-
CHAPTER ONE. The Sleight of Reason
- State University of New York Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
1 ONE THE SLEIGHT OF REASON What happens to a diseased truth? . . . . Does it copulate with a lie And beget history? Is it a good mixer? Or does it sit silent at parties? —Burns Singer, Collected Poems “A GOOD MIXER”: FOUCAULT AND THE “FICTITIOUS UNITY OF SEX” Thought daily encounters motive to investigate further the operative ontologies of the social category of sex. Certainly, the social category of sex, as an attribute said to qualify human bodies, is an instrument central to the history of human domination. But whether or not to affirm the category, or which versions to affirm, continues to puzzle many. In fact, a number of disagreements in specifically feminist thought can be traced to divergent views about the nature of the social category of sex. Despite much exemplary work on the topic, there is still a great deal of confusion about the very sense of this category that is taken, from lived social experience, to be so basic to feminist inquiry and action. On a Foucaultian reading of the category, this confusion is a constitutive aspect of the kind of thing the category is, namely, a “fictitious unity.” He writes: “First, the notion of ‘sex’ made it possible to group together, in an artificial unity, anatomical elements, biological functions, conducts, sensations , and pleasures, and it enabled one to make use of this fictitious unity as a causal principle, an omnipresent meaning, a secret to be discovered 2 SLEIGHTS OF REASON everywhere: sex was thus able to function as a unique signifier and as a universal signified.”1 As many important works have done already, this book affirms Foucault’s claim about the category and seeks to amplify our understanding of the nature and operation of its unity. Of course, the inherent confusion of the notion of sex implies that there is an intrinsic limit to the degree of precision or clarity an account of the category could achieve. Indeed, it is difficult to know which strand of the practico-conceptual tangle of the category of sex to grasp first in attempting such an account. THREE CRUCIAL ELEMENTS: NORM, BISEXUALITY, DEVELOPMENT This work is motivated by the sense that this fictive category is a busy, gregarious one that operates with a loyal crowd of conceptual friends. Moreover, it seems that this cohort of supporting terms often works with a smooth and subtle power whose sources are obscure and often dimly identified. This book examines the question of how several of these supporting terms collaborate with the category of sex, seeking to press that question into what further exactitude is possible. Though there are many candidates from among these allies, only a few are examined in detail in this work: the notions of norm, bisexuality, and development. Moreover, only certain specific versions of these notions are the object of its study. It does not treat all, or even all of the most current versions, of these notions. But the notions chosen, and the versions of the notions chosen, are selected for two reasons: they are of great social and intellectual influence and prominence, and they are crucial to certain conceptual sleights that form and maintain the fictive unity of sex. It is in large part their fictions that comprise the operative unity of the category of sex. This book aims to expose the specific mechanisms of these conceptual sleights at work in the selected versions of the notions of the norm, bisexuality, and development. Plainly, many scholars, thinkers, and activists have had much of great value to say about these notions already. The proposals offered here have benefited greatly from existing work. The wager of this text is that despite this important existing body of thought, it is possible to locate and explicate the specific operations of these notions further still. One might locate its effort in relation to a summative characterization of his work in History of Sexuality, Volume I, that Foucault offers: “It is apparent that the deployment of sexuality, with its different strategies, was what established this notion of ‘sex’; and in the four major forms of hysteria, onanism, fetishism and interrupted coition, it showed this sex to be governed by the interplay of whole and part, principle and lack, absence and presence, excess and deficiency, by the function of instinct, finality, and meaning, of reality and pleasure.”2 In much thinking on the nature of social categories it is precisely this notion of an interplay of concepts, categories, or terms that seems both to...