Kinsey, who sought what Grosz calls a taxonomic (to me a word which recalls the similar ‘taxidermic’) view of human sexuality, is the target and subject of this essay.
His mission affirmed “it was only science, in its disinterested search for truth, that could rid of us our prejudices and assumptions” concerning human sexual behavior (pg. 198). This selection awakens the contemporary philosophical audience to suspicion.
Each of the theses of the essay are accompanied by a destruction via paralepsis of Kinsey’s works.
We are told: “my goal is not a philosophical critique”, “I am not really interested in undertaking an epistemological analyses”, nor “psychobiography”, nor “ [Kinsey’s] scientific contributions to knowledge”, nor his connection to “the tradition of the science of sexuality”.
These brief expenditures of breath are plenty to knock down the straw discourses of an easy target, and we become free to examine the impulse that created them.
Grosz IS interested in “what [Kinsey’s work’s] implications for an understanding of the radical future of female sexuality”, an “ontological approach: the desire to know everything about a mysterious and unknown object”, to “detach [his work] from their assumed context in sexology”.
To make Kinsey “an event”.
The second section heading’s tone of colloquial whimsy brings our suspicions to a climax:
“Five Great Things About Kinsey”.
What are they?
1. First person reports are important, and statistical empirics are problematic, and just plain hard besides.
2. He did not seek a “generic mode of sexuality”; “he sought difference”.
3. He did not limit his subjects selection on religious or moral grounds; he sought a full range of sexual activities.
4. He understood that sexuality is “a cohesive series of disparate responses to various external triggers”. Or, that conceptual banner beloved by the postmodern crowd, “a complex confluence of forces”.
5. He did not oppose the two sexes or see them as a couple (he did not explicitly binarize).
The wacky thing about him, Grosz points out, is that despite his recognition of the chaotic factors involved, he saw sexuality as something essentially knowable.
Here’s pointless side-note (those who are in a hurry are referred to the next line break):
I’m coining my own rhetorical term. I’ll call it ‘polynomy’ until I can talk to a classics scholar. Grosz practices it with exuberance and subtlety. Polynomy:
Repetition of a name (in this case, Kinsey) in situations where a pronoun, its antecedent not yet violated, would grammatically suffice, in order to create a kind of tacit nya-nya-ny’-nya-nya effect (his name seems to occur at least 4 times per page throughout).
“The Science of Sex”
Kinsey contributed to what Foucault called “the specific pleasure of the true discourse on pleasure”.
His method, with its fondness for large numbers, made sex extensive rather than intensive. His (or more properly I should say ‘its’, as Kinsey is taken as the ‘Kinsey-event’) statistical “cover of objectivity” (pg. 205) itself runs up against a variety of problems, where the tangible record of who-does-what-to-whom-and-how-and-how-much intersects with the phenomena of lived experience.
Grosz elaborates this point. Sex is messy, and it’s hard to tell when it’s really going on, and KE relied on the orgasm as a punctuating event to count when it has been accomplished. Kinsey admits a certain distrust of the female orgasm in statistical matters, but decides, “there seems no better unit for measuring.. sexual activity.” (pg. 206).
Interviews, though invaluable for some reason, often potentially involved the projection of fantasy (anticipating Foucault’s observation).
The reintegration of the psychology/physiology dualism proved highly problematic.
A crucial articulation of the problem this causes occurs on pg. 207:
“The point of numerical analysis is that anything can be calculated, but the calculation is not a neutral activity: IT TRANSFORMS WHAT IS A CONTINUITY INTO COMPARABLE UNITS, IT IMPOSES THE FORM OF THE UNIT ONTO ALL PARTICULARS, it is transformational of quality into quantity.”
Grosz seems to be problematizing the numbering of anything, as numbering involves collapsing individual units into masses with which they must be in some way identical. Numericity, as it seeks to unit groups through shared qualities (and, I would add, this is only possible by opposing, making corollary those qualities that differentiate them from some quality shared by a different group) entails the destruction of individual difference.
“In the process he lost what is sexual about sexual behavior,” and retained an accountancy of his own constructions- the orgasm as marker of a sex act.
We should seek an ars erotica rather than a scientia sexualis (echoes of Susan Sontag).
It is likely that female sexuality is inherently uncountable, and possibly male sexuality as well (reconfigured). The current configuration of female sexuality, being wholly intensive to the point of merger with all other activity (“the impossibility to distinguish between the sexual and nonsexual” pg. 210), makes the extensive discourses incomprehensibly irrelevant.
Grosz asks, “can it be that male sexuality.. is the origin of the number itself?” The tangibility of male sexuality actually causing the virtual identification of objects, not the other way around? Not that female sexuality is indescribable, but that it does not correspond to a masculinist schema of knowledge.
The moment of first-person collection in KE project was the opportunity for ars erotica, a recognized experimentation (engagement with the discourse in the first place being a sexual event).
So, “what is the radical future of female sexuality?” (213). In understanding the fundamental indeterminacy of sexuality. And it may consist in part in a certain distrust of identity politics, as they involve tabulation of past events and intelligibility relying on those events.
It is not the elusiveness of female sexuality, but its openness to any examination that makes it radical.
“This is its radical quality: not that it is unknowable, but that it is unknowable through any particular discourse or method.” (213).
The future of female sexuality is “the acknowledgment and celebration of [its] openness.”
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5 comments:
Doesn't conceding all of mathematics to masculinity seem like a rather large loss?
I, similar to Abe, was mildly provoked by the conjugation of masculine sexuality and the number. I would like to suggest an alternative possibility: perhaps Kinsey, simply as a possible example among conceivable others, was numerically overcoded in his sexuality. His sense of sexuality seems clearly oriented towards the numerical, his seems a particularly analytic sexuality. I don't mean to be casting suspicions about Kinsey's personal life, rather I am suggesting that instead of making statements about the numerical being a product of male sexuality we can say that particular sexualities involve a libidinally charged numerical field. In its virtuality, Kinsey's sexuality (for example) is numerical, and masculine. There may be hosts of female sexualities that partake of the virtual field of the numerical. And of course there may be vast tracts of sexualities, masculine and feminine, that partake of other virtual fields. I frankly think we do a disservice to both sexuality and the numeric if we understand them in the fashion Grosz seems to be suggesting in her remarks cited by Abe.
I think that Anderson's comment is in line with how Grosz views male sexuality and its conjugation with the numerical - to some extent. On p.209 Grosz says that "number may also prove alien to male sexuality, ... but in the present forms male sexuality takes, there is something countable... in the clear-cut and unambigious, thorougly decidable nature of male sexual response and activity." Also on p.210-211 she asks the question "can it be that male sexuality, or atleast its self-representation, is the origin of number itself?" So it seems like we are not deeling with male sexuality per se, but one of its self-representations. On the other hand, I do think that Grosz is adhering to the view that female and male sexualities are fundamentally different. By the way she describes female sexuality as that which defies precision, clarity, form, identity (210)it might suggest that male sexuality is inherently in accordance with the precise, the definite and the solid - the calculable. This doesn't mean that male sexuality can't take other forms than the present ones.
Personally, I am reluctant to agree with both the statement that male sexuality (in its present forms) is clear-cut and unambigious, and the statement that female sexuality isn't - she refers to fact that female orgasm remains an anatomical enigma, that female excitement has been hard to define and measure. I'm drawn to a middle position; that mens sexuality should be included in an ars erotica and that women's sexuality should not be dismissed as incalculable. I believe that qualitative and quantitative approaches complement each other and that one is not more appropriate to a specific sex than the other.
I'm gonna have to go with Abe and Anderson on this one and say that the understanding that calculability did not develop as the direct result of phallocentric sexuality. having said that, i think that the distillation of the article to those passages and a critique based on those alone unnecessarily eliminates the value in the piece.
granted that the passages abe quoted do mark a decisively causal and binaristic understanding of the relationship between spatialization and a unitary genital orgasm, I think there is an intentionality in Grosz's words which undermines some of the implications between them.
that said, i think that it is interesting, as always to explore the relation between sexual pleasure, bodies and thought. and i think that the relation of the penis to male orgasm permits a certain focus on that linear progression of pleasure as unitary. however, the focus on this correlation between orgasm and anatomy obscures the other qualitative and expansive elements which are a part of male sexuality.
and i think that the relation between female genitalia and orgasm, in being more multiple does not as easily facilitate a focus on a unitary and linear pleasure but refers even the progressive escalation of orgasm back to the plurality of components.
that means that men too have a multiplicitous sexuality which is qualitative and expansive and which may be ignored as much as the female's multiplicity when focusing on the penis's involvement in orgasm. but that the inability to similarly focus on a one to one relation of female genitalia and orgasm does not itself as easily generate a tunnel vision which ignores the multiplicity at play.
Interesting that the number thing and female sexuality being undefinable (in a way) ties back so nicely to Irigaray...
Perhaps Grosz's point about male sexuality and mathematics is meant to be a provocation for her male readers -if so, then it worked!
Grosz renders female sexuality undefinable and male sexuality exactly the opposite: as totally accounted for. So perhaps Grosz sets up a binary that is oppositional after all?
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