Материал: Bauman Zygmunt - On Postmodern Uses Of Sex

On Postmodern Uses of Sex

Zygmunt Bauman

IN HIS BEAUTIFUL book-long essay La llama doble ± Amor y erotismo, published in 1993, the great Mexican thinker Octavio Paz explores the complex interaction between sex, eroticism and love ± three close relatives yet so unlike each other that each needs a separate language to account for its own existence. The central metaphor of the book, most Ættingly, is one of Ære: above the primordial Ære of sex, lit by nature long before the Ærst stirrings of humanity, rises the red Øame of eroticism, above which quivers and shivers the delicate blue Øame of love. There would be no Øame without Ære; yet there is more, much more, to the red and blue Øames,

and to each one of them, than there is in the Ære from which they arise. Sex, eroticism and love are linked yet separate. They can hardly exist

without each other, and yet their existence is spent in the ongoing war of independence. The boundaries between them are hotly contested ± alternatively, but often simultaneously, the sites of defensive battles and of invasions. Sometimes the logic of war demands that the cross-border dependencies are denied or suppressed; sometimes the invading armies cross the boundary in force with the intention of overpowering and colonizing the territory. Torn between such contradictory impulses, the three areas are notorious for the unclarity of their frontiers and the three discourses that serve (or perhaps produce) them are known to be confused and inhospitable to pedantry and precision.

Sex, so Octavio Paz reminds us, is the least human of the three. Indeed, sex is natural, not a cultural product: we share it with a large part of non-human species. In its natural form untainted by culture sex is always the same; as Theodore Zeldin (1994: 86ff) observed, `there has been more progress in cooking than in sex'. It is but the erotic sublimation of sex, fantasy and sex-substitutes, that are inÆnitely variable. All `history of sex' is therefore the history of the cultural manipulation of sex. It began with the birth of eroticism ± through the cultural trick of separating sexual experience

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(in the sense of Erlebnis, not Erfahrung), and especially the pleasure associated with that experience, from reproduction, that primary function of sex and its raison d'etre. Nature, we may say, is taking no chances and for that reason it cannot but be wasteful; it showers its targets with bullets so that at least one bullet will hit the bull's eye. Sex is no exception; sexually reproducing species are as a rule supplied with quantities of sexual energy and capacity for sexual encounters far in excess of what reproduction proper would require. And so eroticism is not just a purely cultural feat and in no way is it an act of violence committed on nature, an `unnatural' act; nature virtually tempted human wits into the invention, lavish as nature is in turning out huge, redundant and untapped volumes of sexual energy and desire. That surplus is a standing invitation to cultural inventiveness. Yet the uses to which that reproductively redundant and wasted excess may be put is a cultural creation.

Eroticism is about recycling that waste. It depends on Ælling the sexual act with a surplus value ± over and above its reproductive function. Human beings would not be erotic creatures were they not Ærst sexual beings; sexuality is the only soil in which the cultural seeds of eroticism may be sown and grow ± but this soil has limited fertility. Eroticism begins from reproduction, but it transcends it from the start; reproduction, its life-giving force, soon turns into a constraint. To freely manipulate, to process at will the surplus capacity for sexuality, eroticism must be `replanted' into other soils of greater potency and additional nutritional power; culture must emancipate sexual delight from reproduction, its primary utilitarian application. Hence the reproductive function of sex is simultaneously the indispensable condition and a thorn in the Øesh of eroticism; there is an unbreakable link, but also a constant tension between the two ± that tension being as incurable as the link is unbreakable.

Theoretically speaking, there are several tension-management strategies. They were all tried, and the `history of sex' may be told in terms of the focus shifting from one strategy to another, different strategies gaining temporary cultural dominance in various historical eras. The choice, however, is limited. By and large it is conÆned to the redeployment of cultural forces either on the sex/eroticism or eroticism/love frontier, and certain combinations between the troop movements in both territories.

Greatly simplifying, we may say that throughout the modern era two cultural strategies vied with each other for domination. One ± ofÆcially promoted and supported by the legislative powers of the state and ideological powers of the Church and the School, was the strategy of reinforcing the limits imposed by the reproductive functions of sex upon the freedom of erotic imagination ± relegating the unmanageable surplus of sexual energy to culturally suppressed and socially degraded spheres of pornography, prostitution and illicit ± extramarital ± liaisons. The other ± always carrying a tinge of dissent and rebelliousness ± was the romantic strategy of cutting the ties linking eroticism to sex and tying it instead to love.

In the Ærst strategy, eroticism had to justify itself in terms of its sexual

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(reproductive) utility, with the third element ± love ± being a welcome, yet supernumerary, embellishment. Sex was `culturally silent' ± it had no language of its own, no language recognized as public vernacular and a means of public communication. Mid-19th-century intercourse, as Stephen Kern (1992) noted, was by comparison with 20th-century sex `deadly serious' and `abruptly over'; it was `abruptly over' since `the post-coital interlude was particularly embarrassing, because eyes opened, lights came on, and couples were obliged to look at one another or else away and begin to speak or else endure a nerve-breaking silence'. In the second strategy, love was accorded the sole legitimizing power, and eroticism was cast in the image of a handmaiden of love, while its link with sexuality was either frowned upon or reduced to the role of a non-essential, even if pleasurable, attribute. In both strategies, eroticism sought anchorage in something other than itself ± either in sex or in love; both strategies were variants of the policy of alliance, and the potential allies were sought beyond the borders of eroticism. Both strategies assumed that the cultural manipulation and redeployment of surplus sexual energy needed a functional justiÆcation, not being able to stand on its own and be `its own purpose' or a value in its own right. Both strategies stemmed as well from the tacit assumption that, left to itself, human erotic inventiveness would easily run out of control, playing havoc with the delicate tissue of human relations; it needs therefore outside, authoritative and resourceful powers to contain it within acceptable limits and stave off its potentially destructive potential.

Seen against that background, the late modern or postmodern rendition of eroticism appears unprecedented ± a genuine breakthrough and novelty. It enters alliance with neither sexual reproduction nor love, claiming independence from both neighbours and Øatly refusing all responsibility for the impact it may make on their fate; it proudly and boldly proclaims itself to be its only, and sufÆcient, reason and purpose. As Marc C. Taylor and Esa Saarinen (1994) put it, with a wonderful epigrammatic precision, `desire does not desire satisfaction. To the contrary, desire desires desire.' When (seldom, and in a whisper) voiced before, such claims were classiÆed as the heresy of libertinism and exiled to the Devil's Island of sexual disorder and perversion. Now the self-sufÆciency of eroticism, the freedom to seek sexual delights for their own sake, has risen to the level of cultural norm, changing places with its critics, now assigned to the Kunstkammer of cultural oddities and relics of extinct species. Nowadays eroticism has acquired substance it was never before able to carry on its own shoulders, but also an unheard-of lightness and volatility. Being an eroticism `with no strings attached', untied, unbridled, let loose ± the postmodern eroticism is free to enter and leave any association of convenience, but also an easy prey to forces eager to exploit its seductive powers.

It has become the folklore of social science to lay the responsibility for the `erotic revolution' at the door of the `market forces' (an address all the more convenient for the mystery surrounding its notoriously elusive resident). Eager to Æll the void left by the Divine Providence and laws of

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progress, scientiÆcally oriented study of changing human behaviour seeks a candidate for the vacant position of `main determinant' ± and `market forces' are no worse, and in many respects better, than the others. I for once am not particularly worried by the void staying empty and the position remaining unÆlled. `Market forces' can be blamed, at the utmost, for exploiting without scruples the resources already at hand, and for exploiting them while being guided solely by their commercial potential and oblivious to all other, including the culturally devastating or morally iniquitous, aspects of the matter. Charging them with the powers to conjure up the resources themselves would be like accepting the alchemist's authorship of the gold found in the test-tube: an exercise in magical rather than scientiÆc reasoning (though, frankly, the difference between the two within social studies is far from unambiguous). It takes more than the greed for proÆt, free competition and the reÆnement of the advertising media to accomplish a cultural revolution of a scale and depth equal to that of the emancipation of eroticism from sexual reproduction and love. To be redeployed as an economic factor, eroticism must have been Ærst culturally processed and given a form Æt for a would-be commodity.

So let me leave aside the `commercial' uses of eroticism, not really surprising in a society in which the care for whatever is seen as a human need is increasingly mediatized by the commodity market ± and concentrate instead on the somewhat less obvious, and certainly less fully described and much too little discussed links between the erotic revolution and other aspects of the emergent postmodern culture. Among such aspects, two in particular seem to be directly relevant to our topic.

The Ærst is the collapse of the `panoptic' model of securing and perpetuating social order. That model, as you know, has been described in detail by Michel Foucault, in reference to Jeremy Bentham's idea of the universal solution to all tasks requiring the instilling of discipline and so obtaining the desirable sort of conduct from a great number of people. That solution, according to Bentham, was seeing without being seen, a surreptitious surveillance with its objects made aware that they might be closely scrutinized at every moment yet having no way of knowing when they are indeed under observation. Foucault used Bentham's idea as a paradigm of the order-making activity of modern powers. Factories, workhouses, prisons, schools, hospitals, asylums or barracks, whatever their manifest functions, were also throughout the modern era manufacturers of order; in this lay their latent, yet arguably their paramount social function. Among all the panoptical institutions two were decisive for the performance of that latter function due to their vast catchment area. The two panoptical institutions in question were industrial factories and conscript armies. Most male members of society could reasonably be expected to pass through their disciplining treadmill and acquire the habits that would guarantee their obedience to the order-constituting rules (and later to enforce those habits on the female members in their capacity of the `heads of families'). Yet in order to perform their role such panoptical institutions needed men capable of undertaking

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industrial work and army duties ± able to endure the hardships of industrial work and army life. Industrial invalidity and disqualiÆcation from army service meant exclusion from panoptical control and drill. Ability to work and to Æght became therefore the measure of the `norm', while inability was tantamount to social abnormality, deviation from the norm, alternatively subjected to medical or penological treatment. Modern medicine gave that norm the name of `health'. A `healthy man' was a person capable of a certain amount of physical exertion, required by productive work and/or military exploits; the norm guiding the assessment of the state of health and the inÆnite variety of possible abnormalities was therefore `objectively measurable'. It could be easily set as a target; hitting or missing the target could be deÆned with considerable precision.

Contemporary society needs neither mass industrial labour nor mass (conscript) armies. The era when factories and troops were the decisive order-sustaining institution is (at least in our part of the world) over. But so is, as well, panoptical power as the main vehicle of social integration, and normative regulation as the major strategy of order-maintenance. The great majority of people ± men as well as women ± are today integrated through seduction rather than policing, advertising rather than indoctrinating, needcreation rather than normative regulation. Most of us are socially and culturally trained and shaped as sensation-seekers and gatherers, rather than producers and soldiers. Constant openness to new sensations and greed for ever new experience, always stronger and deeper than before, is a condition sine qua non of being amenable to seduction. It is not `health', with its connotation of a steady state, of an immobile target on which all properly trained bodies converge ± but `Ætness', implying being always on the move or ready to move, capacity for imbibing and digesting ever greater volumes of stimuli, Øexibility and resistance to all closure, that grasps the quality expected from the experience-collector, the quality she or he must indeed possess to seek and absorb sensations. And if the mark of `disease' was incapacity for factory or army life, the mark of `unÆtness' is the lack of e¬lan vital, ennui, acedia, inability to feel strongly, lack of energy, stamina, interest in what the colourful life has to offer, desire and desire to desire. . . .

`Fitness' as a deÆnition of a desirable bodily state, however, presents problems of which the norm of `health' was free.

First ± `health' is a norm, and norms are clearly delineated from above and below alike. `Fitness' has perhaps its lower, though rather blurred and murky threshold, but cannot, by deÆnition, have an upper limit; `Ætness' is, after all, about the constant ability to move further on, to rise to ever higher levels of experience. Hence `Ætness' will never acquire the comforting exactitude and precision of a norm. `Fitness' is a never-to- be-reached horizon looming forever in the future, a spur to unstoppable efforts, none of which can be seen as fully satisfactory, let alone the ultimate. Pursuit of Ætness, its little triumphs notwithstanding, is shot through with incurable anxiety and is an inexhaustible source of selfreproach and self-indignation.