Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness

1. Contest and Other Adversatives

I Contest and Other Adversatives Adversalive"ess Contest is a part of human life everywhere that human life is found . In war and in games, in work and in play. physically. intellectually, and morally, human beings match themselves with or against one another. Struggle appears inseparable from human life, and contest is a panicular focus or mode of interpersonal struggle, an opposition that can be hostile but need not be, for certain kinds of conlest may serve to sublimate and dissolve hostilities and to build friendship and cooperation. Contest is one kind of adversativeness, if we understand adversativeness in the ordinary large sense of a relationship in which beings are set against or act against one another. Adversative action, action against, can be destructive, but often it is supportive . If our feet press against the surface we walk on and it does not resist the pressure, we are lost. We all have suffered from drcams in which we feel ourselves plummeting through space. Such dreams can be tcrrifying, for bodily existence is such that it requires some kind of againstness. Gravity is reassuring; it establishes fields where adversativeness can work and where it funct ions as a central element in all physical existence. But adversativeness is significant beyond the physical. It has provided a paradigm for understanding our own existence: in order to know myself, I must know that something else is not me and is (in some measure) set against me, psychologically as well 15 Fighting for Life as physically. Erik Erikson (1963:4 10-11) has discussed the need of the child to fi nd psychic borderlines for guidance-"Slop il! You may nol do that! "- and even to locale or imaginatively project some specific enemy---often a " monster"-to free himself or herself from anxieties reaching vaguely into the unknown . Maturity reduces the need to find or project an enemy in order to hold oneself together: psychic organization becomes more interiorized . Various kinds of adversativeness have been exploited to deal intellectually with the world and with being itself from as far back as we can trace human thought up to the li ving present. "See now the works of the Most High," we read in Sirach 53:15. "They come in pairs, the one opposite the other. ,. We find adversatives in the all but ubiquitous Mother Earth and Father Sky, the Chinese Ii and ch'i, yin and yang, Empedoclean attraction and repulsion. the Platonic dialectic, matter and fonn, Abelard's sic ef nOli, essence and existence, Hegelian dialectic, and countless other binary modes of analysis. These modes proceed by taking one or another sort of adversativeness as an ultimate given and reducing or otherwise referring everything in one way or another to it, thereby satisfying the appetite for understanding, or part of the appetite. Empedocles used adversatives to construct a cosmology , Hobbes to construct a kind of sociology, Hegel to construct a metaphysic of historical change, Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer to construct a biodynamics of "struggle" for life. Historians often rest their cases on adversative paradigms. For some two hundred years we have been quite happy with "explanations " of what is going on in history that proceed by selectively grouping elements around opposing poles: what happened in the latter part of the eighteenth century was that something called "romanticism" emerged as a "'reaction " to something called "classicism"' (or "neoclassicism")-that is what happened. Everyone knows that .'for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction." Our satisfaction with the zigzag through time that such explanations construct probably owes as much to this 16 COlltest lIlId Other Adversatives adversative paradigm of Newtonian physics as it does to Hegelian theorizing, though it probably owes even more to our muscular experience of adversativeness in the physical world. In modem times adversativeness has become even more particularizcd as a tool and object of thought. Binary opposition serves as the foundation of vinually all of modem structuralism, whether linguistic, as in Roman Jakobson's phonemics (Jakobson , Fant, and Halle , 1969), which is related to Ferdinand de Saussure's earlier binary linguistics (Schneidau, 1977: 144-45), or anthropological, as in Claude Levi-Strauss (1969), whose doctrine Morris Freilich sums up: "Everything of imponance comes in twos and in conflict" (1977=246). Binary opposition underlies all modem communication theory and computerization. Roben Frost was onlo the pattern: "It almost scares I A man the way things come in pairs...