 |
| Sigmund Freud |
Dan Lazare’s essay, Materialism
and Gender Theory, makes a compelling case for a critical examination of
the practice of “affirmative gender care” for adolescents. It neatly exposes
the largely fictitious narrative about the beneficial effects of transgender
surgery, particularly when it involves adolescents who have not matured
sufficiently to make an informed decision about a matter that will affect them
for the remainder of their lives.
Lazare does a nice job in
exposing the lies and banalities of the proponents of these dangerous medical
practices and the mostly left wing theorists who provide them with the
theoretical justification for their work.
Lazare also demonstrates how the irrationality behind much of “woke”
ideology feeds into atavistic fears that are exploited by the right. Much of what can be called the Marxist left
has prostrated themselves before the petty bourgeois radicals pushing “gender
identity” politics.
That being said, I want to
comment on what I take to be a huge miss in Lazare’s article, and that is the
way he deals with the theoretical side of the controversies around Judith
Butler and other radical gender theorists.
So let us explore this a bit as
there may be some lessons in a critique of Lazare’s approach that can clarify
the question of what methods a Marxist should employ to resolve some knotty
contemporary problems. To facilitate this discussion I will list several areas of
Lazare’s discussion separately although in reality they are tied together.
The missing historical context
of gender theory
First of all, Lazare does not
place the question of sex and gender in its historical context. Were Lazare merely doing an expose of the ill
effects of transgender surgery on adolescents and the poor reasoning of those
who defend it, we should not need such a discussion. But Lazare’s essay is more
ambitious than that insofar as he attempts to wrestle with the philosophical
issues posed by gender theory. And once
one opens the Pandora’s box of gender theory it is hard to see how a serious
theoretical discussion can proceed without an examination of its history. I don’t intend to do that that here.
Gender theory and its history is a huge topic that encompasses thousands
of volumes. But I do wish to at least point
to some of the areas that should have been discussed in any serious examination
of gender theory. I should add that Lazare does rehearse a few key moments in
recent gender theory, but in reading his essay one is left with the impression that
it all began in the 1980’s. But this is
to “forget” the monumental contribution of Freud.
One has to acknowledge that the
godfather of all gender theory was Sigmund Freud, for he was the first to
systematically explore the distinction between sex and gender, even prior to a
proper formulation of those concepts. As
one commentator wrote,
For many
years, there was essentially no interest in the origins and development of
femininity and masculinity. They were simply assumed to correspond by nature to
the two biological sexes, despite their historical and cross-cultural
variability. The insight that the existence of personality differences between
the sexes required an explanation was a major intellectual leap, and it is
Freud who must be credited with that insight. Thus, psychoanalysis was the
first comprehensive personality theory that attempted to explain the origins of
what we now call gender…it is important to keep in mind that the earliest
psychoanalytic formulations were made before a clear distinction between sex
and gender was proposed. [1]
What is Sex: A reductionist
account of human sexuality
This is not merely an academic
problem either, for in passing over a historical consideration of the concepts
of sex and gender one is also making the implicit assumption that we know what
those concepts mean and there is nothing problematic in our use of them. But in fact there is little clarity in what
we mean by “sex” and even less clarity in the use of the term “gender”.
Kathleen Stock, whom Lazare quotes favorably, dissects no less than 4 distinct
meanings of the term “gender” as it is commonly understood. While Stock’s
distinctions of the meaning of “gender” are useful, they only scratch the
surface of the issue. There is a huge body of specifically feminist literature
on this topic, some of which should be of interest to Marxists. For instance,
the Marxist-feminist Silvia Federici makes the important point that “gender”
cannot be disassociated from “class”. She writes
If it is
true that in capitalist society sexual identity became the carrier of specific
work functions, then gender should not be considered a purely cultural reality,
but should be treated as a specification of class relations. From this
viewpoint, the debates that have taken place among postmodern feminists
concerning the need to dispose of "women" as a category of analysis,
and define feminism purely in oppositional terms, have been misguided. [2]
We find none of this in Stock’s,
and Lazare’s, consideration of gender. When Stock gets around to analyzing
“sex” the situation is even worse. She is far more confident that this concept
has less ambiguity than “gender”. She writes,
We are
talking only about being female or male, which is to say, about sex – and, to
be clear, not the fun kind. For now, concentrate only on the claim that humans
are divided into females and males, and that this binary division is a natural
state of affairs rooted in stable biological fact. [3]
It is right here that we
encounter a major shortcoming of Stock’s analysis. Why does she exclude from her definition of
sex “the fun kind”? Instead she defines sex in terms of the anatomical
divisions between males and females in relation to their role in
reproduction. But this is to miss
precisely what is unique about human sexuality that differentiates it from
other species in the animal kingdom. To
do so is to completely ignore Freud’s contribution to our understanding of
human sexuality, not to mention many other thinkers. Here is a quote from
Freud,
Popular
opinion has quite definite ideas about the nature and characteristics of the
sexual drive. It is generally understood to be absent in childhood, to set in
at the time of puberty in connection with the process of coming to maturity and
to be revealed in the manifestations of an irresistible attraction exercised by
one sex upon the other; whilst its aim is presumed to be sexual union, or at
all events actions leading in that direction. We have every reason to believe,
however, that these views give a very false picture of the true situation.[4]
The late philosopher and
psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear provides a nice summary of what Freud has in mind:
Freud
defines the sexual object as the person or thing towards which we feel sexual
attraction, and the sexual aim as the act towards which the drive tends. If
the sexual drive in humans were merely an animal instinct – at least, as that
is commonly understood – one should expect a fairly rigid and innate pattern.
The sexual object would be a person of the other sex, the sexual aim would be
reproduction. And, of course, speaking at the level of the species, it is part of
our biological nature that innate pressures towards sexual reproduction have
been naturally selected. But what is uncanny about human beings is that this
innate pressure towards reproduction has itself been selected to run its course
through a drive that imitates an instinct. For, if we actually look at
sexuality in human beings, we will see that there is wide variation, both in
object and in aim.[5]
 |
| Jonathan Lear |
Lear goes on to explain that,
With the
sexual instinct in other animals, we have a fairly clear idea of what would
constitute a breakdown in their functioning precisely because the teleological
goal of reproduction is so tightly integrated into the expression of the
instinct.
Freud’s
point is that in the case of human sexuality, the tie between sexual activity
and purported aim has been so loosened that we can no longer think of the aim
as providing a criterion for the activity. No doubt there are evolutionary
constraints: human sexuality has been selected to facilitate reproduction. But
what has been selected allows for such variation in activity and object that no
particular variation could possibly count as an instance of its breakdown.
Human sexuality in its very nature is open to variation. Overall, what is
getting selected is an inextricable entanglement of sexuality and imagination.
Unlike other animals, human sexuality is essentially imaginative – that is, it
is essentially open to imaginative variability. One consequence is that all
sorts of activities are going to count as sexual that have no relation to
reproduction; another consequence is that when humans finally do get around to
reproducing, they are going to reproduce imaginative animals.[6]
This definition of human
sexuality places it within the bounds that biology imposes on humans but at the
same time allows for such variations that cannot be confined to the strict
demands of sexual reproduction but are open to possibilities of fantasy and
imagination. Freud’s concept of drive is thus much wider than the strictly
biological binary division between male and female. But at the same time it is
something built into the human species and manifests itself in all stages of
human development including infancy. It is thus not, strictly speaking, a
cultural phenomenon either, the way “gender” is commonly understood. One might
say that “sex” understood in the broader manner introduced by Freud is a
mediating level of human behavior that exists between the strictly biological
level of “instinct” and the strictly cultural level of “gender”.
Stock fails to recognize this
mediating layer in human sexuality and identifies sex with biological instincts
only, therefore she oversimplifies the narrative of the relationship between
sex and gender. Judith Butler, the main target of Lazare’s piece, commits an
error from the opposite side by completely dismissing the biological roots of
sexuality.
Lazare’s article largely builds
on Stock’s analysis and it suffers from the same problems. Thus while Lazare
brings in an interesting discussion of how
evolutionary pressures were responsible for the “eukaryote revolution”
that resulted in the binary division between male and female of the great
majority of animal species, one can ask what insights this provides us about
the specific nature of human sexuality.
Such accounts leave out what Lear called the “imaginative” dimension of
human sexuality, one that does not exist, except in a very attenuated form, in
other animal species. To quote Lear,
…when we
consider the rest of the animal kingdom, the sexual instinct seems just like
that. The instinct for reproduction is innate, naturally selected, issues in a
characteristic activity and aims at a certain outcome. Freud’s point is that
the sexual drive in humans differs from an animal instinct in important ways.
Think of
it this way: a bird may happen to build a nest in a lady’s shoe. And, in
building the nest, the bird may show a heightened concern for the shoe. But the
bird cannot thereby make the shoe into a fetish. Why not? Is it lack of
imagination on the bird’s part? In an important sense the answer to this
question is ‘yes.’ [7]
The example of a shoe fetish
illustrates the point nicely. Shoe
fetishism is a genuine expression of human sexuality, one which has some
connection to the innate pressure of sexual reproduction but is at the same time
so far removed from it that it is impossible to say how shoe fetishism confirms
the Darwinian drive for survival of the species. One might add that the panoply
of human sexuality is full of examples similar to a shoe fetish in being at
several removes from any connection to biological reproduction. A glaringly
obvious example is homosexuality, another would be sadomasochism. I have
no doubt that some of today’s more “creative” sociobiologists – now calling
themselves “evolutionary psychologists”, would nevertheless come up with
remarkable “just so”[8]
stories to explain this conundrum. The problem here can broadly be diagnosed as
the sin of reductionism. Human sexuality is seen through the prism of a general
concept of sexuality appropriate to other animal species which is rooted in the
innate drive to reproduce and little else.
The Critique of Judith Butler
The radical gender theory of Judith
Butler should certainly elicit an equally radical critique. However, Lazare’s
critique of Butler falls short in many ways and is itself worthy of a proper
critique. For one thing, Lazare oversimplifies Butler’s argument and therefore
concludes that he can land a few knockout blows with some very simple
common-sense type arguments. To take one example, Lazare writes,
“Attacking
the feminist call for sexual equality, it declared that equality between men
and women was beside the point when sexual division itself was oppressive”
Yet the quote that Lazare
produces from Butler does not at all declare “that equality between men and
women was beside the point”. Butler actually says,
“It
is not enough to inquire into how women might become more fully represented
in language and politics. Feminist critique ought also to
understand how the category of ‘women,’ the subject of feminism, is produced
and restrained by the very structures of power through which emancipation is
sought.”[emphasis added]
Clearly Butler is saying that
the feminist critique is insufficient and should become more radical by
examining the basis of the concept of “women”, a concept which is taken for
granted. One can agree or disagree with
Butler’s critique of feminism, but she is clearly not saying that
equality between men and women is “beside the point”.
Lazare’s reductionist concept of
sexuality leads him into oversimplifying and sometimes outright distorting what
Butler is actually writing. Here is
another example, where Lazare produces the following quote from Butler,
“Any
theory of the culturally constructed body ... ought to question ‘the body’ as a
construct of suspect generality when it is figured as passive and prior to
discourse. There are Christian and Cartesian precedents to such views
which, prior to the emergence of vitalistic biologies in the nineteenth
century, understand ‘the body’ as so much inert matter, signifying nothing or,
more specifically, signifying a profane void, the fallen state: deception, sin,
the premonitional metaphorics of hell and the eternal feminine.”
Lazare goes on to comment,
“Modern
biology is as much a social construct as medieval theology. Since both
are arbitrary, freedom lies in casting them off so as to become what one wants
to be”
 |
| René Descartes |
While we can agree that Butler
does in the end say something like freedom lies in casting off either modern
biology or the human body, that is not
the point she is making in the quotation Lazare cites. She references
“Christian and Cartesian precedents” of the concept of the human body. While
she does not specify more than that, it is likely that the Christian theologian
she has in mind is St. Augustine who literally believed that the sexual organs
of the human body are an invasive product of original sin that constantly
divide man from his better nature. Thereby all manner of proscriptions against
unregulated sexual behavior follow. The
Cartesian precedent is a reference to the school of mechanical materialism that
subscribed to Descartes’s dualism. According to Descartes the mind, which is further
identified with the soul, exists apart from matter and vice-versa. The
mechanists inspired by Descartes considered that animals, because they have no
soul, are therefore mechanical devices with no consciousness and no feelings. Descartes
called them, bête-machine, ‘beast machines’. Therefore all manner
of horrific experiments were conducted on helpless animals which they thought
did not experience pain. Here is one
account of this practice:
A
visitor in the 1650s, to the Port Royal School at Paris, reports that pupils
were dissecting dogs who were nailed alive to wooden planks by their four paws.
The purpose was apparently to inspect the circulation of the blood, a subject
of controversy. Hammering in the nails inevitably caused pain to the victims,
an ordeal dismissed by the experimenters. “Their [animal] cries when hammered
were nothing but the noises of some small springs that were being deranged”
(Gombay 2007:ix). The justifying associations of mere clockwork fit the
Cartesian theory of animals as automata. The molesters made fun of persons who
pitied the creatures feeling pain. The cruel situation was reported by Nicolas
Fontaine (1625-1709), who employed a testimony of his niece. Fontaine included
the details in his Memoires pour servir a l’histoire de Port-Royal,
published in 1736 (Delforges 1985:97).[9]
This purely mechanical view of
biological organisms was challenged by the vitalistic biology that emerged in
the 19th century. The vitalists took the other side of the Cartesian
dualism and considered that a mechanical or chemical explanation of biological
organisms was not only insufficient but completely irrelevant and wrong. The
vitalists posited a mysterious immaterial substance as being responsible for a
living organism, what was later called an Élan vital by Henri
Bergson. Butler is therefore referencing
an outdated school of biology – some would even call it a pseudo-science - in
her statement. She is not referencing “modern
biology” at all. While we do not have to
subscribe to Butler’s Foucaldian concept of “discourse”, her critique of both the mechanical
materialist concept of a biological organism and the vitalist concept is
essentially correct. Furthermore, Lazare seems to completely misunderstand
Butler’s discussion of “vitalistic biology”. He writes later,
“Gender
Trouble seems to regard sex as a social construct that
originated with the “vitalistic biologies” of the nineteenth century.”
But Butler’s position on
“vitalistic biology” is exactly the opposite. She sees it as making the same
mistake as the mechanistic biology of the Cartesians in claiming that the body
is not a social construct. Only instead of positing the body as being composed
of inert and passive “matter” the vitalists saw it as an emanation of a
mysterious immaterial essence of some sort. This reading of the mechanist/vitalist dualism
of the body has in fact become something of a meme among gender theorists. For
instance, take this summary in a scholarly journal of the work of one gender
theorist,
Rogers
argues that vitalism, in alliance with an emergent liberal feminism contested theories
that stressed the passivity of matter and legitimized the imposition of
masculine power on a natural world gendered as female.[10]
 |
| Henri Bergson |
Thus, while we agree that Butler
is vulnerable to the charge that she goes to war with modern biology, the quote
Lazare introduces fails to make that case.
The social construction of
scientific concepts
Finally, Lazare’s critique of
Butler’s use of the social construction of scientific concepts fails to make
some vital distinctions. He indicts
Butler for thinking that “sex” is a social construct, and provides an
apparently devastating argument against it, saying that,
“In
fact, it [sex] originated some two billion years earlier with the
“eukaryotic revolution” that ushered in a new form of reproduction.
Instead of mitosis, in which a single cell reproduces by splitting into two
identical cells…”
It is difficult to understand what
Lazare’s point is here. Yes, it’s a
scientific fact that some two billion years ago living organisms evolved a new
strategy for reproducing themselves through a binary division of the sexes. Lazare takes this as devastating evidence that
the category of sex is not a social construction. But that can only be the case
if one assumes that by “social construction” we mean a completely arbitrary
idea that someone came up with that has no relation to reality. It is also a
way of avoiding the insight of Freud and others, that human sexuality has
developed a relative autonomy from the reproductive instinct.
Now it is true that the social
construction of scientific concepts has been understood by some as being an
arbitrary cultural artifact with no objective content. But there is another way
in which the social construction of scientific concepts can be understood, one
that is compatible with and forms a branch of the materialist conception of
history. If one understands the historical nature of scientific progress it is
important to acknowledge that all scientific concepts, including the concept of
sex, are social constructs. But they are
not arbitrary social constructs and that is where Marxists differ from
subjective idealists like Judith Butler. On the other hand, if you deny the
social construction of scientific concepts, i.e., its historical dimension,
then the only alternative is positivism, the conventional view of science as
being an ahistorical search for truth. In the lexicon of the discipline known
as the ‘Structure of Scientific Knowledge’, or the acronym SSK, the radical
historicism that becomes unmoored from objectivity is known as the “strong
programme” whereas the more measured historical approach is known as the “weak
programme”.
I wrote about this distinction
years ago:
The
strong programme [in the sociology of scientific knowledge] does indeed imply
that all scientific knowledge is ultimately just a cultural artifice. It has no
objective standing on its own. The weak programme in the sociology of knowledge
on the other hand states that the scientific enterprise is always historically
and socially embedded, but its products are ultimately objective truths about
the state of the world. Both the strong and weak programmes of the sociology of
knowledge oppose positivism, which does not recognize the historical dimension
of the scientific enterprise at all. But that is where the similarity ends. The
strong programme advocates a radical historicism that denies the objective
nature of reality. The postmodernists are but one expression of the most
radical currents within this stream. The weak programme on the other hand is
concerned with such issues as the historical background that made it possible
to formulate Newton’s laws of motion in the 17th century and why this was not possible
at the time of Democritus. It concerns itself with investigating the historical
conditions that made possible a particular line of inquiry. It does not presume
however to attempt any connection between the historical genesis of particular
scientific theories and their validity. The latter is precisely what the strong
programme does attempt. That is what opens the door to such strange creatures
as “feminist physics” and the derision of mainstream science as “totalitarian”.
The weak programme in the sociology of knowledge is however completely
consistent with a Marxist understanding of the development of science. The
Marxist view of the scientific enterprise is clearly opposed to both the
positivist approach and the cultural relativism of the strong programme in the
sociology of knowledge. [11]
The key point to keep in mind is
that the “weak programme” in the sociology of scientific knowledge sees a
relationship between scientific concepts that are socially – and historically –
constructed, and objective reality. What
exactly is the nature of that relationship is another much longer question that
we will leave aside. On the other hand
the “strong programme” in the sociology of scientific knowledge does not
recognize any reality beyond those that are socially constructed. It thereby easily falls into the trap of
claiming that we “create” the world we live in. The close connection between
the strong programme and radical gender theorists like Judith Butler should be
obvious.
Lazare’s confusion on the nature
of the social construction of scientific concepts results in his arguments
against Butler and her followers totally missing their mark. Thus he asks, “Is
sex a modern invention?” He then
responds to the gender theorist Monique Wittig, who he quotes as saying “the
category of ‘sex’ is a name that enslaves” because “the ‘straight mind,’
evident in the discourses of the human sciences ... ‘take[s] it for
granted that what founds society, any society, is heterosexuality.” Now we can leave aside any discussion about
whether the category of sex “enslaves”.
The important thing to note in her statement is that she is talking
about a category, i.e. a concept that reflects our understanding of the object
it references. Lazare pokes fun at this
idea with the apparently devastating point that “heterosexuality has been the
basis for reproduction long before the straight human mind ever appeared.” Now it is certainly true that sexual
reproduction appeared millions of years before there were any theories of human
sexuality around. But Wittig could
easily reply that she is not talking about reproduction but how we understand
human sexuality. And she would be
completely correct to do so.
What would Lenin say?
When grappling with the purely
philosophical side of Butler’s views,
Lazare asks the question, “What would Lenin say?” The reference is to Lenin’s polemic against
the Machists, written in 1909. This seems like an odd question to ask
considering that when Lenin was writing his critique of what was then called
“Empirio-criticism”, gender theory did not yet exist and Freud’s insights into
the expansive nature of human sexuality had only been published a few years
earlier and doubtless unknown to Lenin. So one can only wonder what relevance
Lenin’s polemic has for the topic at hand. On the other hand, Lazare does stand
in a long tradition of Marxists who turn to Lenin’s polemic against a form of
subjective idealism in his time to respond to newer forms of subjective
idealism. Yet as much as this tradition
deserves a degree of respect, its employment over the decades has become a way
of avoiding difficult philosophical issues instead of wrestling with them. Even
worse, at times the citation of Lenin’s polemic against the Machists has also
been seriously misused for political reasons.
For instance, in the 1920’s it was used as a polemical weapon against
physicists who defended Einstein’s theory of relativity which had been labelled
by the Stalinist bureaucracy at the time as “idealist”. The historian of science in the Soviet Union,
Loren Graham, wrote of this period,
Relativity
theory was particularly troublesome, for Einstein had recognized the importance
in its development of the ideas of the Austrian physicist Ernst Mach, whom
Lenin had severely criticized in his book Materialism and Empiriocriticism.
Mach's philosophy, Lenin wrote, was 'confused idealism' and 'a jumble of idle
and shallow words in which he himself does not believe'. The hostility of
Soviet critics toward quantum mechanics and relativity physics was heightened
when a number of prominent west European philosophers and scientists concluded
that the probabilistic approach of quantum mechanics meant the end of determinism
as a world-view, while the equivalence of matter and energy postulated by
relativity theory marked the end of materialism. Several Western writers
concluded that relativity physics and quantum mechanics were irreconcilable
with Marxism.[12]
The Soviet physicist Boris
Hessen was castigated as a “Machist” for his defense of Einstein’s theory of
relativity. His career was cut short and he was eventually arrested and
murdered in the late 1930’s.
 |
| Boris Hessen |
Of course not all uses of
Lenin’s polemic from 1909 are malicious and they can sometimes shed light on
contemporary controversies. But in employing historical analogies a certain
degree of care is called for especially when such an iconic figure as Lenin is
concerned. Specifically when citing Lenin’s polemic to shed light on Judith
Butler’s version of subjective idealism in gender theory, one possible analogy
is the reaction of intellectuals to certain developments in science that
challenge old paradigms of what reality looks like. In 1909, new developments in physics
challenged the old conception of matter, space and time. Some scientists and philosophers reacted to
those discoveries by abandoning any conception of matter or objective reality
altogether and retreating to the position that all that we can know is what we
perceive through our senses. By way of historical analogy, one can say that for
several decades, the conventional understanding of sexuality, at least one rooted
in the conservative Western tradition, has been completely upended. This led
some theorists to abandon any concept of an objective biological basis for
sexuality. But like Lenin, we can intervene into modern gender theory and
demonstrate that whereas sexuality is a far more complex concept than had been
previously considered it still retains an objective content, though one removed
from a biological reproductive impulse by many layers of mediation.
Lazare however does not take
this approach. He cannot since an expanded view of sexuality is a closed book
for him. Instead he borrows arguments from Lenin against subjective idealism
and employs them in a manner that he considers to have refuted Judith Butler’s
form of subjective idealism. We will consider some of those arguments
momentarily but what we can say initially is that even if such an approach
demonstrates that Judith Butler is a subjective idealist, the argument is
necessarily under-determined. The reason for that is that there are many forms
of subjective idealism and each of them should be dealt with in their
specificity. Instead, by lumping all forms of subjective idealism together into
one general category, little insight is gained about the specific issues that
are being contested. Thus one can
marshal this or that argument against subjective idealism without in any way
engaging with the specific issues Judith Butler is addressing. This may, in the
best of circumstances, demonstrate that Judith Butler’s position is
philosophically untenable but also sheds no light on the issues she is
discussing. From a pedagogical point of view this is highly unsatisfactory.
Arguments against solipsism
Lazare enlists Lenin in his
battle against what he considers Butler’s solipsism. For instance, he writes,
“Lenin
remarked that while Mach and his co-thinkers sought to avoid solipsism, the
dead-end belief that existence of anything outside one’s own head is uncertain,
“they cannot in fact escape solipsism without falling into howling logical
absurdities.”
Lenin’s point is true enough,
but how does it apply to Butler? The
first thing that can be said is that Butler is not a solipsist in the classical
sense, i.e. she does not believe that her mind is the only reality. She clearly
believes that other minds exist. That is the whole basis of her discussion of
“performance” and “discourse”. She is
however what we may call an attenuated solipsist in that she does not believe
there is any reality outside of this ‘community of minds’. That is clearly
indicated in a statement she makes that Lazare quotes,
“That
the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological status
apart from the various acts which constitute its reality.”
How to refute the arguments of
this type of solipsist? This is not
simply an academic question. It is natural to think that it is easy enough to
refute the arguments of a solipsist by appealing to common sense type arguments. For instance, “If you put your hand on a
burning ember your hand will burn and you will scream in pain. This proves that
things exist outside your mind!” But
such arguments are unconvincing to a solipsist who can respond that “The pain I
feel is simply a product of my mind and has nothing to do with anything outside
of it.” The philosopher Raymond
Tallis has explained how arguing with a solipsist is a challenge for
rational discourse and cannot be easily dismissed.[13]
Channeling common sense type arguments that appeal to empirical objects do not
work very well. Rather what does work
nicely is to demonstrate the built-in contradiction endemic to all solipsistic
type arguments, something that Lenin implicitly understood when he pointed to
the “howling logical absurdities” solipsists fall into. Tallis calls the built-in
contradictions in the arguments of solipsists “pragmatic self-refutation”. He writes,
Pragmatic
self-refutation is the characteristic of an assertion that is undermined either
by its own content or by the act of being asserted. Less blatant examples
include Socrates’ falsely modest claim that he knew only one thing: that he
knew nothing. Another is the assertion that all general statements are false.
And readers will be familiar with the Cretan Liar paradox. If I, a Cretan,
claim that everything that Cretans say is false, then my claim, if true, is
false – so it cannot be true.
When I
tell you that no-one exists apart from myself, this is not a logical
contradiction – rather, the very act of my asserting it to you makes sense only
if what I assert is untrue. And so, when we argue against someone who embraces
solipsism, we should not be tempted to respond by challenging the logic or the
empirical content of the position being advanced…
What Tallis calls “pragmatic
self-refutation” is nothing more than the moment of negation in the dialectic
whereby the assertion of what we believe to be true negates the criterion of
truth that we are assuming. Thereby we
are forced to go beyond that moment by asserting a new truth claim that both
preserves and overcomes the limitations of the initial assertion. This is a
good description of the dialectic of Socrates, Hegel and Marx.
Or the other alternative is that
we refuse to recognize the incoherence of our assertion and retreat back into a
dogmatic reassertion of the same truth.
The latter road is the one taken by dogmatists and inveterate skeptics
of all stripes.
Recognizing the limitation of
the arguments against Butler’s form of subjective idealism presented by Lazare,
can we find a nice refutation of Butler that is immanent to her truth claims?
A nice example of such a refutation can be found in an author with whom I
usually disagree, Slavoj Žižek. Žižek
points to the contradictory nature of a certain version of gender theory. He
writes,
Many
observers noticed a tension in LGBT+ ideology between social constructivism and
(some kind of biological) determinism: if an individual biologically
identified/perceived as man experiences himself in his psychic economy a man,
it is considered a social construct, but if an individual biologically
identified/perceived as man experiences herself as woman, this is read as an
urge, not a simple arbitrary construct but a deeper non-negotiable identity
which, if the individuals demands it, the demand has to be met by sex-changing
surgery. [14]
What Žižek is saying is that
this form of gender theory – with which Butler is closely associated – first or
all denies any relationship to biology in our arbitrary social construction of
our gender identity if that gender identity is of a man. But when that same
individual perceives of himself/herself as a woman, then some deeper,
non-arbitrary reality comes into play in which ones gender identity requires a
biological-surgical intervention to be fully realized. Clearly such an account, once the individual
pieces are put together, undermines itself in the manner of a “pragmatic
self-refutation”. Žižek also points to
another problem with gender identity theory, i.e., the assumption it makes that
the subject is fully aware of what its genuine identity should be and the naïve
belief that its assertion of this identity will results in self-liberation.
Such a simplistic notion of the human psyche shows a complete ignorance of the
entire body of psychoanalysis as if there is no such thing as self-delusion and
neuroses. The problem is even more
severe when the subject in question is an adolescent. Žižek writes,
The
Freudian solution is here rather simple: yes, psychic sexual identity is a
choice, not a biological fact, but it is not a conscious choice that the
subject can playfully repeat and transform. It is an unconscious choice which
precedes subjective constitution and which is, as such, formative of
subjectivity, which means that the change of this choice entails the radical
transformation of the bearer of the choice.[15]
Another commentator on Judith
Butler, Justin Smith, in his 2019 book Irrationality, provides another
example of the paradoxes Butler’s version of gender theory engenders (no pun
intended.) He nails down the folly of attempting to get beyond the “binary
essentialism” of male and female by replacing it with the “binary essentialism”
between “cis” and “trans”. He writes,
By dividing the world into “cis”
and “trans”— allowing all sorts of gradations within the latter based on self-
reporting alone, while seeing the former as an essential property of the people
it supposedly describes—this new way of thinking has traded one binarism for
another. “Cis- ” is a prefix we previously knew from geography: for example,
Cisjordania, also known as the West Bank, was an area on “this side” of the
Jordan River. But in recent years it has come to refer primarily to people who are
on “this side” of the gender identity into which they were born, rather than
having crossed over, as when one fords a river, into what appears to be another
sovereign land. To call a person “cis” is to hold that that person just is what
she or he is, unambiguously, settled. But if we are hoping to establish a way
of looking at human variety that favors continuity and fluidity, how does it
help matters to simply shift the fundamental rift from that between “male” and “female”
to that between “cis”and “trans? There is an irresolvable tension between the
insistence, on the one hand, upon the illegitimacy of binary thinking, and, on
the other, the equally strong insistence that an individual’s identity as, say,
a cis man, is plainly and simply a matter of straightforward fact.[16]
In providing a Marxist critique
of Judith Butler and gender identity theory, one should wield a scalpel rather
than a chain-saw. Lazare’s choice of the chain-saw undermines his effort. His
essay would have been far more effective had he focused on the irresolvable
contradictions inherent in Butler’s outlook rather than attempting to take on the entire body of
gender theory to which he was ill-equipped.
If there is a lesson to be
learned here it is that Marxists should exercise a certain degree of humility
in approaching an area of human knowledge they have not mastered. Just because
you have assimilated the basic principles of Marxism and have read all the
Marxist classics does not make you an expert in all areas of science and
culture. Yet it is precisely that type
of intellectual arrogance that characterizes a great deal of Marxist
commentary. It is a problem that Trotsky
spoke about many years ago when he was invited to speak to a convention of
chemists:
Whenever
any Marxist attempted to transmute the theory of Marx into a universal
master-key and ignore all other spheres of learning, Vladimir Ilyich (Lenin)
would rebuke him with the expressive phrase: “Komchvanstvo” (“Communist
swagger”). This would mean in this particular case – Communism is not a
substitute for chemistry. [17]
On the other hand, Marxists
should have something to say about developments in science and culture. It is
no virtue to sit out raging cultural controversies. We do have the conviction
that dialectical philosophy can and should inform the work of researchers in all areas of science and culture which
those researchers ignore at their own peril. Trotsky made this point as well:
But the
converse theorem is also true. An attempt to dismiss Marxism with the
supposition that chemistry (or the natural sciences in general) is able to
decide all questions is a peculiar “Chemist swagger”
(Khimchvanstvo) which in point of theory is no less erroneous and in point of
fact no less pretentious than Communist swagger. [18]
Lazare rightly takes to task
those left groups who have entered the fray of the controversies raised by
gender theory with a certain “Communist swagger” masking over their ignorance. He should have been equally critical of his
own efforts in this area.
NOTES
[1] Psychoanalytic Theories of
Gender Identity, ETHEL S. PERSON, M.D. LIONEL OVESEY, M.D, Journal of the
American Academy of Psychoanalysis, 1983, https://guilfordjournals.com/doi/pdf/10.1521/jaap.1.1983.11.2.203
[2]
Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch, Autonomedia, 2004, p. 14.
[3]
Kathleen Stock, Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism,
Fleet, Little, Brown Book Group, 2021.
[4]
Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on
the Theory of Sexuality, 1905.
[5] Jonathan Lear, Freud, Routledge, 2015,
p. 76.
[6]
Ibid. pp. 77-78.
[7]
Ibid. p. 76.
[8] “Just so” stories are an allusion
to contrived explanations that seek to mask over ignorance of a topic. They
were made famous by Rudyard Kipling’s accounts of phenomena like “how the tiger
got its stripes.” The phrase was introduced into modern biology by the late
Stephen Jay Gould who used it to characterize the contrived theories of
sociobiologists such as the late E. O. Wilson in their attempt to make all
biological features explainable in terms of Darwinian adaptations.
[10] Alvin Snider, Cartesian Bodies,
Modern Philology, Vol. 98, No. 2, Religion, Gender, and the Writing of Women: Historicist
Essays in Honor of Janel Mueller (Nov., 2000), p. 303, Published by: The
University of Chicago Press.
The
reference is to the book by John Rogers, The Matter of Revolution.
[11] Excerpt from letter to Chris
Talbot, n.26, https://permanent-revolution.org/polemics/downward_spiral_ch06.pdf
[12] Loren R. Graham, The Socio-political Roots of Boris Hessen:
Soviet Marxism and the History of Science,
https://www.surplusvalue.org.au/Science_Environment/boris%20biog.pdf
[13] Raymond Tallis, Arguing with a Solipsist, Philosophy
Now, Issue 141: December 2020 / January
2,
[14] Slavoj Žižek: Transgender dogma
is naive and incompatible with Freud,
(30th
May 2019), https://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/2019/06/slavoj-zizek-transgender-dogma-is-naive.html
[15] Ibid.
[16] Justin Smith, Irrationality: A
History of the Dark Side of Reason, Princeton University Press, 2019, p.
220
[17] Leon Trotsky, Dialectical
Materialism and Science. New International, Vol.6 No.1, February 1940, pp.
24-31. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1925/09/science.htm
[18] Ibid.
