desire is always activated and a response is always 191 “The “subject” of the experience of art, that which remains and endures, is not the subjectivity of the person who experiences it but the work itself.” [Gadamer, H.G. (1975). Truth and Method. p.102.] 192 Gadamer, H.G. (1986). Relevance. p.33. 193 Steiner, George (1970). Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman. New York: Atheneum. p.ix. 62 provoked. We are always engaging and gathering around it; this means that the activities of play and the festival are always effected. But we are not forced to receive it poietically; we are free to respond to it with the method we choose (freedom is one of the possibilities effected by the horizon of beauty; if beauty forced us to respond poietically, it would contradict itself). Therefore, the playing and festival effected by our choice may not always effect an alternate horizon. This factor of freedom further illuminates the nature of the moment of beauty and calls for a clarification of its structure. The Moment of Beauty: Two Movements The ‘moment’ of beauty is constituted by two movements: the initiation of beauty, and the reciprocation of method. The generation of the moment takes place as follows: When beauty enters the frame – the sensuous appearance of sexual beauty for example – it demands our attention, and this attention is an immediate correction to our intentionalities. It enters and fills our field of vision, and we are struck, both ‘epistemologically’ (in terms of MacIntyre’s ‘crisis’) and physically. (Proust repeatedly speaks of the ‘quickening’, ‘adrenalizing,’ effect of beauty that gives life its spark).194 In this moment of ‘struckness’, the frame of technology is momentarily suspended and we are opened up to the horizon of beauty. Beauty invites us to bring it forth poietically, to ‘play’ and ‘tarry.’ The moment is thus initiated. But once we regain our perceptual balance, our habitual way of seeing, we can (i) take up the invitation and respond poietically, ‘playing and tarrying’ according to the method that brings beauty into realization, and thus effect the unraveling of technology, or (ii) resume our technological way of intending, thus making the encounter with beauty into an experience whose sole purpose is to generate a sensation of pleasure (as in the case in the scenario with the waitress). In the latter case, beauty is not realized (“in our sheer aesthetic-mindedness we no longer guard and preserve [its] coming to presence”)195 and the frame is not unraveled. The moment is thus completed by either one of these two methods of reciprocation. 194 195 Scarry, E. (1999). Beauty. pp. 24-25. Heidegger, M. (1977). Question Concerning Technology. p.35. 63 Two observations at this point will prompt a question and send us into our next section: (i) (a) the ‘quickening’ effect of beauty heightens desire and propels the person to action – either poietic or technological; therefore (b) the ideal of authenticity can be pursued along either a poietic or a technological trajectory. (ii) (a) The strength of the sway of technology suggests that more often than not, our response to beauty – especially sexual beauty – will be technological; this suggests that (b), the trajectory that the pursuit of authenticity takes will, more often than not, be technological. What, then, are the consequences of the technological pursuit of authenticity? Part II: Violence The technological pursuit of authenticity is violence and its consequence is murder. Lionel Trilling has pointed out the “violent meanings which are explicit in the Greek ancestry of the word ‘authentic.’ Authenteo: to have full power over; also, to commit a murder. Authentes: not only a master and a doer, but also a perpetrator, a murderer, even a self murderer, a suicide.”196 Violence and murder (including self-murder) are embedded in the very essence of authenticity, always ready to be activated, to be drawn out by a particular method of revealing. My aim in the second half of this chapter is to show why authenticity pursued via the method of lust and technology is a violent destining towards murder. I will begin by charting the course of the desire for authenticity when it is pursued by a technological method; its impact on identity and it’s consequences in the actual world of human relations. I will call this form of authenticity ‘technological authenticity’ for the sake of clarity (and for the sake of accuracy). ‘Technological authenticity’ applied to the apprehension of sexual beauty is lust. 196 Trilling, L. (1971) Sincerity and Authenticity. p.131. 64 As in Chapter One, I will delve into the axially symmetrical intentionality of technology that subsists in archaic society in order to draw out implications that often remain hidden from the view of our modern gaze. It is in this axial symmetry that we will uncover the nature and structure of the ‘festival’ when it is enacted technologically. This will reveal to us the image embedded deep in the core of lust; the image through which we are revealed and to which we are sent when we receive sexual beauty through technological desire. To begin our delineation, then, let’s turn to the activity which engages with beauty, tarries to-and-fro with it, and effects its temporal horizon. How does the activity of ‘play’ comport itself when it is engaged technologically? ‘Free Play’ and Transgression Charles Taylor has noted that when the search for authenticity loses its horizon of significance, it derails into deviant forms.197 Taylor’s summary outline of the characteristics and requirements of authenticity will serve us well here: “Briefly we can say that authenticity (A) involves (i) creation and construction as well as discovery, (ii) originality, and frequently (iii) opposition to the rules of society and even potentially to what we recognize as morality. But it is also true, as we saw, that it (B) requires openness to horizons of significance (for otherwise the creation loses the background that can save it from insignificance) and (ii) a self-definition in dialogue.”198 Play, in either it’s authentic or, as we shall see in a moment, technologically authentic, forms is always an engagement with beauty. Why? We can point to two factors that will explain this: (i) as we have seen from (A) above, authenticity frequently involves opposition to the rules of society. It is a mode of transgression, a passing beyond or over the bounds that confine one to conformism. (ii) The fact that it has to do with creativity and originality mean that the categories intended are those of beauty. An authentic identity must be formed in dialogue with the beautiful. Transgression and beauty go together in fact, if we take the frame of technology as our reference. As I have argued in the first part of this chapter, the ideal of authenticity is a desire to transcend the frame and achieve an alternate horizon of revealing. However, this ‘transgression’ of technological conformism cannot be achieved by 197 198 Taylor, C. (1991). Malaise. pp.55-69. Ibid., p.66 65 simply wanting to achieve it. It requires a method that opens up to and maintains this openness to the horizon of beauty. And this method is in and of itself dialogical: the tarrying to and fro of play. The ‘playing’ form however can be simulated syntactically without making present the adequate semantic horizon (that is, the adequate temporality). That is, it can be simulated in form but not in method. The ‘sheer aesthetic-mindedness’ that Heidegger talks about obtains when the frame of technology becomes the limit of our horizons and ‘playing’ ceases to be an opening up to the beautiful – as poiesis – and becomes a mimesis of technology, challenging-forth and reconfiguring the world at will. Gadamer’s determination of the locus of play in the artwork itself and not the person seeing it, (“The “subject” of the experience of art, that which remains and endures, is not the subjectivity of the person who experiences it but the work itself.”)199 is here reversed, and the player stands over and above the beautiful, as he does when the world is conceived and grasped as picture – that is, when he intends it from within a technological temporality. Time, which had begun to ‘flow’ in the activity of play, when one is taken up by the playing, stops here when we stand over and above it. Time becomes spatial, and being, therefore, becomes having. If to poietically contemplate the work of art is to ‘be with it in time’, then technological contemplation is to force the work of art to ‘be with oneself in time.’ Beauty is still intended, but technologically, and therefore the temporal structure of this contemplation, rather than allowing us to ‘see’ beauty, only shows us ourselves (“She’s wearing us”), thus locking us into subjectivism 200 (except of course that it doesn’t show us ourselves but only shows us ourselves as we are revealed by technology and technological desire). The intentionality of ‘free play’201 also obtains in mythology, in the ‘playing’ of the deities that arbitrarily confers form on a substance in one way 199 Gadamer, H.G. (1975). Truth and Method. p.102. Walter Benjamin on this point: “A man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it. In contrast, the distracted mass absorbs the work of art.” [Benjamin, W. (1936).”Work of Art.” In Illuminations. p.586.] The notion of temporal intentionality as distracted or concentrated (focused), can be found in Augustine’s deliberations on time in the Confessions. Paul Ricoeur deals extensively with this subject in Time and Narrative vols. 1-3, and more summarily in “The Human Experience of Time and Narrative ,” in The Ricoeur Reader (1991). 201 Taylor, C. (1991). Malaise. p.61. Taylor uses the term to refer to the philosophical stance of deconstructionists such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, for whom ‘play’ has free reign and all categories can be deconstructed, even the notion of the self. 200 66 or another202, whose counterpart in technology is the technological capacity and intentionality of man who arbitrarily configures the ‘standing-reserve’ into whatever yields pleasure. The “free play” that configures and reconfigures being according to whim has nothing ‘free’ and spontaneous about it because the temporal realm which makes newness and spontaneity ontologically possible, is shut from view. There is nothing transgressive about it either insofar as transgressing technology is concerned. ‘Free play’ effects a mimesis of the technological frame, as it ‘unlocks, stores up, transforms, distributes, and switches about ever anew.’ The obliteration of being is bilateral, in that the ‘player’ and the ‘played’ are both unlocked from out of their temporal context and locked into the technological frame, and thus reduced to standing-reserve.203 This is the method which forecloses the poietic revealing of authenticity in the temporal realm of the beautiful. However, play is the method which attains to the beautiful, whether ‘free’ or technological, because the desire that powers both forms is the desire to be revealed authentically. Even when the horizon that opens up to the realm of poietic authenticity is absent, the desire to be revealed authentically persists. In the absence of a horizon of beauty, an attempt to generate an authentic identity will be pursued technologically and destined accordingly. What then is the strategy of this technologically authentic self generation? To answer this we must first delineate the matrix of identity generation in the frame of technology. 202 The deity, in the words of one Indology scholar, “is playful. Like a child building sand castles on the beach, [the deity] creates the world and destroys it again.” [Cf. Sax, William S. (Ed.) (1995) The Gods at Play: Lila in South Asia. Oxford: Oxford University Press.] With the Greeks we have the same structure of ‘playing’ in a fragment of Heraclitus which reads: “The Aeon is a child at play, playing draughts. The kingly rule is as a child’s.” [Cf. Heraclitus of Ephesus, “Fragment 52,” quoted in: Rahner, H. (1967). Man at Play. p.14.] 203 In the thought of Derrida and Foucault and – more vividly - the work of George Bataille we have examples of the valorization of the idea of ‘free play.’ The so-called ‘transgressiveness’ of the ‘free play’ modality that transgresses all boundaries and recognizes no rules, in the final analysis, reveals itself to be completely technologically framed and ordered, a mere repetition of tired recurrences. This attempt at the reordering, even obliteration, of horizons simply furthers the technological rule, obediently carrying out its enframing, never attaining to an alternative temporality. What begins as a thundering war cry against the conformism and ressentiment of modern society and thought categories, in the final analysis dissolves into a faint, obedient, whimper, easily absorbed into the fabric of the technological frame. An authentic transgression obviously has to contradict the categories of conformism, and these forms do not. It is to all intents and purposes not play at all, but rather the obedient and precontrived carrying out of the ordering forth of technological destining – enframing. [Cf. Bataille, Georges (1986). Erotism. Trans. Mary Dalwood. San Francisco: City Lights Books.] 67 Axiological Identity Technological authenticity is axiologically determined. Axiology is defined as the science or theory of value.204 I use it in the sense in which value-conferral is the hermeneutic through which one intends an object, and accords it a place on a vector, or scale, corresponding to one’s valuation of it. The place one gives it on the vector depends upon the value it is perceived to have. A higher density of value corresponds to a higher position on the scale.205 In the frame of technology, the mode of intentionality that dominates in relationship to the beautiful, intending it for its pleasure yielding value, is axiological. Primally, what this means is that what is revealed in the technological frame is accorded value according to the extent to which it is desired. Therefore, what has worth does not have worth just because it is, but only at the whim of the subjective desire of others. This axiological vector, made present by the technological gaze of the other, becomes the gauntlet in which one’s identity must be worked out. Yet the goal is still to be intended beautifully, because only the beautiful persists beyond the dissolution of the standing reserve. What is to be done? If the source of the being of the person subsists not in the person, not in a significant horizon, but in the technological frame, then it is the frame that must be manipulated in order to yield a greater conferral of value on the person it intends. The achievement of an increase in being206 204 Cf. Frondizi, Risieri (1971). What is Value? An Introduction to Axiology. LaSalle, Illinois: Open Court Publishing Company. 205 Martha Nussbaum’s commentary on Plato’s “science of measurement” and its contemporary forms [Nussbaum, M. (1990) “The Discernment of Perception.” In Love’s Knowledge. pp.54-105] sheds interesting light on Classical precursors to this axiological vector in which all value is equalized along a vector of units of pleasure. She argues that Plato’s 'science of measurement' is the dominant form of ethical deliberation and comprises of four parts, or claims: (i) Metricity: there is one value in each situation of choice that is contained in all the alternatives, and the rational chooser will weigh the alternatives and choose the one that contains the highest quantity of the single value, according to a certain standard. (ii) Singleness: there is one single metric, or standard, that can be applied to all situations of choice. (iii) Cosequentialism: each choice is not valuable on its own but has value according to the ends produced by that choice. So the value of the choice is its value as a means. Maximization is the combination of the three initial claims to yield the highest possible quantity of a single value. (iv) Content: the single value has to be identified. Pleasure is the most common identification of the single metric in contemporary thought as well as in Aristotle’s time. So the maximization of the quantity of pleasure is the aim of all choice in all situations of choice. 206 Interestingly, Gadamer speaks of the work of art as “an increase in being.” Is there not perhaps a mimesis taking place, in the one who strives to articulate his life artistically – to make of his life, ‘an increase in being’? [Cf. Gadamer, H.G., (1975). Truth and Method.] 68 means here the attainment of a higher point along the axiological vector. What has being in the technological frame is not any being in itself, but desire alone. Everything else has being in relation to this. The attainment of this higher point has everything to do with adapting to the temporality of the frame, which means ‘playing’ by its game, which consists of always keeping the frame in a state of heightened desire for oneself. The frame, whose temporality is the conglomeration of disparate moments, each cyclical and unconnected to the next in a unified integrity, does not see the unity of a life, but only what appears as picture, in the instant. Therefore the desire provoked must have as big an impact in as little time as possible, a goal at home in the world of advertising and publicity. This is why, according to Walter Benjamin, 207 the celebrity is the paradigm of the personality in the technological matrix. When the ‘aura’208 surrounding an original work of art is lost in the reproduction, as it necessarily would be of anything revealed technologically, then the tactic taken to reproduce – manufacture – this aura is the ‘shock effect’. 209 This shock effect may be done in many ways, but it always involves the arresting of the other into a “being, fascinated, deprived of his freedom,”210 as does the effect of the waitress on the customers. This effect renders a simulacrum of the intentionality of the beautiful in the other, but it is simply the master-slave dialectic taking root, and therefore, the person arrested in this way is dominated and “no longer counts in my eyes.”211 But, of course, along this vector both are slaves to the technological, both carry out its orders, as Heidegger has shown.212 And so within the confines of the frame, the authenticity-seeking identity must also manufacture his own ‘aura’, which is nothing but the accumulation of ‘shock-effect’ moments that he has thrown at the frame. The technique of achieving authenticity, then, is one of stretching and straining the boundaries of the frame, widening the gaze of the other, in an attempt to engender at least a simulacrum of the gaze that intends with a focus and participation that brings forth the beautiful poietically. His ‘authentic’ identity is conceived and constructed as nothing other than the pastiche of lived experiences, which in some way are supposed to confer on him the value that 207 Benjamin, W. (1936). “Work of Art,” In Illuminations. p.586. Ibid. 209 Ibid. 210 Merlau-Ponty, M. (1962.) Phenomenology of Perception. p.167. 211 Ibid. 212 Heidegger, M. (1977). Question Concerning Technology. 208 69 keeps him at a higher station along the axiological vector, one in which he is regarded as deserving of the intentionality which intends his persistence. But differences are here insignificant, because no matter where one is along the vector, one is still on the vector, and the ground that grounds the reality of difference, of uniqueness, of originality, of beauty, is nowhere along the vector but subsists in a different temporal realm. One is reduced to standingreserve, ready to be distributed and switched about and replaced accordingly. To exist along the axiological vector is to exist on a reel of film. When one is seen, when one’s image is caught in the frame, one exists. Yet when the aperture of the camera widens or narrows or shuts completely our being is increased, or decreased, or obliterated. This is why we must seek to always seduce the shutter to remain open, by fascination or seduction. But either way, we have no being, because our being subsists in the desire of the other. Axiological Sexuality How is sexuality revealed within this authenticity process? When the beauty of the sexuality of the human body is interpreted aesthetically, along an axiological vector, the entirety of both the body and identity of the person is conflated with their perceived sexual desirability, that is, as in lust, the sexual value of the body is unlocked and becomes the hermeneutic through which the other is interpreted. It becomes the metaphor213 through which identity is seen. If identity is subject to the metaphorization accruing from desirability, and desirability is subject to one’s valuation by another, then as the axiological station of the person shifts, so does the metaphor change, and so, therefore does identity change. What was seen as beautiful one day, is ugly the next. And it all depends upon the way in which the frame, made present by the aesthetic gaze of the other, valuates the person in that particular moment. The frames that make up the narrative of a human life are not connected, and thus any connection between the last frame and the current frame is contingent. This means that there is no reason why what was once perceived as beautiful 213 The trope of the metaphor (this is that) as that which conflates two identities, is distinct from the simile (this is like that) as that which unites two identities but retains their difference. Goodman describes metaphor like so: “Briefly, a metaphor is an affair between a predicate with the past and an object that yields while protesting.” [Goodman, N. Languages of Art.p.69.] 70 should indeed continue to be viewed with a beautiful intentionality, since today they are not experienced as, and therefore are not, beautiful.214 What was once beautiful, and placed along an axiological vector at a high point, is now demoted to a lower point, and perhaps the lowest point; Elaine Scarry has described this process of the disappointment accruing from the absence of the beauty that was once present to perception.215 The formerly beautiful thing is now beautiful no longer. We experience this as a betrayal, as if that which appeared as beautiful was lying to us, and tricked us into holding on to it, only to prove itself as un-persisting as what is intended technologically.216 What was the source of our dialogical integration around an alternative horizon, our bridge that ‘destines’ us out of technological dissolution, has now left us flailing in the sea. Along the axiological vector, as I have shown, since identity is contingent upon the valuation of the other, when one disappoints in beauty, one’s entire being is revealed as an aberration. No longer deserving of the persistence due to the beautiful, the one who has disappointed is subject to dissolution and reconfiguration. She no longer has being. And since she no longer has being, she is no longer worth having for she does not contribute to another’s having being. The relationship, the ‘playing’ and ‘tarrying’ of the intentionality of beauty falls through, because an oncoming wave in the sea has concealed the ‘plank’ for a moment and obscured its persisting nature. Do all these dynamics of ‘inauthentic authenticity’ have a ‘deep’ intentionality, something hidden beneath, an ancestry that somehow remains at play in these structures? Once again, turning our gaze to the axial symmetry of myth will illuminate the ‘hidden’ dynamics of technology. 214 As I mentioned in chapter one, only desire has ontological status in technology. When this is the case, subjective experience alone is what determines the ontological valence of being. As Heidegger has it, in our historical epoch, truth is conceived as judgment. [Cf. Heidegger, M. (1977). Basic Writings.] 215 Scarry, E. (1999). Beauty. pp.12-15. 216 Scarry cites in this regard a poem by Emily Dickinson [(1998). The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition. Ed. R.W. Franklin. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. p.785]: “It dropped so low – in my RegardI heard it hit the GroundAnd go to pieces on the Stones At bottom of my mind.” 71 The Archaic Axiological Axis Rene Girard, and Mircea Eliade have shown that the metonymical (metaphorical) method of reasoning is the primary form of reasoning in archaic society. 217 218 Visser describes the modality of shame and honor in the cyclical temporal horizon of archaic society (where time is spatialized) in terms symmetrical to my articulation of the dwelling along the axiological vector.219 The locus of identity in honor/shame cultures is to be found in the estimation of oneself in the eyes of another. The attribution of honor owing to a good ‘performance’220, to impressiveness, (like Benjamin’s ‘shock effect’) in the eyes of others, and shame for the contrary, owing to the metonymical identification, is nothing less than the bestowal of being on the other.221 (Being, here, like time, is something to be had). One is shameful, one is honorable. And since there is no room for change and progress within a cyclical temporality, the honor-shame dynamic takes the form of a jostling for space within the boundaries of the circle (what in technology would be the frame).222 The more honor one is accorded, the more space one is given – in that one is given a higher station along the axiological vector. That honor is accorded based on one’s ‘performance’ means that some people will never achieve honor and will always be ‘shamed’ – the weak, the ugly, the deformed, the crippled or incapacitated. This closed space of dwelling - since it is on the axiological vector - is the space of the superman223, but though he ‘wins’, the superman also loses in the ultimate sense because he is framed and claimed by the cyclical dynamics that he is at the mercy of; along the vector, being cannot be revealed as being, but only as a contingency of the desire of others (standing-reserve). The master is the slave of the slave. 217 Cf. Girard, R. (1977). Violence and the Sacred.; Girard, R. (1996). The Girard Reader. Cf. Eliade, M. (1959). Cosmos and History.; Eliade, M. (1963). Myth and Reality. 219 Visser, M. (2002). Beyond Fate. pp. 29-57. 220 “Honor, therefore, demands display; other people are spectators and must be provided with a performance so that they can make their judgement…In ancient Greek drama, always saturated as it is with honor, shame, and fate, there was a chorus; it was as though an event occurring without onlookers was inconceivable – or simply not an event.” [Visser, M. (2002). Beyond Fate. p.39.] 221 “This other-centredness of one’s identity means that other people must be in a position, as we say, to judge and then to award amounts of honor and dishonor.” [Visser, M. (2002). Beyond fate. p.39.] 222 Ibid. pp.36-37. 223 Nietszche’s superman can be understood in this light. 218 72 Honor, therefore, is ‘the good’ in archaic society, and as Taylor has argued, identity is worked out as a relation to the good.224 The desired good is honor and all that confers honor, because if we have no alternative to this way of revealing, then this is how our being is revealed.225 Inherent to the concept of honor, however, is the fact that it can only be awarded to someone at the expense of another. “Honor arises from competition – it is always a matter of evident prowess – and is awarded by the people watching and deciding who has won.”226 What is being played for in the honor competition is not just a luxury or a prize that has no serious bearing, but being itself, one’s entire identity. Social relationships based within this matrix of honor are grounded in rivalry. Rivalry is the springboard from which we will delve deeper into the heart of the intentionality of technology, perhaps to its very core. Desire, Violence, and Sacrifice The concept of ‘mimetic desire,’227 developed by Rene Girard, yields insight into the causes of rivalry and its calamitous effects. The Latin word for rival – aemulus – provides a good point of departure. Aemulus is also the root of the English verb ‘to emulate’, as in, to model someone, his actions, his way of being, his desires and his way of desiring. To say that desire is mimetic is to say that desire is mediated. We are educated into a way of desiring, by modeling the desire of others. Advertisers, of course, know this concept very well. The ability to make someone desire something that they previously did not desire is the essence of the art of advertising. How is it done? Desire is shaped by the use of a model, often an exemplar of beauty, achievement, fame, power (having is essential here, since it is having time228, money, beauty, fame, power that confers a highpoint on the axiological vector), who is shown desiring something and attaining that thing (say a brand of shoes or car, 224 Cf. Taylor, C. (1989). Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. pp 3-91 225 If this is the case in mythic society, then it is the case in technology, where the axiological vector is the field of being. In modernity, the dynamics accruing to honour obtain in the form of an inauthentically (technologically) revealed authenticity. 226 Visser, M. (2002). Beyond Fate.p.39. 227 Cf. Girard, R. (1977). Violence and the Sacred.; Girard, R. (1965). Deceit, Desire and the Nove: Self and Other in Literary Structure.Trans. Yvonne Freccero. Baltimore: John Hopkins Press. 228 Having time refers to the spatial temporality made present here – but in a more direct social sense, when time is spatial it is the one who can induce others to give him more of their time – to ‘contemplate’ him 73 or exotic vacation). Advertising, like myth, works with metonymical reasoning. We associate the object desired by the model – something he has – as comprising in some part his being, which, in reality, is what we really want. We want to have things only because we want to have being. Identity, along the vector, and in myth, is comprised of the conglomeration of had229 things, experiences, conferrals of approval by others, power. We therefore want to have as much of the being (honor) of the one we perceive as occupying a lot of space in the closed cyclic frame that we dwell in.230 But what does that mean? If we want what the model has, because we want the being of the model – that is the space (honor) of the model – then the model becomes our rival; we compete for the same thing. As the mimetic rivalry builds up, and the existential tension accruing from the competition reaches unmanageable proportions (proportions that no longer fit into the confines of the frame – or circle), they must be dissolved, the steam must be let out, cleansing and purification must take place, and society must start anew.231 This is the point at which we have reached the zenith of the cycle, the point of dissolution and regeneration. Girard calls this the ‘mimetic crisis’ or ‘mimetic contagion.’232 It is characterized by a general obliteration of the differences between beings, between one person and another, between male and female, animal and human.233 There is a general breakdown in society234 and relationships, boundaries are torn down and there is an escalation of violence. 235 This is the point before which the periodic ‘regeneration of time’236 that happens in the event of a festival237 takes place. And it is also the point at which, as Girard has amply documented and demonstrated, the narrative of a myth begins.238 The context in which myths begin is usually 229 Having is here understood as consumption. The inherent instrumentalism that accrues in this cyclical spatial time which we have, can be gleaned at through an etymological aperture: the Latin the root of the word ‘consume’, consumere, means ‘to use.’ 230 The beliefs of societies who engaged in cannibalism are an interesting, particularly literal, example of this dynamic. The cannibalized person is usually eaten with the belief that to consume him is to have the attributes he had. 231 Cf. Eliade, M. (1959). Cosmos and History.; Girard, R. (1977). Violence and the Sacred.; Girard, R. (1986). The Scapegoat. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 232 Girard, R. (1977). Violence and the Sacred. 233 Ibid. 234 Visser, M. (2002). Beyond Fate. p.54. 235 “Violence is the process itself when two or more partners try to prevent one another from appropriating the object they all desire through physical or other means.” [Girard, R. (1996). The Girard Reader. p.9.] 236 Cf. Eliade, M. (1959). Cosmos and History. pp.49-92. 237 The connection to Gadamer’s notion of the festival will come apparent soon. 238 Girard, R. (1977). Violence and the Sacred. 74 characterized as a state of disorder in the community, an “undifferentiated chaos”239, symbolized by a ‘plague’, as in the Oedipus myth240, or a ‘deluge’, as in Tablet XI of the Epic of Gilgamesh241 - to name only a couple. The enactment of this non-differentiated chaos took place in the festival or ceremony as well.242 This state of ‘deluge’ is nothing but the mimetic crisis, the build up of tension to the point at which violence breaks out. What are the implications of this crisis? In order for the chaos to be overcome and purification and regeneration of differences to occur – that is, in order to re-establish social harmony – a step must be taken that will gather the community together for an action that will reunite them. This action was the ritual killing, ‘the unanimous immolation’ of a victim: a human sacrifice. “The sacrifice serves to protect the entire community from its own violence…the elements of dissension scattered throughout the community are drawn to the person of the sacrificial victim and eliminated, at least temporarily, by its sacrifice…The purpose of the sacrifice is to restore harmony to the community, to reinforce its social fabric.”243 This sacrificial act of expelling the victim (the ‘cause’ of the crisis who took the crisis with him into death) was the moment of the expiation of the crisis. The community experienced a feeling of communion in this moment. The sacrifice was the event of transcendence, of differentiation, of reintegration, and reharmonization of relationships because it was the moment of the periodic reordering and regeneration of time, renewing all things. The sacrifice was the moment of the ‘saving’ of the world. But if time was conceived spatially, the transcendence, integration and newness achieved was nothing other than a spatial expansion due to the residual space left behind by the disappearance of the victim. 239 Girad, R. (1996). The Girard Reader. p.11. Ibid. 241 Eliade, M. (1959). Cosmos and History. p.57. 242 “The akitu festival comprises a series of dramatic elements the intention of which is the abolition of past time, the restoration of primordial chaos, and the repetition of the cosmogonic act…We witness, one might say, a “deluge” that annihilates all humanity in order to prepare the way for a new and regenerated human species.” [Eliade, M. Cosmos and History. p.57] 243 Girard, R. (1977). Violence and the Sacred. p.7. 240 75 Sacrificial Victims of Archaic Axiology The victim is chosen according to a metonymical reasoning process; he is chosen for being different (Oedipus was a foreigner), for having a physical defect (Oedipus had a limp), or conversely, for being unusually gifted or physically striking -whatever sets him apart physically or at least very recognizably.244 Then he or she is accused of all the crimes pertaining to the chaos of non-differentiation, obliteration of boundaries and transgression of taboos – the two crimes that are universal across all myths and cultures in attracting the most opprobrium being patricide and incest.245 The victim, once accused, because he symbolizes the embodiment of all the manifestations of the crisis, is then identified as the source of the crisis. Thus, when the victim is purged from society, the crisis too will be purged, and the ‘deluge’ will subside.246 And the result is that the crisis is suspended and social ties are renewed. The sacrifice gathers everyone together again and restores peace in the community.247 But this peace is granted from within a cyclical, sacrificial 244 Cf. Girard, R. (1977). Violence and the Sacred. The Oedipus myth once again is the archetypal example. Girards discussion of Freud’s notion of the Oedipus complex in Violence and the Sacred (1977) and Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (1987) is groundbreaking, and relevant, but beyond the scope of this paper. 246 The ‘purging,’ in the more distantly archaic communities was always the murder of the victim, and while this method obtained later on as well, there are some victims who were not murdered but either maimed or banished from the community itself. The purging of Oedipus, for example, was a banishment. Banishment, of course, in that cultural matrix, meant the loss or annihilation of being, as it meant the total, irrevocable, incontestable identification with shamefulness, as the last judgment upon the persons worth. 247 Perhaps we can understand this in terms of a spatial dynamic: the honor which the victim had has now been left behind, and there is that much more honor, and space, to go around. The community unites around the space opened up by the disappearance of the victim. ‘Space being opened up’ can also be understood as an allusion to the experience of transcendence, which the entire community shares in, like the festival. It reorders time and renews it (time, remember is conceived spatially). Let us, however, make a bolder connection. The structure of a TV advertisement, as Postman [Postman, N. (1995). The End of Education.] has shown, has a structure similar to that of stories of redemption. But it also has the same structure as a myth. There is a problem (crisis), owing to a lack of spatial extension (shame), the solution is offered (acquire a product – one modeled by an ‘honored’ person – one with much space), and a resolution of the crisis is effected (restoration of harmony). If having an object, the desire for which is modeled by the person with honor – famous or beautiful, is conceived as the attainment of greater being, then having it at the expense of someone else is to have being to the diminishment of the others being. It is jostling for space, and ‘transcendence’, as the acquisition of more space, at the expense of the other’s space, is what happens when the product is acquired. The ‘deep’ intentionality, therefore, of this method of desire is that of the sacrificial murder. It only differs in degree. But even this difference in degree is only a matter of immediacy and proximity to the victim of our ‘having.’ The fact that our ‘having’ a pair of brand-name running shoes, the possession of which has been attained through a process involving, if not rooted in, near slave labor in a sweatshop, is perhaps a concrete example of the survival of the sacrificial mechanism. We could even take an example of the rich/poor, north/south divide. The instances abound. (I am not saying that buying a pair of running shoes is the same thing as murder. That would be a distortion. But I am saying it’s structures and intenionality are symmetrical if they arise from a conception of being as having. If they arise from and effect the same temporal horizon, 245 76 intentionality, and is not lasting, but will ebb away from this moment on until the next crisis comes around – thus necessitating the next sacrifice.248 A phenomenon which Girard calls ‘double transference’249 arises here. Prior to his sacrifice, the ‘guilty’ victim, through association, was identified as the source of the contagion that was rife throughout the community. But the same reflexive (metaphorical) reasoning obtains during and after his sacrifice. The guilty victim is now also identified as the source of the peace, harmony, and transcendence that now reigns throughout –the one that has driven out the plague and caused the deluge to subside. Girard locates the origin of the gods in mythic religion in this sacrificial victim, who, precisely because of being the cause and remedy of the crisis, is identified as the transcendent source and power that confers both plagues and harvests on the community.250 Hence the ‘double transference’ of the mimetic crisis and the restoration of order onto the victim/god. He is at one and the same time the most shamed of the shameful, and the most honored of the honorable. In either case however, he has no being because he is only conferred this being according to the subjective state of the community. We here have the archaic foundations of the ‘deep’ intentionality of the axiological vector: sacrificial murder. The one who is idealized (divinized) is at the very same time regarded with an intentionality that intends violence towards them (victimized). In the first case, it is because they are seen because perceived as possessing beauty - as a source of integration and transcendence, a saving power from the deluge of mimetic crises and technological destining. In the second case, when they disappoint, and the subjectivity of the other no longer identifies peace and harmony with them, one in which to be means to have, all the consequent social arrangements and processes which arise from that conception are set forth, and the destination of this mode of being is indeed murder.) 248 An axial symmetry with technology: Heidegger’s notion that the ‘delusion’ (read ‘deluge’) of the subjectivism and alienation of man in the enframing of technology [Heidegger, M. (1977). Question Concerning Technology. p27.] and his thesis that “the frenziedness of technology may entrench itself everywhere to such an extent that someday, throughout everything technological, the essence of technology may come to presence in the coming to pass of truth,” (p.35) can be easily read as the technological manifestation of the mimetic crisis – the deluge – signaling the advent of the festival – the violent sacrifice that results in the regeneration of being. It also reveals Heidegger’s own ultimate enframing within the technological, because his soteriology is the ‘saving power’ of the violent sacred. As Girard has it, “Heidegger’s Being is the sacred. The violent sacred.”[ (1996). The Girard Reader. p.283.] 249 Cf. Girard’s description of this phenomenon in Violence and the Sacred (1977), especially chapter six, “Sacrifice as Sacral Violence and Substitution.” 250 The Latin word for sacrifice is sacrificare, which means ‘to make sacred.’ The roots of this word stem deep into the archaic origins of the sacrificial murder whose product was the simulation of transcendence, to the extent of even generating personifications of cosmic and societal cycles – the gods. The sacred in this framework is a product of violence. Hence, the title of Girard’s magisterial study, Violence and the Sacred. 77 they fall to the bottom of the vector, are seen as ugly, guilty, lacking in being, not capable of rescuing one from the ‘deluge’ and therefore deserving of violence. In both cases, because being is conferred – had – they are not revealed as being. And in both cases the guilt251, and therefore, the invitation to violence, inheres. The rise and fall of celebrities can be seen as a manifestation of this process of double transference. Beauty, revealed in this intentionality, as I have been arguing, cannot be intended beautifully, but only violently, acquisitively, and therefore not at all. 252 In order to see how these dynamics are effected by lust, we have to briefly look at the way in which the concept of sacrifice informs our understanding of sexual desire. Sex as Festival From the preceding, we have been able to ascertain that desire is always mimetic and not an autonomous self-generating phenomenon; we are taught how to desire. Moreover, as Girard claims, mimesis, as well as preceding desire, absorbs all desires, including sexual desire.253 The notion that a structural symmetry exists between the initiation, ritual and paroxysm of the festival – sacrificial or otherwise – and the structure of sex from initiation to orgasm, is suggestive, and can be gleaned through two words which indicate two opposing intentionalities through which sex is revealed. The Latin lustrum – sharing a root with ‘lust’ – is a term that refers to a kind of cathartic purification ceremony in ancient Greece and Rome in which a person or a town is purged of obsessions and madness by means of a ritual which culminates in an expiatory sacrifice. It mirrors exactly the structure delineated by Girard.254 The other Latin word is castum – a root with ‘chastity’ – that refers to both the period of strict continence enjoined prior to the enactment of the festival, as well the festival itself.255 The chaste rendering of the festival will be treated with in the next chapter. I want to focus now on the manifestation of the festival as it is 251 Cf. Girard, R. (1977). Violence and the Sacred. pp. 169-185. The idealization-disappointment dynamic which I cited earlier from Scarry obtains here. [Cf. Scarry, E. (1999). Beauty.] 253 Girard, R. (1986). Scapegoat. p.144. 254 Fowler, W.W. (1911). The Religious Experience of the Roman People, from the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus. London: London Macmillan. pp.209-211. 255 Lewis, C.T. and Short, C. (1917). A Latin Dictionary. Oxford: The Clarendon Press. 252 78 rendered through the intentionality of lust, and thus attain to the genesis of the violent strand of the desire for authenticity. The ‘Deep’ Intentionality of Lust When sexuality is absorbed into acquisitive desire, it has to do with violence, and can’t be understood apart from violence. Girard points out that sex and violence have structural and thematic associations and symmetries.256 This association helps us to understand the phenomenon of lust from a wider, and, at the same time, deeper perspective. If the link seems a little conjectural, the following Shakespearean sonnet will go some ways to corroborating the conjecture: Th’expense of spirit in a waste of shame Is lust in action; and, till action, lust Is perjured, murd’rous, bloody, full of blame, Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust; Enjoyed no sooner but despised straight; Past reason hunted, and no sooner had, Past reason hated as a swallowed bait On purpose laid to make the taker mad: Mad in pursuit, and in possession so; Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme; A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe; Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream. All this the world well knows, yet none knows well To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.257 256 “In refusing to admit an association between sexuality and violence - an association readily acknowledged by men over the course of several millennia - modern thinkers are attempting to prove their broadmindedness and liberality. Their stance has led to numerous misconceptions. Like violence, sexual desire tends to fasten upon surrogate objects if the object to which it was originally attracted remains inaccessible; it willingly accepts substitutes. And again like violence, repressed sexual desire accumulates energy that sooner or later bursts forth, causing tremendous havoc. It is also worth noting that the shift from violence to sexuality and from sexuality to violence is easily effected, even by the most “normal” of individuals, totally lacking in perversion. Thwarted sexuality leads naturally to violence, just as lovers’ quarrels often end in an amorous embrace. Recent scientific findings seem to justify the primitive perspective on many points. Sexual excitement and violent impulses manifest themselves in the same manner. In both instances, the majority of discernible bodily reactions are identical.” [Girard, R. (1977). Violence and the Sacred. pp.35-36.] 257 Shakespeare, William (2002). “Sonnet 129.” In Colin Burrow (Ed.), William Shakspeare: The Complete Sonnets and Poems. New York: Oxford University Press. 79 The structure of Shakespeare’s description of this process of lust is exactly that of the intentionality, escalation of violence, and paroxysm that leads to the sacrificial murder of an innocent victim, as described by Girard.258 The individual act of lust, or relationship of lust, is a microcosmic enactment of the sacrificial cycle. This cycle, as we have seen, mirrors the temporality and intentionality of technology. Being is revealed in the same way in both myth and technology – as a dissolvable or deconstructable conglomeration of parts. He shows how the notion of the pursuit of being as having and consuming, that obtains in the intentionality of violence, when time is made cyclical and thus spatialized (“Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme”) is effected by lust. It is nothing other than the effecting of the master-slave dialectic of Hegel, or the honor-shame dialectic of mythic society, where to have being is to have it at the expense of another. The last line of the sonnet, (“the heaven that leads men to this hell”), refers to an event, sought after in a frenzy (mimetic crisis), whose character indicates the structure of the festival – that temporal reordering that relieves him of the mimetic conflicts that have been burdening him. This is the experience of transcendence that may or may not be transcendence in actual fact, but only the momentary, sensually accessible, suspension of the conflict. Whether the transcendence is real or not can be seen by its effects, which, in this case (“A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe”), in lieu of the trajectory it sets in motion (“leads men to this hell”), turns out to be an experience having the structure – and therefore temporality – of the violent sacrifice. Moreover, the method of lust is not altered (“yet none knows well to shun the heaven…”). Sexual desire still remains a mad, acquisitive pursuit. Therefore the cycle is enacted over and over again. In the sexual encounter, a feeling of transcendence, integration, and harmony resulting from the intentionality of lust, arises out of a spatial expansion rather than a real alteration in temporality. Encounters such as these are bound to be a matter of extension (a jostling for space, honor, power – an alternating master-slave dialectic in which there is no real unity, no solidarity), rather than communication, and therefore a collapsing of the horizons of two distinct persons into two arbitrary reducible configurations within a technological frame. The ecstatic feeling of transcendence, of standing outside oneself in rapture, characteristic of the festival, and characteristic of the orgasm, is in this case the rapture of violence. It is the rapture of having extended the spatial dimensions of one’s being and reduced the being of 258 Cf. Girard, R. (1977). Violence and the Sacred. 80 another - the rapture of conquering and of having (even if it is mutual, regardless of the intentions, the intentionality remains; mutual consent means nothing in terms of the method effected). There is no real transcendence of the frame here, no natality, but only a reconfiguration of the elements in the frame, the acquisition of the being of another, their space. All ‘newness’ here corresponds to the recent acquisition of the spoils of war.259 These dynamics are manifest in what I take to be the personification of lust – a template, in whose image the person intended by lust is rendered. Identifying this personification will lead us deeper into the mytho-poetic nucleus of the intentionality of lust and thus technology and myth. The Anthropological Image of Lust The ‘mytho-poetic’ nucleus of lust is best represented by the sacrificial rites performed by members of the cult of Dionysus. The Dionysian ritual is the archaic scenario in which sexuality and violence are most explicitly conjoined. It represents the deepest anthropological implications of the intentionality of lust. Dionysus is often regarded nowadays as the god of wine and revelry, yet this is “a more sedate version of his original designation as the god of homicidal fury.”260 Nietszche saw Dionysus as the symbol of the vitality, passion, lust, and violence of the eternal fruitfulness of life. He saw it as the antidote to the ressentiment of bourgeois 19th century Europe. 261 In the Bacchae of Euripides, Dionysus is at once the god of ‘homicidal fury’ and the immolated victim and principle of regeneration. 259 The intentionality is that of a cannibalism. The victim is consumed so that his being his absorbed in a literal sense into the being of the cannibal. [Cf. Girard, R. (1977). Violence and the Sacred. pp. 274-280.] 260 Ibid., p.133. 261 Cf. Girard, R. (1996). “Nietszche Verses the Crucified.” In The Girard Reader. pp 243-261. Girard [(1977). Violence and the Sacred. p.132.] comments on the strangeness of this notion of Dionysus as antidote since “throughout the play the god (Dionysus) wanders from place to place, engendering violence and crime with the artfulness of a satanic seducer. Only the quixotic masochism of our own age, the result of a long immunity to the violence that threatens primitive societies, allows us to see anything attractive in the Dionysus of the Bacchae. It seems clear that Euripides shares none of our illusions, which would be comic if they were less disquieting.” However, as we have seen from Heidegger’s notion of the ‘saving power’ growing in technology, it is the logical outcome of the technological frame. Real violence is the antidote to the violence of technological frivolity which systematizes and frames everything into standing-reserve. The ideal is that the frame of technology will be subverted by a violent transgression of all boundaries – which is merely the physical paroxysm of the process of enframing. 81 Dionysiac cults were characterized by engagement in periodic orgies, in which the identification of the sexual rite and the violent immolation and murder were absolute: “A bacchant through his orgiastic rites, imitates the drama of the suffering Dionysus.”262 The intentionality of lust (“perjured, murd’rous, bloody”) is a mimesis of this identification. As a periodic festival, the enactment of the dissolution and regeneration of time and the world that obtains in cyclical cosmology, where differences were obliterated, were enacted: “The Dionysiac state of mind can…and often does erase all manner of differences: familial, cultural, biological, and natural. The entire everyday world is caught up in the whirl, producing a hallucinatory state that is not a synthesis of elements, but a formless and grotesque mixture of things that are normally separate.”263 Even incest was often incorporated into these rites. But this inclusion was not just an exotic import into the sacrificial process, but the logical and predictable outcome of the obliteration of differences. Incest, from the Latin incastus, means un-separate. The sacrificial crisis always intends incest because the intentionality of violence and lust always intend the total obliteration of differences – a crossing of all boundaries and taboos.264 Incest, the taboo shared by all cultures, is integrally bound to the intentionality of lust, as the most dramatic consequence, and deepest significance of its method. The image of the dismembered Dionysus is the foundation of an anthropology whose core renders the human being, and human community and relationships as subject to dissolution, reconfiguration and violence (a total axial symmetry with the postmodern pastiche identity). Neither individuality, nor relationship, nor community remains, only a mass pool of desire that, “instead of creating individuals, as it becomes increasingly mimetic, makes those it possesses more easily interchangeable and capable of substitution as it’s intensity increases.”265 Because of this autarchy of desire we can say that the waitress (in the McLuhan scenario) is Dionysus and the one’s watching her are also Dionysus; but more accurately, the situation is Dionysus. Dionysus, as the personification of technological desire, is everyone and no-one. As autarchic desire, Dionysus absorbs and manipulates everyone. Human being is revealed, 262 Eliade, M. (1959). Cosmos and History. p.22. (A Bacchant is another name for a Dionysiac, a member of the cult of Dionysus) 263 Girard, R. (1977). Violence and the Sacred. p.160. 264 Ibid. pp.112-118 265 Girard, R. (1986). The Scapegoat. p.132. 82 and comports itself as, a mass of indistinct, all-consuming, desire. “She’s wearing us,” and we are wearing Dionysus. The revealing effected by lust is the obscuration of differences, and the loss of autonomy; it is sexual desire, as Girard points out, that manipulates rather than being manipulated; 266 “Sexuality is one of those primary forces whose sovereignty over man is assured by man’s firm belief in his sovereignty over it.”267 Because desire is mimetic, even in its autarchic state it is framed and claimed by technology. Both the image in the frame, and the frame of the image, are the dismembered Dionysus. As the principle of dissolution and regeneration, he is the engine that propels time along the trajectory of the fragmented, disparate, framed moments of the temporality of technology. Beauty, as revealed in this momentary temporality, is dragged through the cycle with all its dissolutive dynamics, immolated, and murdered. The dismembered Dionysus is the personification of lust. These are the consequences of the technological pursuit of authenticity; this is the destining of lust. But this sacrificial scenario was the method through which peace and order in the community were established, and social institutions and relationships were renewed. It was the way out of the violence of mimetic contagion. But what kind of a peace and order was this? The Myth of Myth The peace afforded by the sacrifice was a temporary reprieve. The order and peace established was an order and peace flowing from the cathartic murder of the victim. The intentionality of the culture in times of peace was the same intentionality as the frenziedness of the mimetic crisis and sacrificial murder. It was just a different point in the revolution of the cycle retaining the same temporal intentionality. It is simply the other side, the absence of the festival-sacrifice, but an absence ordered by the inner temporal structure of the festival-sacrifice itself. Because the principle of order, regulation, and peace is set forth by the festival-sacrifice, the violence is not undone by the renewed order; it is merely concealed, distributed into the order of the framework, waiting to burst fruitfully, violently, into light at the recurrence of the festival, once desire has reached the point of mimetic crisis again. Nothing essential 266 267 Ibid., p.139. Girard, R. (1977). Violence and the Sacred. p.34. 83 changes before, during, or after the sacrifice. The principle of order and disorder are one and the same.268 The difference between Dionysus and Apollo (understood as the god and principle of order and the opposite of Dionysus)269 is a difference in mood, not an ontological difference. Why is this? Because the method and horizon of desire have not changed in any way. It is still acquisitive desire; being is still a matter of having. When this is the case, the fundamental horizon of all relationships and social institutions is rivalry. Being must be had at the expense of another. Therefore, there must be a sacrificial victim. But what is this ordering principle? According to Girard, the redescription of a sacrificial event in such a way as to obscure and conceal the actual violence perpetrated is the origin and strategy of myth. Myth is merely Dionysus subdued and rendered into symbolic order. The Dionysian intentionality is revealed in its full cataclysmic effect during the ritual murder, whereas myth is the Apollonian explanation of the Dionysian ritual into a symbolic structure that at one and the same time extends the dynamics of the ritual into a metaphoric representation of the cosmogony, structures, and processes of the world, while concealing its origin in sacrificial murder.270 This is the reason for the dark edges of the frames of the reel of film. This is where we existentially blink. It must be so because the enormity of the violence of the sacrificial immolation is too violent, too powerful, for the crowd to believe that it has come from itself.271 And in a certain sense it hasn’t. As we have seen from Girard’s understanding of the Dionysian sacrifice (and Shakespeare’s articulation of lust “mad in pursuit”), acquisitive desire, once it has reached the stage of mimetic contagion, becomes autarchic; it manipulates everything and everyone. As Girard has pointed out, what is rarely grasped by the social sciences and much of modern thought is that violence is a relationship. It is a method. We look at the act of violence in an individuated fashion, as a momentary act. By doing so, we fail to understand that it is the paroxysm of a ritual, a stage along a method. And if we fail to understand this, we are unable to realize it and acknowledge it before it is too late. Violence is always at play; it is a way of being. Murder is the logical outcome of a method emerging from a conception of being as having, from an acquisitive ordering of desire, whose root lies in the image of the 268 Cf. Girard (1977) Violence and the Sacred. Ibid. p.315 270 Cf. Girard (1977) Violence and the Sacred. 271 Ibid. 269 84 dismembered Dionysus. It is the paroxysm of the ritual that emerges from the previous sacrificial murder. It is in the stage immediate to the eruption of the full-scale realization of the ritual, the war, or the visible and physical act of violence, that mythic description dissolves and the only words spoken are actions of violence. In the darkness of the frame, the threshold of the paroxysm, when all differences are obliterated and a wave comes crashing over us in the midst of the sea, when the aperture of the technological frame closes, when the moment of the generation of the world is at hand, language ceases to exist as language. Communication ceases because difference, therefore otherness, has been obliterated. All is an extension of all, and it is in this deluge that the murder is enacted at its paroxysm. And this lets off the steam, we have peace, and we emerge again from the gap in the reel, the frame of the frame, and into the picture, where we are afforded light, and thus, differentiation, language and social cohesion. But we have not unraveled the frame. We are still locked within the ritual, and as language again begins to describe the same processes and relationships with a mythic superimposition, we have the sending forward of the same intentionality and thus the same ritual escalation – imperceptible at first and gradually more perceptible at an ever-quickening pace until it is too late, and the frame moves once again into the darkness of violence. To reiterate once again, what must change in order for the final destining in sacrificial violence to be avoided is the method of desire. We must move away from acquisitive desire. Describing the dynamics in a different way does nothing to halt the destining of desire along its trajectory of violence and murder. In fact, in obscuring the underlying dynamics of violence from sight, it prevents us from coming to terms with them directly. The reason I have dwelt at relative length on this theme of myth is to relate it to sexuality education, and to try to show that the approaches usually taken to undo instrumentalism are ineffective, unless they directly aim to transform the dynamics of lust – acquisitive sexual desire - into a poietic method of desiring. There is an idea expressed by Postman272, Keen273 and others, that in response to the problem of instrumentalism we need new myths, myths that express and articulate life in a poetic manner. We must develop or choose ‘myths that serve,’ as Postman puts it. 274 But this seems problematic; why 272 Postman, (1994), End of Education. Cf. Keen, S. (1973) Your Mythic Journey: Finding meaning in your life through writing and storytelling. Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher. 274 Postman, (1994) End of Education. 273 85 does one choose one myth and not another? Surely, it is not the myth chosen that is at issue here, but the method, the very fact of choosing a ‘myth that serves.’ To choose a ‘myth that serves’ is to find oneself – if one were to look intently – thoroughly inserted into the very technological dynamic that one is trying to overcome. It sounds strikingly similar to the challenging-forth of the technological that ‘unlocks, stores up, transforms, distributes and switches about ever anew.’ To choose a myth and superimpose it upon the act, rather than to alter the method and let the meaning emerge from it, is an instantiation of technology challenging forth meaning. It is not ‘myth that serves’ here, but myth, in the sense of technology, that is served. Here, it is meaning itself which is challenged forth to yield a use – that of supplying meaning as ‘standing-reserve.’ But if meaning is intended in this way, it is not revealed as meaning, with the dynamics pertaining to meaning – which are the same dynamics pertaining to beauty (correcting, de-centering, objectivising, etc.) – but as something belonging solely to the subjectivity of the human being, and thus, it has no claims on him. It is not a dialogical dynamic in the final analysis, but a monologue. It has the same intentionality as that of ‘free play.’ One cannot effect a reversal of the technological dynamic by adopting the methods set forth by that very same dynamic. Sexuality education that doesn’t achieve a real shift in its method of intending sexuality cannot, no matter what myths it employs, or which way it describes things, undo the problem of technology. In order for meaning to inhere, the horizon must be made present in which meaning can be revealed. Desire itself must be ordered and gathered towards the bringing forth of meaning. The ‘plank amidst the waves of the sea’ cannot be just gazed at, it has to be grasped. And that means that one’s entire being must envelop itself around it, in thought and action. Desire must be ordered poietically. It is not enough to simply ‘put’ it well. Description of any kind means nothing if the method of action doesn’t directly contradict technology; it remains in the service of technology and ultimately, therefore, of violence. Technological authenticity in the final analysis is poetic lust. In any sexual encounter – understood broadly in the sense of any time sexuality is intended – a poetic discourse accompanied by dramatic sentiment can serve as a mythological obscuration of lust, making it easier for lust to infuse the sexual encounter with its method under the guise of beauty. But it is the method that speaks most firmly, even if more quietly and when the language of sentiment and hyperbole has died down, the method chosen is revealed. 86 This is the language we must listen to if we are seeking to locate the path we are on. Lyric and sentiment can serve the beautiful, infusing it with emotional connection, or it can serve to obscure the fact that the language our bodies are speaking renders the beautiful aesthetically and renders the lyricism and sentiment as mythic. Description only describes when it ‘responds and corresponds’ poietically. Otherwise, the material of description is challenged forth and fragmented – a symbolic displacement in which myth prescribes and technologically frames the encounter as beautiful, whereas the disjunction between the method and the description (in both word and emotion) is both an instantiation of, and destining towards, violence. This is the manner of technological authenticity, the flourishing of its violent meanings. We have a double obscuration here, that first violently obscures the image of the other by intending them lustfully, violently, and then obscures the violent obscuration itself by describing it lyrically, in the language of authenticity or beauty. The first step towards undoing this violence is to describe the method of violence as that which it is. I have attempted to do this with the dynamics of lust. The second step is to deploy a new method. And this I will attempt to do in the next chapter. 87 CHAPTER THREE: CHASTITY This chapter presents chastity as the method of poiesis in the sexual sphere. I propose it as the method that responds to sexual beauty in a way that is fundamentally opposed to the dynamisms of technology and lust. I undertake an analysis of the meaning of the word ‘chastity,’ and the way in which the dynamism inherent in that meaning are made incarnate in shame and continence. Beginning with the anthropological template of the intentionality of lust - the immolated and murdered Dionysus - we can commence our ascent to beauty. I earlier cited Aristotle’s definition of beauty as that from which “nothing can be added and nothing can be taken away.”275 Our method must begin here. We must discover how, in the advent of sexual beauty, we are to respond, in order that the frame of technology is unraveled and the immolated victim of lust is rendered as one. 275 Gadamer, H.G. (1986). Relevance. p.43. 88 The Method (of Beauty): Chastity Augustine, who described beauty as the ‘plank amidst the waves of the sea’ describes for us the method of grasping it: “Indeed, it is through continence that we are gathered together and rendered as one, from the many into which we had flowed.”276 276 I have translated directly from the original Latin, which reads: “per continentiam quippe colligimur et redigimur in unum, a quo in multa defluximus.” [Taken from Catechismus Catholicae Ecclesiae (Catechism of the Catholic Church, Latin Version), Section 2340, retrieved off the World Wide Web: http://www.vatican.va 25/11/03]. The fact that there is a divergent variety of available translations sheds interesting light on the richness of this phrase. Each one emphasizes certain aspects more than others. My own translation, which I think is the most literal, draws out possibilities inherent in Augustine’s original phrasing that speak to the method I have built up in the preceding two chapters. Let us look at the latin of Augustine (I want to bracket out the term ‘continentiam’ for the moment): I have translated colligimur as ‘gathered together’, redigimur in unum as ‘rendered as one’ , multa as ‘many’ and defluximus as ‘flowed.’ [ My translations have been taken from: Traupman, John C. (1966). The New College Latin & English Dictionary. New York: Grosset & Dunlap.] Let us look at two translations. Pinecoffin’s [Augustine (1966). Confessions. Trans. Pinecoffin. London: Penguin.] translation is insightful in terms of the ethical implications of the phrase, while being the least literal: “… we are made as one and regain that unity of self which we lost by falling apart in the search for a variety of pleasures.” (p.233) A very interesting addition Pinecoffin makes to the phrase is the explanation of why we have lost that unity of self and fallen apart - because of the ‘search for a variety of pleasures.’ This calls to mind Plotinus’ assertion that “We are what we desire and what we look at.” The fragmentedness of the self, therefore, reflects the fragmentedness of our desire, or rather, our desire for fragmentation. We cannot avoid our delineation of the intentionality of lust, myth and technology as the desire which intends the fragmentation of the other, ultimately mirroring the immolation of the Dionysian sacrifice. Thus it is by adopting the opposite desiring, which is continence, the intentionality that desires unity is effected thus rendering us as one, since ‘we are what we desire and what we look at.’ The validity of Pinecoffin’s interpretation is attenuated by the fact that Augustine was philosophically inspired by Plotinus’ neo-platonism. However, Pinecoffin’s excellent unpacking of the terseness of the original phrase slightly misses out on it’s subtlety and doesn’t give enough due to it’s eidetic possibilities. I’ll come to this in a moment. The other translation is that found in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (1994), which translates these terms thus: “…we are gathered together and led back to the unity from which we were fragmented into multiplicity.” (pp 562, paragraph 2340). The term redigimur in unum is here translated as ‘led back into the unity’, emphasizing the teleological dynamism of the concept. The interesting translation of defluximus as ‘fragmented’ rather than ‘flowed into’ is again very insightful, and very, very, revealing of the axial symmetry that lies between the intentionality of myth and the intentionality of technology. Translating the word defluximus as ‘fragmented’ makes far more sense today than it would have in Augustine’s time, and the word ‘flowed’ would have had a more immediate appeal in Augustine’s time than it does now, although I have chosen to use it - and with the intention of drawing out this very same axial symmetry. If the realm against which being is revealed in archaic society is the cosmic flux which dissolves and is characterized by the image of the sea, then it’s counterpart in technology is the frame, characterized perhaps best by the grid against which a computer generated image, or a rendering of a scientific experiment can be mapped. Fragmentation can be pictured as the separation of the lines or squares on the grid from one another. The symmetry, however becomes a identifiable unity as we progress technologically and realize that we can reduce the grid even further into a soup of energy, effectively rendering a picture of the world characterized by the Heraclitean flux. The term redigimur in unum, ‘rendered as one’, indicates an eidetic angle from which to consider the concept at hand. What is rendered is an image. The one that we are ‘made as’ or ‘rendered as’ is the image of 89 Even though Augustine is talking specifically about continence, he intends it as an aspect of a greater phenomenon, one which, replacing the word ‘continetiam,’ would draw it into its deepest significance. That is to say, the phenomenon suggested by the literal translation, that of ‘continence’, is insufficient on it’s own to effect the dynamisms attributed to it in the rest of the phrase, that of gathering together and rendering as one. It is not continence which effects these dynamisms, but a deeper phenomenon, abstracted from which, continence has no meaning, and as an aspect of which, continence becomes one of it’s modes of expression: this is the phenomenon of chastity (how ‘continence’ is an aspect of chastity but not it’s essence will become clearer as we progress). Therefore it is worth rephrasing as it is the foundation of the method: It is through chastity that we are gathered together and rendered as one from the multiplicity into which we had flowed. 277 If the image rendered by the intentionality of lust and violence is the fragmented, immolated, dismembered human being, then the image rendered by chastity is the whole, persisting, and irreducible human being. These two images represent the two opposite intentionalities of technology and beauty. They are the ‘mytho-poetic’ nuclei of lust and of chastity, respectively. We can see each as a fundamental hermeneutic. Lust is the hermeneutic of technology, chastity is the hermeneutic of beauty. One or the other lies at the core of every encounter within the sexual sphere. It is the beginning, the method, and the result of the encounter. At this fundamental level there is an either/or dynamic. Technology is “a way of revealing,”278 and the essence of technology is enframing. And the ‘mytho-poetic’ nucleus of enframing is murder. Lust is the technological ‘way of revealing’ - ‘enframing’ - in the sexual sphere. Enframing sets-upon all reality, and frames and reveals all reality through it’s mediation. Time itself is enframed by technology. What is revealed beauty - of the unified, whole, indestructable image. We cannot fail to notice the structural similarity of chastity, and that of the method of poiesis. Even the term ‘rendering’ alternately translated as ‘making’ can just as well be substituted by ‘revealing.’ I have chosen this translation because of it’s eidetic, poetic significations, which ultimately point to the realm we are trying to attain: beauty. 277 At least one translation of Augustine’s Confessions translates his use of the word continentiam not literally, as ‘continence’, but rather with consideration for the meaning he conveys, deems it more accurate and appropriate to translate it as ‘chastity.’ [Cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church, French and English editions, whereas the Latin and Italian maintain the term ‘continence.’] The point is perhaps a subtle one, in that ‘continence’ does refer to the capacity for self-possession, the ability to resist sensual urges. However, continence, while limiting the intentionality of technology to an extent, providing a bulwark against it, does not succeed in fully unravelling it, and, in the final analysis, if not an expression of chastity, ultimately slips into the intentionality of technology in a very subtle, yet unmistakable way. 278 Heidegger, M. (1977). Question Concerning Technology. 90 technologically is rendered as ‘standing-reserve’; is “unlocked”, “transformed”, “stored up”, “distributed”, and “switched-about ever anew.”279 It is revealed as ‘objectless’ and without being. Chastity is a way of revealing. The essence of chastity is unframing. The ‘mythopoetic’ nucleus of chastity is the ‘saving’ of the would be immolated victim at the heart of the intentionality of technology; it is the ‘way of revealing’ that gathers and renders into one the beauty that has been fragmented into a multiplicity of parts.280 Thus it is the ‘way of revealing’ that, destroying the intentional dynamisms of lust, reveals the other as beautiful indestructable, persisting as a ‘plank amidst the waves of the sea’, indissoluble by the dissolutionary force of technology, inviolable and therefore not subject to the immolative violence of the sacrificial murder. Chastity unravels technology. We can gain support for this view from an analysis of the word itself. The Meaning of the word ‘Chastity’ The Oxford English Dictionary lists five definitions of chastity: continence; abstinence; ceremonial purity; exclusion of metricious ornament, purity of style; exclusion of excess or extravagance-restraint.281 None of these tells us very much about the essence of chastity and hardly suggest the dynamisms of which I have been speaking. So we have to look elsewhere to find more promising leads. A glance at its Indo-European282 etymology will help us attain to it’s meaning, and understand more clearly the claim that it unravels technology and ‘gathers us together and renders us as one.’ This will give us a point of departure from which to describe how the meaning of chastity is made incarnate in action. 283 In Latin284, chastity - castitas - has several derivations: castigare which means ‘to chastise’ or ‘to correct’; Castra, which means to cut, like castrate, is cognate with the Sanskrit csastra, which means ‘knife’, or ‘sword.’ 279 Ibid. Augustine (1991). Confessions. 281 Little, W. (1933). Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. 282 I am thankful to Professor Joe Keogh, Dept. of English, Niagara University for the Indo-European roots, and suggestions, and to Jose Thevercad, Doctoral Candidate in History and Theory of Architecture at McGill University (at the time of writing) for making the connections. 283 As Gadamer has pointed out. [Gadamer, H.G. (1975). Truth and Method.] 284 Traupman, John C. (1966). The New College Latin & English Dictionary. 280 91 Castus, another form, more directly linked to chastity, means ‘separate.’ It is linked to incastus - incest. Incastus - unseparate - literally means ‘uncut.’285 Castum, as I mentioned earlier means both ‘festival’, and a period of time, usually in preparation for the festival, during which continence was enjoined. In Sanskrit286, chastity is both sudh or sundh- which means to chastise, to cleanse, to correct, to purify. Derived from sudh are: suddha - an adjective which means ‘clean’, ‘pure,’ ‘correct’, ‘accurate’, ‘genuine’, ‘unmixed,’ ‘unmodified.’ It also means ‘complete’ and ‘entire.’; and suddhi - ‘setting free or securing (from any danger)’, ‘making true’, ‘correctness,’ ‘genuineness’, ‘accuracy’, ‘truth,’ ‘clearness’, ‘certainty,’ ‘accurate knowledge regarding something.’ Derived from sundh is sundhyu, which means ‘pure’, ‘bright’, ‘radiant’, ‘beautiful’, ‘free from’ or ‘unmolested by.’ The Indo-European root of chastity - kes, or kas, which means ‘to cut’ is also the root of the Greek word ‘cosmos’ or ‘order.’ In it’s Sanskrit form, sas, it is the root of sastra, which means ‘theory’ as precept and as divine knowledge. In Greek, theory - theoria - means ‘to see.’ ‘To see’ as Gadamer has shown us, for the Greeks meant ‘to contemplate’ or ‘to be purely present to what is truly real’287 - to be ‘in communion with.’ These meanings are particularly suggestive, especially in light of our previous reflections. The resemblance of the constitutive meanings of chastity to the phenomenology of beauty is striking. Chastity is both the method of seeing, and a sign of beauty. It is both a verb and a noun at the same time. Can we say that beauty is in the method? Can we say that beauty is a method? Can we say that the method of beauty is chastity? I think we can. Chastity is the 285 Beyond the scope of this paper, but nonetheless enlightening, is the development of the psychological developmental implications of the notion of chastity as ‘separate’ - as the opposite of incest - carried out by the French psychologist Xavier Thevenot. According to Thevenot in there are four characteristics of life within the womb that must be renounced after birth and during our growth to adulthood. The first is the absence of time and space, and because of this, the absence of the notion of the other. The second characteristic is the absence of rupture. There is no notion of difference because there is no division. The third characteristic is total coincidence. Contradiction does not exist. And the fourth is a feeling of omnipotence, having no obstacles to the one’s desires. From this prenatal existence we have a taste of the fusion of our desires with the world around us. But in being born we have our first separation and childhood and adolescence are a series of separations, such as the cessation of breast-feeding and the onset of puberty. But we always maintain our desire for fusion, and it is most closely linked to the sexual experience. But unless this desire for sexual fusion becomes chaste, we don’t recognize the other, but only gratify our sexual needs. Chastity is the continual separation from our infantile way of desiring sexual fusion, which is incestuous in the sense that it does not recognize the boundaries of otherness, and growth into sexual maturity which recognizes the otherness of others. 286 Monier-Williams (1921) A Sanskrit-English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press 287 Gadamer, H.G. (1986). Relevance. 92 method of seeing beauty, and the method of beauty itself. It is beauty, as the Sanskrit sundhyu testifies to. If we gather the meanings into groups consisting of like verbs and adjectives, we will quickly see the emergence of the intentionality of chastity in the shape of three constitutive dynamics: (1): Correction: to correct and to be corrected: ‘to correct’, ‘accuracy’, ‘truth,’ ‘clearness’, ‘certainty,’ ‘accurate knowledge regarding something,’ ‘to cleanse’, ‘to purify’, ‘clean’, ‘pure,’ ‘correct’, ‘accurate’, ‘making true’, ‘correctness.’ (2): Separation: to separate and to be separate: ‘knife’, or ‘sword.’ ‘separate’ and ‘to separate’ ‘to cut’ ‘free from’ or ‘unmolested by.’ ‘unmixed,’ ‘unmodified.’ ; ‘setting free or securing (from any danger)’ ‘pure’ ‘sacred’ ‘holy’ (in Latin and in Hebrew, ‘holy’ means ‘separate’) ‘time of continence that precedes the festival.’ (3): Seeing: to see and to be seen (theoria): ‘festival’ ‘genuine’, ‘complete’, ‘entire’, ‘genuineness’, ‘bright’, ‘radiant’, ‘beautiful’, ‘cosmos’, ‘order’, ‘theory’, ‘to see,’ ‘contemplation’, ‘communion.’ These three dynamics of Correction, Separation, and Seeing (theoria), each with their bilateral significances, are all interconnected. In fact they are inseparable, since, as in the method of beauty, to see is to be separate from technology, and to be separate from technology is to have been corrected and thus on the correct method of intending. To be on the correct method is to be separating and seeing, etc. Chastity is the ‘knife’ which cuts through the technological frame which dissolves distinctions and individuality, and recognizes the separateness of the beautiful, realizes distinctions, and attains genuine communion - seeing beauty, by reordering the ‘order’ of the ‘cosmos’, thus effecting an alternate temporal horizon. And the chaste is the beautiful, the one who is ‘free and secure from the danger’ - technology - and the one who ‘sets free and secures from the danger.’ Chastity, in the sexual realm, is the ‘saving power’, which unravels technology (lust) and ‘sees’ beauty as distinct, ‘separate’ from the technological, ‘radiant’, ‘complete’ and ‘entire,’ persisting in it’s ‘genuineness’ (or authenticity) like ‘a plank amidst the waves,’ because it is, and is constantly becoming, all these things. This is how chastity ‘gathers and renders us as one.’ The ordering of the three dynamics needs to be emphasized. It seems that a temporal primacy must be given to ‘correction,’ because its existence is otherwise unexplainable. Why would there be a need for a correct method if we could ‘see’ beauty already, or if we were already separate? However, the 93 fact that the primal dynamic of chastity is ‘correction’ tells us that this primacy is itself a response to a prior dynamic: chastity is first of all a response to beauty. As Gadamer suggested earlier, beauty imposes it’s method. It sees us first, and in seeing us, it corrects us; we are struck at the moment it grasps our vision and for that moment we are caught up in its method. After it leaves us, however, it leaves us with a trace, an alternate way of looking to that which is primally available to us. This trace is what we have to follow to respond to it’s seeing of us with our seeing of it. And so we have the ‘correct’ method of chastity which is the pursuit of ‘seeing’ (that is being with) beauty, by cutting, or separating ourselves from the method of technology. In adopting beauty’s way of seeing we become a mimesis of beauty, becoming what we desire, to recall Plotinus. Chastity is the mimesis of beauty. It is in this way that chastity, which is the response to beauty, is beauty. It can only be understood as a response to beauty; the beauty of chastity subsists in it’s relationship to beauty, in the fact that it is the method of beauty. Chastity grasps the plank and is itself the plank insofar as it is grasping. The man in the sea, now no longer drowning because he is grasping the plank, is able at the same time to extend his hand to another, in friendship, thus being a plank for the other, and “time begins to move again” as they course their way through the sea together in solidarity, persisting, separate, seeing and being seen by the other. The plank has corrected them, and they respond to this correction, separating from the sea in order to see, passing through the reel to the real. As planks in the midst of the sea, as moments of beauty in the midst of the frame, they become openings in the frame, moments in whom time - the ‘order’ of the ‘cosmos’- belongs to a different horizon, that whose structure shares the intentionality of Gadamer’s description of the ‘festival’ (the ‘period of continence in preparation for the festival’ is perfectly adequate to the separation effected by chastity for the sake of ‘seeing,’ for enacting the festival temporality). To encounter chastity is to encounter recognition. It is to be seen. And to be seen, while in the midst of the frame, is to be faced with an ‘epistemological crisis’; one is gazed at by a method which is alien to the frame, inexplicable by it’s own rules, and this gives rise to a question: is there another way of knowing, of being? Has enframing really driven out “every other possibility of revealing?” This is the same question that is raised when we encounter beauty. The question instigated by chastity - this dynamic of beauty’s invitation and our response, correction, separation and seeing - suggests the movement 94 from reflexive consciousness to reflective consciousness. The shared root of the word chastity with that of ‘theory’ echoes this suggestion. We remember that wonder at the beautiful is the beginning of philosophy, and this suggestion is a provocation to question: Is there an essential thread linking chastity and theory? Could it be that chastity has a role in the emergence of reflective thought, and if so, in the emergence of culture itself? The answer to this question is something beyond the limits of my thesis, but the way to it can be preceded by more immediately answerable questions: Could it be that a chaste sexuality is a beautiful sexuality, and thus a reflective sexuality? And if so, that it is within a chaste sexuality that meaning emerges and persists? Could it be that an other than chaste sexuality is a reflexive sexuality and that ipso facto, beauty, and therefore reflection and meaning cannot inhere? These questions will answer themselves as we progress. First we have to look at how these dynamics of chastity are made incarnate in human action. Incarnate Signs: Shame and Continence The corrective method of chastity, then, is engaged by the resistance and reintegration of sexual desire: - (i) resistance to (separation from) technology (a lustful bilateral appropriation of, and thus aesthetic rendering of sexual beauty), and (ii) reintegration around (‘seeing’) beauty (a poietic gathering and ordering of sexual beauty, thus rendering it authentically). But what, practically speaking, is chastity? How, in the sexual sphere, do we resist technology and reintegrate around beauty? There are two signs which both indicate the presence of the method of chastity, and are the actions through which that method is effected. These signs are ‘shame’ 288 and ‘continence’ 289 - an expression that signifies abstinence but is actually more expressive of the dynamisms at hand than the term ‘abstinence.’ If we see desire as a primordial dynamism that communicates our being, like “a vector of aspiration along which our whole existence develops and perfects itself from within,”290 then chastity is the directing of this primordial communicative dynamic through the 3-fold matrix of correction, separation, 288 Cf. Wojtyla, Karol (1981). Love and Responsibility. Trans. H.T. Willetts. San Francisco: Ignatius Press. pp.174-193. I have relied on Wojtyla’s phenomenological analysis of the concepts of shame and continence in my discussion here. 289 Ibid., pp.194-208. 290 Ibid., p.46. 95 and seeing, effected by the signs of shame and continence. We can see shame and continence as the signs of a language of chastity. Both shame and continence are sexual responses to sexual value. They are deployed in the spheres of vision (shame) and of bodily action (continence). Both are reducible to the sphere of action itself, and, since all action is action of the body, we can reduce the sphere of vision into that of bodily action, so that shame can be seen as a continence of the eyes. However, we can also reduce the sphere of action into vision in the sense that it is an intentionality, so continence is thus shame of the body. They are both ways of ‘seeing.’ Nonetheless, the separation serves to highlight, not two totally distinct spheres of intentionality, but rather the initiation (vision), and paroxysm (bodily action) of the method of desiring. Shame Shame, according to Wojtyla, is a more general phenomenon than simply the feeling of needing to conceal something negative - in the sense that one says ‘I am ashamed of’ this or that. This phenomenon arises in the presence of something positive as well, in the sense that one can feel shame of being lauded in public for doing some great deed. So, the phenomenon transcends these two variables and contains them both. What is common in both cases is that the phenomenon of shame arises when something “which ought to be private, passes the bounds of a person’s privacy and somehow becomes public.” Shame effects an action of concealment. So whether in the face of a positive or a negative value, shame is the concealment of, and the desire of concealing, what should essentially remain hidden. Concerning sexual value, shame is the concealment of one’s sexual value from the eyes of others, and it is also from the other point of view, the concealment of another’s sexual value from one’s field of vision. But in what sense? Obviously, the person as a sexual being cannot conceal the fact that he or she is a person and thus possesses a sexual value per se. So shame specifically is the concealment (applying bilaterally to the intended and the intender) of sexual value insofar as it can be appropriated by lust - that is, challengedforth, intended technologically and enjoyed as a resource of pleasure (“Shame is a natural form of self defense for the person against the danger of descending or being pushed into the position of an object for sexual use.”291). 291 Ibid., p.182. 96 Shame inheres in the spheres of looking and of being looked at. So walking down the street naked is not an example of sexual shame, nor is going to a strip club or watching pornography. These are obvious examples, perhaps the most blatant, but the jurisdiction of shame extends to the entire sphere concerning sensual impressions, especially the more subtle ways of engaging this sphere - not just the need to conceal and be concealed in a physical sense, but also the need to disengage from certain modes of looking and being looked at - modes of engaging the sphere of sensual impressions in the realm of suggestion. Shame is characterized by a modesty of expression - in speech, action, and dress - and a modesty of impression - in sight, imagination and memory. That is, respectively, modesty in the introduction of sensuality, or sexual value, into intersubjective consciousness (by this I mean an immodest expression which is a provocation of a sexual response from another, or others), and modesty in response to the entrance of sensuality, or sexual value, into intersubjective consciousness. The latter would also include gathering and ordering one’s field of vision in such a way that limits to a minimum the possibility of the entrance of immodest sexual value (there is no point in a man going to a strip club and trying to exercise modesty of impression). However, both impression and expression are always mutually present. To bear, in the imagination, an impression of the sexual value of another, is to express a misrecognition or recognition of that other, whose identity is dialogically generated. To express is also to reveal an impression within that acts like a hermeneutic or matrix through which all actions are expressed. Modesty is the refusal to place another, or oneself, upon an axiological vector - a refusal to define, or be defined, by or through the qualities which one possesses. Continence ‘Continence’ consists in being able to control one’s reflexive sexual impulses. Its function is not to obliterate, but to moderate or regulate sexual response and desire, in order to be free to engage when one chooses, guided by decision and not reflex. As the word suggests, it has a function of containment and self-possession; it guards the person from being possessed by a reflexive sexual response. Thus it is the capacity to maintain one’s equilibrium in the face of an overwhelming sensual desire to challenge-forth sexual value from another or oneself by developing the ability to resist it (In 97 the case of any form of auto-eroticism - which has a bilateral dynamic in that it involves, fundamentally, an appropriation of the sexual value of another as material for sexual imagination - the intentionality of lust subsists, regardless of what the motivations are. Whether they are conditions of stress, anxiety, loneliness, adolescent experimentation, or anything else, is irrelevant; the morality or immorality of masturbation doesn’t concern me here, only its epistemological contribution to an anthropological claim; it remains a technological rendering of the image of the human being, emerging from the inner template of an immolated corpse.). Wojtyla links the development of the capacity for genuine ‘tenderness’ to the capacity for continence. 292 Tenderness arises out of freedom, out of the ability to control one’s urges towards sexual pleasure in order to always respond “at the right times with reference to the right objects, toward the right people, with the right aim, and in the right way,” 293 This is necessary for tenderness which “springs from awareness of the inner state of another person (and indirectly of that person’s external situation, which conditions his inner state) and whoever feels it actively seeks to communicate his feeling of close involvement with the other person and his situation.”294 That the sexual reflex is a much more powerful physical force - and at the same time a passive one, that happens to us without our consent, so to speak (it is after all, a reflex) - than reflection, is clear, and suggests that the default method of sexual desiring, in the absence of reflection, is technological. To respond reflexively is to do without poiesis, which requires reflective distance and deliberation. A reflexive sexual response towards another is a technological sexual response, violence. Therefore the capacity for reflection in the sexual sphere must be learned, and is increased through discipline, in the same way a craftsman learns his skill of deliberating and ordering the four causes pertaining to the material before him, developing a greater capacity for responsiveness, and a greater capacity to understand the way of being of a certain material and how to better draw it out poietically. This includes, remember, his deliberation of the manner in which he, as one of the causes, is to participate in the making of the artifact, and this could include his decision, after deliberation, to pass it on to another, having realized that the particularity of this material is best brought out by another and not himself, or not himself at this particular time, or that at this time the material 292 Ibid., pp.207-208. Aristotle, « Nicomachean Ethics, (EN 1106b21-3). » cited in: Nussbaum, M. (1990). “The Discernment of Perception.” In Love’s Knowledge. p.79. 294 Wojtyla, K. (1981). Love and Responsibility. p.203. 293 98 is not ready to be brought-forth. That the poietic rendering of the object may require that he is not the one who physically sculpts it does not mean that he does not participate in its poietic rendering. The fact of his deliberation at his encountering of the material, and recognition that it is not to be made by him, is evidence of a refusal to challenge forth, and it is evidence of his responsiveness to the objecthood of the object, in its manner of being. He is ‘adjacent’ in the face of the requirements of the beautiful, and his focus is always on the method. In this way he never renders the object technologically, but furthers it along the destining of poiesis, and this is how he participates by subordinating himself to the method, holding in check his physical participation in order that the beauty before him persists along the method of its realization. In like manner, the ability to redirect the sexual reflex through reflective consciousness and poietically deliberate the sexual value before us is increased through the discipline of continence. Continence is training in reflection and poiesis. It is training in ‘adjacency,’ the development of the muscles, so to speak, that allow one to ‘tarry’ with beauty, to ‘play’, to reach out to the ‘plank.’ Continence, increasing the capacity for reflection, allows us to ‘contemplate’ the beauty of another - to be with it in time. To further our analogy, the craftsman will of course engage in a deeper participation with the particular object when he is the one who physically brings it into realization. But this does not mean that the poietic method is thrown out the window. It persists in all situations. This is obviously analogous to physical engagement with the sexual beauty of another in a poietic manner. The impression, therefore, that the craftsman leaves on the beauty he encounters, is always an expression of his relationship with it, and at all times poietic. He is always ‘seeing’ it, in communion with it, but the way in which he is in communion varies according to whether or not he makes it, or whether he tarries it along towards the one who is to make it. He always makes an impression on the object. What makes the impression a contribution to a poietic destining rather than a technological one, is whether or not it is an expression of the way in which he and the object participate in each other’s poietic rendering, the way in which they are in communion. The craftsman, or artist, who brings an object to its final crafted realization, leaves his signature on it. He is in a very real sense inseparable from it as a craftsman and it is inseparable from him. It has made him and he has made it; they have generated each other in dialogue. They are known together. The impression made on the object by making it must correspond to an actual particular union of the artist and the art in the manner in which they will both comport 99 themselves from that point until finality. Otherwise, it is in no way a poietic rendering, but a challenging-forth. The material is ‘had,’ the experience of bringing it forth is not one of artist and craft, but one of aesthetic, ‘free play’. The impression must be one correspondent to the relationship, otherwise the intentionality of having is enacted, and thus we have the destining towards the technologization of everything into standing reserve. So shame and continence are the visual and bodily actions which instigate desire towards the poietic realization of sexual beauty; by these actions reflexive desire is gathered and ordered into reflective desire (a kind of self-poiesis that must be in effect if we are to enact a poietic rendering of another) and meaning, which is attained to through reflection not reflexion, is integrated into the center of the sexual life (the three-fold of chastity and its signs, shame and continence, are always present, even though their syntax may alter. That is, shame and continence will still be present even in the physical participation in the sexual act but the way in which they presence will be different. This discussion is essential for understanding the nature of chastity, but it exceeds the bounds of this thesis). The ‘Moment’ of Chastity The ‘moment’ of the encounter with sexual beauty consists of two basic movements: it is initiated by the entrance of beauty, and is reciprocated by the response of either technology or chastity. Beauty always initiates - it is a given. Gadamer has shown the festival-like time structure of the experience of beauty. But Girard has also shown that the festival was the periodic enactment of the sacrificial murder of the victim chosen to expiate the rivalry and social crisis at the point of its paroxysm. This left us with an interesting phenomenon: the festival in itself is not a neutral event, and has not been so since its archaic origins. The festival is either an event of violence or an event of beauty which frees us from violence. The second movement that makes up the moment - its reciprocation - can enact either one of these two intentionalities. Therefore the nature and structure of the ‘moment’ differs according to the response rendered. The initial appearance of sexual beauty arouses in us, naturally, a reflexive sexual response - a kind of ‘quickening’ of sexual desire. But once this ‘quickening’ of sexual desire enters the field of reflective consciousness, sexual desire, our “vector of aspiration along which our whole existence 100 develops and perfects itself from within,”295 reveals itself as an opening to two divergent methods of response - and thus two paths of destining. The first imposes itself on us forcefully: the desire to appropriate and enjoy - then and there - the sexual value of the body before us, to challenge-forth and consume. This is the path of lust, the enactment of the Dionysian sacrifice, which I discussed in the previous chapter. The other quietly proposes itself, correcting, entering the field like a ‘plank amidst the waves’: the desire to deliberate, and gather and order the sexual beauty before us poietically, and draw it out into its fullest realization. And here we have the enactment of the festival with all the dynamics pertaining to it. When the reciprocation of the initiation of the moment is an act of chastity, manifested through shame and/or continence, the moment is rendered in an altogether different manner. Let’s say our waitress enters the picture, and one of the men on the table (let’s assume he had no idea this would happen), faced with the sexual value before him, turns his eyes away, refusing to assent to the lustful enjoyment of her sexual value: an act of ‘shame. Let’s take another scenario, in which a man or woman says ‘no’ to the chance of ‘casual’ sexual enjoyment: an act of continence. In both cases they refuse to use and enjoy. What has just happened, intentionally speaking? The two movements of shame and continence in these scenarios are constantly deliberating and reflecting, tarrying and playing, directing sexual desire towards recognizing the particularity of the beauty before them, discerning the contours of it’s being - the manner of it’s comportment, intending it’s persistence, and never challenging-forth by lust and obscuring it from sight. This playing and tarrying of shame and continence at all times intends the body of the person before them as an objective body and not a standing reserve. The axiological vector coiled around her body is unwound and falls away and she ceases to ‘wear’ them. We can see shame and continence as the two hands of chastity, each bearing the threefold dynamic of correction, separation, and seeing.296 They 295 Ibid., p.46. But the hands aren’t the body, and the body is not just the accumulation of members. These two signs are constitutive of chastity, but they can be present even when chastity is not. Analogously, abstaining from food can be a mode of expression that indicates an underlying dynamism of self-control, but is not necessarily so it could be that someone is sick, or dislikes the food, or is anorexic, etc. Or they can be manifested from what remains a technological intentionality - they can still be oblique expressions of acquisitive desire. When this is the case, it is only the simulacra of shame and continence that are manifested. They are hands which can also bear the dynamics of technology. An example from the realm of mythology can make this clear: Parsons [Parsons, Elsie Worthington Clews (1913). Religious Chastity. New York: Macaulay Co. See especially 296 101 manifest the three-fold dynamic of chastity in action. We saw how the craftsman, encountering beauty, employs the correct method of beauty, poiesis. He separates himself from a reflexive physical connection with the object by adopting a reflective distance, deliberating it’s way of being and it’s indebtedness, and thus makes a free decision as to whether or not to engage it physically, all the while maintaining his ‘adjacency’ to the method. In determining whether he engages or not, and in determining the way that he engages, he makes sure that he brings forth beauty into its fullest realization. He is thus always ‘seeing’ beauty through the method and this way never becomes an impediment to it’s realization by challenging-it forth technologically. ‘She’ never wears him. His action, if we remember, is bilateral: in intending poietically, he realizes himself as a craftsman. In his look he crafts her unique, particularity, separating her from the sea, unraveling the frame, and gathering and rendering her as one. This three-fold dynamic of chastity, as well as having a synchronic significance, has a diachronic significance as well. As well as being a correction, separation, and seeing in the moment of the advent of sexual beauty, it is the remembering of a correction, in the present act of separation, in anticipation of a fuller seeing. Like the plank amidst the waves, chastity enters the moment of technology, and opens up time, reconnecting it to the past and the future, remembering all things ancient, making all things new. The three-fold of chastity has a narrative structure, situating the event of the encounter with sexual beauty into the totality of the narrative unity of the life of the other. Narrative, fundamentally, is the telling of a story. To narrate Chapter XIV “Chastity in Sympathetic Magic” and Chapter XV “The Magical Virtue of Chastity.” pp. 193206] describes the significance of chastity as a means to the attainment of supernatural or magic power in mythological and archaic society and into the first centuries of the first millennium. The idea was that there was a magical potency accruing to the chaste who was endowed with supernatural powers. The intention behind the practice of continence was to extend one’s space through the power of magic. It is in a sense, only a redirection of lust to a different kind of lust. The intentionality is still technological. Continence for the sake of storing up power – magical or psychological or whatever – is not chastity but technology. It does not transcend the frame and the temporality remains the same. It is a subtle and less visible deployment of one’s sexuality, not in order to reveal the other as beautiful, but to maintain power over them, thus effectively leapfrogging one’s way up the less visible side of the axiological vector. Nietschze’s Zarathustra praises chastity, but undoubtedly he intends it in this anti-chaste power game manifestation. The reason: to not be subject to control by sexual impulses leaves you much less vulnerable than the average man, and much less susceptible to manipulation by those you find sexually desirable. This is no doubt an effect of chastity, but not it’s essence by any means. We can interpret this kind of pseudo-chastity as the Appollonian ordering seeking to control the Dionysian. It still retains the intentionality of violence and technology, but in an underhanded manner. It is still, nonetheless, preferable to blatant lust insofar as it’s immediate effects are concerned, but ‘violence is a relationship’ and though it may be a step towards the method of chastity, it will nonetheless destine towards the Dionysian paroxysm if it does not open itself up to the re-integration of sexuality around beauty which is what genuine chastity is. 102 someone’s story is to make them known, to gather their past, present and future, and render their life as one. “To give people back a memory is also to give them back a future, to put them back in time and thus release them from the ‘instantaneous mind’…the past is not passé, for our future is guaranteed precisely by our ability to possess a narrative identity.” 297 It is the narrative structure which bridges the gaps between the frames, threading together the disparate moments, illuminating the obscurity of our disunity with the light of recognition. The structure of narrative is the structure of ‘seeing’. This is the structure of friendship, and “there where friendship emerges, time begins again to move, and at the same time, as subtly as it may be, hope awakens like a melody stirring from the recesses of memory.”298 The essence of chastity is the unraveling of time. Chastity is a way of revealing. The human being, in the temporality of chastity, is gathered together and rendered as one. It is no mistake that Augustine’s reflection on time and his reflection on chastity are symmetrical; time is at the nucleus of anthropology, and anthropology is the image of time; the unity of the human being, and the unity of time are one. No technique, no myth, no re-description, no feeling or sentiment, no orgy or orgasm, can effect the unraveling of time. There is no form of violence or sexual transgression that is not already framed by technology. The only language that can re-describe time is the one that actually alters time in its fundamental realm. Chastity, from this angle, is the only real sexual transgression. And in chastity, I venture, lies the authentic rendering of the violent meanings of authenticity. 297 Ricoeur, Paul (1990) “The Creativity of Language,” in A Ricoeur Reader. p.473 Marcel, Gabriel (1996) “The Structure of Hope.” Trans. David L. Schindler, Jr. In Communio. Vol.23, p.607. 298 103 CONCLUSION I have undertaken an introduction to the concept of chastity. The thesis, true to it’s title, is by no means an exhaustive treatise. There are many more questions to be considered in any further study of the subject of chastity – marriage, contraception, premarital sex, childbirth, male-female differences, the impact of technology - the field is wide open. In this introduction, I have been concerned to describe chastity from a somewhat phenomenological perspective, and it’s manner of interaction with the dynamisms of significant cultural forces. I began with the commonly held view that chastity is merely a prohibition, no different than abstinence, that it was a form of inaction. I hope I have been able to show that, in the sexual realm, chastity is in fact the only form of action, if action is to be understood in terms of meaningful action, action that emerges from and effects a horizon of significance. The question we began with was that of recognition. How do we recognize another insofar as they are intended through their sexual being? The inclinations of a technological culture seem to urge us to misrecognize others as we are misrecognized ourselves by that same culture. Desire is a mimetic phenomenon and culture is our most powerful mimetic agent – it is 104 everywhere and nowhere, pervasive and omnipresent, yet difficult to pin down. Like Dionysus, culture is a personification of collective desires. And like Dionysus it can become autarchic, taking on a life of its own, implementing its constitutive desires, manipulating, destining, bearing a horizon. Heidegger has identified modern culture as technological. I have tried to show that technology, in the cultural sense we are intending, shares the same structure as lust, and lust in turn shares the same structure as myth and sacrificial violence. The same horizons and dynamics of time inhere in all these intentionalities. Not one of these horizons opens up to a space where meaning can dwell and be revealed. And the human being revealed through this intentionality is revealed according to the structure of the intentionality; she is immolated and fragmented, meaningless and subject to use by another. And how are we to overcome this autarchic cultural frame? I pointed to beauty as the realm that we were all already pointing to in various ways. The ideal of authenticity is the finger that points to the beautiful, and it knows why it does so, even if we do not or are unable to articulate the reasons why. I have tried to articulate these reasons in relation to technology and to lust. I have argued that lust is always violent, and always intends the destruction of beauty no matter which forms of poetic or lyric description we may want to confer on it. I have shown how the ‘violent meanings’ of authenticity are given a voice whenever authenticity is pursued with a technological method. And I have also shown how beauty always gives itself as much as we may destroy it; the plank is thrown into the sea time and time again, each time an event, each time offering us the persistence of our being, our identity, if we take up its method and grasp it. And I have argued that the only way to grasp sexual beauty adequately, in a manner that does not method along a trajectory of violence and murder is chastity. I have not been interested in suggesting chastity as one alternative among many that should be included in a sex education curriculum. If my arguments have been sound until this point it should be clear that chastity is the only method of sex education and sexual existence that is not violent, that recognizes meaning, and that reveals human beings as whole and as beautiful. The intentionality of chastity is not merely a protective space which puts a break on the Dionysian violence of technological culture (this was the reason for the institution of sexual taboos in archaic societies; taboos were intended to prevent the dissemination of mimetic desire from enveloping 105 everything with violence299 ). It’s originality lies in the fact that it is the only form of sexual existence that grapples with desire itself – the method of horizons, that which effects time and destining – and gathers and renders it poietically. It is the only authentic sexual existence. 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