Letter from London
Such is the life of a research fellow, that once again I find myself faced with the imminent closure of my contract, and the possibility of penury until I find a place to prostitute my knowledge once more. In anticipation of this I found myself diversifying over Christmas to find out whether I could at least support myself financially if no academic post materialised in the unlikely season of spring. I took a job cabbying.
That is, me and my car (which I couldn’t bear to sell even though that seemed the most obvious solution to the cash crisis) gave ourselves over to the business of moving people around London for a small fee (a very small fee in fact, I have no idea how anyone makes a living out of driving a mini-cab). My friend Madeleine, motivated by a concern for my safety, recommended me a `good’ cab company to apply to: Q-cars. That’s Q for queer. And so I commenced.
A couple of transsexuals, a handful of transvestites, a bunch of dykes, a clutch of gay guys, and me the quaint curiosity, an old fashioned `straight’. Never before had I found myself so continuously having to account for my sexuality to a constantly renewing queue of people tumbling into the intimacy of my car. Blimey. Sex became the single most important thing in the world over christmas. Sex, that is, in talk. And you know what Foucault said about that. The more it’s spoken the less it’s done. Actually, he said the more it’s a secret the more it is known. And this seems at least one worthwhile thing to remember: making sex the single most important defining feature of a community is likely to rob sex of its sexiness. It felt more like a threat. Which serves to remind us all just goes to show how easy it is for a radical to turn into facist without even noticing (especially a drunk radical).
Which seems a good point to remember the social studies of sociology of anthropology of science of knowledge of scientists of technology of things of humans and of actants - a bunch of radicals with the full potential of sliding into complacency and complicity, and turning into a menace on the edge.
One of the transsexuals (a very sophisticated being with implants and explants to bring the shape of the body into line with a certain understanding of what a woman is) was also interested in deconstructing technological artifacts. She was saying that she liked to take things to bits, to find how they worked. A sister de-constructivist, I thought. And she said that once she’d figured them out, she could never be bothered to put them back together again: I know exactly what she means. Once she knows how they work, she says, the interest in them goes. Well. I couldn’t help wondering whether she thought she now knew how she worked, now she had taken herself (in some sense) to bits (literally).
OK, we have a similarity, but there is also a difference. It was always my brother who took the physical objects to pieces and never put them back together again, never me. And my deconstructive activity is wholly intangible in the concrete sense. But we do seem to be engaged in something of the same. Also, I have a very different relationship with my breasts than she does to her penis. I wouldn’t let anyone take mine away without a fight, whereas she is saving up money, and going through all kinds of institutional hoops in order to persuade someone to remove hers… Nevertheless I’m with her all the way in saying that the bits of the body matter quite a lot in the business of living and not just in the small moments of actually making love. But we don’t just live in a physcial plane.
Gay, lesbian, transvestites, transsexuals, feminists have all done their best to make the point that bodies and sexuality are active actors in the social network that we all move about in. Transvestites and transsexuals make a lot of sense as a breaching experiment, they force everyone into at least a small hesitation in which to realise that they routinely change their behaviour according to whether they think they are speaking to a man or a woman. By the way, this doesn’t mean that it is necessarily wrong to treat people differently. Issues of morality easily muddle the thinking. Let’s just take this step by step.
First is the point that there are two categories of people that everyone has to fit into. But who made that rule? That’s another question, leave it alone for a moment. First is the point that there are two categories of people that everyone has to fit into. If you still rebel about this, then all you have to do is ask yourself do you have children? do you have parents? are you married or in love? Can any of these mundane things be thought about without recourse to these two basic categories of people. And can you see how you are implicated in making the rule work as you practice being that son or daughter, that mother or father, that husband or wife, that lover. None of us has the power to say they won’t take part. As soon as you’re born, you’re categorised, before you even know how to say Hey! You can’t choose to not take part in this. Even if you choose suicide, you’ll be marked as a dead man or woman. It’s the price you pay to take part in life. And, as any transsexual will testify, it is the presence or absence of the penis that carries the guarantee of this difference.
When Saussure realised that signifi-ers weren’t the same thing as signifi-eds he opened the way to a cluster of interesting avenues of thought about the relationship of the word to the world. But for some reason, whereas we are all happy with the idea that the word Tree has an arbitrary relationship with the thing it stands for we don’t seem to be able to carry the idea across to the thing that gets called the phallus. Is a phallic object like an erect penis because a penis is a phallus? or is a penis called a phallus because it looks like a phallic object?
That we all continue to assume (even on the odd occasion, if not always) that people with penises are people with power - and don’t forget, it is people with penises who have the power over naming in our society [a not in-sign-ificant thing] - should alert us to the fact that there is an issue lying precisely there that needs to be addressed. This revelation raises 3 vital questions about theoretical directions. 1. Do we try to break the word away from the bit of the world it’s trying to speak for (ie take it from the penis and attach it to the vagina or the breasts)? 2. Do we break the thing itself and try to drain away its power altogether? or 3. Do we wonder about the nature of the power of the word and how it comes to be so attached to certain kinds of things?
All three strategies are deployed in our `EASST’ community: first, science studies, etc., can be found trying to take the power of the scientist and attaching it to sociology (for example) in an outright contest of who is right (Collins and Wolpert spring to mind, and this can be found in some feminist theories who try to give it to for example Donna Haraway and take it from, well, any man actually). This sets up a counter attack where other people try to keep a grip on the phallus and hold it firmly in its traditional place (those people who consistently look for great men to quote and quote and quote ad nauseum rather than spend any time reading something written by a woman let alone any [other] object). Second, the deconstructive reflexive stuff (of, lets say, Woolgar and Ashmore) are very good at taking away everyone’s power, and draining it off via an intricate and infinite network of other words and sentences. And the third: the Actor Network Thing which l eaves power intact and spreads it between many kinds of thing via a semiotic network. But how do the actors relate to this semiotic? and from where does the sign draw its power? This is the same place I arrive at having come through the Woolgar/Ashmore discursive route. How do words, or signs, conjure up and carry power around from object to object? And how do they fix certain objects in more or less powerful positions? The mystery remains firmly locked in the big black box.
What to do, what to do. Well, I don’t really know, and I certainly don’t know what you will do. But in the meantime, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m off to lurk around Lacan, that dead French bloke who listened to anthropology, looked again at Freud, and learned a thing or two about the power of the phallus and the place of the penis. The human subject as a three dimensional thing which has mind body and unconscious to contend with. There’s a lot going on, don’t you know, in psychoanalysis these days. It has something to say about science, signifiers, subjectivity, and sexuality. It comes straight in on these sociological questions. It says something substantial (if a little tricky) about knowledge and truth and all that. It won’t help solve my financial crisis, ok, but it might help to understand why that’s something else that we never address in our studies.
Cheerio for now, then, and remember, if you’re ever lost in London, look me up, I know all the quick routes from Battersea to the City, or at the very least, I can let you have the number of a very good cab company (0171 622 0011).